Authors: Tahir Shah
Back at Gran Bolivar the Snake Pit was still silent. Wringing his hands together, the concierge told me of the good old days. With a week to get through until the Professor’s return, I pulled up a chair and listened.
‘Gentlemen used to dress for dinner,’ he said. ‘And their wives would drift through these rooms in sequinned gowns. It was a wonderful sight, like Hollywood.’
‘What of the gossip?’
The concierge put a hand to his mouth.
‘Ah,’ he mumbled, ‘all those secret rendezvous, all that passion!’
‘Affairs?’
‘Oh yes, but we never breathed a word,’ he said, ‘we left the hissing to the snakes.’
‘What of la senora que carga una hacha de cocinaV The concierge’s face dropped.
‘She has scared away the guests,’ he said, sweeping an arm across the foyer in an arc. ‘In Peru we are very superstitious…’
*
Two blocks behind the Hotel Gran Bolivar, beside a kiosk selling under-ripe bananas, a woman was sitting on a stool. Her shoulders were hunched forward, her greying hair pulled back in a single pigtail. Her mouth was a blinding smile of white and gold. The seat stood on an oriental prayer rug, beside which there was another stool for customers.
I watched from a distance as people would pause from their hurried lives to hear a tale. They came from many backgrounds: businessmen, secretaries, housewives, even manual workers. The lady would tell them stories. The tradition is one I have known well in the East where everyone can make time for a tale.
Wiping the empty seat with the corner of a rag, the woman invited me to sit. She told me her name was Dolores, and that stories had been in her family for fifteen generations. The tales, which came from the mountains, she said, were magical. They would purify my soul. The charge was three soles. I sat down and handed over the coins.
The story was an epic tale of love and honour, compassion and great bravery. Its heroes were Peruvian warriors, caught in a struggle between good and evil. Dolores said the tale had been in her family for three hundred years. Her comment brought a smile to my face. For the story was famous throughout central Asia, and is told in the pages of The Arabian Nights.
‘The tale has cleaned your head’ Dolores said when she had finished. ‘But your mind is still troubled’
My headache had actually grown worse.
Tomorrow morning a train will leave Lima for Huancayo,’ said Dolores. ‘If you want to be rid of your problems, take that train. Go and meet a man called Señor Pedro Oroña Laya. Tell him I sent you. You can find him at Wall Wasi,’ she said, ‘the Sacred House.’
As I still had a few days to spare, I decided to take the story-teller’s advice. Next morning I made my way to the station on the southern bank of the Rimac River. The train to Huancayo was about to leave. It carries passengers just once a month, a point of which Dolores must have been aware.
Huancayo is a small commercial town set high in the mountains, in the Mantaro Valley, the bread basket of Peru. Reaching it by railway from Lima was a feat of engineering that only the Victorians would have attempted. Like Kenya’s Lunatic Express, which climbs the Great Rift each day, the route was technically impossible. Construction on what became the highest railway line on earth began in 1870. For 23 years the imported Chinese workforce slogged away, boring tunnels and building bridges.
For 11 hours the Huancayo Express ground its way up the rails and into the Andes. The line is famous for its 22 ‘switch-backs’, a system which allows the double-ended train to ascend a steep incline by slaloming forward and back.
Outside, sweeping plateaux gave way to ice-capped mountains and crystal streams. Sometimes the earth was the colour of a doe’s hide, and at others it was red as ochre, or grey like slate. There were dark brackish pools of water, like Welsh tarns, and fields which stretched forever. Dogs with savage, bulging eyes ran alongside, desperate to keep up with the carriages. Women paused from their work in the wheat fields to wave, their faces red-brown like polished mahogany.
We passed an open-top hopper waiting on a slip-track. It was filled with large, uniform ingots of silver. The man opposite watched my eyes widen greedily. His face was masked in a clipped white beard, his cheeks high, his eyes like fragments of coal. A long-time resident of Huancayo, he was originally from Denmark.
His wine-red lips spoke cautiously ‘Silver for the Sendero Luminoso’ he said, ‘for the Shining Path.’
‘Surely these are government mines?’
‘The government may mine it, but Luminoso will take it.’
Peru’s recent history has been dominated by the Shining Path. Their brutal, pure form of Marxism is sometimes compared to that of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. Sendero Luminoso may have never got their hands on national power, but all Peruvians have felt their effect. In a campaign dedicated to death, which ran from 1980 until about 1992, they wreaked havoc across the country. More than 25,000 ordinary people were killed by their hand, and a reputed $22 billion worth of property was destroyed. The eventual capture of Abimael Guzman, the Path’s leader, put an end to the violence.
‘But I thought the days of the Shining Path were over,’ I said.
The bearded man grinned.
‘Don’t believe the propaganda,’ he whispered. ‘There’s a conspiracy going on.’
The carriage swelled from time to time with entertainers hired by the tourist office. A troupe of dancers pranced through, singing folksongs. A pair of adolescent girls hurried behind them with food. Another followed them, pouring chicha, to wash down the plates of carapulcra, a meat and potato stew. After the chicha there was bingo, with prizes - raw potatoes and maize. And after the bingo there was an impromptu lecture on llamas.
The Dane rolled his eyes as the occupants of the carriage applauded.
‘It’s always the same’ he said dolefully. ‘The authorities lay on the party, but behind the façade they’re scheming.’
‘What are you talking about?’
He nudged a thumb towards the llama expert.
‘Everyone knows the government is supporting the Path,’ said my informant, ‘and that guy’s in on it.’
‘Are you sure he is?’
‘Of course!’ came the reply. ‘Peru’s in disarray - forces are colluding.’
‘Colluding? Who’s colluding with who?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said the Dane, ‘I’ll tell you everything.’
A tap-dancer struggled through the carriage against the movement of the train. Then came another round of chicha.
‘The missionaries are opening up the jungle for the oil companies’ he said. ‘The drug barons are being funded by the CIA; the multinationals are sabotaging their own factories, and President Fujimori’s in bed with MOSSAD.’
‘The Israeli Secret Service?’
‘Of course!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s obvious.’
‘Is it?’
‘My boy’ said the Dane, ‘you have much to learn.’
I turned to the aisle, where the next entertainer was on. He was demonstrating how to make a whistling sound, by blowing into his shoe.
The informer scratched his thumb across his chin.
‘Peru’s teeming with conspiracy,’ he said. ‘It’s been going on for years. How do you think the Nazca Lines got there?’
My eyes left the whistling shoe and focused back on the Danish man.
‘What’s your theory?’
‘It’s not theory but fact,’ he said. Only Maria Reiche and a handful of Nazcans were in on it…’
‘In on what?’
‘The Lines!’ he declared, ‘Reiche and the others drew the Lines themselves.’
‘But why would they do such a thing?’
‘How else do you expect they could have attracted tourists to that hell-hole of a place?’
*
Trawl through the Sunday markets of Latin America and you’ll come across some remarkable things. From Tierra del Fuego to Caracas, the selection is very much the same. There are tarantulas staked out in miniature frames, monkey bone aphrodisiacs, and bottles filled with coloured sand; ball-gowns made from magenta nylon and llama skin slippers, sequinned espadrilles and silver poison rings. Like anywhere else on the continent, Huancayo’s wares are invariably marked with the name of the town. Peruvian tourists like nothing more than to amaze their friends with the latest stuffed armadillo souvenir, displayed on a plinth, with ‘Huancayo’ etched neatly underneath.
The town, once crippled by Sendero Luminoso, had entered a renaissance. Everyone had tales of the bad old days, when you had to check under your car for bombs. And everyone could tell of a relative or friend who had stepped out after dark and was never seen again. But with Guzman behind bars life was different, they said. One woman, selling scarves at the side of road, pressed her thumb into the air in celebration.
‘Our happiness is all the greater,’ she declared, ‘sabemos lo que es la pena, because we have tasted sorrow.’
After an earsplitting night at the Hotel Disco, where every room had direct access to the dance floor, I flagged down a taxi and ordered him to Wali Wasi. Dolores, the storyteller, had told me to head for the cemetery at Umuto, which I assumed was nearby. I climbed in. The driver’s foot lurched down onto the accelerator and we took off at the speed of light. We passed colonial churches and concrete monstrosities, pensioners crooked over walking canes, and a brigade of children with baskets on their backs. The taxi was gathering speed as we approached the countryside. Forty minutes later, we were still racing along, a great plume of dust following our tracks.
Periodically, the driver would swivel round to face me, his maniacal eyes flashing like a jinn’s, his foot jammed to the magic pedal. He swore that we’d almost arrived. Another hour went by. We careered down a rutted track for a mile or so, and ended up in the middle of a maize field. The driver again turned to face me. The light had dis appeared from his eyes. His head ducked with submission. Sinking his teeth into his upper lip, he mumbled an apology, but he had no idea where we were. Could I please settle the bill?
I spotted a child shepherding an alpaca around the edge of the field, and asked him for directions. He pointed to the next field.
‘The cemetery is there’ he said. ‘El maestro, the master, lives just beyond it.’
The driver pretended he had been joking. Perhaps, he hinted, my tip could reflect the high level of service.
A few minutes later, I found myself knocking at the mottled door of what looked like a stable block. The mud walls, recently repaired, were decorated with spiral-like symbols.
A little girl opened the door, which led into a courtyard. I glanced around. Hundreds of faces were scrutinising me, their expressions leering like inmates escaped from an asylum. Most of them were made of cow dung. They were painted in gaudy colours, their gaunt features boiling with rage. Each one bore the same impenetrable eyes, and the same disfigured mouth. Some were decorated with odds and ends - old bottles and plastic tubs, bleached bones, contorted roots, twigs and driftwood. The walls of the yard were adorned with yet more art. Dozens of paintings loomed down, each more disturbing than the last. Among them, the skeleton of Death was being crucified, and a woman was being raped by a bull. I wondered what kind of disturbed freak could have come up with such work.
At that moment the maestro arrived.
Pedro Oroña Laya was a cross between Jesus and Chewbaka. He looked like the sort of man who, under more normal circumstances, one might try to avoid. Not since the wilds of the Hindu Kush had I come across such an abundance of facial hair. With his beard and almond eyes the maestro could have passed as a Pashtun, from Afghanistan. But, then again, no Pashtun would be seen in sweeping beige robes, with a home-made cross around his neck.
‘Welcome to my imagination,’ said the maestro, gesturing for me to sit down.
I told him that Dolores had sent me, and that my mind was troubled. The master cleared his throat and spat at the dirt.
‘I can return the harmony,’ he said. ‘Estas poseído por el demonio, you are full of demons. And you are going to need your strength.’
‘What for? Why will I need strength?’
The maestro didn’t answer. Instead, squinting, he cleared his throat for a second time.
‘First, I will make una máscara, a mask of your face,’ he decided.
I followed him out of the courtyard, up the lane to the main road and across into an enclosure. A herd of dairy cows were being milked; the farmer’s wife was scrubbing the urns with a wad of straw. The master motioned for me to hold my hands out in front of my chest. I thought he wanted to read my palms. But instead he piled a mass of warm cow dung onto them.
‘Take this back to Wall Wasi,’ he said.
Once sitting on the courtyard floor, the maestro pushed his hands through the fresh dung, breathing in the aroma. He then stirred in a dollop of white glue, and kneaded the mixture until it was smooth as jam. I stood in the shade, watching his expert hands moulding my face from the dung. Unlike a conventional sculptor, Pedro didn’t look at me once. I presumed he was making a symbolic mask. When the face was completed, it was left in the sun to dry. The maestro said he would paint it later, but first he would continue with the treatment, which would make me strong.
He led me under the eaves of a veranda, from which were hanging cobs of dry maize. We stood together beside a miniature shrine. At its base was a human skull, a little the worse for wear. Above it was an assortment of lurid dung masks, including one with red light-bulbs for eyes, a femur for a nose and real human teeth set in its mouth.
The maestro told me to wait at the shrine. He disappeared into an anteroom. I heard him poking about, getting the place ready. Clapping his hands, he called me in.
Pedro’s was an imagination without limit. As I stepped into the sanctuary, I was hit full force by the extent of his fantasy.
Much of the chamber was taken up by a home-made totem-pole. An anthropologist might have said it was built in reverence to the land; for it was made from maize cobs, dried corn leaves and strands of feathery pampas grass. There were ribbons too wound around its neck, which led to a face so fiendish that it caused me to miss a breath. Its eyebrows and nose were cobs, and its fangs splinters of bone. On the floor around it were clustered a range of offerings - dried herbs and ears of black maize, sunflower heads, and a postal sack tied with a granny knot.