by Tahir Shah
Lima’s traffic stop-starts its way down the choked highways, jolting forward a few inches at a time. No one questions the lack of speed, they’re used to it. Unwinding their windows, they make the most of the ride. Weaving between the cars are thousands of vendedores ambulantes, street-sellers. Whatever you want to buy, they have it stuffed into their sacks. Bubble gum and baseball caps, playing cards and fluffy dice, posters of Marilyn Monroe and maps of France, light-bulbs and eyelash curlers, ball-point pens and sellotape. In a city where wages are so spectacularly low, even respectable professionals can be found on the streets supplementing their income after work.
I don’t know what manner of lunacy came over me, but I checked in to Lima’s Hotel Gran Bolivar. The old lady of Lima society, built in 1924, the Bolivar was once the place to be seen. It’s a colossus of a building, haughty and proud, with birch-white walls and a formidable entrance on Plaza San Martin. An hour of bargaining secured a grand suite on the third floor, at the knock-down price of $25. The manager appeared anxious for custom, as the place was virtually empty.
The bellboy led the way down a palatial corridor. He stopped at a tremendous doorway, flanked by fluted columns. As he slipped the solid brass key into the lock, my conscience beckoned me. How could I stay in such luxury after seeing shanty-towns minutes before? I was racked with guilt, and was about to deliberate on my fortune. But the tour of the suite had begun.
The hardwood doors were dark with lacquer, their knobs molded with the hotel’s monogram. A study led from the dining-room which overlooked the Plaza. The curtains, which were double-lined, reeked of a time when curtains were a detail of luxury rather than merely an accessory to keep out the light. Like the others, the drawing-room was tiled in herringbone parquet. The veneer of its cocktail bar was chipped, where generations of shakers had been forced down a little too hard. The bellboy pointed out anterooms and cubby-holes, a writing desk with secret drawers, and a vast walk-in closet with an automatic light. Then he rocked on his heels waiting for a tip.
When he had gone, I telephoned an old family friend, living in the exclusive Miraflores district of Lima. She burst into tears when I told her where I was staying.
“Leave at once!” she said. “It’s so dangerous there. Everyone knows the Bolivar’s haunted by the woman with the butcher’s cleaver.”
“But my door is locked.”
“She can enter any room by passing through the walls,” said my friend. “She’ll hack off your head and drink your blood.”
I told her about the monogrammed door handles, the parquet floors, the lagoon-like bath, and the lack of other guests.
“Why do you think the place is empty?” she said. “Everyone knows of la señora con el cuchillo de carnicero, the woman with the meat cleaver.”
“But I’ve paid in advance.”
“I don’t care what you’ve paid,” she said coldly. “But spend a night in that hotel and be dead before morning.”
ELEVEN
Conspiracy
The round bar at Hotel Gran Bolivar was once known as the ‘snake Pit”, because every socialite tongue could be found there, hissing gossip. These days it’s hardly patronized at all. Bartenders are positioned at strategic points around the salon, waiting for the bustle of clientele which never comes. Their bow-ties are tight, their hair groomed back with brilliantine, and their eyes alert. Each evening, the small dance floor at the centre of the room is swept and polished with beeswax. But years have passed since feet last swanned over its parquet.
Despite my friend’s fretting, I survived the night at Gran Bolivar. I’d seen no ghosts, but had woken with an excruciating headache. It felt as if I’d been clubbed with a baseball bat, but the woman with the cleaver had left me alone.
After breakfast, I set out into the river of honking traffic in search of Professor Cabieses. The street corners were jam-packed with moneychangers, clutching rolls of dollar bills. They vied for space with a swarm of hawkers, selling potted plastic flowers and hurricane lamps, frying pans, Zippos and chicks dyed pink. One man ran into the road with his stock of squirming puppies. Anywhere else motorists might be uninterested in snapping up a dog. But in Lima, where there’s a deep mistrust of retail stores, the street is the only place to shop.
The Peruvian capital gets a bad rap from tourists. They say it’s rundown and dangerous, that the sewers stink and that everyone you meet is out to either rob or kill you. It is partly true. I’ve never known another city where a waiter chains your bag to the table, or where the knifings are more common.
At its height, Lima was one of the grandest cities on the continent.
It was rated as more beautiful than Paris, as refined as Rome. Stroll in the backstreets off Plaza de Armas and the flamboyant baroque doorways, heavy with crests and friezes glare down. Like the enclosed balconies of the palacios, the palaces, they signify the opulence of a colonial power with a point to prove. But the high life came to an abrupt end in 1746 when a great earthquake struck. Most of the resplendent villas and colonnades, the plazas and the palacios, were reduced to dust.
In the century which followed, the wars of independence slashed the capital’s population, as Limenos were sent to the front lines. With time, their city was rebuilt, but it never regained its majesty.
A few telephone calls tracked Cabieses to a large teaching hospital near Miraflores. An elite suburb, the area is reserved for those who have made it. In Miraflores rich women walk in Italian shoes. With their hair swirled up like candyfloss, they prowl the sidewalks, flashing off their jewels. The streets are free of vendedores ambulantes. There’s no one touting moss-green lizards or surgical gloves, and the only smell is of espresso brewing on spotless stalls.
Professor Cabieses’ secretary mumbled that he had gone to a neurosurgical conference and would be back in a week. I said that I’d thought the doctor was an authority on drugs. In a secretive voice, the assistant replied that Dr Cabieses was an expert in many things.
Again my journey had been becalmed. With a full week to kill, I cursed myself for conducting a search where any answers proved soon to be further questions. What began as a trail of feathers, was becoming a trial of unfulfilled hope. I went to the concierge of Hotel Gran Bolivar for words of comfort. He pushed me towards a taxi. Museo del Oro, the Gold Museum, was the only thing worth seeing in Lima, he said.
No one was quite certain when Miguel Mujica Gallo founded his remarkable museum, which nestles in the suburb of Monterrico. I cannot think of a greater shrine to the art of collecting. A treasure trove, it’s brimming with loot. Even before I’d got into the main body of the building, I found myself wading through Gallo’s less important collection – several hundred thousand weapons. He had bought up just about everything one might care to look at, from General Custer’s revolver to a set of rare Persian helmets.
The scope of Gallo’s museum was impressive, but the size of the collection was almost irrelevant; it was his collecting spirit that mattered. That spirit, I reflected, had kindled my current journey. Everyone ought to be working on a collection of some kind. I would count myself as a collector of tsantsas, shrunken heads, even though I have yet to afford one. When I was nine my aunt explained to me that a man without a collection was like a house without a roof. She presented me with a triple-edged Malayan dagger-cane, and advised me to collect sword-sticks, which I have done ever since.
Most of Museo del Oro was devoted to artefacts from pre-Incan Peru. There were textiles of Birdmen and funerary dolls, macaw-feather cloaks, Chancay ceramics, ritualistic daggers, mummies, and a dazzling accumulation of gold ornaments. But, for my money, all the rest was eclipsed by four understated objects. Two of them were skulls adorned with yellow and blue feathers. The other two were figurines. About two feet high, they were covered in bright feathers as well, and had crude jeering faces. In their hands were trophy heads.
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 señora con el cuchillo de carnicero?”
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 graying 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 honor, 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 Orona Laya. Tell him I sent you. You can find him at Wali 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 color of a doe’s hide, and at others it was red as ocher, or gray 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 Guzmán, 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 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 colored sand; ball-gowns mad
e 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, “porque conocemos el sabor de la tristeza, because we have tasted sorrow.”
After an ear-splitting 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 disappeared 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.
