by Tim Cahill
The Atacamanos knew well that their climate preserves death. So do modern men. A few hundred miles north of Arica, there are other burial sites. Several travelers—notably Michael Andrews, a British filmmaker—have stumbled through that perpetual ocher fog and found themselves standing in the midst of fields of bleached bones: they have seen human skulls, scattered like soccer balls, grinning up from the sand.
Grave robbers are interested primarily in the textiles used to wrap the bodies. Those once made in Paracas, Peru, for instance, are noted for their elegance: perfectly perserved tapestries woven by unknown artists two thousand years ago. The textiles bring a pretty price, and grave robbers, Michael Andrews noted, are “none too discriminating: some of the staring skulls wear collars and ties.”
* * *
THERE WAS, along this fast desert highway, a scene of past horror from the more recent past every fifty or sixty miles. You could see them glittering alongside the road in a bullying sun that had finally burnt away the fog. Automobiles that collide in the Atacama are salvaged. The broken glass is not. It is swept to the side of the road into a heap, and every time I saw such a pile flashing in the distance, I thought of bodies bleeding in the sand, on the burning asphalt, here, in this lonely, hostile desert.
GARRY SLEPT WELL and took the wheel about one that afternoon. We stopped to check the truck, and Garry thought he found a leak by the radiator.
We were rising out of the Atacama, pushing over passes through high rounded hills covered over in grainy black sand. When I looked ahead or to the side, I could see faint hints of green or red in the land. The green was, what, copper; the red, iron. A man wouldn’t have to be much of a geologist to locate mineral deposits here.
We were careening over the hills, and Garry took the corners at a speed that made our tires scream against the blacktop. I thought he was pushing too hard and said so.
“We need to push it,” Garry said. “Gotta see if the radiator will hold. We’ve got fifty miles into Arica, where they have the GM factory. If the radiator has a hole in it, I’m going to blow it out, and we’ll get it fixed.”
But the radiator wasn’t leaking and we both knew it. We always had leaks under the truck after it was serviced. Mechanics, who were given to understand by their bosses that our mission was important, tended to overfill anything that required fluid. There was no room left for heat expansion, and things leaked for a day or so after every service.
We took a hillside on what felt like two wheels. I looked below and saw the line of a boulder that had rolled down the black sand. It looked like the track of a snowball rolling down a powder slope. I had a vision of the Sierra jumping the road and rolling, end over end, down the hill, leaving a curious hop-and-skip track.
“This,” Garry said, concentrating fiercely, “is the classic situation for a gauge to be just about ten feet high on the dash.”
“What?”
“The temperature gauge is the gauge of the day. Did you ever see a horror film called Videodrome? TVs and things start swelling up to abnormal size.”
It occurred to me that Garry needed a daily crisis to keep him going, and if we didn’t have a crisis, he’d invent one. It was late afternoon and I was at the low end of my cycle, feeling sorry for myself, stuck, as I was, in a speeding truck driven by a madman through a land of horror, where glittering glass on the side of the road meant death and dismemberment.…
“What’s going on?” Garry asked.
“Depressed again,” I said.
“What do you need?”
“Silence in which to brood.”
WE PULLED INTO ARICA, near the border with Peru, at three-thirty that afternoon, found the GM plant with no difficulty, and met with the plant manager, Oscar Nuenschwander, who was expecting us. There was a message for Garry from Daniel Buteler, of GM Chile. Call him.
So for half an hour, Garry talked to a man in Santiago, Chile, concerning a telex that Buteler had gotten from Jane, in Canada, which was about a call she had received from a publicity firm in L.A. The firm was setting up a press conference for us in the United States. People wanted to know the exact time we would be arriving in Dallas. These people in L.A. had never heard of gasoline bandits: it seemed a surreal phone call.
Garry had decided against reinforcing the camper shell. It had not gotten any worse since Tierra del Fuego. While he supervised the mechanics—the radiator was fine; any leaks were the result of overfilling—Mr. Nuenschwander ran me down to the Chilean Auto Club in his personal car.
We had heard that in order to enter Peru we would need some document from the Chilean Auto Club. Then, in Peru, we needed a corresponding document from that country’s auto club. When we had both documents, we would be issued decals to put on the windows. Without the decals, police could turn us back.
A young man at the auto club said no such documents were necessary.
For a certainty?
An absolute certainty.
Why had auto-club people in Lima invented these documents then?
Who could say?
GARRY, IMAGINING that we had to clear the border and get to the Peruvian Touring and Automobile Club before a five o’clock closing time, was whipping the mechanics into a froth. There were five of them in white lab coats, dashing back and forth, waving their arms and screaming about the fuel filter. Garry was, I saw, filthy and not completely coherent. He had a virulent case of Zippy’s, which he had passed on to five competent and otherwise intelligent individuals in the space of one hour, Zippy’s being somewhat contagious.
Garry was happy to hear that we wouldn’t have to race through customs. Given the state of our affairs, however, it seemed cruel to mention a bit of bad planning on our part that had just occurred to me. There was a curfew from midnight to 5:00 A.M. in Lima. We couldn’t pick up Joe Skorupa there at 4:00 A.M. as planned. Being out after curfew could be deadly in Lima.
Garry telexed Jane in Moncton. Contact Skorupa in Lima. We wanted him standing out in front of the Gran Hotel Bolívar at five P.M. instead. He should be packed and ready to go.
While Garry sat at the telex, I went out to the truck, filed away our documents for Chile, and got out the maps and documentation we needed for Peru. I brought my clip file on Peru back to read to Garry.
“We’ve got,” I said, “terrorists in the south. Shining Path guerrillas, Maoists. They operate mainly in the southeast. Two months ago, guerrillas, armed with machines and shotguns, intercepted several boats on the Apurimac River and, after a ‘popular trial’ executed nineteen men who were accused of being members of the peasant militia fighting the terrorists.”
The guerrillas were thought to be operating out of the jungle area of Ayacucho, which was about 150 miles from the Pan-American Highway. Worse, the guerrillas were increasingly threatening tourists in an effort to destabilize the economy, which depends a great deal on tourism. The guerrillas had blown up the train to the old Inca city of Machu Picchu.
The interior minister said that the Shining Path had declared war on Peru.
The president, in an effort to stabilize the economy and put a lid on inflation, had nationalized all banks. There was a firestorm of criticism.
And while the guerrilla cells were located in the forested eastern slopes of the Andes, where the mountains dropped down into the vastness of the Amazon, Lima was not in any way a haven of safety. A month before, “terrorists using submachine guns and dynamite killed the president of the state trading company,” reported The Miami Herald. In the same week, a car bomb exploded at Citibank headquarters, and another bomb damaged the Lima Sheraton hotel.
North of Lima, in the middle of the country, on the coastal desert, there was noticeably less guerrilla activity. The north was noted for highway robbery, and was home to gasoline bandits.
WATCHING A PARTY of North Americans, two couples in their twenties, I wondered how they had managed to get so deeply into South America, overland, without learning anything about ordinary self-protective border behavior. The
y had just come off a bus and were waiting in line at the Peruvian checkpoint just over the border from Chile.
“Check out the hats,” one of the men said in English. And then there was a good deal of laughter because the uniformed soldier watching the line was wearing a hat that was somewhat more ornate than the sort a U.S. soldier would be issued.
“Where do they get those hats?” one of the women asked in a tone of amused horror, much as someone else might ask where Jimmy Swaggart gets his hair greased. The party burst out laughing again. They were having a jolly time and the soldier in question began taking an interest in them. He had a nine-millimeter pistol in the holster on his belt.
It was a busy border. Chilenos from the town of Arica were traveling into Tacna, Peru, to buy fruits and vegetables. Peruanos were passing the other way, into Arica, to buy goods—clothes primarily—manufactured there under government tax subsidies. The locals, Chilenos and Peruanos, rode in special taxis, painted blue. It was a border with an international taxi service, and the people were familiar with border etiquette, which is to say, no one, except the North Americans, was laughing.
Chance had placed us just behind this party and I thought it prudent to emphasize the fact that I was not with them. We faded to the end of the line: no great problem in South America which, on the whole, does not have a tradition of orderly queuing. People will yield if you assert your right to the position you hold. Relax for a minute and you are at the end of the line. We relaxed and put some distance between ourselves and the other North Americans.
From this vantage point I saw the soldier stroll past our line—which was for the Peruvian Investigative Police’s document check—and stop at the customs window to exchange a few words with an official there. Customs was the next order of business for all of us in this line.
It’s always a bad bet to suppose officials don’t speak some English. Win the bet and you get a cheap laugh. Lose and you may end up enduring a body-cavity search before being denied entry into the country in question. Fines or a few days in detention are a possibility.
An official came out to search the truck. He opened the camper shell, and the smell of festering strawberry milk shakes literally knocked him back a step. He was not keen to crawl around in there. Various letters of recommendation suddenly impressed him, and he waved us through.
“We should break open a few more shakes back there,” Garry said. “Get up in the tropics with milk shakes baking in the back. We’ll never get searched.”
The formalities were endless. We signed, by actual count, twenty-eight documents. We had taken to describing ourselves as a driver and a mechanic because officials were used to that. Garry was generally the mechanic, primarily because he found mecánico an easy Spanish word to say. An obliging official signed and stamped our logbook with the date and time.
We weren’t, Garry thought, drivers so much as men who carried documents. “Documenteros,” I said.
WE ROLLED INTO the Peruvian border town of Tacna just after dark. It was a busy night, and the long main street was thronged with couples strolling under the stately palms that lined the street. Cruising pickup trucks carried a dozen people or more, all of them hanging from the bed and shouting to friends on the street. There was music everywhere: boom boxes, car radios, loudspeakers in front of the stores, all of which were open for business. It was a cacophony of styles: salsa, disco, high Andes flutes, and American rock ’n’ roll. The Animals with Eric Burdon shouting about how “we gotta get out of this place.”
We asked directions from a man wearing a moth-eaten coat that had once been mustard-yellow and was now mustard-gray. He motioned us to the proper road with his right arm, which had been amputated at the elbow.
WE WERE STOPPED by armed police outside of Tacna. Garry was driving and dining on beef jerky. For reasons that have yet to be explained, he slipped the jerky under his seat, as if to hide it from the police. An officer searched the cab in a cursory fashion. He did look under the driver’s seat where Garry had stashed his guilty jerky. They let us pass.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Hide the jerky?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I saw the police and suddenly felt guilty. I suppose it’s the way I feel. Like I’m on some kind of drug.”
“A jerky junkie.”
“Jerky junkie and big-time milk-shake smuggler.”
“We are,” I suggested, “beginning to lose brain cells.”
GARRY WOKE ME in the middle of the night and said he was tired. I poured my cup about a third full of instant coffee and wet it down with cold bottled water. I took the wheel and read Garry’s note on the suckerboard: “Switchbacks, potholes, and fog at the top of the switchbacks. Very ignorant fog.”
The road was paved but in such bad condition—so riddled with deep and dangerous potholes—that driving was a nightmare. We were slaloming along the Pacific Ocean on headlands fifteen-hundred-feet high and more. Old riverbeds ran down to the sea, and we dropped into these steep valleys through a series of tight switchbacks. The valley floors were narrow, and then it was another fifteen or twenty miles of uphill switchbacks to the high plateau above where the road ran straight for fifteen to fifty miles. Each and every one of the plateaus was shrouded in a gelatinous fog. Work the switchbacks, crawl through the fog. Garry was right: the fog was ignorant.
On the plateaus, some of the rivers held water, but the bridges were rickety, patently unsafe, and most of the big trucks turned off the road and followed the riverbed for as much as a mile, looking for a shallow crossing. At some places, I got out and waded the river, just to be sure. When I got back, one of the big semis would be waiting behind me, and the driver would follow me through. Other times, I would sit behind a semi, and when the driver came back from the river, his pants wet to mid-calf, I’d follow him through.
Often we passed a few words together, these drivers and I. The words were obscene and concerned the fog. Sometimes, rounding a corner over a fifteen-hundred-foot drop-off, the lane would narrow against a cliff face. In those places, our truck and a big semi couldn’t pass. I’d stop, and the trucks would stop as well. I couldn’t actually see the big trucks, only the yellow foglights shining in my eyes like a nightmare predator. One of us had to back away, let the other through, and there was no macho posturing. These narrow turns were matters of life and death. Whoever had the easiest backup took it. Often the drivers flashed me a V-for-victory sign. It occurred to me that there were very good drivers doing a very hard job. I came to respect them.
There were occasional towns, mud huts lining the narrow Pan-American Highway. We were looking at monuments to poverty so grotesque I imagined people literally starved to death in these towns. Outside one of them, I rounded the first bend of an “S” curve and saw something that squeezed at my chest like a vise. On the cliff wall ahead, written neatly in white paint where every driver had to see it, was large angry graffiti that read, WE ARE NOT ANIMALS.
It is sometimes easy to let calluses form when confronted by starve-to-death poverty, to become callous. In these towns, there would be the odor of sewage and sickness. Men moved slowly, and projects were started and abandoned.
Well-fed foreigners sometimes think of these people as sluggish, lazy, dull-witted, little more than animals. The truth is, they had been hungry all their lives. It was the constant ache of malnutrition that set such a sticky, hopeless, slow-motion pace in these poor towns along the coastal desert.
THERE WASN’T MUCH in the way of a sunrise. The land was covered over in grainy sand, the cliff faces and hills were the same color, the fog itself was sandy brown, and when we passed the ocean, it rolled up onto a dirty beach in gray sand-colored waves.
Garry was up, going through his usual case of post-sunrise blahs. Along the beach, a wind off of the Pacific had piled a series of dirty gray dunes across the highway. A man dressed in rags and two small children in the filthiest clothes imaginable shoveled at the sand, clearing a lane for t
raffic.
It was the custom to stop, to give them a few pennies for their work. It was also clear that they only worked when they heard the distant sound of cars or trucks. They apparently lived in a nearby hut on the beach that was built of irregular pieces of driftwood, wired and tied into the semblance of a dwelling.
Garry thought the man and his children looked “stunned,” a word he reserved for that slow-moving hopelessness you see in the faces of the very poor.
“Stop,” he said.
Garry got out of the truck and opened up the camper shell. He took out several boxes of the freeze-dried food we weren’t eating and tried to give them to the man. The ragman backed away, afraid of some kind of a trick. I stepped out and tried to explain that this was food, that all you needed to do to eat it was add hot water. The man stared at me. He didn’t know what to make of all the foil packages we were trying to give him, and needed to puzzle it out. He looked, for a moment, like a man trying to add up a lot of long numbers in his mind.
Garry had given the children milk shakes, and they were drinking them with pleasure, smiling brightly for the first time, so that I felt, through my fatigue, as if I might begin to cry.
I DROVE while Garry drank the concoction of one part instant Nescafe to one part water that we still called coffee.
“How,” I wondered aloud, “do we get so filthy driving? I mean, we both had showers in Chile, and now we look like hell. I think we scared that guy back there.”
“Couple of gringos get out of the truck looking like they just walked fifteen hundred miles through the jungle and start throwing foil packages at him. We look bad.”
