by Lyn Hamilton
About half a mile down the dusty road, he pulled off the road again, and we bumped down what was essentially a cart path in the general direction of a clump of trees. I could see a few primitive huts to one side, some laundry flapping in a breeze, a fenced-in area beside them where a few tired stalks of corn were growing. “Here we are. The commune,” Steve said. My heart sank for my two young friends.
We disembarked, and Puma and Steve unloaded the bags from the back of the van. I smiled at Ines, who was staring at me. She didn’t smile back.
I hugged both the kids and, in a moment of weakness, slipped the Peruvian equivalent of about twenty dollars to Puma, then watched as they headed toward the encampment. “Don’t forget what I told you,” Puma called back to me. “About December 31 and everything.” How could I forget when I was being reminded about it everywhere I went?
“I won’t. And thanks for the advice.”
“Thanks for giving them a ride,” I said to Steve. We were alone in the truck. Ines, although there was now plenty of room, preferred to sit in the back.
“No problem. They’re not much older than my kids, you know. My son’s in college, and my daughter is just finishing high school. I know this puts me solidly in the camp of male chauvinist pigs, but I particularly wouldn’t like to think of my daughter in that place.” He glanced over at me. “By the way, I saw what you did.” I feigned innocence. “Feeling flush, are you?”
“No,” I replied. “Actually, I’m feeling broke. But it’s all relative. You’re going to see that there’s a roof over my head, and you’ll feed me. I’ll manage.”
He sighed. “I don’t much like the idea of their staying at that place,” he repeated.
“They’ll be okay,” I said, somewhat hesitantly. “Is there something other than their general comfort you think they need to worry about?”‘
“Not really,” he replied, just a tad too quickly. “Have I conveyed to you how absolutely delighted I am that you accepted this position?” he went on, changing the subject. I smiled.
“Really, I mean it,” he said. “I’m a field man, not a businessman. I’m itching to be out there at the site. But there’s so much to be done, just to keep this project running, and I’m second on the totem pole. Hilda, Dr. Schwengen, is the head of this project, really, although she and I are called codirectors. Have you heard of her? No?” he said, looking at my blank expression. “She’s the high priestess of field archaeology in this part of the world. Austrian, originally, but she emigrated to the States when she was very young. Done some wonderful work on Inca sites, cleared a whole city up in the mountains almost single-handed, fighting off banditos in the process. Something of a legend, is our Hilda. She’s now turned her attention to the Moche. So far, though, we’ve come up dry.”
“Is this your first year here?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Fourth,” Steve replied. “Fourth and last unless we can come up with something spectacular. The grant I got for this dig runs out at the end of this season, and unless we can bring in another sponsor or two— we’ve got one small one to help out this year—we’re done here. I’ve talked to a couple of the Peruvian banks, but sponsors look for something a little more exciting for their money than what we’ve found so far. The stuff we’ve found is all really interesting; we’ve uncovered a workers’ cemetery and what was probably a village populated by craftspeople.”
“But that sounds fascinating,” I interrupted him.
“Oh, it is,” he replied. “But it’s not glamorous. We’ve learned a lot about early Moche times, but sponsors want something more exciting than that, and they know it’s possible. There have been terrific finds a little north of here. Sipan, for example. Those tombs were just spectacular. I’m biased, of course, but I think they’re the New World equivalent of King Tut’s tomb. Enough gold and silver to keep a Croesus happy. That’s what sponsors want. I’m still convinced, though, there’s something big here, and so’s Hilda. I have a feeling in my bones this is the season we’ll find it. All the signs are right. Hope so, anyway, as much for Hilda as for myself.”
“That’s terrific,” I said.
“It is. I should warn you about our sponsor, though. One Carlos Montero. He’s the mayor’s brother and owner of one of the few big businesses in town. This is essentially a one-factory town, by the way.”
My ears pricked up. Steve went on. “As you can see, there isn’t much here. Fishing certainly, some farming. And Carlos and us. As for Carlos…” He paused for a second or two. “Let’s just say that political correctness has not reached the northern coastal desert of Peru. Carlos and a lot of the local men around here think that if a woman is out on her own, she’s fair game. I wouldn’t take in any of the local bars at night without a guy present, if I were you. The women on the project find Carlos a bit of a pain, I should warn you, always hitting on them. We try to make sure you women aren’t left alone with him for long.”
“So what does Carlos do, if anything, when he’s not bothering women and being the mayor’s brother?” I asked.
“Owns the local factory, one with the rather amusing name of Fabrica des Artesanias Paraiso, which means paradise as you probably know, the Paradise Crafts Factory,” Steve said. “They make reproductions of Moche artifacts, and ship them all over the world.”
Now this is interesting, I thought to myself.
“Montero supports our work here,” Steve went on. “I’d be hard-pressed to make ends meet without him. He makes a donation of some substance every year, and lends us tools and workers from time to time. I rent the truck from him, and he gives us a good rate. It’s generous of him, but not a bad deal for him either. Let’s just say we have a rather symbiotic relationship. He helps us financially and in kind. We agree to let him see whatever we find before it’s shipped off to Lima, and we kind of turn our backs while he photographs it in some detail, so he can make reproductions later and be first on the market. Most of the souvenirs of Moche objects that you find around here are manufactured in his plant.”
“Is yours the only dig he does this for?” I asked.
“The only one this year. He supported a dig the Germans did south of here for a few years. Got some lovely stuff from there. Montero usually does ceramics. He’s got a mold maker who can do a quick mold right from the photograph, and then the factory churns them out by the hundreds, if not thousands. He’s got a chain of little dealers that sell it for him. They hang around the tourist sites and flog the stuff. You know the sort: Wanna buy a watch, mister? That kind of thing. They look like independent dealers, but they’re just as often as not Montero’s people. He’s doing very well, and thinking about branching out into gold and silver reproductions, because the Germans found the tomb of a Moche priestess, lucky sods.” He paused. “Do we detect a hint of professional jealousy here, you’re wondering?”
I laughed. “Maybe just a whiff. But go on.”
“Okay. Some of Montero’s stuff is kind of tacky, I’m afraid. It offends me slightly to take his money, but not enough to stop taking it. The Germans pulled up stakes last year and didn’t come back this season, so now we’re the recipients of all of Montero’s largesse. There’s a little work still going on way down south, but essentially we’re the only project in these parts this year.”
“Does Montero make replicas too? In addition to reproductions, I mean,” I asked in what I hoped was a casual tone.
“I suppose he might. Anything to make a buck. He’s just a bit obsessed with being big man about town, biggest house, biggest car, that kind of thing. Probably competing since childhood with his brother, the mayor,” Steve replied. “But replicas are high ticket items, really expensive to make, as I suppose you know. I kind of see Montero as the mass producer of cheap merchandise, junk, dare I say it.”
I didn’t probe further, even though I wanted to. The flared vase that was supposed to have originated from Campina Vieja hadn’t looked like junk to me, but I decided I’d asked enough about Montero and his Fabr
ica Paraiso for the time being. If Carlos Montero really was a bigwig in town, I was going to have to be careful with my questioning.
“Why didn’t the Germans come back again this year?” I asked out of mild curiosity.
“The weather, I expect,” Steve replied. “You’ve heard of El Nino?” I nodded. El Nino was the name given to a periodic climatic event that caused changes in the currents in the Pacific. The phenomenon is named El Nino for the Christ child, because the warm currents associated with it tend to come around Christmastime. When, for a number of reasons, the warm currents stay around longer than usual, they cause tremendous changes in water temperature, and therefore weather on land, not just in Peru, but all over the world.
“Well, we’re in for a big one. I don’t think those of us who live in large North American cities truly appreciate the kind of climatic and therefore social changes weather conditions like El Nino cause,” he went on. “We catch glimpses of how vulnerable we can be to weather during droughts in the Midwest, flooding or ice storms in other places, but to a certain extent we’re protected from major weather patterns. Not so down here.
“In the desert, you can really be at the mercy of the elements. There was terrible flooding here during the last El Nino, people killed in mud slides. And then there’s the cholera that tends to come along with the flooding. I should add this is not an entirely new phenomenon. You can see evidence of it in the archaeological record. It may even have been these kinds of weather patterns that ended the Moche empire. Anyway, another El Nino is on its way, and we’re seeing the climatic and social changes that come with it. Fish stocks are down. The warmer than normal water is killing the sea plants and fish. One of the Peruvian workers on the site estimates the fishing is off by almost eighty percent. That means that the people who make their living fishing are in a bad way. Some of them are trying to turn to a little farming to keep going.
“At the same time, we’ve got drought elsewhere, so people are on the move. In some cases, they are just moving in and taking over land near the coast here and starting to farm it.
“Needless to say, the locals are not happy with the new arrivals—they call them invasores, invaders— particularly since good land is hard to come by, and fishing is all but gone. The newcomers, unfortunately, are armed in some cases, and there have been a couple of very nasty confrontations. Times like these push people to the limit.
“And the rain hasn’t even started here yet. It’s winter here, remember. Normally we can get in and out in a season before there’s any rain, but it’s raining already in Chile, so we may have to pack up early and go home. That’s why we’re the only team in these parts this season. The others decided to give this year a pass. And I confess it’s one of the reasons I worried a bit about those two kids we picked up on the highway. I don’t think the campesinos, the local farmers, will be any more pleased to see these young invasores than they will the people from inland, and even if they don’t mind, our young friends could get caught in the cross fire.
“We’re being extra careful ourselves. We try to stick together as a group out at the site, and always have at least two of us at the hacienda at any time. It is, as you’ll see, a little isolated.
“I haven’t scared you with this, have I? We just have to take precautions, that’s all. And there is some good news in this, by the way. It’s made it a lot easier to get Peruvian workers on the dig, with so many people looking for work. Small as we are, archaeology is getting to be the major employer in this town, what with our project and Montero’s crafts factory on the other side of the highway.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, as I digested all this. The road was following what appeared to be a very wide ditch on our left, several hundred yards wide, which I eventually realized was a riverbed, with only a trickle of water in the center of it. We were heading, I knew, in the direction of the sea, so this ditch, it would appear, was near the mouth of the river. The road was deserted. There were no houses lining it, and only the occasional clump of trees to the right. From time to time we would see someone, in one case a man riding a donkey, but otherwise the place was just about empty. Our truck left clouds of dust in its wake.
After a mile or so of bumping along like this, we came up to a small woodland and passing that turned right several hundred yards, then drove across a concrete irrigation canal and over a slight hill.
I don’t think I will ever forget my first view of the Hacienda Garua. Steve had said the hacienda was a little isolated, but that didn’t come anywhere near describing it. It seemed to me to be overwhelmingly lonely, a huge old house, once very grand, that had fallen into decay. The house was angled, I could see, to take in the breezes and a view across the river’s mouth to grassy dunes and the sea beyond. The hacienda was two storeys, with a beautiful carved wood door, the carving now dry and cracked and broken. There were large windows on the main floor only, with wood shutters, several of them pulled tight, a couple of them hanging askew on rusty hinges and banging against the wall in the breeze.
The house had once been yellow ochre, I could tell, but the paint was now faded and cracked. In front of the house was a fountain, a stone cupid holding a conch shell, silent and dry. Off to the right on the edge of the woods were the remains of a small building, a little folly perhaps, a place once used to enjoy the outdoors. Now it was a shell, a row of archways leading nowhere. Dust swirled in the yard as Steve pulled the truck up to the door and cut the engine.
The place had an air of a ghost town, somehow, even though I knew it was inhabited. As I approached the door, I half expected to hear music and voices from within, the clink of silver and crystal from some ghostly party held a century before. Instead, all I could hear was the sound of a dog barking somewhere and the distant crowing of a rooster. I stood there, just looking at it, almost overwhelmed by the desolation, as Steve began to unload the back and help Ines with her baskets.
Slowly, and somewhat reluctantly I admit, I walked through the huge door and a large entranceway to find myself in an interior courtyard, open to the sky. If houses can be said to have a personality, this one was introverted, its energy directed inside. While the outside of the house was austere, architectural features were reserved for the interior. The courtyard floor was fashioned of large polished stones—marble, I thought—under the dust. Several were cracked and worn. There was an open hallway, verandahlike, on all four sides of the courtyard and on both floors, raised slightly above courtyard level and reached by three marble steps on each side of the entranceway and an equal number in the center at the end facing me.
The verandahs were held up by Italianate columns, and lined with wrought iron railings, white paint peeling, and the walls showed signs of the same yellow ochre of the exterior. On all four sides of the main floor, and three on the second, several rooms, judging from the number of doors and windows I could see overlooking the courtyard, led off these verandahs. The second floor, on the end straight ahead of me and opposite to the entranceway, was open at the back to catch the breezes, and I could see the sky, grey and overcast beyond.
I heard footsteps behind me. “Hands up, turn around slowly, or I’ll shoot,” a voice growled.
9
For heaven’s sake, Lucho! Do you have to be a complete dork?“ a woman’s voice exclaimed.
I carefully inched my head up and to the right until I could see a young woman leaning over the railing on the floor above. “Put that thing away, you idiot,” she said to someone I couldn’t see. “Lucho,” she said, glancing at me but tossing her head in the general direction of whoever it was behind me, “is practicing to be a terrorist.”
“A freedom fighter,” the man’s voice said peevishly. “And I’m not practicing, I’m training. Training to be a freedom fighter.”
“A freedom fighter, of course,” she said, grinning at me. “I forgot. You must be Rebecca, aren’t you?” she asked.
I nodded, not yet having regained control of my vocal cords.
�
�Hold on a sec,” she said, turning away from the railing.
Hold on a sec? I’d hold on a sec. My feet were still rooted to the ground in sheer terror. I heard sandals clicking on the stairs, and then she reappeared from one corner of the courtyard.
“I’m Tracey. Tracey Dougall. The paleo. Tea?”
The paleo? Tea? After that welcoming party, surely scotch would be more appropriate. But I’d take what I could get. “Sure,” I managed to say.
Steve Neal wandered in. “Good. I see you’ve already met a member of the team.” He gave both Tracey and me a nice smile, but the real warmth, regrettably, was directed toward Tracey. No wonder. She was gorgeous. Young—still in her mid-twenties, I’d say—blond, hair cut very short and spiky over a beautifully shaped head, great cheekbones, wide eyes, full mouth, perfect teeth, flawless complexion, she was one of those people who have come out on top in the genetic sweepstakes. She was wearing black tights with a black halter top, sandals with platform soles, and a large denim shirt, a man’s probably, open but tied at the waist. It would be easy, I thought, to dislike this woman.
