The Motorcycle Diaries

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  But the site whose archaeological and “touristic” significance overwhelms all others in the region is Machu Picchu, which in the indigenous language means Old Mountain. The name is completely divorced from the settlement which sheltered within its hold the last members of a free people. For Bingham, the [U.S.] archaeologist who discovered the ruins, the place was more than a refuge against invaders, but was the original settlement of the dominant Quechua race and a sacred site for them. Later, in the period of the Spanish conquest, it also became a hideout for the defeated army. At first glance there are several indications that the above-mentioned archaeologist was right. In Ollantaytambo, for example, the most important defensive constructions face away from Machu Picchu, even though the slope behind is not steep enough to ensure effective defense against attack from there, possibly suggesting that their backs were covered in that direction. A further indication is their preoccupation with keeping the area hidden from outsiders, even after all resistance had been crushed. The last Inca himself was captured far from Machu Picchu, where Bingham found skeletons that were almost all female. He identified them as being those of virgins of the Temple of the Sun, a religious order whose members the Spaniards never managed to flush out. As is customary in constructions like this, the Temple of the Sun with its famous Intiwatana crowns the city. It is carved from the rock which also serves as its pedestal, and close by a series of carefully polished stones suggest that this is a very important place. Looking out across the river are three trapezoidal windows typical of Quechua architecture, which Bingham identified as the windows through which the Ayllus brothers in Inca mythology came to the outside world to show the chosen people the path to their promised land. To my understanding the argument is a little strained. The interpretation has, of course, been contested by a great many prestigious researchers. There is also voluminous debate about the function of the Temple of the Sun whose discoverer, Bingham, maintained it was a circular enclosure, similar to the temple dedicated to the same sun god in Cuzco. Whatever the case, the form and cut of the stones suggest it was of principal importance, and it is thought that beneath the huge stones that form the temple’s base lies the tomb of the Incas.

  Here you can easily appreciate the difference between the various social classes of the village, each of them occupying a distinct place according to their grouping, and remaining more or less independent from the rest of the community. It’s a pity they knew no other roofing matter besides straw; now there are no examples of roofing left, even on the most luxurious sites. But for architects who had no knowledge of vaulting or arch supports, it must have been very difficult to resolve this problem. In the buildings reserved for the warriors, we were shown cavities in the stone walls, like small chambers; on either side of them holes just big enough for a man’s arm to pass through had been hollowed out. This was apparently a place of physical punishment; the victim was forced to place both arms through the respective holes and was then pushed backwards until his bones broke. I was unconvinced about the effectiveness of the procedure and introduced my limbs in the manner indicated. Alberto pushed me slowly: the slight pressure provoked excruciating pain and the sensation that I would be torn apart completely if he continued to press my chest.

  But you can really appreciate the imposing magnitude of the city-fortress from the view at Huayna Picchu (Young Mountain), rising some 200 meters higher. The place must have been used as a kind of lookout point rather than as housing or as fortifications because the ruins are only of minor importance. Machu Picchu is impregnable on two of its sides, defended by an abyss dropping a sheer 300 meters to the river and a narrow gorge linking up with the “young mountain”; its most vulnerable side is defensible from a succession of terraces, making any attack against it extremely difficult, while toward Machu Picchu’s face, looking approximately south, vast fortifications and the natural narrowing of the hilltop make a difficult pass through which to attack. If you remember also that the torrential Vilcanota rushes around the base of the mountain, you can see that the first inhabitants of Machu Picchu were wise in their choice.

  In reality it hardly matters what the primitive origins of the city are. It’s best, in any case, to leave discussion of the subject to archaeologists. The most important and irrefutable thing, however, is that here we found the pure expression of the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas — untouched by a conquering civilization and full of immensely evocative treasures between its walls. The walls themselves have died from the tedium of having no life between them. The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, constrained by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences.

  *An epic drama of the Inca General Ollanta, put to death for falling in love with an Inca princess.

  *Put on the Inca throne by Hernando Pizarro after helping to unseat Atahualpa, Manco II in turn fought the Spaniards. His first rebellion was crushed at Ollantaytambo in 1536.

  EL SEÑOR DE LOS TEMBLORES

  our lord of the earthquakes

  From the cathedral, the peals of the María Angola rung out for the first time since the earthquake. Legend has it that this famous bell, among the largest in the world, contains 27 kilograms of gold. It was supposedly donated by a lady called María Angulo, but the name of the bell itself was changed due to a slight problem with rhyming slang.*

  The cost of restoring the cathedral bell towers, destroyed by the earthquake of 1950, had been met by General Franco’s government,** and as a gesture of gratitude the band was ordered to play the Spanish national anthem. As the first chords sounded, the bishop’s red headdress locked itself into position as he moved his arms about like a puppet. “Stop, stop, there’s been a mistake,” he whispered, while the indignant voice of a Spaniard could be heard, “Two years’ work, and they play this!” I couldn’t say whether with good intentions or otherwise, the band had struck up the Spanish Republican anthem.

  In the afternoon he leaves his stately home in the cathedral, Our Lord of the Earthquakes, who is no more than a dark brown image of Christ. He is paraded throughout the city and his pilgrimage stops at all the main churches. As he passes, a crowd of layabouts competes with each other to throw handfuls of the little flowers that grow abundantly on the slopes of the nearby mountains, named by the natives nucchu. The violent red of the flowers, the intense bronze of the Lord of the Earthquakes and the silver altar they carry him on lend the procession the impression that it’s a pagan festival. This feeling is intensified by the many-colored clothes of the Indians, who wear for the occasion their best traditional costumes in expression of a culture or way of life which still holds on to living values. In contrast, a cluster of Indians in European clothes march at the head of the procession, carrying banners. Their tired, affected faces resemble an image of those Quechuas who refused to heed Manco II’s call, pledging themselves to Pizarro and in the degradation of their defeat smothering the pride of an independent race.

  Standing over the small frames of the Indians gathered to see the procession pass, the blond head of a North American can occasionally be glimpsed. With his camera and sports shirt, he seems to be (and, in fact, actually is) a correspondent from another world lost amid the isolation of the Inca Empire.

  *Because it rhymed with culo (ass in Spanish).

  **General Franco was military dictator in Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975.

  EL SOLAR DEL VENCEDOR

  homeland for the victor

  What was once the lavish capital of the Inca Empire conserved much of its brilliance for many years out of simple inertia. There were new men flaunting its riches, but they were the same riches. For a time they were not merely maintained but augmented,
with the products of the gold and silver mines that converged on the region; the sole difference being that Cuzco no longer bore the title “navel of the world” but was just another point on its periphery. Its treasures emigrated to the new metropolis across the sea to feed the opulence of another imperial court. The Indians no longer worked with determination at the barren soil; yet the conquistadors had not come to fight daily with the land for their sustenance, but to gain easy fortunes through heroic deeds or simple greed. Slowly Cuzco languished, pushed to the margins, lost in the cordillera. On the Pacific coast a new rival emerged, Lima, growing with the fruits of the taxes levied by clever intermediaries on the wealth flowing out of Peru. Although there was no cataclysm by which to mark the transition, the brilliant Inca capital passed into its current state, a relic of times gone by. Only recently has one or other modern building arisen to clash with the existing collection, but otherwise all the monuments of colonial splendor still remain.

  The cathedral is grounded firmly in the center of the city. Its solidity, typical to its era, makes it look more like a fortress than a church. The glitz of its brilliant interior reflects a glorious past; the giant paintings reposing on the lateral walls do not measure up to riches scattered through the sanctuary but somehow they do not seem out of place, and a St. Christopher emerging from the water seemed, at least to me, a fine piece. The earthquake wreaked havoc there as well: the frames of the paintings are broken and the paintings themselves scratched and creased. The effect created by the golden frames and the golden doors to the side altars all falling off their hinges is very strange, as if they’re revealing the lesions of age. Gold doesn’t have the gentle dignity of silver which becomes more charming as it ages, and so the cathedral seems to be decorated like an old woman with too much makeup. There is real artistry in the choir stalls, made from wood by Indian or mestizo craftsmen. In their carved scenes of the lives of the saints, they have infused the cedar with the spirit of the Catholic Church and the enigmatic soul of the true Andean peoples.

  One of Cuzco’s jewels, worthy of the visits by each and every tourist, is the pulpit of the Basilica of San Blas. It has nothing more to show for itself except the fine carving, before which you pause, enraptured, and like the choir stalls of the cathedral it expresses the fusion of two hostile but somehow almost complementary races. The whole city is an immense gallery: the churches, of course, but even every house, every balcony looking out over every street, is like a medium with which to evoke times past. Each of those does not have the same merit, of course. But as I write in this moment, so far from there, when my notes before me seem faded and artificial, I’m unable to say which impressed me the most. Amid the magma of churches we visited I remember the pitiful image of the bell towers of the Church of Belén, toppled by the earthquake, lying like dismembered animals on the hillside.

  After careful analysis, there are very few works of art capable of standing up under close inspection; Cuzco is not a city to visit for this or that painting. Rather, it’s the whole of the city together which creates the impression of the peaceful, if sometimes disquieting, center of a civilization that has long since passed.

  CUZCO A SECAS

  cuzco straight

  If everything that goes to make up Cuzco were erased from the face of the earth and in its place a little, history-less village appeared, there would still always be something to say about it. As if mixing cocktails, we threw all our impressions together. Our life in those two weeks never lost the hobo character which marked our whole journey. The letter of introduction we had for Dr. Hermosa turned out to be fairly useful, although in actual fact he was not the type of man who needed such a formal presentation to lend a hand. It was enough for him to know Alberto had worked with Dr. Fernández, one of the most eminent leprologists in the Americas, and Alberto brandished the card with his customary skill. Extensive discussion with Dr. Hermosa gave us an approximate picture of Peruvian life and the opportunity to make a trip around the entire Valley of the Incas in his car. He was very kind to us and he was also the one who found us train tickets to Machu Picchu.

  The average speed of the regional trains is about 10 to 20 kilometers an hour — such consumptive conditions achieved by being constantly affronted with considerable climbs and descents. In order that trains might win against the difficult ascent as they leave the city, the tracks had to be constructed in such a way that the train moves forward for a while, then slips backwards to another track from where it begins a new climb, and this back and forth is repeated several times until it reaches to the top and begins its descent along the course of a river which eventually flows into the Vilcanota. On the train trip we met a pair of Chilean swindlers, selling herbs and telling fortunes. They were very friendly toward us, sharing their food after we had invited them to drink our mate. On reaching the ruins, we stumbled across a group of footballers and were invited to play. I had the opportunity to show off a few impressive saves, before humbly admitting that I’d played premier league football in Buenos Aires with Alberto, who demonstrated his skill in midfield on a pitch the locals call a pampa. Our relatively spectacular flair gained us the attention of the owner of the ball who was also the manager of the hotel. He invited us to stay a couple of days there, until the next gang of North Americans were shipped in on their special rail coaches. Señor Soto, as well as being a wonderful individual, was also a very learned person, and after exhausting his favorite topic of sport we were able to speak at length about Inca culture, about which he knew a great deal.

  We felt pretty sad when the time came to leave. We drank the last exquisite coffee prepared by Señora Soto and boarded the little train for its 12-hour trip back to Cuzco. In these types of trains there are third-class carriages “reserved” for the local Indians: they’re like the cattle transportation wagons they use in Argentina, except that the smell of cow shit is ever more pleasant than the human version. The somewhat animal-like concept the indigenous people have of modesty and hygiene means that irrespective of gender or age they do their business by the roadside, the women cleaning themselves with their skirts, the men not bothering at all, and then carry on as before. The underskirts of Indian women who have kids are literally warehouses of excrement, a consequence of the way they wipe the rascals every time one of them passes wind. Of course, the tourists traveling in their comfortable rail coaches could only glean the vaguest idea of the conditions in which the Indians live, from the fast glimpses they catch as they speed past our train, which has stopped to let them pass. The fact that it was the U.S. archaeologist Bingham who discovered the ruins, and expounded his findings in easily accessible articles for the general public, means that Machu Picchu is by now very famous in that country to the north and the majority of North Americans visiting Peru come here. (In general they fly direct to Lima, tour Cuzco, visit the ruins and return straight home, not believing that anything else is worth seeing.)

  The archaeological museum in Cuzco is pretty poor. When the authorities opened their eyes to the mountain of treasure being smuggled out of the various sites, it was already too late. Treasure hunters, tourists, foreign archaeologists, anyone at all with any interest in the subject, had systematically looted the region and they were able to collect for the museum only what remained: virtually the scraps. Even so, for people like us, without much archaeological education and with only muddled and recently acquired knowledge of Inca civilization, there was enough to see, and we saw it over several days. The mestizo curator was very knowledgeable, with a breathtaking enthusiasm for the race whose blood flowed in his veins. He spoke to us of the splendid past and the present misery, of the urgent need to educate the Indians, as a first step toward total rehabilitation. He insisted that immediately raising the economic level of Indian families was the only way to mitigate the soporific effects of coca and drink. He talked of fostering a fuller and more exact understanding of the Quechua people so that individuals of that race could look at their past and feel pride, rather than, looking at
their present, feel only shame at belonging to the Indian or mestizo class. At that time the coca problem was being debated in the United Nations and we told him about our experience with the drug and its effects. He replied that the same had happened to him, and exploded with a string of abuse against those who make profits from poisoning large numbers of people. The Colla and Quechua races are the majority in Peru and are the only ones who consume coca. The semi-indigenous features of the curator, his eyes shining with enthusiasm and his faith in the future, constituted one more treasure of the museum, but a living museum, proof of a race still fighting for its identity.

  HUAMBO

  huambo

  Our source of doorbells dried up and following Gardel’s advice we turned to face the north.* Abancay was a forced stop because from there the trucks left for Huancarama, the last town before the leper colony at Huambo. Our preferred method of soliciting bed and board didn’t change at all from before (Civil Guard and hospital), neither did that of transportation — hitching a lift — except that for the latter we had to wait two days because no trucks departed during Easter. We wandered aimlessly around the little village, finding nothing particularly interesting, not enough to forget our hunger, with the hospital food being so scarce. Lying in a field next to a stream, we looked at the sky as it changed with evening, dreaming up memories of past loves, or picturing in every cloud the tempting image of ordinary food.