by Norman Lewis
As there had been so few survivors it was hard to find anyone to talk to who had been in the vicinity at the time of the disaster but in the end we spoke to a group of Quechuas who had been to put flowers tied up in plastic bags over the spot where they believed their families to be buried under a great sallow sea of what could have been broken-up cement. The problem had been to recreate a phantom identity of streets and squares, and to decide where the dead lay in relation to them. Gradually, by agreement, a shadow town-plan had been worked out, and now on the surface of the otherwise featureless rubble there appeared orderly rows of little crosses, much like war-graves, except that here they were gathered in small clusters—in one case with as many as thirty over the spot where a particularly numerous family had lived.
The Quechuas described apocalyptic moments: first the rumble and roar of the earthquake coming in, with the sound of an express train in a tunnel; the earth heaving and plunging and shaking itself—then, seconds later, the screech of the oncoming landslide. One of the men had been saved with his young son because they had been out to look for strayed sheep in a nearby village. They had been flung to the ground, showered with earth and pummelled by flying stones. Uprooted trees had come crashing down around them and in a matter of minutes, as the great dust cloud went up (that over Ranrahirca had reached 18,000 feet), the day had gone dark. Hours later, after groping their way over landslides, round earth-fissures, and wading through floods produced by the damming of the Santa River, they reached the spot where the town had once been, to find their world at an end.
We stayed the night in austere conditions at Quiravilca. From this an ancient and narrow Inca road, with terrible gradients, unlimited blind bends and sickening views of rivers threading through abysses thousands of feet below, twists down to the coast. A notice at the entrance to the road warns the traveller by car on no account to attempt this climb before 11 am, by which time the fog had normally cleared, and the road had had time to dry. Walter beseeched us not to ignore the warning, and when called upon for an opinion the driver only mentioned in the most matter-of-fact way that his brother had gone over the top in the previous year. Tony told us that he had an appointment to keep down at Trujillo on the coast. Through lack of experience of the continent, what he did not know was that South Americans as a whole do not exaggerate in such warnings of danger. He wanted to push on, so at 9 am, over a wet road and through a light fog, we started the climb.
The road was steep from the start. Water dripped from overhanging ledges on to a black surface which glistened in places as if smeared with oil. From the outset our driver, Pedro, gave the impression of being almost excessively relaxed. He had the face of an Inca, with a forehead sloping steeply back in the admired fashion, and exaggerated by many loving mothers by binding a board tightly to the forepart of the cranium in early infancy. Walter, who sat in the front, was perturbed by the fact that Pedro never fully opened his eyes and occasionally let one hand drop from the wheel. When Walter asked him sternly why he never sounded his horn on bends, his reply implied that he felt that to do so called into question the arrangements of Providence. We came to the spot where his brother had lost his life, and stopped for a few seconds to peer down into the micro-landscape at the bottom of the chasm beneath us. He bowed slightly, smiled and said, ‘He had completed his destiny.’ Asked by Walter what had actually happened, he said that his brother had collided with a bus whose driver had fallen asleep. Did this often happen? Walter asked, and Pedro told him, not often, but sometimes. The high altitude made drivers drowsy, and in addition they were usually tired. It was possible to drop off sometimes for a second or two without running off the road. He had done it himself. At this point he mentioned a local custom by which passengers seated on the side of the car away from a precipitous edge often opened their doors on a bend to enable them to jump to safety in case of an uncontrollable skid.
From Quiravilca to Trujillo it was about eighty miles as the crow flies but the road wound through peaks which must have added half as much again to that distance. Buses managed to collect enough passengers in this tremendous wilderness to make the trip worthwhile, and there were more of them than I would have thought possible. On one occasion we were edging inch by inch past a crowded bus under the impassive stare of a dozen nursing mothers, pink-cheeked under their pantomime hats. Their menfolk had lashed themselves to the luggage racks on the roof. To our left we looked down on thousands of feet of vapour. ‘Surely that driver is asleep,’ I said to Pedro. ‘No, sir,’ was the reply. ‘He is thinking. The eye of God is upon us all.’
Crossing the mountains had taken ten hours, for it was seven in the evening and pitch dark by the time we reached the coast road and the suburbs of Trujillo. This, I knew, was another occasion when the objectives of our Peruvian expedition, as planned, were to be pushed further from sight. Tony’s presence in the country produced a degree of interest and excitement disproportionate, as he would have heartily agreed, to the importance of the happening. The fact was that this was a country where remarkably little occupied the press apart from the dismal merry-go-round of politics, an occasional coup or counter-coup, the stale old joke of projected reforms, religious and social news, the fluctuations of the stock market, horoscopes and lengthy obituaries. Now, at least, there was something new for the headlines.
Discouragingly, our stay in Trujillo had been scrupulously organised. A lunch had been arranged at the Golf Country Club. After that a display of local arts and crafts was to be followed by an equestrian parade led by a famous rejoneador, Hugo Bustamante, who would demonstrate the manoeuvres used in bullfighting on horseback.
The situation at the Golf Country Club when we arrived was not promising. The exuberance of our hosts’ welcome seemed overshadowed by preoccupation, and by the small crises that raged round them. It was whispered to us that a number of guests had turned up without bothering to be invited and that this had played havoc with the seating arrangements. Meticulous records of ancestry were kept in such Latin American towns, and a man with a forefather who had been included among Pizarro’s licentious soldiery cannot be seated next to a man who has only made a lot of money or even, if he is enough of a snob, a great bullfighter. There was a problem, too, with the sun. The lunch was held in the club’s gardens and when extra tables had to be brought they could not be squeezed into the limited shade, and some of the ladies could be heard complaining.
Amid these distractions, and momentarily unnoticed, Tony had slipped away to occupy a defensive position at one end of a bench, and called upon me to take the vacant seat on the other side. Asked why, he said it was to make sure that no woman could creep up on him and seat herself where she could be photographed. Such pictures, he said, were usually brought to the attention of ‘his wife’s sister’.
Next day we drove to Chanchan, the capital between 1150 and 1450 of the relatively short-lived Chimu empire, which spread through the deserts north of Trujillo to the borders of Ecuador. This city, the largest of all those of pre-Conquest South America, had come into being purely through technological discoveries in the area of irrigation. Previously the coastal peoples had lived well enough on the fish provided by this corner of the Pacific in superabundance; by way of dietetic variation in an area where rain never fell, wild potatoes could be dug out of the banks of the Mocha River. The great breakthrough happened when the decision was taken to dig canals diverting the water into fields, and what must have been many thousands of people got together to build a canal fifty miles in length across the desert to top up the failing water supply in the Mocha from the valley of the Chicama.
The Mocha area now became the market garden of North Peru and its huge and sudden affluence was reflected in this stunning city, an architect’s dream of the day, and in some respects even of this day, too. It was designed and built by men of extraordinary vision and brand-new ideas. Geometry, supposed to have been invented in ancient Egypt, made its spontaneous appearance here and became almost a craze.
; Development was carried out under the strictest of controls. Chanchan contains ten self-contained complexes, each based on a single model and a town in its own right. All buildings are symmetrical and rectangular and set precisely at right-angles to one another. The remnants of long straight walls still enclose its streets. These were decorated with monkeys and birds presented in an abstract woodland scene. Patches of this decoration that remain intact show no attempt at variation. The same animals and birds in the same frozen postures feature throughout.
Perhaps an enormous and unprecedented project of this kind, employing gangs of workers rather than devoted craftsmen, demanded standardisation. Chanchan was supremely functional, with every citizen correctly housed according to his status. There were no slums, this ancient city being enormously in advance in this respect of anything Europe of the Middle Ages had to offer. It was as devoid of excitement or surprise as a succession of identical concourses in an airport building. A citizen walking between these walls, with nothing to engage his interest but the same monkey, the same parrot, and the same bunch of leaves, must surely have preferred to stare straight ahead. A theory has been put forward that the straitjacket of architectural standardisation led eventually to decadence in the arts, the elimination of the individual masterpiece, and a sort of mass production in which, for example, a superb pottery head made to the order of a wealthy patron sits squarely upon the shoulders of one of a series of identical bodies.
In Trujillo we had been shown a famous collection of Mochica-Chimu effigy pots. Millions, possibly, of these ceramic masterpieces have been recovered from temples and graves, and there is no aspect of the potter’s world that they do not portray. All forms of human and animal activity are registered: a female patient is visited by a doctor who, while examining her pelvis, caresses a breast. Another woman, naked, bends over a pot to wash her hair. A man smashes an enemy’s head with his axe. Prisoners dragging what look like anchors are driven from the battlefield. A llama scratches its ear. Frogs copulate, a dentist knocks out a tooth, a parrot examines a newly hatched chick.
Sexual intercourse in its many varieties and every conceivable perversion is a favourite theme; the potters pried into every carnal secret with a searching eye for anatomical detail. Fellatio is scrupulously observed. Intercourse takes place between old men and young girls, and more remarkably between young men and old women. Three-in-a-bed situations are common. The Mochica-Chimu taste for sodomy was only curtailed by the coming of the Spanish Inquisition, and a famous pot shows a man sodomising a girl lying between her sleeping parents. What is extraordinary is that in this authoritarian, highly protective society, in which the death penalty was imposed for a number of crimes, such aberrations could escape even censure.
Before we left we were presented with a pot apiece. Mine took the form of a frog, dating from the period immediately before the Chimu kingdom collapsed under attack by the Incas. This fine animal, about six times life-size, has no part in the extreme realism of the Mochican potter’s art. All minor physical details have been suppressed. The rugose skin has become featureless, polished hide, the legs have been hardly more than sketched in. What remains is halfway to an amphibious abstraction. There remains a face wearing a tolerant, quizzical expression and the slyest of smiles.
We arrived back in Lima in good time to fulfil an engagement upon which Anthony Walter appeared to set exceptional store. This was a visit to the most exclusive club in Peru. Walter told us that the secretary had added proudly that it was probably the most exclusive in the whole of South America, for it excluded positively anyone without an ancestor who had ridden with the small band of desperadoes who had destroyed the empire of the Incas, or was the possessor of less land than could be ridden round comfortably in three days.
My suspicion, going by something he had let drop, was that Walter was hoping to get a few paragraphs into the national press that would show Tony in a favourable light. I guessed that photographers would be kept out of sight for this occasion, and that any reporters allowed in would have guaranteed to make none of the usual references to what was rumoured to be an unsuccessful marriage.
Before setting out on this venture it occurred to me to consider with some doubt in my mind the way in which Tony had decided to dress. He had an almost obsessive preference for informality in the matter of attire. At this moment he presented himself in an open-necked sports shirt and tightly fitting, slightly flared trousers with a high waistband. This was his favourite outfit and had never failed to attract discreet glances when in the company of Peruvians who stuck to dark lounge-suits and club ties even in a desert environment. ‘They can be extremely conservative in this part of the world,’ I said. What was intended as a word of warning was lightly brushed aside. ‘Can they?’ he asked. ‘Well, what of it?’
The Club Nacionál was located on the main street and had an unassuming entrance. Walter pressed the bell and I was slightly startled when the door was opened instantly by some kind of club servant with a face devoid of feeling or thought in a way that could have only been achieved by years of practice.
He was staring at Snowdon. Walter explained the purpose of our visit, and the man, still looking at Tony and speaking English with hardly a trace of an accent, said, ‘Sir, you are not wearing a tie. I regret I am unable to admit you.’
Tony uttered a light, triumphant laugh. ‘As it happens I was waiting for this,’ he said. He pulled a scarf from his pocket and tied it round his neck. Nothing changed in the man’s face. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you are not wearing a jacket, I am still not allowed by the rules to ask you to enter.’
‘I see,’ Walter said. ‘Well, this seems all rather unexpected. Is there someone I can talk to? Surely the secretary is available? We have an appointment with him.’
‘I’m obliged to abide by the rules,’ the man said. ‘What I can do is to admit you to the club’s sports area and I will arrange for someone to see you there.’
We exchanged blank looks. I was bewildered, as no doubt the others were, too. Had there ever existed a diplomatic precedent, I wondered, upon which Anthony Walter could draw for guidance as to how to handle an incident of this kind? And then a page boy was at our side indicating that we should follow him, and he led us out of the main entrance down a side-turning and back into the building again through a low narrow door.
For a moment all I could register was noise, but odour followed closely on the heels of this impression. We were in a huge room containing a swimming-pool, and a number of men in swim-shorts were chasing each other round the margin of this, hurling themselves or anyone they could catch up with into the water, with great, bellowing cries of pretended fury or of mirth, and constant use of the favourite Peruvian oath, ‘I shit on God.’ Every few seconds a high diver hit the water with a monstrous watery explosion that drowned for a split second the slap of running feet, the noise of horseplay, the oaths and the mocking laughter. The smell was of wet bodies, stale towels, chlorine and water.
A man in a tracksuit padded up, chewing with eyes averted. He grabbed a folded table and three chairs leaning against the wall, opened them up and nodded to us to take possession of them. Later he appeared with three cups of coffee on a tray. One saucer was full of spilt coffee and he snatched it away and splashed the coffee on the floor. He had placed the table against the wall next to a revolving door through which half-naked men came and went endlessly. Walter called back the man and asked him in a pause in the uproar if anyone knew that we were there, to which he replied, ‘I haven’t the faintest.’ Five minutes, perhaps, passed while we looked at each other in silence, then Tony got up and left through the revolving door and we followed him.
We were to have spent an hour at most on this visit and the embassy had arranged that it was to be followed by a friendly and completely informal call—from which Walter and I had been excused—on one of the government ministers who was believed by the embassy to share with Tony an interest in the arts. This appointment Tony now decided he no longer wished
to keep. ‘I have a desperate headache,’ he said to Walter. ‘Could you possibly get in touch with the man and explain that I’m feeling a bit under the weather.’
We dropped him off at the hotel and drove on to the ministry. ‘I have to admit I have a bit of a headache, too,’ Walter said. ‘I simply don’t know what I’m going to say to the ambassador. It has been an appalling morning.’
‘But does it really matter so very much whether he was shown round the club or not?’ I asked.
‘The trouble is that a member of the Royal Family has been snubbed. It’s my job to see that things like this don’t happen. I only hope and pray that this one doesn’t get into the papers. Does he read them, by the way?’
‘No, he asks me what they say.’
‘And you tell him?’
‘Yes, but I leave bits out.’
‘Is he enjoying himself?’
‘Most of the time. He seems exceptionally vulnerable to the kind of incident we’ve just experienced.’
‘I wonder why.’
‘I do too.’
I dropped Walter off at the ministry. ‘Best of luck with the minister,’ I said, and he made a face and shook his head.
Back at the hotel I found that the storm had blown itself out. We lunched in the centre of the main dining-room where Tony drew admiring glances and unhesitatingly agreed to autograph a menu passed to him by the waiter. So what had the upset been about? I found it mysterious that this intelligent man had been thrown so much off balance by the pinpricks of that morning. It had been a grotesque affair at the club, a scene from a play in the mood of Waiting for Godot, with a peer of the realm, a diplomat and a writer, hunched together, heads almost touching over cold coffee in a malodorous pandemonium, awaiting what?—the figment of a ceremony that had passed out of someone’s mind. Surely this was less a cause for fury than a farcical memory to be put in store for the amusement of one’s friends in years to come? Tony alternatively craved and detested the presence of others. He snubbed ambassadors and rebuffed hard-working pressmen. Our first supper in the hotel had been lugubriously consumed among the dust-sheets of a subterranean room, then suddenly and inexplicably next day we were upstairs among the Instamatics and the sycophantic smiles. What was to explain these violent fluctuations of mood?
