Requiem with Yellow Butterflies
Page 10
Dad took a can of Cusqueña from the mini-bar fridge, cracked it, poured it into two glasses, and handed one to me.
‘I’m trying to cut down on this stuff.’
‘Have a beer with your old man.’
We lifted our glasses. ‘To Machu Picchu.’
In his 1609 Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Garcilaso de la Vega, the mestizo son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, recalls the story his uncle told him, as a boy, about the origins of the Inca kings:
Nephew, I will tell you these things with pleasure: indeed, it is right that you should hear them and keep them in your heart…You should know that in olden times the whole of this region before you was covered with brush and heath, and people lived in those times like wild beasts, with no religion or government…Our father the Sun, seeing men in the state I have mentioned, took pity and was sorry for them, and sent from heaven to earth a son and a daughter of his to indoctrinate them in the knowledge of our father the Sun that they might worship him and adopt him as their god…With this order and mandate our father the Sun set these two children of his in Lake Titicaca, eighty leagues from here, and bade them go where they would, and wherever they stopped to eat or sleep to try to thrust into the ground a golden wand…when this wand should sink into the ground at a single thrust, there our father the Sun wished them to stop and set up their court.3
On our first night in Lima, Dad and I got smashed. It was something that occasionally happened when we found ourselves together without my mother’s moderating influence. After our reunion at the hotel, we had dinner with Thomas, a psychology professor from Los Angeles, and his 18-year-old son, Ryan. The restaurant backed onto a 1500-year-old adobe and clay pyramid, Huaca Pucllana, which was floodlit after dark so that it glowed like a pile of stolen bullion. Dad ordered ají de gallina, and I ordered ceviche. We drank pisco sours with the entree, a crisp Chilean white with the main. The Americans drank water. Thomas and Dad discussed how important it was that their beloved Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was holding its biggest conference in Latin America, where psychoanalysis still reigned. Ryan, a pudgy kid with acne scars, hid behind his fringe and hardly spoke. I recognised my adolescent self in his slouching shyness, his tendency to let his father talk for both of them.
‘Ryan’s been studying Spanish since elementary school,’ said Thomas. ‘He’s been helping me out with the lingo while we’re down here.’
My father’s colleague complimented my Spanish and asked where I’d learned.
‘I’ve been wandering around Latin America for years now.’
Thomas took another piece of bread from the basket on the table. ‘Don’t get any ideas, Ryan. It’s time you started college.’
‘Have you chosen a major?’ I asked.
‘Not yet,’ he mumbled.
Thomas chewed his potatoes thoughtfully. He swallowed and licked his lips. ‘Psychology is under consideration.’
His son nodded, examining his placemat.
‘It’s a good option,’ said Dad. When I scowled at him, he shrugged. ‘Well, if he wants to.’
‘You were never interested in the family trade, James?’ asked Thomas.
‘Not seriously. I was always more interested in fiction and poetry. Maybe that’s another way of studying psychology.’ I clapped Dad on the shoulder. ‘Anyway, I knew I didn’t want to live in this guy’s shadow all my life.’
Ryan stared intently at the bread basket, and a long silence fell over the table, broken only by the smacking of lips.
Dad and I drank faster.
‘Jimmy’s a bit horrified that I’ve booked us onto a package tour in Cuzco,’ he told them, speaking with his mouth full. ‘He likes to organise everything independently. You know, saddle his own llama. But I thought since we have so little time…’
‘Is this the three-day tour?’ said Thomas. ‘We did that last weekend. It was fantastic. I think you’ll have half the conference there with you.’
‘Imagine there’s a landslide,’ I said. ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy could be wiped from the map.’
This was not as silly a suggestion as it sounded. In 2010, nearly 2000 visitors needed to be airlifted from Machu Picchu after heavy rain caused mudslides.
‘Peru would be left to the psychoanalysts,’ Dad said. ‘Disastrous.’
Thomas pondered this possibility gravely.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said at last. ‘It’s been a lovely evening. We need to make an early start tomorrow.’
The ninth Inca king, Pachacuti, expanded his father’s small chiefdom into a vast land empire, Tahuantinsuyu (the parts that in their fourness make a whole). The empire stretched from the Pacific coast to the jungle lowlands and south towards the pampa. Pachacuti rebuilt Cuzco, the imperial capital, in the shape of a puma (or perhaps in the shape of the empire itself). On a hillside nearby, he ordered the construction of a winter retreat where his court could enjoy the mountain scenery, hunt for deer and bathe in thermal springs.4
Back at the hotel, Dad and I staggered to our respective sides of the king-sized bed. After he turned out the light, I felt him shifting his weight about, trying to get comfortable. The darkened room was spinning slightly.
‘Jimmy?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Did I ever tell you about my old man?’
‘Every time you have more than three beers.’
‘He liked a beer, old John.’
‘I know, you’ve told me.’
‘Once, when he was in the navy——’
‘You’ve told me, Dad. They dared him to jump into the dock water from the top of the mast.’
‘He did it, too, the old pisshead.’
In the silence that followed, I could sense his thoughts turning to his days as a scholarship boy at a Melbourne private school.
‘They used to give me shit about his old Holden at Carey Grammar.’
‘I know, Dad.’
‘And then they fired him from Johnson and Johnson for turning up pissed, and he bought the newsagent. Used to leave me to do Saturday stocktake and knock off down the pub…’ He trailed off. For a minute, I thought he’d fallen asleep. I even started to drift off myself.
‘Hey, Jimmy…’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘You don’t really mind doing a package tour with your old man, do you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Hey, Jimmy…’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘You know I’m proud of you, don’t you?’ ‘Go to sleep, mate, it’s late.’
Machu Picchu means ‘old peak’, in Quechua.5 The ruined city, snuggled in a saddle between two towering peaks, is named for the mountain on which it stands. But the site may have had another name when it was a royal retreat for Pachacuti and his successor, Topa Inca Yupanqui, from the mid-fifteenth to the late sixteenth centuries. To the north, across the chasm, Machu Picchu’s sister mountain, Huayna Picchu (young peak), rears like a great, grey incisor over the rest of the cordillera. Between the two, the old Inca road follows the course of the Urubamba River along the floor of the sacred valley.
‘I must be like that imperturbable and crystalline river,’ wrote the Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas, about a decade before he took his own life.6
We set out for Machu Picchu before dawn on 28 July, which happened to be Peruvian Independence Day. In Cuzco, red and white flags flew from every building – someone told us you could be fined if you didn’t make the mandatory patriotic gesture. Black stone walls gleamed beneath the headlights of the minibus as it lurched through cobbled streets. I remembered the child protagonist of Arguedas’s novel Deep Rivers, awed by the old Inca walls of Cuzco, asking his father, ‘Do the stones sing at night?’
And his father replying, ‘It’s possible.’7
But if the stones were singing that morning, Dad and I couldn’t hear them over the engine.
‘We’re going to Machu Picchu,’ he said, flashing his teeth at me in the dark.
‘Tim,’ he said, his voice hoarse, his accent unmistakably Australian.
‘Kim,’ corrected Dad.
‘Sorry I missed your talk. How’re you handling the altitude?’ ‘Not too bad for an old fart, Tony. This is my son, James. James, this is Tony Kidman.’
We nodded at each other across the cabin. I recognised from his red hair and slightly upturned nose that he was the actress Nicole Kidman’s father. Tony was a well-known Sydney psychologist, a fellow veteran of the international conference circuit. He and Dad traded reminiscences most of the way to the little town of Aguas Calientes, where we caught a connecting bus to the summit.
‘God, Tony’s looking old,’ he said, after they’d parted ways. ‘Do I look that old?’
When I went for counselling during my first year as an undergraduate arts student, the therapist immediately recognised my surname in his notes.
‘Halford…’ said the craggy old fellow, squinting at his clipboard and casting his mind back across the years.
Brisbane psychology circles were small enough that most local practitioners knew each other.
‘Oh, you must be Kim and Barb’s boy. How are they?’
He’d been a colleague of both my parents. Since they’d been pressuring me for months to make the appointment, the connection was not appreciated. I didn’t want them to know I’d relented.
‘Well, you’re from a good home. Your grades look fine. What’s the problem: girls? boys?’
One of my earliest girlfriends and I had recently parted ways. In the aftermath, she’d told her large, gossipy group of female friends more detail than I would have liked about our two years of confused sexual apprenticeship. I was hiding from my social circle, reading more Dostoevsky than was good for me.
‘No, nothing like that,’ I told him. ‘I’m thinking of changing majors from literature to psychology.’
I never arranged a second session; I booked a plane ticket instead. I spent a large part of the next decade avoiding Brisbane and my father’s name.
Years later, when I was briefly home, the ex-girlfriend invited me for coffee at Wordsmiths Cafe on campus.
‘I saw a doctor a few months ago,’ she said.
‘You’re not pregnant to what’s-his-name, are you?’
‘No, I’m on the pill.’
‘You hate the pill.’
‘I know. But I went to see a specialist. Because I was experiencing some pain.’
‘Ah.’
‘Like I used to.’
‘I see.’
‘The doctor said I have a latex allergy. Quite a severe one.’
‘Okay.’
‘I thought I should tell you. Because…I wanted you to know there’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Or with me.’
‘With you?’
‘We’re very happy now.’ ‘Ah, good.’
The North American archaeologist Hiram Bingham III made his name in 1911, when he stumbled across Machu Picchu looking for Vitcos, the last Inca capital. After being defeated by the Spanish, the Inca had retreated to a secluded location in the tropical lowlands of Peru, where they held out against the invaders for more than 30 years. When Vitcos was defeated and overrun in 1572, its location was lost. Bingham’s expedition set out to find what remained.
Less than a week in, his party made a detour. At a place called Mandorpampa, an innkeeper and plantation owner, Melchor Arteaga, who Bingham referred to as ‘an Indian rather better than the average, but overfond of fire-water’,8 promised to take them to see nearby ruins for a fee of 50 cents. The American wrote:
Presently we found ourselves in the midst of a tropical forest, beneath the shade of whose trees we could make out a maze of ancient walls, the ruins of buildings made of blocks of granite, some of which were beautifully fitted together in the most refined style of Inca architecture.9
Arteaga has become something of a folk hero in revisionist accounts of the discovery of Machu Picchu. Today’s tour guides are at pains to point out that Bingham’s ‘lost city of the Inca’ was not lost to the innkeeper or to other locals who lived in the area. Legend has it Bingham accepted a free lunch of sweet potatoes from farmers who were living in the ruins. They had cleared some of the overgrown Inca terraces for their crops.
The explorer, then, didn’t discover this ‘lost city’, he merely brought Machu Picchu before the Western gaze for the first time. It was as unknown to the early twentieth-century white elites in Cuzco and Lima as it was to the conquistadors. Part of Machu Picchu’s importance, as Bingham noted, was that it was ‘untouched by Spanish hands’.10 In 1912, he returned with a larger expedition to lay his own hands all over it.
My father was named Kim for the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel. His olive complexion – so unlike my grandmother’s paleness – matched her mental image of the book’s protagonist, an Irish boy ‘burned black as any native’,11 whose ability to pass as Indian makes him an effective spy for the British. My grandfather preferred Bill. But in this, as in many other things, he and my father were at odds. William still appears on official documents, but Dad was Kim to his mother, and Kim to his friends, and has always been Kim to us.
The two men clashed again, years later, over Dad cutting classes to attend anti-Vietnam rallies as a schoolboy. His number was never called, but he left the family home young, and for years had little to do with his father – a former navy man who believed it was young men’s duty to serve. It was only with the arrival of grandsons they were reconciled.
My main memory of John Halford is of a stick-thin man who wore a too-large dressing-gown and breathed through a mask.
‘Too many fags during the war,’ Dad said.
I have never smoked a cigarette.
In Latin America, as in Australia, debates regularly erupt over the politics of colonial place names. Authorities have struggled to settle on the correct spelling of Cuzco, the Spanish city on the site of the old Inca capital through which all travellers pass on their way to Machu Picchu. ‘Cuzco’ with a ‘z’ is the traditional Spanish spelling of the name. It has appeared consistently in documents since the Conquest. In recent decades, however, both local and national governments have opted for ‘Cusco’, rejecting the letter ‘z’ as Spanish. A third spelling, ‘Qosco’, was adopted by the provincial council in the early 1990s. This version had the double benefit of differentiating the Quechua pronunciation from its hispanised gloss and defying the conventions of Spanish orthography (as in English, the letter ‘u’ must always follow the letter ‘q’). Within a few years, however, ‘Qosco’ was dropped at the bidding of the tourism industry, which claimed the new spelling was confusing international visitors and perhaps contributing to declining revenue.12
Hiram Bingham begins Inca Land (1922) with an epigram from Kipling’s ‘The Explorer’, a poetic manifesto and motivational pamphlet for adventurous young men of empire: ‘Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges – Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’13
This swashbuckling notion of exploration was already anachronistic in Bingham’s time. While his writing often channelled the nineteenth-century colonial romances of Kipling, Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard, his expeditions were state-of-the-art affairs funded and equipped by large American corporations like Kodak and Winchester, underwritten by Yale’s institutional clout, and promoted energetically through the media. Bingham was a modern, self-fashioning media celebrity. It’s often said he was the basis for Harrison Ford’s character in Indiana Jones.
As an archaeologist, Bingham made a great photographer. With no formal qualifications in his academic field, he left most of the digging to others, freely roaming
the site and snapping spectacular black-and-white images with a brand-new Kodak 3A special camera he’d personally cadged, free of charge, from George Eastman of Eastman Kodak. Nearly all of Bingham’s theories about the origins and significance of Machu Picchu have proved incorrect. But he intuitively grasped its photogenic qualities. His photos, published in a 1913 special issue of National Geographic, fired the imagination of a mass audience who would one day visit the site themselves. ‘The Incas,’ he wrote in his accompanying feature article, ‘were, undeniably, lovers of beautiful scenery.’14
For as long as outsiders have known about Machu Picchu, the old Inca capital of Cuzco has served as its gateway. The construction of a railway link with Buenos Aires in 1908 was already beginning to produce economic and cultural opening at the time of the first Yale expedition. After Bingham publicised his ‘discovery’ in National Geographic, Spanish guidebooks to the city and its surroundings started to appear. The flow of tourists, according to the anthropologists Pierre L. van den Berghe and Jorge Flores Ochoa, remained at fewer than twenty a day well into the 1950s.15 ‘We ascended on horseback,’ wrote the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda of his 1948 visit to Machu Picchu. ‘In those days there was no highway…I felt infinitely small at the centre of that navel of stone; navel of a proud and eminent, uninhabited world to which I belonged somehow…I felt Chilean, Peruvian, American.’16
Four years later, a young Argentine medical student, Ernesto Guevara, expressed similar sentiments in his diary – Pan-American pride and a sincere if dubious identification with Latin American indigenous cultures (his own origins were Basque and Irish): ‘We found ourselves before a pure expression of the most powerful American civilisation, untouched by contact with the conquering civilisation.’17 Like so many travellers to come, he was eager to differentiate himself from mere tourists (especially North Americans), who were already beginning to appear on the scene. ‘The degenerate tribes that can be found making the journey’,18 Guevara called them. Only South Americans, with their ‘semi-indigenous spirit’, the young revolutionary claimed, could fully appreciate Machu Picchu. In a brilliant essay called ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, Jonathan Culler gives a good description of what the middle-class, non-indigenous Guevara is up to here: ‘Ferocious denigration of tourists is in part an attempt to convince oneself that one is not a tourist… Part of what is involved in being a tourist is disliking tourists (both other tourists and the fact that one is oneself a tourist).’19