by Ted Simon
In the natural paradise of the Southern Andes I crossed over to Chile and the long-awaited Pacific Ocean. I continued my political education in Santiago which was still in the grip of curfews and the throes of nightly
shootings in the streets; torture in the prisons and starvation in the slums.
Then again I crossed the mountains, this time at ten thousand feet, to Mendoza. North of Mendoza the parched bones of the Andes sprawl in the waterless wastes of San Juan, Rioja and Catamarca. I rode from oasis to oasis, coming up at last to the fertile valleys of Tucuman and Salta where I spent my second Christmas.
And in 1975 I began my journey along the roof of the Americas, in Bolivia at fourteen thousand feet.
Antoine usually did the shopping for the three of us. Bruno drove and nursed their battered Renault van. If I had a role on the motorcycle it was to explore the route ahead and find good places for us to eat and spend a night. And sometimes, coming into a small town, I felt like the advance man for a travelling circus.
It was mid-afternoon when we stopped in Abancay to buy food and, well, just to stop for a while. The streets were coming to life after the siesta. In those Peruvian valleys the sun rises at eight and sets at four, although light pours across the mountain tops for the normal number of hours. When the sun does become visible above the peaks the heat bounces down two miles of mountainside to collect at the bottom around the palms and cactus, to roast the big stones in the river bed and to make the thought of movement disagreeable. The valley may be at six or seven thousand feet above sea level but at midday it is very hot. Dogs expose their bellies in the dust. Donkeys stand still as though stuffed, with their heads bathed in shade. In the silent mud-walled houses the shadow looks thick as molasses. But the valley is not a desert. Tumbling down the mountainside come streams of water. There are grains, fruit, vegetables and flowers in abundance, as there were in the time of the Incas.
We were parked along the kerb of the main street. Bruno was staring angrily at his engine.
'I've had it up to here with this heap of shit,' he hissed in French.
Bruno treated the Renault the way he treated horses, with alternate admiration and contempt. I watched sympathetically, enjoying myself, sitting on the bike a few yards away and resting my forearms and knees. The long descents into the valleys over stony dirt roads were worse for me, a constant jarring from wrists to shoulders, with my knees driving into the leather bags slung across the tank.
I always liked watching Bruno. He did everything with an animal gravity which ended either in gleeful satisfaction or an explosion of rage. I
was not far from thinking of him as my son. He had just lost his father and was perhaps still looking for him.
The men of this small town in Peru did not crowd around me as they would have in a city. The Indians as always appeared to be perfectly indifferent. Those with more Spanish blood showed their curiosity, at a distance. A large-bellied man in white shirt and trousers presented himself in a ceremonial fashion, as though his fatness entitled him to represent the other men, who were mostly thin.
'Where are you going on this poderosa?' he said in Spanish, very condescending.
T am going to Lima,' I said, careful to maintain the same steady smile. Experience had taught me the delicate art of these exchanges. Eagerness could be an embarrassment. Better to keep a close mouth and savour the tension.
'Y de donde viene?'
T come from England.'
Once, in Bolivia, I had made the same reply, but the man I was talking to there had never heard of England. Now I watched to see what England might mean in Abancay. An Indian woman walked past with quick steps, dragging a small black and white pig on a string. Her gaze barely flickered.
'You have come on a long journey.'
'Yes,' I said. 'It has been sixteen months.'
'And when do you hope to regain your family?'
'In one year, or perhaps two.'
'Good luck,' he said. 'You have much courage.'
There was a flash of gold teeth, and he took off his hat. A crow dropped a small medallion of black and white shit on the crown of his head. He replaced his hat. *
'Thank you,' I said.
Antoine came back with his face smiling but inwardly composed. It was rarely any other way. His shirt was clean, his hair groomed, and there was even a crease in his safari trousers. He was soigne, as though on active diplomatic duty. In fact they both had diplomatic passports, having been attached to the French Legation in Paraguay. Bruno had bought the old van in Asuncion and wanted to drive it to Mexico. Antoine was sharing the journey as far as Lima. They both spoke Spanish with a fluent French accent. My accent was better, but my Spanish was horrible.
Antoine put back on the dashboard of the van the little Paraguayan bowl where we kept our mutual funds, and reported on his mission.
He had some tomatoes and eggplants and a strange giant bean. There was never much in the shops. We all shared the feeling that somewhere behind the sombre shelves of soap and wire wool the good things were quickly hidden away when we came in view. There was no hope of finding meat at this time of day. There were no eggs. Bread was not a local food. We never saw any dairy products aside from tins of condensed milk, although there was a brand of indestructible thousand-year margarine.
'Perhaps further on we will find eggs and mangoes,' said Antoine. 'There's a pump down the road, on the way out of town,' I said. Bruno slammed the lid on the engine. 'The salope will never make it,' he shouted.
'To the pump?' I asked, 'or to Mexico?'
'In any case,' he said, 'we will never get up another mountain today.'
I shrugged and put on my jacket and helmet and gloves.
I'll go ahead and see if I can find somewhere for the night,' I said.
From Abancay the road to the north rises steeply again, toiling over the ascending slopes for thirty or forty miles until it runs free at last with the llama and the eagles at twelve thousand feet. It would have been good to get about halfway up and spend the night among the greener trees, the sweeter springs and the fresher air. I wondered what was wrong with the van that it should lose so much power. We had tried many things, all the things that seemed most obvious. At times it went well, but usually it was sluggish and too hot.
I wondered whether to leave them and go on alone. It was always there as a possibility, quietly understood on both sides. I kept all my things on the bike, even though it would have been easier to offload some of them on to the van.
I remembered how we had met at La Quiaca, the Bolivian border town, drawn together by the frustrations of the customs house there. Afterwards we had eaten together in the big canteen over the bus station, soup and rice, and beans and sausage in a spicy red sauce. We were very happy to have finished with all the paper work and the payments of one dollar here, two dollars there, for pieces of paper we did not want and would never need. Our hearts were light as mountain air, excited by the journeys we had already achieved, and by the ones that lay ahead.
It was natural for us to travel on together that day. We circled the rim of an immense bowl, thousands of feet deep. I had often anticipated in my imagination the vertiginous drops of the Andes, but had not expected so soon to find myself riding so close to the edge of nothing. I could see the van across this vast upside down space, a whitish speck crawling along, and at times I imagined Bruno and Antoine inside, exchanging desultory comments. I knew it was dusty in there, and that their vision was limited, and I was glad to be outside and alone, free to escape from my own ordinariness and the train of other people's thoughts.
But at night it was fine to share a meal and talk, to hear about the things
I had missed and the thoughts I had not had. So it went on, day by day, but always a thing of the moment. And when, in Potosi, Bruno wanted to go on to Sucre and I wanted to stay and write, it was the easiest thing to separate, perhaps for ever, just as it was the easiest thing for us to find each other again, as if by chance, a week later in L
a Paz. We guarded each other's liberty as though it were our own.
Only sometimes it was not so easy, and you had to pay the price for company. On the third day after La Quiaca, just past noon and in bright sunshine, we came up the highest road I have ever travelled, perhaps the highest in the world, at sixteen thousand feet or more. Ahead of us a party of Indians was crossing the road in procession. Bolivian Indians are among the world's poorest and they lead a harsh life. Most of their clothing is homespun from hand-dyed wool, yet no company could have looked more prosperous and content than these Indians as they appeared before us on the 10th of January 1975. We passed them by, and then stopped, entranced. The men were smiling enthusiastically and saluting as they came up to us. Most of them were carrying pottery vessels or cloth-wrapped bundles.
Bruno asked the leader where they were going.
'To Otavi,' he replied, pointing over a long rise of stony ground, partly cultivated for maize, where houses were just visible.
'It is the Feast of the Kings. You are invited.'
They seemed truly happy that we had arrived at this propitious moment, their happiness no less sincere for having been released by some of the corn beer they carried in the pots.
It was a wonderful chance. The Indians continued across the hill and we found our own roundabout way there.
Otavi is a small town of cobbled streets and adobe houses built on a steep hillside. We climbed the main street still buoyed up by the gaiety and splendour of the Indians we had met on the road. Then I began to realize that the village was in the grip of a quite different mood. There were many people on the sidewalks, standing, leaning, squatting. No one moved. No one spoke. I had the impression of walking through a museum of ethnic culture.
Of course there was sound and movement of a kind. People still breathed, and scratched themselves and raised coca leaves to their mouths. They followed us with their eyes, but a spell had been cast over them and it was like being watched by pebbles on a beach.
On our left was a house with a more imposing roof. A sign identified it as the 'Corregimiento', or magistrate's office. The somnolent bystanders were thickest here. The doors were open to reveal people arguing and gesturing, in strange contrast to the entranced pavements outside.
We stood wondering what to do. Already I was absorbed in this world of stone, plaster, lime-wash, natural wood and hide, sun-bleached wool and bright vegetable dyes arranged in brilliant traditional patterns. Then another man looking as outlandish as we did, in a green corduroy jacket and a pork pie hat, came hurrying down the hill towards us like the White Rabbit in Wonderland.
He spoke fluently and eloquently in Spanish, which was unusual out there, and he wanted to tell us about his fish. This was a fish he had brought with him from Argentina, but I was never able to grasp its significance because he was quite drunk.
Another man with a crazy black face came to join us then. He was altogether too drunk to speak at all, but he waved his arms in large meaningful swoops, and the two of them surrounded us and bore us away on a tour.
'Churchill, Franco, de Gaulle, Truman. I know them all’ said White Rabbit. He spoke with abandon about economic imperialism, military juntas and exploitation, while Crazy Face conducted the flow of words with his arms. We strolled on past the rows of enchanted spectators, and it at last came through to me that everybody in town was simultaneously stoned and squiffy on cocaine and alcohol. It transpired that the corregidor had forbidden the annual procession and fiesta. Great negotiations were in progress while the would-be revellers could do nothing but drink their chicha, chew their leaf, and become silently blotto.
Two women walked past side by side, crooning and carrying white flags, followed by several children and an old man with a long curved bamboo woodwind, but this unofficial procession died before our eyes. The old man tried to play for us, producing three dismal honking notes and sprays of saliva as his drunken lips failed to hold on to the mouthpiece.
We inspected the chapel at the top of the hill. Most of the stucco had peeled off it, and old crones sat in the shade of the entrance leaning stupefied against the chapel walls.
Yet there were some energetic spirits and they were determined to create some sort of pageant around us, and they pressed us to stay and drink and wait for the fun to start. Inevitably we were nervous, wondering what would happen to us if this whole damned drunken town should spring to life in a full-blooded fiesta. We had to decide because we were a group, and if we wanted to get to Potosi that day we would have to leave soon. Somehow we let our fears speak for us in the name of wisdom and we left.
Alone, I would have stayed, and learned much more about those people. The chance did not come my way again.
There is a way to convert fear into positive energy. When I had discovered it for myself along the way, I used it quite deliberately to project
confidence and sympathy. It had never failed me, and it gave me an unusual and exhilarating sense of power over circumstance. But it seemed to function only when I was alone.
So as I left Abancay and started climbing the dirt road I wondered whether it was time, again, to go on alone, not to go faster but because I thought I might lose my power in the group. Then I put the matter aside, satisfied with having brought it to my attention, thinking TTI know when the moment comes', and I set about looking for a place where we could cook and eat and sleep.
The least we needed was a level area to park the van and pitch a tent. For a while there was nothing. Small, terraced allotments, heavily cultivated, occupied every corner of open ground among the rocks and bushes. Then, at the tenth kilometre stone, a path opened off to the right into a gently sloping field sparsely planted with olive trees. It was dry and stony, and not very inviting, but it would do.
It was just the time of day when my hallucinations came to try me out. They were of the crassest kind possible. Usually they began with nothing more original than a cold bottle of beer. When my appetite was sufficiently inflamed I would go on to lobster, roast beef and real coffee, followed by an accidental meeting with a perfect and most loving woman in a large, clean bed. Sometimes I would conjure up the settings for these indulgences but it was hardly worth bothering. They were always roughly similar, and involved clean table linen, polished glassware, bathrooms with towels and an abundance of friendly hospitality and admiration. As the afternoons turned to evenings and I began to wonder where I would eat and sleep that night, this television set turned on in my head and subjected me to trial by advertisement, hitting me inexorably with every one of my known cravings in turn.
It was not my appetite for cold beer or perfect loving women that shamed and appalled me at those times, it was the fact that I allowed these images to oppress me when they were clearly unattainable, and to make what was there and real and within my grasp seem undesirable. Under the influence of these lobster and champagne ravings I became the perfect sucker, vulnerable to the shoddiest substitutes. For lack of cold beer I would waste money on warm coke, and hate it. I would fall prey to any hotel sign, knowing full well that far from enjoying a clean bed and loving women I would be shut up in a dirty, foetid box with a hundred mosquitoes.
It is said that at three or four in the morning the body is physically at its lowest ebb, but it was at five in the afternoon, at the cocktail hour, that my morale slumped, and the temptations came to me in the wilderness. I fought them as best I could through all the years of the journey and always, when I won, I was handsomely rewarded. I carried a stock of memories of magical evenings out alone in the wild, completely satisfied by the simple food I had cooked, listening to the silence and toasting the stars in a glass of tea, and I used these memories as my blindfold against the gross sirens that beckoned with their neon smiles. Success was built on success, and sometimes I was able to carry through a victorious campaign for days or weeks on end, becoming hardier and happier with each succeeding day. But the war could never be truly won. Sooner or later some warm generous person on my tail would offer, unso
licited, some or even all of the delights I had learned to ignore. Then, when it was time to leave, the struggle would begin all over again. Like a general I was only as good as my last battle.
Yet the torment only ever lasted for an hour in every twenty-four. During the day, out in the world, no matter how hard or cold or wet the road might be, I never wished I were safe in the Ritz. More often the road was neither cold nor wet, and I felt myself to be the most privileged person on earth to be able to pass through where others saw only normality, and to think myself in paradise. While at night I swam lazily among mysterious and potent dreams.
And still ... during the days before I met Antoine and Bruno at La Quiaca my morale had been sagging badly. I had left Santiago with a heavy heart. I wanted company, and I knew that was why I was not ready to leave them. They protected me from my five o'clock follies, and I was grateful to know they were chugging up the road behind me, pleasant and familiar friends.
So on that evening outside Abancay my cerebral TV channel was showing a different programme. As clearly as if I stood before it, the white building in the distance became the stately hacienda that somewhere in South America I had always hoped to encounter. I saw the richly moulded plaster work framing heavy wooden doors studded with black iron; floors of gleaming hardwood polished and hammered by generations of leather boots; ancestral portraits of Spanish swordsmen in lace and breastplate; stiff white table linen splashed with the crimson geometry of candlelight passing through cut glass goblets of wine; and myself deep in a leather armchair, listening to my host tell tales of the Conquest, as I gazed up at the white faces of his perfect daughters flitting coyly behind the rails of the gallery beneath the coffered ceiling.
