by Ted Simon
With a sigh I stopped the bike and waited. It was not many minutes before the dusty white van laboured into sight. We turned into the field and chose a good spot. Antoine got out the plastic water carrier and we all drank some warmish water. I threw my red bag and jacket to the ground, and added my helmet to the pile. Bruno lifted the hood of the van and began again to wonder what he could do to the engine.
'There's a house over there,' I said. They had not noticed.
'I'll see who's there and tell them what we're doing. Maybe I can get some meat,' I added, thinking about the wine and the girls on the gallery. I rode along the path, about five hundred yards, past an area of thick marshy grass. The house and its courtyards were enclosed by a high wall and as I approached, the house became hidden from view. A van stood outside the broken iron gate, and three men were talking. Two of them said 'Adios' and looked at me curiously, then got into their van and drove off. The third man watched me, without expression, as I parked the bike and walked towards him. He was so placed that I still could see nothing of the house. 'Buenas dias’ I said.
'Buenas dias’ he replied, and waited as I composed my Spanish. 'We are in the field down there,' I said. 'We are three. We hope to spend the night there.'
'If you like,' he said, and fell silent again. He was half Spanish and wore shabby Western clothing. His shirt was buttoned tightly at the neck, and I noticed a great many red dots on his skin above the collar and on his arms below the short sleeves.
'We would like to buy some meat if you please.'
'There is no meat,' he said, without emphasis or explanation.
‘If possible, we would like to buy a chicken.' I suggested.
'There is no chicken,' he said.
This time I simply watched him, patiently, until he felt obliged to fill the vacuum.
'We sell all our meat to the buyer of meat. You can ask him.' 'Thank you, Senor. I will try. Where is his house?' 'At thirty-three kilometres,' he said.
I could not make sense of his reply as I felt sure the buyer would be in town, and pointed that way.
'No,' he said. 'At the thirty-third kilometre,' and waved towards the mountain.
'He has a house?' I asked. It was a poor question, but I could think of nothing better. Already I was feeling slightly uneasy.
'Yes, he has a house,' he replied. Again silence. He was shrouded in silence. Or he was listening to sounds I could not hear.
'Bueno. Muchas gracias.' Slowly I turned towards the bike, hoping that he might add something, but he simply stood and watched me ride away.
It meant riding nineteen kilometres. I told Bruno and Antoine what I was doing and set off up the road. It continued to climb steeply and the air grew cooler. The trees were leafier, and a pleasant brook bubbled along the roadside. Some goats, startled on their way home, skittered up an almost vertical face of rocks and bushes, and a small girl, half their size, shouted and rushed after them at the same speed, her long skirts flying. Where the road curved round a spur a few mud and wattle huts stood among banana trees on a shelf of ground overhanging the valley. An Indian woman was hoeing her corn. I asked for 'the man who buys meat' but she shook her head helplessly. Beyond these huts there was no further sign of human habitation. I passed the 33rd kilometre stone. The vegetation thinned, and large areas of the mountainside were bare. It seemed absurd to suppose that a meat wholesaler would have his warehouse at the top of a mountain. My embarrassment and indignation welled up a tide of fury. I had allowed myself to want the meat (and the sherry and the daughters) and it had made me stupid.
I turned around, storing up anger for the man who had sent me on this mad errand, determined to confront him, preparing phrases which would shame him into telling me the truth. I could not conceive that he had invented the meat buyer, but at the same time I imagined his laughter as he watched me roaring off and up the mountain.
As I passed Bruno and Antoine I could hardly get a word out. Astonishingly, the man was still standing near the gate. As before he watched me get off the bike and walk towards him.
'There is nobody up there, Senor,' I said, tightlipped.
'You could not find him?' he asked.
'There is nothing there,' I said. 'No house, no people.'
'Well,' he said, 'there is some meat. Please come with me.'
His face betrayed no reaction, no hint of mockery, but the voice was, I thought, faintly tinged with interest. Bewildered, I followed him through the gate.
The house was now revealed in all its glory, but it was the glory of total decay. Windows without frames stared blankly from peeling and cracked walls. Broken shutters hung drunkenly by one hinge. A once magnificent porch was littered with wrecked furniture and masonry rubbish, and the lath and plaster ceiling above it bellied down like the breastbones of a decomposing whale. We walked towards it across a muddy and unkempt yard. A wave of athletic pigs swept across our path, driving frantic hens in all directions. In a dark corner of the porch an old Indian woman bundled up in black sat spinning yarn, all her life apparently concentrated in her fingers as the floss of wool flowed from her right hand to the twirling bobbin in her left. There were a few younger men and women moving or standing but I could not tell whether they had any purpose. The sense of collapse was general and overwhelming.
The man with the spots asked me to wait a moment while he went into the house. I wish I had gone in with him, for I never saw the inside, but my attention was caught by a large blueprint pinned to the wall. It was a diagram headed 'Co-operative del 24 Junio', and it set out the organization of the co-operative, with the chairman and his council on top and the descending chain of command and responsibility. It was sufficiently elaborate to be interesting, and simple enough to be credible. In faraway Lima I imagined this piece of paper must have impressed a number of people. 'Now here we have our "24 Junio". You see, our reforms are going well. The people are really taking the land into their own hands. They have a fine building there too, for their meetings and recreation. The original landlord described it to me. He is a friend of mine, you know - a friend of the revolution. He lives in Lima, of course, with his four perfect daughters . . .'
I wondered whether the man with spots was the chairman. Then he came out and asked me again to follow him. My cravings had subsided and I was in a much happier state. My senses now were bristling with excitement at the sights and sounds and smells that surrounded me. We walked round the main building past sheds and outhouses, and plodded uphill across some fallow grassland. Eventually we reached a cluster of huts like the ones I had seen from the road. An Indian woman came out towards us, wiping her hands on her embroidered apron. She had a nice smiling face. I had the strange impression that we were expected, as though she had had a telephone message that we were coming, a ludicrous idea.
She wore her stiff-brimmed black hat set very square on her head, and her long black hair hung in two braids. They talked a while in the Indian language. Then the man said to me:
'This is my wife. She will show you the meat.'
She smiled at me again and led me into a smaller hut. The light outside was already fading, and inside it was very dark. A barrel stood there, on end, open at the top. She pointed to it and I saw it was full of raw meat encrusted with dried blood. She pulled out the first lump and held it up for inspection. It was a shapeless mass weighing many kilos. I could not guess which part of the animal it was, only that it was cow.
'It's very big,' I said.
She gestured that I should look for myself. I laid my gloves aside on a crate and plunged my hands into the gory mess. After a while I found a piece that I liked better than the rest. None of it smelled bad, and I could not understand how the meat stayed fresh in the heat of the day, with all the flies around, and no salt or preservative. The problem fascinated me, but my Spanish was not good enough to resolve it.
The piece of meat I had chosen looked quite gruesome and was still too large. The man laid it on a tree stump and chopped it in half with a wood axe. H
is wife brought a yard arm and weighed one of the halves. It came to just under two kilos, and I paid the price which was half the price in the butchers' shops when you could find one.
I carried the piece away in my bloodstained fingers, still convinced that it would be inedible. I felt that I was living through part two of a complex and inscrutable hoax, but by now I was a willing accomplice.
Antoine and Bruno did not, as I expected, turn pale with disgust when I held out my trophy, so I got busy on the lump with my knife and their cutting board, and found three fine big steaks inside. The bits and pieces, shorn of their crusts, I put aside for soup stock. As I worked I discovered a possible reason why my friends seemed so indifferent. When I held my head still a quivering cloud formed in front of my eyes, a curtain of shimmering dots too close for focus. I put my hand to my face and found blood on it, my own blood. The flies, for that is what they were, were small, noiseless, numerous and avaricious beyond belief. Their bodies, when you could see one, were custard yellow, but they were hardly bigger than fruit flies. They seemed to chew their way into the skin so that the blood welled out in gouts.
I have never been able to make my peace with mosquitoes, and they have troubled me in most parts of the world. Some people I know have taught themselves to be undisturbed. It used to impress me to watch Father Walsh in Fortaleza, talking calmly or watching television while several of the huge hump-backed mosquitoes they had there fed contentedly on his forehead. By comparison I was as agitated as a scarecrow in a gale. He used to say that as they were not Anopheles there was no danger of malaria and, furthermore, there was no point in killing them once they got started, since the irritation came from the anti-coagulant they injected first. If you let them get on with it, the chances were, he said, that they would suck most of the poison out again. It seemed a most rational and saintly attitude, and represented exactly the style of pragmatic holiness they all practised up there at Sao Raimundo.
One might have thought that travelling constantly and knowing that any irritations I met along the way would soon be left behind would make it easier to bear these trifling inconveniences. Not so. At least, not for me. They could be suffered, but not dismissed.
As for the anti-coagulant theory, that did not work for me either. It was the Buddhists who eventually made me realize that if you are waiting for a spot to hurt, it will do its best to hurt you. When I allowed the insect to have its fill of me I could never forget that I was conducting an experiment and in consequence it always hurt. So I used my mosquito net and waved my arms, and came to a kind of dynamic equilibrium with mosquitoes.
But not with the flies of Abancay. They were for me the insect equivalent of the Piranha fish, and I could almost see their saw-toothed jaws tearing into me. I put up my net as fast as I could and prayed the mesh was fine enough to keep them out. I am lucky enough not to share the
common horror of slimy, creepy and slippery things. Snakes, spiders, beetles and worms do not distress me, and often I find them full of interest, but these silent devourers of my flesh filled me with loathing. I swore never to stop anywhere again where there was one of the tiny monsters to be seen, and said a prayer, in passing, for the Conquistadors.
Bruno said there was a similar black fly in Paraguay, and he seemed more resigned to it, while Antoine showed no visible reaction at all that I can remember.
While twilight lasted, two men came riding past towards the house, wearing scarves and cowboy hats and broad leather chaps or 'pasa montes'. At that moment I remembered that I had left my gloves behind at the hut, and I called out to them, saying I would come in the morning to collect them. At the back of my mind was the idea that they would be less likely to disappear if it was known that I was coming back for them. The next morning I discovered my mistake.
When I came to the hut I could not find my nice, smiling woman. There was a strange couple there.
'Yes,' said the man, 'Luis has your gloves, to give to you. Now he has gone off into the mountains to hunt for cochineal, and it is impossible to find him. But tonight or tomorrow morning, Sehor, have no fear, he will bring them to you.'
The long conversation that followed was merely to express my frustration. It was clearly fruitless from the start. The meat had, after all, cost me dear, for it was a long time before I could find another pair of suitable gloves. I consoled myself with the knowledge that the experience had been priceless, but still I cursed myself and all Indians indiscriminately. Then we set off up the mountain.
The van was no better than the day before. It was never out of first gear. As soon as the sun appeared it began to overheat again, and they drove with the bonnet open. Since Bruno could not see where he was going, Antoine had to stand up and lean out of the open door calling directions to Bruno. In this unlikely fashion they would creep up the mountain towards me as I sat on some pleasant rock beside a river, watching and thinking. I spent a lot of time then, and later, thinking about the meat buyer. Many days later I learned that it was forbidden by decree for producers to sell meat privately. Also, every alternate week had been declared 'meatless' to favour exports. I thought that explained some of it, but by no means all. And I went on listening for the sounds that the man with the spots seemed to hear. Perhaps, I thought, they also offered immunity to blood-sucking flies.
The mountain got steeper, and there were dizzy drops from the road. The views in these great valleys are unequalled anywhere, and I benefited from Bruno's snail's pace to sit quietly and observe distant peaks and terraces, and then all the small detail around me. Sometimes little goatherds peered at me bashfully from behind trees, to disappear with a giggle and pop up again seconds later in a quite different place. Their strength and agility must have been extreme.
As we rose into the thinner air the van lost more and more power until at last it was exhausted and could go no further. Yet we felt that we must be near the summit. Once there, it would be a hundred miles or more of level roads and steep descent. We had to get to the top somehow.
‘I’ll give you a tow,' I said. 'Well, why not. You've almost got enough power. The bit extra I can give you will make the difference.'
It worked for a while, but then the bike began to get unpleasantly hot, and I was thinking we would have to find some other way when I saw some people ahead of us on the narrow dirt road. It is a rarity, I am sure, to see a motorcycle towing a car up a hill, but they were even more odd, I thought. They were walking, but not at all the way one walks in order to get somewhere, or for the fun of walking. They were in procession and had a religious air about them. There was a man in the lead and he held an object in his hand, but I could not make out what it was, and in any case he was not carrying it with reverence. Yet there was an unmistakable aura of ecstasy and fervour about them all.
I stopped the bike, and the van stopped too. At last the leader of the procession reached us, and the others stood behind him, a random group of people enchanted by their fate. The object I had been unable to identify was the fractured steering link of a bus. The driver and his passengers had just narrowly escaped from plunging thousands of feet down a mountainside. They were in a state of total bliss.
When we explained what we were doing, the driver approached the van like a faith healer, and laid his hands on the distributor. With the minimum of fuss, the engine power increased by fifty per cent and we sailed away to the top of the mountain.
My greatest concern the next evening was to be out of range of the 'yellow peril'. Several times on the climb beyond Andahuaylas I stopped on some idyllic camp site until, after a few minutes, the first flesh-eating fly homed in and I fled further up the mountain. Altitude was the only defence. That night we slept in a high valley, moist and green and so intensely cultivated that there was scarcely space for us. Bruno wanted to move into an empty barn, but the owner said he put his pigs there when it rained. It looked like rain, so we made do with grass verge.
Next day I planned to make Ayacucho, a long ride, and I left the others far behind.
They were much better equipped to travel in the dark and
could afford to arrive later. The road plunged again into a deep valley, a phenomenal drop to the Rio Pampas where I was once again among thorn and cactus. The climb on the other side of the river was correspondingly high, and took me after several hours to a plateau at fifteen thousand feet. Herds of llama scattered at my arrival, and were a serious hazard because instead of running from danger isolated animals ran to the herd, often across my path. I saw eagles and, for the first time, the world's biggest bird, the Condor. It was soaring at some distance, and its size was not noticeable, until it flapped, just once, its twelve-foot wings. The shape they made as they beat up and down left no doubt. It was an airborne monster, a thrilling sight to see.
The road ran on across this high table of rock and scrub much further than the map indicated. I could feel the cold gathering, and worried that I did not have enough fuel. The sun was almost down, hitting me in the eyes and dazzling me as always happened when I was most concerned about making good time and keeping out of potholes. Then I met a truck, the only vehicle I had seen, and miraculously the driver had spare petrol.
I made the last long descent into Ayacucho in the dark. Ayacucho is an important town in Peruvian history. A great battle was fought in that valley and it has interest for tourists. There was a simple but graceful hotel with patio and fountains and tiled corridors. I was given a room to myself for seventy soles. The usual price was eighty soles.
Tor essos que llegen en coche, ochenta. Pero essos en moto son muy hombre,' said the clerk with a grin. In other words, car drivers pay the full rate but there is a discount for heroes.
Attached to the hotel was a cafe-restaurant. It was built as an afterthought and compared with the hotel it was shoddy and fly-blown. It reflected the general indifference to standards in food and drink, an indifference born of scarcity. It was pointless to work up an appetite for steak, a cold beer or an egg fried in butter. The chances were more than even that whatever you wanted you could not have.
