But Enough About You: Essays (14 page)

Owing to a computer error, we were installed in Room 1002—one of the “Presidential” Suites—at the Miraflores Park Hotel. It has a condor’s-eye view of the sea and city, a pool on the balcony, a Jacuzzi that could accommodate four—perfect for summit meetings—and a huge sauna. I proposed canceling our ten-day itinerary and remaining in Room 1002. I could always file colorful dispatches back to my editor in New York. “
The fierce jungle sun beat down unrelentingly as the anaconda slithered lethally toward our sinking dugout . . .
” I drifted off to sleep that night to the sound of the Pacific surf pounding against the coast below.

Next day, in the Cathedral of Lima we stood in front of Pizarro’s tomb. A glass case atop an ornate altar encloses his rather small wooden coffin, along with a box inscribed,
Aqui yace el marquez gobernador don francisco pizarro
(“Here lies the Marquis-Governor,” etc.). He brought death, destruction, and disease. In his fine book,
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
, Charles Mann notes that European-borne diseases may have wiped out as many as nine out of ten Peruvians in the sixteenth century. What a legacy. But as Prescott tells us, the old conquistador at least died like a cavalier. He was assassinated by a rival faction of Spaniards in 1541, just across the square from where he rests, less than a decade after he duplicitously murdered the last Inca ruler, Atahualpa. He fought his
attackers with bravado and as he died, drew a cross on the floor in his own blood and bent down to kiss it.

A grave was hastily dug in an obscure corner [of the cathedral], the services were hurried through, and, in secrecy, and in darkness dispelled only by the feeble glimmering of a few tapers furnished by these humble menials, the remains of Pizarro, rolled in their bloody shroud, were consigned to their kindred dust. Such was the miserable end of the Conqueror of Peru—of the man who but a few hours before had lorded it over the land with as absolute a sway as was possessed by its hereditary Incas . . . he perished like a wretched outcast. “There was none, even,” in the expressive language of the chronicler, “to say, God forgive him!”

The balance of the afternoon we spent staring at 1,800-year-old ceramic depictions of . . . well, I’ll let the captions speak for themselves: “Low relief scene of intercourse between the male divinity and a woman”; “Dead Man Masturbating” (Sean Penn’s next movie!); “Copulating Frogs” and “Copulating Rodents.” The last two specimens are rather human and amusing. All this is to be found in the “Sala Erótica” at the Rafael Larco Herrera archaeological museum, along with some 45,000 nonerotic items. We flew to Cusco early the next day, our feet tingling weirdly from altitude pills.

Cusco, Pizarro’s El Dorado, nests in a valley 11,000 feet above sea level. At our hotel, the Monasterio, they’ll pipe oxygen into your room for an extra $25 a day.
Sold
. The first night, I did a not-smart thing by taking a painkiller (for the altitude headache) along with my evening dose of Diamox and awoke at three a.m. to what F. Scott Fitzgerald calls the dark night of the soul.

Dawn broke to the news that a tremendous mudslide had glopped onto the railroad tracks leading to the base of Machu Picchu. This retarded our forward progress but did allow my vital organs to refresh and reboot.

Cusco was the Rome of its day, and to look on its ruins—
Qoricancha, the Temple of the Sun, or the Cyclopean-scale fortress of Sacsayhuamán on the heights above the town—is to feel something of the thrum that must have run through Shelley when he came up with “Ozymandias.” I mean Rome in a literal sense.

“In 1491,” Mann informs us, “the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West African tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman empire . . . bigger by far than any European state, the Inka domination extended over a staggering 32 degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.”

It was also one of the shortest-lived empires in history. When the Spaniards arrived, it had flourished for less than one hundred years. But its achievements were great and in ways surpassed Europe’s. The Inca erected cities on mountainsides sloping 65 degrees. (San Francisco’s steepest hill is 31.5 degrees.) They built twenty thousand miles of roadways, some of which are still in use. Most impressive of all, they were the first empire in history to eradicate hunger. All this they managed without money, the wheel, writing, or the arch. Yes, there was the danger that you might qualify for human sacrifice, but otherwise, not bad by sixteenth-century standards.

It must have been something to take the breath away, Cusco. Having garrotted Atahualpa and massacred thousands of his men, Pizarro and his men entered the city on November 15, 1533. In Prescott’s telling: “. . . though falling short of the El Dorado which had engaged their credulous fancies, [it] astonished the Spaniards by the beauty of its edifices, the length and regularity of its streets, and the good order and appearance of comfort, even luxury, visible in its numerous population. It far surpassed all they had yet seen in the New World.”

They did not tarry with sightseeing, but instead “lost no time in plundering . . . as well as despoiling the religious edifices. The interior decorations supplied them with considerable booty. They stripped off the jewels and rich ornaments that garnished the royal mummies in the temple of Coricancha. Indignant at the concealment of their treasures, they put the inhabitants, in some instances, to the torture,
and endeavored to extort from them a confession of their hiding places. They invaded the repose of the sepulchres, in which the Peruvians often deposited their valuable effects, and compelled the grave to give up its dead. No place was left unexplored by the rapacious Conquerors . . .”

There’s something else I’d like to have seen: the Incan counterattack three years later. The Spaniards had steel, gunpowder, and horses, but the Inca had slings, and according to Mann, could hurl rocks with sniperlike accuracy at 100 miles per hour:

In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in campfires until they were red-hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in midair. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles. During a counterattack in May 1536 an Inka army used these missiles to burn Spanish-occupied Qosqo to the ground. Unable to step outside, the conquistadors cowered in shelters beneath a relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone. Rather than evacuate, the Spaniards, as brave as they were greedy, fought to the end. In a desperate, last-ditch counterattack, the Europeans eked out victory.

As we walked to the main entrance of the cathedral, I noticed a sign:
ROOM OF THE INQUISITION
. Our guide, Edgard Mendivil, a deeply learned man, explained that this had formerly been a museum. “But they finally thought it was strange to have a museum showing instruments they killed people with in the name of God, so they closed it and now it’s a shop.”

A few years ago, a sixteenth-century papal bull was found in Seville. It officially designated Pizarro’s chaplain, a Dominican friar named Vicente Valverde, leader of the expedition. So it was technically his party. Open
The Conquest of Peru
to any random page and you will find the good friar explaining the Trinity to some Inca as the flames begin to lick at his ankles. In their first encounter, the otherwise hapless emperor Atahualpa had the good sense to tell this malefic ecclesiastical busybody to go stuff his Trinity. At their last
meeting, Valverde generously offered to commute Atahualpa’s death sentence from immolation to strangling—provided he stopped being so obdurate about the Trinity and opted for the full conversion package. Yet another Inca, this one named Challcuchima, didn’t get off so easily.

“Father Valverde accompanied the Peruvian chieftain to the stake,” Prescott writes. “He seems always to have been present at this dreary moment, anxious to profit by it.” (Not the sort of padre you want on the other side of the screen at Saturday afternoon confession.) Valverde was eventually slaughtered in 1541—not a windfall year for the Pizarro party, it would seem—by some apparently non-Trinitarian Indians. His cross survives. It’s mounted above one of the altars in the cathedral here in Cusco. Most crucifixes put me in a reverent frame of mind. This one chilled me to the bone.

The train from Cusco to Machu Picchu runs along the Urubamba River through the Sacred Valley and into narrowing canyons. The roiling chocolate-colored water beside you eventually empties into the Atlantic Ocean thousands of miles later. None other than Jacques Cousteau figured that out.

The Peru Rail engineers hadn’t yet completely deglopped the tracks, so we had to disembark, ride in a van a kilometer or so to the other side of the mudslide, and catch another train. This we did in concert with some eight hundred other people, seven hundred of whom ended up sitting on Dr. Melocotón’s and my lap.

If you sit on the left side on the ride to Machu Picchu, you have bracing vistas of stupendous ravines, speckled with thousands of lush bromeliads; also wild magnolia, immense rhododendron bushes, ferns, liana vines, and Incan ruins. You’re in the cloud forest now, where the Andes start to give way to jungle. It’s a sight. Sit on the right side and your vista consists of hours upon hours of—rock.

We disembarked in late afternoon at Aguas Calientes, the little town that serves as a launching pad for Machu Picchu. Most people spend their nights here. But you can now spend the night up top. We boarded a bus for the final stage of the journey: a 1,500-foot climb up
a switchback road. I counted fifteen turns. The view down becomes increasingly impressive, so much so that I found myself thinking of an old friend of mine whose odd hobby it was to collect newspaper clippings about bus plunges. He had dozens. No bus plunged in Pakistan or Peru without his knowing it.

We made our loud ascent, gears grinding, exhaust spewing. Perhaps noting my lack of color, or the fact that my fingernails were embedded in Dr. Melocotón’s forearm, Edgard said soothingly, “Sir, there has never—
never
—been a fatality.” Then suddenly a perfect rainbow appeared, and five minutes later we were checked into Room 40 (try to get this room if you can—it’s got the best view, but rooms 39 and 38 will do) at the Sanctuary Lodge and furiously gobbling tea sandwiches.

There was less than an hour of light left. Edgard led us through the gates and up a trail. We came out of the bushes and there it was.

The air was soft and hushed, except for the occasional whoops of a group of teenagers. The mountains were striated with wisps of mist as in old Chinese screen paintings. Swallows dipped amid the ruins. In the distance below, a small herd of llamas, necks comic and giraffe-like above the low walls, began their daily ascent back up to their night hut. It was a scene familiar from my earliest childhood, when I had first seen it in some issue of
National Geographic
. What the Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham thought when he first laid eyes on it on July 24, 1911, I don’t know, but it must have been some variation on “Holy
s—
.”

Bingham found it, as discoverers so often do, by accident. He was in search of something else, an Incan site called Vilcabamba. On his way there, he encountered a farmer who told him, “I know a place.” Bingham told him, “Show me.”

We sat in the gloaming as Edgard told us the story. The farmer said to Bingham, “Sir, it is a
torturous
road.” (He should see the bus ride.) Bingham said he would pay well for taking him. “How much do you make in a week?” The farmer named a sum. Bingham offered two weeks pay. The farmer held out. They finally settled on five weeks.

“And so,” Edgard concluded, “Melchor Arteaga, this farmer, be
came the first
operator
at Machu Picchu.” Melchor was smarter still: The actual job of leading the gringo up the torturous road he delegated to the son of Melquiades Richarte, a neighbor, who thus become the actual first guide at Machu Picchu.

It’s still not entirely clear why, exactly, the Incas built it. Theories vary. The one that makes the most sense is that it was a religious center and a depository for mummies. The Incas were crazy for mummification and treated preserved remains as living beings, much like Anthony Perkins in
Psycho
. It’s logical, then, that they would have taken their dead to a mountaintop metropolis built in the shape of a condor, god of the sky. Here the spirits of the dead could be assimilated into the heavens. What tips toward this conclusion is the evidence that very few children lived at Machu Picchu.

Building all this was a staggering undertaking. Some sixty thousand workers spent seventy years on it. They lopped off the top of a mountain and built supporting terraces—8,000 feet above sea level. Not only did they have to hew the rock, they also had to lug up the topsoil. Two of the grassy plazas alone were sodded with an estimated 220 tons of clay, humped here clump by clump on aching backs from a riverbed fifty miles away. The human remains found here all show evidence of malnutrition. Why should that be, when food was abundant? The answer is—coca. They chewed the leaves to keep going. And if you’ve got a buzz on, hey, who needs food and drink? And all this effort to build a city for just a few hundred people.

Who only inhabited the finished city for thirty years. Why did they abandon it? Eighty percent of the mummies show evidence of smallpox. The Inca were early believers in Intelligent Design; they didn’t believe disease was natural or random. “They thought,” Edgard said, “that this indicated that the gods did not
like
this place.” There’s another theory: that they put it to the torch and buried their mummies and treasures rather than let them fall into the hands of the approaching conquistadors. Edgard, who brings clients here fifty times a year and is well versed in the scholarship, subscribes to the approaching-conquistador theory. I’d have split, too, if I heard that Friar Valverde was on his way to talk Trinity.