Chasing Che (31 page)

A sagging hut with balding thatch stood by the spot, as if guarding the crossing. Four other low adobe buildings were scattered within sight, all of them in various stages of wattled collapse. A cargo truck covered with tarpaulins sat by the hut, and behind the truck were a pair of brightly colored bicycles with panniers. The Peruvian trucker and two young Austrians were inside the hut, eating soup.

One of the bicyclists was too bowel-sick to talk, and lay in his sleeping bag moaning. The other was named Franz. His legs poked like tree trunks from padded Spandex shorts and he had a bad sunburn. Franz talked plainly, with the resigned tone of a man sentenced to labor he could not escape. A few days before, he had dallied in a
mountain town while having a “romance” with a Peruvian woman. This had put the Austrians behind schedule and exposed Franz to dangerous levels of pleasure. Now he had hundreds of miles of cruel road to pedal in a hurry, and he resented it. Later, when the road had beaten the last reserves of generosity out of me, and I grew angry and sullen with the mountains, then I would feel more sympathy for Franz. But at the moment I thought he was ungrateful for the rare place we inhabited.

Franz and his buddy were heading for Lima. He asked about the road north, and I asked about the road south. I described the 15,400-foot pass and the glorious downhill ride into Lima awaiting him. He described the cut in the road a mile ahead. As usual, the road had given out at its weakest point, a steep cliff face. Rains had weakened the rocky soil, and a broad section had simply slid down the mountain. Although vehicles could not pass, some people were walking across the loose scree left behind by the collapse. The Austrians had carried their bikes over that way this morning, stepping gingerly in their biking slippers while trying not to look a thousand feet down into the valley floor. Franz said the road would be fixed tomorrow.

The trucker had been watching our conversation and now asked for a translation. He insisted it would be two days until the road was open. He was a skinny man of Andean origins, but dressed in the unremarkable uniform of the “civilized” Peruvian male—machine-made wool sweater, slacks, and thin black loafers that he shined ostentatiously from time to time with a small cloth from his breast pocket. It was dark and eerie in the hut with dusk falling. The ill Austrian lay in his doss bag, immobile, while three Indian women tended the fire that warmed the soup. They sold us the soup for pennies a bowl and peered in shock at our faces, our strange way of talking, and the bright Spandex uniforms of the Austrians. The trucker didn’t want to admit it at first but he spoke a little Quechua and brokered the soup purchases. He came this way every week, he said, carrying beer to Ayacucho. The trip was always delayed by something, he said: weather, police operations, road problems, mechanical breakdown, illness, accidents, what have you. He looked at my map with
the road on the wrong side of the river and said that was why he didn’t use maps.

Franz and the trucker disagreed on the speed of repairs but were in accord on the scene at the cut. Twenty trucks and as many buses were waiting there, as well as private cars. The repair crews were working at a snail’s pace while the drivers got drunk and howled over campfires. A steady stream of bus passengers on foot picked their way across the cliff face, hoping to find a lift among the vehicles on the far side. Stuck on the mountain face, people were pissing by the side of the road, cooking meals, fighting, and generally displaying the full splendor of human spirit. I decided to spend the night right here at the ford, rather than move up to the cut. The Austrians were relieved. This was bandit country, and their guidebook probably gave the same useless advice as mine: “Travel by day,” “Do not display your wealth or eat in public,” and “It is still not very safe to travel this route.” We were zero for three.

Three women clucked outside the hut, staring at the fortunes embodied in our two-wheeled vehicles. I went out and they addressed me in Quechua with great gales of laugher. They did not speak Spanish—not even a word, it seemed. Their dress was as traditional as I had seen yet. From their jaunty bowler hats through their homespun sweaters and skirts to their seven layers of petticoats they were straight from an ancient time. They rubbed their bellies and pleaded in sounds that bounced off my eardrums. I gave them a bag of rice, which pleased them so much they asked for my watch and, when that didn’t work, some money. They were very happy with the rice, however, and scampered up the road chatting and waving polite good-byes.

The tropics are mercilessly consistent in the measure of days and nights. It grew equatorially dark by 6:30, and there was, of course, no electricity here. On foot I splashed through the ford, wandered a hundred yards up the road, and found the three women in another collapsed hut, sharing the rice I had given them with a half-dozen filthy, shoeless children and an old man. One of the youngest children spoke a little Spanish: in baby talk, I learned that they came from a village that was “a day” up the creek. They had walked out of that narrow cut
between hills and had been waiting three days now with no food, hoping for a lift to a place whose name I didn’t recognize.

Ernesto wrote with plain delight of seeing the descendants of the Incas: “We were in an enchanted valley where time had stopped several centuries ago, and which we lucky mortals, until then stuck in the twentieth century, had been given the good fortune to see.” Watching this clan gather around the fire and eat my rice, I was overwhelmed with a similar joy, but also despair. They were the most pure example of untrammeled indigenous life I had ever seen, but this essentially meant they were extremely poor: Their clothes were homemade, their feet bare, and they owned none of the necessities of life as I knew it. My wristwatch was to them a sign of enormous wealth. Yet for all their muddy deprivation, they were living lives determined by their own culture and history. They had none of the deadly anomie that plagued the shantytowns of Lima, or the psychotic alienation that fed the Shining Path. These were people living in their own time, speaking their own language, not yet ripped from the womb of their own world. For them, the stars still marched in order through the cosmos.

They fed me spoonfuls of plain boiled rice and stared at me with an artless gaze that quickly grew unbearable. I was used to doing the staring, and travel unwrapped an endless vista for me to appreciate. My all-consuming curiosity was a luxurious First World habit—the rudeness of a people used to evaluating everything with a distancing eye. Now the tables had turned; the traveler become the travel. This was fair, but it also grew old quickly, and I returned across the ford, where Franz and I decided to go to sleep on top of the truck. The driver agreed this was a good idea—we would be safer there if someone came during the night, he said, and none of us wanted to discuss who that might be. The sick Austrian did not want to move. I told him in the goriest possible detail about the
vinchuca
beetles that live in thatched roofs; how they crawl down at night and bite you, infecting you with Chagas disease, which eats away at the walls of your heart for years without any symptoms, until one day you drop dead while eating a pastry in Vienna. He rolled over and went to sleep. The
driver locked himself in his cab and went to sleep, too. Franz and I scaled the side of the truck with our most valuable possessions and sleeping bags.

The canvas on top was stretched tight as a cot. Beneath us were 1,200 cases of pilsner. We settled down and said good-night like an old married couple. Slowly, under the pressure of our combined weight, the canvas began to stretch. Every few minutes I noticed that I had sunk lower. Eventually I was touching the beer; after a bit longer I was lying on a bed of beer caps. At twelve bottles a case that made 14,400 bottles, not one of them soft enough to sleep on. Franz had an air mattress and by 7:40 was snoring away. I lay awake on this bed of metal dimples and imagined Shining Path guerrillas sneaking into the settlement, intent on stealing Kooky. In my fantasies I routed the Western Hemisphere’s most fanatical guerrilla force with a rain of beer bottles. The stars were spectacular. I sang under my breath:

I
woke up at 5:45 with rain on my face. My back was buttoned with the indentations of beer caps. I looked around. It was still dark, but I was glad to be awake because I saw through the rain that I was now in Washington, D.C. I woke Franz up and explained where we were. He climbed down to the cab with me and I drove the beer truck down Massachusetts Avenue (we were about half a mile below the traffic circle where Letelier, the Chilean exile, was blown up), clattering the
stick shift while looking for an all-night coffee shop. That’s the problem with Washington: no all-night coffee shops.

Somehow, despite the windshield, rain was blowing onto my face as I drove around pointing out Congress and various monuments to Franz. I turned on the wipers, but the rain kept coming. I had to reach up and wipe the rain off my face.…

I woke up rubbing my face. It was still 5:45, it was still dark, and it was still Peru. It was raining on my face—real rain, not dream rain. I climbed down without waking Franz and went to boil some water. In the lifting gray I set up my little camping stove on the bank of the stream above the ford, where it braided in rivulets. I laid out my instant coffee, my red plastic cup, my spoon, and my cigarette lighter. The water boiled but was not hot, so I kept cooking it. Franz soon joined me, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and laid out his cup, his spoon, and his instant coffee.

“Do you got any sugar?” he asked. I did, and traded a little sugar for a little of his powdered milk, a wary exchange by two men who measured their remaining supplies in grams. I hadn’t had milk powder in my coffee in ages, and the smell threw me back in a reverie to a time ten years before when I had traveled over China by train. There are no dairy products in the Chinese larder, and after a couple of months of doing without I bought three packets of Nestlé powdered milk in a tourist store and began mixing cups in any samovar I could find. Late in the trip I’d spent a night high on the Tibetan plateau with a clan of horse nomads on a pilgrimage. They served me yak butter tea and I made them powdered cow milk. They shared many of the physical features and even habits of dress and hairstyles with the Peruvian Indian, who was a first cousin. They too lived in a world whose cosmos spun overhead as it always had.

The same three women I’d fed with rice last night appeared again and squatted down on the opposite bank of the stream, which was very narrow here. It was light now. They talked among themselves, pointing shyly at the various devices: there were no words in Quechua for powdered milk, for butane/propane fuel canisters, or for gorp, which Franz issued in a precious dribble from a plastic bag
that he did not want me to get my hands on. While we stirred and sipped the women watched intently.

After my own dose of caffeine it was time to be ambassadorial, and I stirred up a fresh serving in the red plastic cup. I reached halfway across the stream and gestured toward the women. The boldest reached tenderly across to meet me, took the cup, emptied the coffee onto the ground, and put the cup in her pocket.

After some gentle prying I was able to get the cup back and, using sign language, explain that I meant for her to have the coffee in the cup, not the cup itself. Not only was she distraught at losing the cup—everyone had seen it, I had handed it right to her!—but she was also terrified of coffee, and reeled back when I approached with a second cup. Eventually I persuaded one of the other women to try it; she took a sip and spit it out on the ground with disgust.

I turned down their offer to buy my camp stove, which convinced them only that I was a tough negotiator. They came back twice in the next half hour with higher and higher offers, eventually totaling three dollars. I resisted.

All this time the women had spoken only Quechua, and in their attempts to buy my cookstove they had taught me the word for
pot (manco)
. At the end, when I was packing up to leave, the youngest woman suddenly spoke in halting Spanish, with an accent so thick she sounded Russian.

“There are … beautiful things … in your country,” she said.

I
wished Franz luck, smashed through the ford, and drove up to the washout. It was much bigger than I had expected, some three hundred feet across. The last mile of road ascending to the cut was lined with the same colorful trucks and buses that had nearly killed me over the last two days. The passengers waited by the vehicles, but the drivers had all gone up to see the action.

The road passed across a cliff face here, or at least it had. When
the rains came a huge chunk of road had slid down into the river. It was a spectacular spot, the drama spiced by the rusted hulk of a bus resting on the valley floor below. It was an old wreck; you take what consolation you can. I pulled right to the head of the queue, dismounted, and noticed the little goat path across the gap that Franz and his partner had transited while carrying their bicycles. The slope was made entirely of round, loose rocks, angling down at about forty degrees. They were brave men.

There was a mass outbreak of stupidity under way. Immediately on my arrival all the truck drivers began whooping and shouting for me to ride straight across the gap. They had seen too many episodes of
Knight Rider
and were gravely disappointed that the supergringo would not leap with snarling engine through the air. The repair crew also consisted of morons. Their method for fixing a washed-out road was simple and totally ineffective. First, they got three Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers, then parked two of them on the road and had the drivers fall asleep in their seats, mouths open to the heavens. The third Cat then began shoveling rocks and dirt into the gap, where they promptly slid down a thousand feet and made a nice addition to the pile already at the bottom.