Cloud Road (23 page)

The matadors folded their capes and packed up. The crowd filtered away; the loose bull’s location could be tracked by the sudden starbursts of people fleeing from a point. Men were already dismantling the stands. Next week: football. Someone would go down in midfield, and see a brown stain in the earth.

The buses were full. We walked down the hill in the dark, hoping to pick up the empty buses coming back from Huari. They wouldn’t stop because they already had passengers waiting in Cajay. We turned off the road onto a gravel path to cut out the long hairpins. Within ten yards, Elaine cried out once, fell and collapsed in a heap. ‘I trod on loose pebbles, my foot shot away.’ She would not tell me how bad it was so I knew it was bad. A local man came into the circle of our torchlight and asked what was the matter. He bathed the ankle in cold water and put his hands on the spot where it hurt. Her face relaxed. ‘That’s better.’

‘Put on your boot, Señora.’

She could still hardly bear to put her foot to the ground. A large crowd gathered round, and agreed she must get on
the very next bus, no matter what the driver said. I ambushed the next one by walking straight at it along the middle of the road, and went to the hedgebank to help Elaine. When we turned round, the bus was totally full. I reminded a row of sitting ladies that they had all agreed the Señora must be on the next bus. They looked
shame-faced
, and by sitting on each other, made a small space for Elaine. I climbed onto the roof and wedged myself in the roof-rack. There was no moon. I felt guilty at enjoying the beauty of the starry sky with Elaine injured, but the Milky Way shone brightly and I was enraptured. The driver stopped outside the hospital. Elaine said, ‘They’ll only insist on an injection, I don’t want an injection.’

‘I’ve got clean syringes.’

‘Just get me to a bar.’

She limped to one, but she wasn’t going to be walking for a few days.

We drank strong dark beer and watched the television news of the bullfight. The camera zoomed in on the two Scots mountaineers we had met on the bus. They were strolling across the car park. The loose bull galloped past, one horn missing a set of kidneys by about an inch and a half. His last e-mail home nearly read,
Having scaled several top peaks in the Cordillera Blanca, I was on my day off, leaving the bullfight early to get a safe seat on the bus, when I was gored by an escaped bull. Hope all is well with you, Ross.

Dawn brought the World Cup Final. I pulled on clothes, and took out a chair to join heavily muffled locals glued to a black and white television set up in the middle of the courtyard. They were cool towards me until Brazil went close and I cheered.

‘We thought, as a European, you would be supporting Germany.’ Before the goal kick, I filled them in on a century of footballing prejudice, and we settled down amicably to watch Brazil win.

Elaine’s foot and ankle did not bruise as badly as we had feared. She strapped it up and hobbled round the town. We were running out of ideas on how a donkey might enter our lives. Huddled in a freezing café, we watched four men agree a price to travel in the back of an empty garbage-crusher truck. Would that be our fate? Elaine drank coca tea; I risked milk coffee, although there was seldom fresh milk.

She nodded at my coffee, ‘What’s it like?’

‘It’s made with paralysed milk.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I meant sterilised. There should be tourist signs at the edge of town,
Huari, a cheap place to grow old and die
.’

A four-wheel drive drew up, braked and rammed a lamppost. The driver stepped out, red-faced drunk. At his side was a smart, young woman in a figure-hugging grey wool dress. Her locks swung loosely in long ringlets. She saw us and waved, and, with a big smile, ran to embrace me. I had no idea who she was. ‘I am Lari, we danced together at the bullfight yesterday!’ The ‘student’ I had danced with was a businesswoman.

We began talking, and explained our donkey difficulties.

‘You should ask in the meat market,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to eat one!’

She laughed, ‘The butchers know all the livestock traders.’

On the butcher’s head sat a familiar hat with a spot of blood on the rim. He was Ricardo, the knife-man at the bullfight. He patted two horned skulls. ‘These are the two animals you saw killed yesterday.’

I asked about donkeys. He stroked his jaw. ‘You need to see Victor Jarra, he has animals to sell. He lives in a village called Huamantanga.’ Finding transport took an hour, the journey took half an hour. Finding Victor Jarra, a ghost of a man with a cold handshake, and discovering the animals had all been sold, took thirty seconds. Elaine was getting desperate. Her chance to walk the full
hundred-mile
stage had long gone. She sat outside our room, studying the guidebook. ‘There is only one small town along our route, La Union, with a bus service to Lima. I have to complete the first fifty miles in time to meet it, so we have to leave in two days.’

We went in the bar we had promised ourselves we would not go in. It was full of character, if character means most customers falling asleep in their drinks before sunset. There were three men at the table in the shadows behind the door. Another was buying more beer. The large woman behind the bar was refusing to let go of the bottles until they told her who was paying. The soberest one stood up and addressed me, ‘I am José Ramírez, I am a journalist, the others are teachers.’

Effortlessly I slid the conversation to donkeys. José Ramírez, the journalist, said, ‘Go on Radio Colcas in the
morning.’ He wrote an address and the resplendent name of Prosculo Sifuentes Huerta. ‘I will tell him to expect you for an interview at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Appeal for anyone who wants to sell a donkey to come to your hotel.’

At ten to eight next morning I walked through the wakening streets. The early sun was filtering through mist, lighting the breath of men loading ponies outside the grocery. Thin threads of cigarette smoke trailed from the cold hands of men lolling against peeling walls to catch the day’s first warmth. A woman walking up the cobbled hill followed her own ten-yard shadow up the shining cobbles. Everything was washed in sepia light. One man never rested: the town square drunk bowed, ‘Welcome to Huari, Señor.’ He started work early, and was soon awash, drowning in his own sea-blue eyes.

The office of Radio Colcas is also the one-roomed flat of Ramírez Villacorta, a middle-aged man smelling of bedclothes, who plays cassettes and compact discs on a domestic music centre, and broadcasts them to the town and a couple of neighbouring valleys. He offered me a seat at the table, unfolded a cut-throat razor and gave himself an air-shave, the shave he would have given himself had there been any hot water, had there been a soft brush to whip a stick of shaving soap into an easy lather. He splashed alcohol on his cheeks, combed his hair outwards from the crown in a black ink-splash and took the microphone.

‘Today, ladies and gentlemen, we have a special guest here in the studio, and he needs your help.’

I described our trip, gave advice for the youth of Huari and showed them the donkey-shaped hole in my life. The
radio appeal was our last hope. We had to leave the following morning, baggage animal or not. All day there were rumours, men came to the hotel when we were not there, and never came back. We had been six days in a one-day town, and still had no donkey.

In the morning, resigned to being our own beasts of burden, we began stripping down our packs. I discarded maps that had been used, but I had hoped to keep. Elaine thrashed around the bathroom, enlivened by the pain of her ankle and the daily thrill of washing her hair in icy water. She poured expensive toiletries, creams and concentrated clothes detergent down the toilet, to save eight ounces of weight. At nine thirty, when we had finished, there was a knock on the door. A shy man introduced himself, ‘I am Erfanio Jésus Trujillo. My brother lives in Colcas village, and has a strong, male donkey to sell for 550 soles, a very good animal.’ That was £110; in this area, that was a high price, but not unreasonable for a good animal.

‘Please bring the animal for us to see. If it is as good as you say, we will buy it. But we have to start for Castillo at twelve o’clock.’

He came back at twelve thirty. We had waited, of course. In the street was a slightly short, but stocky, animal. We pounced to show off our new expertise. While Elaine was busy at the front, I pointed between the rear legs, ‘The lack of
cojones
suggests this is a female, not the male you promised us.’

He smiled a
these things happen
smile and said, ‘This is the animal my brother wanted to sell.’ And his brother, who I think was invented for the purposes of bargaining, now wanted 600 soles.

We were now in the centre of a circle of people, probing and poking. They agreed she was somewhere between seven and nine. I asked Elaine, ‘Walk her up and down the street.’ The donkey was reluctant to start moving, but once the idea took root, she ambled along nicely. The tack on her back was the oldest and most useless he had been able to cobble together. The blanket was sewn together from old clothes; I could see the flies from a pair of jeans in it, broken zip still attached.

‘500 soles,’ I said.

‘It is my brother, I have to take him 600 soles, or he will be angry with me.’

‘You asked 550 for a strong male, now you want 600 for a small female. I cannot pay more for less.’

He smiled bashfully. ‘600 soles.’

After ten minutes, I had the donkey and the tack for 550 soles. I didn’t think it was a good deal, but nor was another day in Huari. We were now the proud owners of a rather pretty donkey. ‘Hello Dapple,’ I said and walked her to the market to pick up fodder. The whole town stopped to stare.

‘How much did you pay?’ asked a woman in the market stall.

‘500 soles,’ I lied.

‘What! I could get you one tomorrow for 200 soles! You were robbed! Hey listen everyone! The Gringo paid 500 soles for a donkey!’

‘What! My sister has one she would sell you for 100 soles!’

Ricardo, the bullfight butcher, appeared. ‘You have bought it?’ He looked her over. ‘She’s a nice animal, it’s not expensive.’

People deferred to him. ‘Nice animal, very good price,’ they agreed. Except one woman, who kept shouting ‘100 soles, that’s the most I’d pay. 500? Ha!’

I bought armfuls of hay and, now that we had transport, more fruit and vegetables for ourselves. ‘One last thing,’ called Ricardo, ‘tie her up well for the first week, they will run home if they get a chance!’

‘Great,’ said Elaine, ‘a homing donkey.’

In the mountains, baggage animals acquire the habit of walking the edge of the trail next to the drop, to avoid snagging the load on the cliffs. This means that if they stumble they usually disappear into the abyss, and you had to be able to survive a few days and nights living out of your day-bag. We re-packed, reserving for our day-bags delicate articles, warm clothing and waterproofs, the day’s food and a litre of water. Next, we had to work out how to tie two backpacks onto a round animal. There was no shortage of advice, none of it the same. Two women from the restaurant took charge.

‘Is this too heavy?’ I pointed at the baggage.

‘No! She can carry at least fifty, maybe seventy kilos all day.’ I later checked with a vet: fifty kilos is the recommended limit. But this was reassuring; our packs totalled no more than forty kilos.

The woman from the corner café said, ‘One last thing. Here people are all right, but in Castillo there are many thieves, be very careful.’

At last, we could leave. In a few minutes, we were walking in pasture down to the bridge over the river on the road to Cajay. A one-eyed man going the other way waved cheerfully: the fiddler from the bullfight dance. We rounded a corner to see a huge tree covered in scarlet
flowers, standing in a meadow of yellow dry grasses, with a field of red clay as a backdrop. It was good to be on the road again.

‘It’s just struck me,’ I said, ‘I’ve bought a donkey from a man called Jesus.’

We followed a dirt road above the tree-lined Huari River. The first thing to say about walking with Dapple was that it was no problem to get her to halt. Any slight slowing or hesitation by me caused her to stop dead. Mindful of Ricardo’s advice about homing instincts, we were very careful never to let go of her rope. When we stopped to rest, I tied her to a small tree at the foot of the roadside bank. She walked round it once, snagging the rope, glimpsed longer grass above and tried to jump up. The rope was now too tight to let her, and she fell down, knocking the luggage loose.

Our bags wouldn’t balance on top of her back, so they had to be held either side and then tied, which wasn’t hard if there were three people. Our cinch was a woven wool strap, eight feet long and four inches wide. Iron rings at each end were tied off with two leather straps. The tension on these had slackened. I prised them open, then heaved them tight, my fingers struggling with the stiff, home-cured leather.

The valley narrowed into a dark canyon where two rivers and two roads joined. A cluster of unrendered, dismal brown adobe houses lay beneath three shoulders of mountain: poor people living like prisoners in an oubliette.
Our road took us left, back across the river, on a road signposted to Tingo María, and the Amazon. It was the gateway to the infamous Huallaga valley: the land of cocaine.

We passed an ancient dame, one eye shining with a china-white cataract. When she heard my foreign accent, she stopped, listening intently. Her mouth opened like a mouse-hole sewn into the parchment of her face, dark tongue bobbing silently. All afternoon, we followed the larger river downstream but there was nowhere to pitch a tent. We crossed the river and left the road, which continued in huge hairpins up the mountain: that would be our route in the morning. We took a lane through small orchards, cultivated fields and pasture. Stones had been laboriously cleared and heaped in large ridged mounds. We had only half an hour of light left when we came to a large modern house with a shining corrugated iron roof. In the yard stood a tall man in his mid-forties, with pale skin, an open face and the unguarded eyes of a child. His wife, younger than he was, stood modestly behind, a baby girl in her arms. She did not have an Andean face.