The Moche Warrior (17 page)

But the best story was reserved for last: the time Hilda Schwengen held off four banditos. Hilda and Steve were heading back to town in an open Jeep on a narrow country road lined by high embankments, not far from one of their dig sites, when four men leapt from the bushes into the path of their car, brandishing metal pipes and, in one case apparently, a sword. Steve and Hilda were ordered to get out of the vehicle. Hilda calmly reached over, pulled a gun out of the glove compartment, and started shooting over their heads. “I believe they thought she was a poor shot,” Steve said amid much laughter. “Even I thought so. I was cowering on the floor of the Jeep… if you can imagine someone my size cramming himself into that small a space. Which I did. But Hilda kept firing, and eventually it occurred to them she might get lucky and hit something, so they turned tail and ran.”

It was a story, I could tell, that had been told time and time again until it had reached almost mythic proportions. It was also apparent to me as the story was being recited that there was a great deal of affection as well as reverence for Hilda, no matter how she appeared to me.

It was a really enjoyable evening, the first I’d had in a while, and I began to relax just a little, enough so that I’d kicked off my shoes and sat curled up in the chair. As we all sat around the table enjoying the camaraderie, the power went out. This was, apparently, a reasonably regular occurrence, because candles and matches were right at hand. The evening was getting cool, however, and I decided to get my sweater from my room to cover my shoulders. I padded up the stairs in my bare feet, enjoying the feel of the cool marble on my toes, and careful not to make any noise to disturb Hilda. As I got to my room, I noticed the door was partly open, not as I had left it, and I thought I could see a flicker of candlelight within. Carefully, I eased my way very quietly around the door.

Ines was there, her back to me, a candle flickering on the night table. She was touching each article of clothing I had left on the bed, and I thought I heard her whispering. When each piece had been touched in turn, she straightened, and without turning around, she said, “So you’ve come at last, as it is spoken.” Then turning to look at me, rigid in the doorway, she whispered, “
Cuidado al arbolado!”‘
Beware of the woods. “If you are to succeed, you must survive the woods.”

Suddenly there was a gust of wind, the candle went out, a door banged sharply. I turned, distracted by the noise. When I turned back, she was gone, although I was blocking the door. I looked to see if she had gone through the little bathroom to Tracey’s room, but could not see her there. It was perplexing and unsettling.

I went back downstairs a few minutes later, and Ines was there, cleaning up in the kitchen. She didn’t say anything to me; in fact, she didn’t acknowledge my presence in any way. Shortly thereafter, her brother, Tomas, came to take her home and Steve, Tracey, and I walked her to the door. Tomas had a little motorcycle taxi, a bike with a seat in the back. Ines climbed on and sat primly, her hat pulled down firmly, her bag clutched in front of her. As her brother, whom I’d not met, wheeled the bike around to head back into town, I saw a figure caught for a moment in the beam of the headlight, standing under one of the ghostly arches of the little folly outside. He was a workman, a
campesino
or farmer, perhaps, judging from his clothes, and he was holding something in a sack—burlap, I thought, or plastic—a rice sack most likely. He quickly melted back into the shadow of the arches as the beam passed by.

Strange place, I thought.

Later that night, I lay in bed unable to sleep, although perhaps I dozed. The episode with Ines preyed on my mind, as did the vision of the man under the arches, and so I started at every little noise. At some point, I began to realize that the breeze had begun to whisper, and I got up quietly and went to the door, opening it just a crack. There were indeed voices, whispers, down below. I sensed, rather than saw, the big front door open a little and someone slip in. A match flared for a second or two just as I moved to the railing to see who was down there. Steve, I thought, a stranger and someone else I couldn’t see. The conversation was short and it seemed, an angry one, and then the second person, whoever he was— the man of the arches perhaps?—slipped out again. I was back in my bed, door closed tight, before Steve reached the second floor.

A moment or two later, I thought I heard Tracey’s door, next to mine, click shut. I got up once again and looked out. The night sky was fairly bright, despite the haze, and I caught a glimpse of Tracey gliding along the balcony on the opposite side of the courtyard. She went right down to the end, and although I waited for a few minutes more, didn’t return. Steve and Tracey. I wasn’t surprised, but it was a little disappointing just the same.

10

I first made the acquaintance of Senor Carlos Montero, owner of the rather preciously named Paradise Crafts Factory, and my personal choice for man most likely to have smuggled Moche artifacts out of Peru, a few days after I’d arrived. It was not an auspicious start to the relationship, as I recall, and certainly not one that improved his standing in my eyes, Montero more than living up to his advance billing from the women on the project. But at least it afforded me an excuse to visit the factory, something I’d been trying to accomplish since I’d first arrived.

The problem was that my life as Rebecca was seriously cutting into the time I needed to solve the problems of my real life. In the morning I rose to the crowing of the rooster in the yard outside the hacienda, not long after five a.m. By six, I’d washed, the degree to which I did so dictated by the state of the water supply, I had the coffee on, some fruit, bread, and peanut butter out on the table, as the team, yawning, made their way to the kitchen, such as it was. Shortly after six, I drove into town, picked up Pablo, the foreman, at one end of town, and a group of students studying with Steve and Hilda who were billeted in a small apartment building right in town. Some piled in the back of the truck, others in the cab. I then drove them to the site, a dusty area just a few hundred yards off the Panamericana, dropped them off, and headed back for a marker on the highway, where I picked up the team of Peruvian workers, eight in all, and ferried them to the site. Then I returned to the hacienda. By that time, Steve would be eager to get going, and Hilda, who apparently thought there were three food groups—caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol—would be well into the cigarettes and coffee she lived on all day. I’d take them out to the site to join the others.

At seven-thirty or so, I picked up Ines Cardoso at the highway and took her to the market in Campina Vieja to buy groceries. While she was doing that, I picked up whatever supplies were needed for the hacienda and the dig: scotch every day, drinking water almost always, film for the cameras, rope, wood, chains, propane for the refrigerator, whatever. As soon as that was done, I headed out to the site to assist with the work there, dropping Ines and her bundle of groceries off at her home. She didn’t mention the incident in my room in the whole time I was there, and neither did I. I didn’t think she’d explain herself if I asked, and furthermore it was difficult to take a warning about the woods very seriously when there were so few trees around.

When I wasn’t running errands, I worked in the lab. Every single artifact at the site, no matter how small or insignificant they might look to me, was sent back, usually in a plastic baggie with a tag on it with details of where it had been found. Each article had to be entered into the computer on a template designed for that purpose: the first cut at information included location, depth in ground, size, material, and a description of some sort. Then there was a more detailed template, depending on the type of material, which was much more specific. Here Ralph and Tracey tried to classify the material by period and culture—middle Moche for example. It was painstakingly detailed work for them. For me it was a kind of mindless activity, simply taking the information given me and entering it in the appropriate place on the template.

At some point every day, and sometimes more than once, I’d pick up the little bags of whatever artifacts had been found at the site, delivering them to Tracey and Ralph, who worked all day in the lab.

If I had a moment to spare, I worked at the site, sometimes as what is called a digger assistant, working under the supervision of Steve or Hilda. The excavation site was about twelve feet square marked off in sections by a grid of string. I was occasionally allowed to clear areas of the site, but usually I either helped with the recording of the artifacts that had been found—by and large, ceramic shards—or carried debris from the pit to the sieve. The sieve was made of a large piece of mesh, about two and a half feet square, framed and mounted on legs, so that it was about waist height. The debris was placed on top, and then the frame was rocked back and forth on its legs so that the dirt fell through, leaving tiny artifacts on the top. These were recorded and bagged to take back to the lab. Nothing, I learned, is removed from a site until it’s been mapped on a grid of the site, recorded, and often photographed.

On a hot day, I was supposed to be out at the site between two and two-thirty to bring everyone back; on a cooler day they worked a little later. Not much though. In the afternoon, the breeze, which would normally be welcomed in the heat, gained in intensity until the dust whipped and swirled around the site. It got in your eyes, your clothes, your hair. You could taste it in your mouth. Worse yet, on a bad day, it drifted back into the excavation, covering up much of the day’s work.

At five every day, I’d be back out at the highway to pick up Ines at her place, to bring her to the hacienda to finish preparing dinner. In between I ferried people and supplies between the site, town, and the hacienda as needed.

At some point every day I went to the commune to check on my two young charges, as I quickly came to think of them, Puma and Pachamama. I rather surprised myself with this sentimental attachment to the two kids. I didn’t quite know how they had wormed themselves into my affections, but it seemed they had.

They’d been assigned a little hut, and Pachamama, with the help of the other members of the group, very quickly made it quite habitable, for a hut, that is. They’d found some woven rugs somewhere which were nailed to the walls to keep the dust and sand out, and someone had lent them a little wooden table and a couple of stools. They were still sleeping in their sleeping bags but had a little platform to put them on. Puma immediately set himself the task of learning Spanish, although it was hardly necessary for life on the commune, the inhabitants being, by and large, Americans. He spoke Spanish to me whenever I visited, and while it was certainly rudimentary at this stage, I thought he showed some real facility for the language.

The head of the commune was a man, who, in a fit of hubris, had named himself Manco Capac, after the first Inca king, said to be the son of the Sun and the Moon. When I asked him why he’d chosen the name, he replied, “Whatever works,” a statement I began to realize was the motto of the commune. That, and “go with the flow.”

Manco Capac was not a tall man, rather short, in fact, about my height, but what he lacked in stature, he made up for in presence. He’d been an actor at one time, apparently, before he became the original Inca reincarnated, and it showed. He had a large head, in proportion to his body, moved with a certain grace, as if he’d studied dance, and had a voice that commanded attention. He had piercing eyes, an unusual shade of blue; rather splendid cheekbones; and grey hair pulled back into a very long braid at the back. I’d have put him in his early fifties. One of the other commune members, a middle-aged man who had inexplicably chosen the name Moonray—I gathered that taking an alias was part of the ritual of leaving one’s past life behind—told me that Manco Capac had been on the verge of a brilliant career in Hollywood, when he’d become sickened by the excess, and come to Peru to get back to basics. I could certainly understand someone being sickened by Hollywood, but Manco Capac, imposing though he might be, didn’t look familiar to me, so how close to the verge of success he had actually been was debatable. Failed actor seemed more likely.

The commune consisted of a group of small huts, where most lived, and a main building, with water and electricity, where the kitchen and eating area were located, and in the back of which Manco Capac resided. About twenty people, of all ages, shapes, and sizes lived there, and everyone was given a job. Pachamama worked in the kitchen, and Puma, who struck me as not being particularly bright, but a sweet kid, was assigned a lot of the grunt work, such as finding wood, or clearing more land for the primary activity which, according to Moonray, was farming. At least they called it farming. Gardening is what I’d call it, and difficult gardening at that. The soil was very sandy, and the commune sat on the edge of a clump of trees, algarroba or carob trees with beautiful spreading branches, but some of the nastiest thorns I’d ever seen. They covered the ground beneath the trees and would tear through thin soles in a flash. All in all, it had an indelible air of the sixties, right down to the faint whiff of marijuana.

Never having been one inclined to togetherness, I’d often wondered what people saw in such a lifestyle, and for some reason I decided that in Puma I’d found a kindred spirit in that regard. Pachamama liked the bustle of the main house and the kitchen, made friends easily, and seemed to regard all of this as a bit of a lark. I had a feeling that when she’d had enough of the life of the commune, she’d just blithely move on. But on more than one occasion I’d found Puma alone on the edge of the property, deep in thought. Not wanting to startle him, I’d watched him from a distance.

The place was peaceful and very quiet, the silence broken only by some distant voices singing in the commune and the chink and scraping of a trowel nearby. Puma looked up finally and saw me. “Hear that sound? Farmer over there,” he said, gesturing behind the commune. “Putting up a wall between us and him. Not too keen on us, I’d say. I offered to help, but either he didn’t understand me, or he didn’t like me. I’m not sure which. He should learn to go with the flow like Manco Capac says. I told him about the ‘pocalypse too, but I don’t think he understood that either.”