Authors: Tim Cahill
Deserts are attractive places for archaeologists because of the excellent preservation of the sites and artifacts. Even bodies.
Recently, anthropologists from the University of Tarapacá in Chile discovered ninety-six mummies near the town of Arica, on the border between Chile and Peru. Some of the remains were eight thousand years old, three thousand years older than the mummies of Egypt.
The oasis-dwelling people of the ancient Atacama—Atacamanos—apparently used pelican beaks to strip the corpses of flesh. The abdominal cavities were emptied, filled with feathers, and the long bones of the arms and legs were reinforced with sticks. It is thought that the bodies may have been placed upright in the village in a macabre ritual. For burial, the corpses were wrapped in layers of cloth, the finest closest to the body, the coarsest grade on the outside. The dry desert air preserves fatality, and autopsies performed on rehydrated mummies have pinpointed the causes of deaths that occurred at the dawn of civilization. The autopsies have also revealed some puzzling stuff. What to make of this knowledge: 25 percent of the ancient desert people, it seemed, suffered from chronic ear infections.
The Atacamanos knew well that their climate preserves death. So do modern men. A few hundred miles north of Arica, there are other burial sites. Several travelers—notably Michael Andrews, a British filmmaker—have stumbled through that perpetual ocher fog and found themselves standing in the midst of fields of bleached bones: they have seen human skulls, scattered like soccer balls, grinning up from the sand.
Grave robbers are interested primarily in the textiles used to wrap the bodies. Those once made in Paracas, Peru, for instance, are noted for their elegance: perfectly perserved tapestries woven by unknown artists two thousand years ago. The textiles bring a pretty price, and grave robbers, Michael Andrews noted, are “none too discriminating: some of the staring skulls wear collars and ties.”
* * *
T
HERE WAS
, along this fast desert highway, a scene of past horror from the more recent past every fifty or sixty miles. You could see them glittering alongside the road in a bullying sun that had finally burnt away the fog. Automobiles that collide in the Atacama are salvaged. The broken glass is not. It is swept to the side of the road into a heap, and every time I saw such a pile flashing in the distance, I thought of bodies bleeding in the sand, on the burning asphalt, here, in this lonely, hostile desert.
G
ARRY SLEPT WELL
and took the wheel about one that afternoon. We stopped to check the truck, and Garry thought he found a leak by the radiator.
We were rising out of the Atacama, pushing over passes through high rounded hills covered over in grainy black sand. When I looked ahead or to the side, I could see faint hints of green or red in the land. The green was, what, copper; the red, iron. A man wouldn’t have to be much of a geologist to locate mineral deposits here.
We were careening over the hills, and Garry took the corners at a speed that made our tires scream against the blacktop. I thought he was pushing too hard and said so.
“We need to push it,” Garry said. “Gotta see if the radiator will hold. We’ve got fifty miles into Arica, where they have the GM factory. If the radiator has a hole in it, I’m going to blow it out, and we’ll get it fixed.”
But the radiator wasn’t leaking and we both knew it. We always had leaks under the truck after it was serviced. Mechanics, who were given to understand by their bosses that our mission was important, tended to overfill anything that required fluid. There was no room left for heat expansion, and things leaked for a day or so after every service.
We took a hillside on what felt like two wheels. I looked below and saw the line of a boulder that had rolled down the black sand. It looked like the track of a snowball rolling down a powder slope. I had a vision of the Sierra jumping the road and rolling, end over end, down the hill, leaving a curious hop-and-skip track.
“This,” Garry said, concentrating fiercely, “is the classic situation for a gauge to be just about ten feet high on the dash.”
“What?”
“The temperature gauge is the gauge of the day. Did you ever see a horror film called
Videodrome
? TVs and things start swelling up to abnormal size.”
It occurred to me that Garry needed a daily crisis to keep him going,
and if we didn’t have a crisis, he’d invent one. It was late afternoon and I was at the low end of my cycle, feeling sorry for myself, stuck, as I was, in a speeding truck driven by a madman through a land of horror, where glittering glass on the side of the road meant death and dismemberment.…
“What’s going on?” Garry asked.
“Depressed again,” I said.
“What do you need?”
“Silence in which to brood.”
W
E PULLED INTO
A
RICA
, near the border with Peru, at three-thirty that afternoon, found the GM plant with no difficulty, and met with the plant manager, Oscar Nuenschwander, who was expecting us. There was a message for Garry from Daniel Buteler, of GM Chile. Call him.
So for half an hour, Garry talked to a man in Santiago, Chile, concerning a telex that Buteler had gotten from Jane, in Canada, which was about a call she had received from a publicity firm in L.A. The firm was setting up a press conference for us in the United States. People wanted to know the exact time we would be arriving in Dallas. These people in L.A. had never heard of gasoline bandits: it seemed a surreal phone call.
Garry had decided against reinforcing the camper shell. It had not gotten any worse since Tierra del Fuego. While he supervised the mechanics—the radiator was fine; any leaks were the result of overfilling—Mr. Nuenschwander ran me down to the Chilean Auto Club in his personal car.
We had heard that in order to enter Peru we would need some document from the Chilean Auto Club. Then, in Peru, we needed a corresponding document from that country’s auto club. When we had both documents, we would be issued decals to put on the windows. Without the decals, police could turn us back.
A young man at the auto club said no such documents were necessary.
For a certainty?
An absolute certainty.
Why had auto-club people in Lima invented these documents then?
Who could say?
G
ARRY, IMAGINING
that we had to clear the border and get to the Peruvian Touring and Automobile Club before a five o’clock closing time, was whipping the mechanics into a froth. There were five of them
in white lab coats, dashing back and forth, waving their arms and screaming about the fuel filter. Garry was, I saw, filthy and not completely coherent. He had a virulent case of Zippy’s, which he had passed on to five competent and otherwise intelligent individuals in the space of one hour, Zippy’s being somewhat contagious.
Garry was happy to hear that we wouldn’t have to race through customs. Given the state of our affairs, however, it seemed cruel to mention a bit of bad planning on our part that had just occurred to me. There was a curfew from midnight to 5:00
A.M
. in Lima. We couldn’t pick up Joe Skorupa there at 4:00
A.M
. as planned. Being out after curfew could be deadly in Lima.
Garry telexed Jane in Moncton. Contact Skorupa in Lima. We wanted him standing out in front of the Gran Hotel Bolívar at five
P.M
. instead. He should be packed and ready to go.
While Garry sat at the telex, I went out to the truck, filed away our documents for Chile, and got out the maps and documentation we needed for Peru. I brought my clip file on Peru back to read to Garry.
“We’ve got,” I said, “terrorists in the south. Shining Path guerrillas, Maoists. They operate mainly in the southeast. Two months ago, guerrillas, armed with machines and shotguns, intercepted several boats on the Apurimac River and, after a ‘popular trial’ executed nineteen men who were accused of being members of the peasant militia fighting the terrorists.”
The guerrillas were thought to be operating out of the jungle area of Ayacucho, which was about 150 miles from the Pan-American Highway. Worse, the guerrillas were increasingly threatening tourists in an effort to destabilize the economy, which depends a great deal on tourism. The guerrillas had blown up the train to the old Inca city of Machu Picchu.
The interior minister said that the Shining Path had declared war on Peru.
The president, in an effort to stabilize the economy and put a lid on inflation, had nationalized all banks. There was a firestorm of criticism.
And while the guerrilla cells were located in the forested eastern slopes of the Andes, where the mountains dropped down into the vastness of the Amazon, Lima was not in any way a haven of safety. A month before, “terrorists using submachine guns and dynamite killed the president of the state trading company,” reported
The Miami Herald
. In the same week, a car bomb exploded at Citibank headquarters, and another bomb damaged the Lima Sheraton hotel.
North of Lima, in the middle of the country, on the coastal desert,
there was noticeably less guerrilla activity. The north was noted for highway robbery, and was home to gasoline bandits.
W
ATCHING A PARTY
of North Americans, two couples in their twenties, I wondered how they had managed to get so deeply into South America, overland, without learning anything about ordinary self-protective border behavior. They had just come off a bus and were waiting in line at the Peruvian checkpoint just over the border from Chile.
“Check out the hats,” one of the men said in English. And then there was a good deal of laughter because the uniformed soldier watching the line was wearing a hat that was somewhat more ornate than the sort a U.S. soldier would be issued.
“Where do they get those hats?” one of the women asked in a tone of amused horror, much as someone else might ask where Jimmy Swaggart gets his hair greased. The party burst out laughing again. They were having a jolly time and the soldier in question began taking an interest in them. He had a nine-millimeter pistol in the holster on his belt.
It was a busy border. Chilenos from the town of Arica were traveling into Tacna, Peru, to buy fruits and vegetables. Peruanos were passing the other way, into Arica, to buy goods—clothes primarily—manufactured there under government tax subsidies. The locals, Chilenos and Peruanos, rode in special taxis, painted blue. It was a border with an international taxi service, and the people were familiar with border etiquette, which is to say, no one, except the North Americans, was laughing.
Chance had placed us just behind this party and I thought it prudent to emphasize the fact that I was not with them. We faded to the end of the line: no great problem in South America which, on the whole, does not have a tradition of orderly queuing. People will yield if you assert your right to the position you hold. Relax for a minute and you are at the end of the line. We relaxed and put some distance between ourselves and the other North Americans.
From this vantage point I saw the soldier stroll past our line—which was for the Peruvian Investigative Police’s document check—and stop at the customs window to exchange a few words with an official there. Customs was the next order of business for all of us in this line.
It’s always a bad bet to suppose officials don’t speak some English. Win the bet and you get a cheap laugh. Lose and you may end up enduring a body-cavity search before being denied entry into the country in question. Fines or a few days in detention are a possibility.
An official came out to search the truck. He opened the camper shell, and the smell of festering strawberry milk shakes literally knocked him back a step. He was not keen to crawl around in there. Various letters of recommendation suddenly impressed him, and he waved us through.
“We should break open a few more shakes back there,” Garry said. “Get up in the tropics with milk shakes baking in the back. We’ll never get searched.”
The formalities were endless. We signed, by actual count, twenty-eight documents. We had taken to describing ourselves as a driver and a mechanic because officials were used to that. Garry was generally the mechanic, primarily because he found
mecánico
an easy Spanish word to say. An obliging official signed and stamped our logbook with the date and time.
We weren’t, Garry thought, drivers so much as men who carried documents. “
Documenteros
,” I said.
W
E ROLLED INTO
the Peruvian border town of Tacna just after dark. It was a busy night, and the long main street was thronged with couples strolling under the stately palms that lined the street. Cruising pickup trucks carried a dozen people or more, all of them hanging from the bed and shouting to friends on the street. There was music everywhere: boom boxes, car radios, loudspeakers in front of the stores, all of which were open for business. It was a cacophony of styles: salsa, disco, high Andes flutes, and American rock ’n’ roll. The Animals with Eric Burdon shouting about how “we gotta get out of this place.”
We asked directions from a man wearing a moth-eaten coat that had once been mustard-yellow and was now mustard-gray. He motioned us to the proper road with his right arm, which had been amputated at the elbow.
W
E WERE STOPPED
by armed police outside of Tacna. Garry was driving and dining on beef jerky. For reasons that have yet to be explained, he slipped the jerky under his seat, as if to hide it from the police. An officer searched the cab in a cursory fashion. He did look under the driver’s seat where Garry had stashed his guilty jerky. They let us pass.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Hide the jerky?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I saw the police and suddenly felt guilty. I suppose it’s the way I feel. Like I’m on some kind of drug.”
“A jerky junkie.”
“Jerky junkie and big-time milk-shake smuggler.”
“We are,” I suggested, “beginning to lose brain cells.”
G
ARRY WOKE ME
in the middle of the night and said he was tired. I poured my cup about a third full of instant coffee and wet it down with cold bottled water. I took the wheel and read Garry’s note on the suckerboard: “Switchbacks, potholes, and fog at the top of the switchbacks. Very ignorant fog.”