Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (39 page)

I noticed that my friend, Marcio, was not the only one with a paunch. Since Rio most of the men I met seemed well fed and fondled their stomachs often through their jersey knitwear. It struck me that I could scarcely remember a fat man north of Rio, but I did recall a conversation with a black shoe-shine boy who had been amazed when I described how I travelled. He thought it would be impossible for me to get enough to eat. 'You have to eat so many more things than us,' he said, patting his very hard flat stomach. I realized with a shock that he really believed I belonged to a different species and required a quite different diet. Now I
had to admit that I did seem to be among a different species, and in a different country.

At Iguacu, where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet, I chose Argentina, and wandered down past the old Jesuit settlements of Missiones into the great beefy heartland of Argentina. The sad and violent history of Argentina was erupting all around me. There were daily shootings. Revolution and ever greater repression were inevitable. Fine sentiments were like froth on the lips of a dying man. Every shout of 'Liberty' drove another nail in the coffin, and 'Democracy' came to sound to me like a dirty word.

Yet in this big open land all the vanity and venom of public life seemed like the squabbling of children in the wings of a vast and empty stage. Only the chocolate melancholy of the tango followed me across the Pampa.

I think it was in Argentina that I turned professional. I had been on the road for a year; I had been very high and very low, and everywhere in between. The world no longer threatened me as it had; I felt I had the measure of it.

It must have helped that I was in horse country. I felt very much that I shared something of the gaucho's view of the world, and my seat certainly fitted my saddle as closely as his. Riding the bike was as natural as sitting on a chair. It scarcely tired me at all. I could pack and unpack the bike with the automatic familiarity of shaving, and I did not allow the prospect of it to annoy me. The same was true for minor maintenance problems: a puncture, cleaning a chain, aligning the wheels, whatever it was. I did it without giving a thought to the inconvenience. These things were facts of life. I slept on the ground more often, and my bones began to arrange themselves accordingly. The air bed was punctured and I did not bother with it much. I had a hammock, a wonderful old hammock made for a married couple, and bequeathed to me by Lulu's grandmother. I treasured it and used it as often as possible, finding it very comfortable.

I felt very much tried and seasoned, and no longer expected to make silly mistakes or confront unexpected hazards. I had also developed a battery of useful instincts. I knew when there were thieves around, when the bike had to be protected, and when it was safe. More often than not it was safe. I knew when to expect trouble from strangers, and how to defuse it. I knew what drivers of cars and lorries were going to do before they knew it themselves. At times I think I could even read the minds of stray dogs, though it was a rarity to see one on the highway that was not already a pulped carcass at the roadside.

In the natural paradise of the Southern Andes I crossed over to Chile and the long-awaited Pacific Ocean. I continued my political education in Santiago which was still in the grip of curfews and the throes of nightly

shootings in the streets; torture in the prisons and starvation in the slums.

Then again I crossed the mountains, this time at ten thousand feet, to Mendoza. North of Mendoza the parched bones of the Andes sprawl in the waterless wastes of San Juan, Rioja and Catamarca. I rode from oasis to oasis, coming up at last to the fertile valleys of Tucuman and Salta where I spent my second Christmas.

And in 1975 I began my journey along the roof of the Americas, in Bolivia at fourteen thousand feet.

Antoine usually did the shopping for the three of us. Bruno drove and nursed their battered Renault van. If I had a role on the motorcycle it was to explore the route ahead and find good places for us to eat and spend a night. And sometimes, coming into a small town, I felt like the advance man for a travelling circus.

It was mid-afternoon when we stopped in Abancay to buy food and, well, just to stop for a while. The streets were coming to life after the siesta. In those Peruvian valleys the sun rises at eight and sets at four, although light pours across the mountain tops for the normal number of hours. When the sun does become visible above the peaks the heat bounces down two miles of mountainside to collect at the bottom around the palms and cactus, to roast the big stones in the river bed and to make the thought of movement disagreeable. The valley may be at six or seven thousand feet above sea level but at midday it is very hot. Dogs expose their bellies in the dust. Donkeys stand still as though stuffed, with their heads bathed in shade. In the silent mud-walled houses the shadow looks thick as molasses. But the valley is not a desert. Tumbling down the mountainside come streams of water. There are grains, fruit, vegetables and flowers in abundance, as there were in the time of the Incas.

We were parked along the kerb of the main street. Bruno was staring angrily at his engine.

'I've had it up to here with this heap of shit,' he hissed in French.

Bruno treated the Renault the way he treated horses, with alternate admiration and contempt. I watched sympathetically, enjoying myself, sitting on the bike a few yards away and resting my forearms and knees. The long descents into the valleys over stony dirt roads were worse for me, a constant jarring from wrists to shoulders, with my knees driving into the leather bags slung across the tank.

I always liked watching Bruno. He did everything with an animal gravity which ended either in gleeful satisfaction or an explosion of rage. I

was not far from thinking of him as my son. He had just lost his father and was perhaps still looking for him.

The men of this small town in Peru did not crowd around me as they would have in a city. The Indians as always appeared to be perfectly indifferent. Those with more Spanish blood showed their curiosity, at a distance. A large-bellied man in white shirt and trousers presented himself in a ceremonial fashion, as though his fatness entitled him to represent the other men, who were mostly thin.

'Where are you going on this
poderosa?'
he said in Spanish, very condescending.

T am going to Lima,' I said, careful to maintain the same steady smile. Experience had taught me the delicate art of these exchanges. Eagerness could be an embarrassment. Better to keep a close mouth and savour the tension.

'Y
de donde viene?'

T come from England.'

Once, in Bolivia, I had made the same reply, but the man I was talking to there had never heard of England. Now I watched to see what England might mean in Abancay. An Indian woman walked past with quick steps, dragging a small black and white pig on a string. Her gaze barely flickered.

'You have come on a long journey.'

'Yes,' I said. 'It has been sixteen months.'

'And when do you hope to regain your family?'

'In one year, or perhaps two.'

'Good luck,' he said. 'You have much courage.'

There was a flash of gold teeth, and he took off his hat. A crow dropped a small medallion of black and white shit on the crown of his head. He replaced his hat. *

'Thank you,' I said.

Antoine came back with his face smiling but inwardly composed. It was rarely any other way. His shirt was clean, his hair groomed, and there was even a crease in his safari trousers. He was
soigne,
as though on active diplomatic duty. In fact they both had diplomatic passports, having been attached to the French Legation in Paraguay. Bruno had bought the old van in Asuncion and wanted to drive it to Mexico. Antoine was sharing the journey as far as Lima. They both spoke Spanish with a fluent French accent. My accent was better, but my Spanish was horrible.

Antoine put back on the dashboard of the van the little Paraguayan bowl where we kept our mutual funds, and reported on his mission.

He had some tomatoes and eggplants and a strange giant bean. There was never much in the shops. We all shared the feeling that somewhere behind the sombre shelves of soap and wire wool the good things were quickly hidden away when we came in view. There was no hope of finding meat at this time of day. There were no eggs. Bread was not a local food. We never saw any dairy products aside from tins of condensed milk, although there was a brand of indestructible thousand-year margarine.

'Perhaps further on we will find eggs and mangoes,' said Antoine. 'There's a pump down the road, on the way out of town,' I said. Bruno slammed the lid on the engine. 'The
salope
will never make it,' he shouted.

'To the pump?' I asked, 'or to Mexico?'

'In any case,' he said, 'we will never get up another mountain today.'

I shrugged and put on my jacket and helmet and gloves.

I'll go ahead and see if I can find somewhere for the night,' I said.

From Abancay the road to the north rises steeply again, toiling over the ascending slopes for thirty or forty miles until it runs free at last with the llama and the eagles at twelve thousand feet. It would have been good to get about halfway up and spend the night among the greener trees, the sweeter springs and the fresher air. I wondered what was wrong with the van that it should lose so much power. We had tried many things, all the things that seemed most obvious. At times it went well, but usually it was sluggish and too hot.

I wondered whether to leave them and go on alone. It was always there as a possibility, quietly understood on both sides. I kept all my things on the bike, even though it would have been easier to offload some of them on to the van.

I remembered how we had met at La Quiaca, the Bolivian border town, drawn together by the frustrations of the customs house there. Afterwards we had eaten together in the big canteen over the bus station, soup and rice, and beans and sausage in a spicy red sauce. We were very happy to have finished with all the paper work and the payments of one dollar here, two dollars there, for pieces of paper we did not want and would never need. Our hearts were light as mountain air, excited by the journeys we had already achieved, and by the ones that lay ahead.

It was natural for us to travel on together that day. We circled the rim of an immense bowl, thousands of feet deep. I had often anticipated in my imagination the vertiginous drops of the Andes, but had not expected so soon to find myself riding so close to the edge of nothing. I could see the van across this vast upside down space, a whitish speck crawling along, and at times I imagined Bruno and Antoine inside, exchanging desultory comments. I knew it was dusty in there, and that their vision was limited, and I was glad to be outside and alone, free to escape from my own ordinariness and the train of other people's thoughts.

But at night it was fine to share a meal and talk, to hear about the things

I had missed and the thoughts I had not had. So it went on, day by day, but always a thing of the moment. And when, in Potosi, Bruno wanted to go on to Sucre and I wanted to stay and write, it was the easiest thing to separate, perhaps for ever, just as it was the easiest thing for us to find each other again, as if by chance, a week later in La Paz. We guarded each other's liberty as though it were our own.

Only sometimes it was not so easy, and you had to pay the price for company. On the third day after La Quiaca, just past noon and in bright sunshine, we came up the highest road I have ever travelled, perhaps the highest in the world, at sixteen thousand feet or more. Ahead of us a party of Indians was crossing the road in procession. Bolivian Indians are among the world's poorest and they lead a harsh life. Most of their clothing is homespun from hand-dyed wool, yet no company could have looked more prosperous and content than these Indians as they appeared before us on the 10th of January 1975. We passed them by, and then stopped, entranced. The men were smiling enthusiastically and saluting as they came up to us. Most of them were carrying pottery vessels or cloth-wrapped bundles.

Bruno asked the leader where they were going.

'To Otavi,' he replied, pointing over a long rise of stony ground, partly cultivated for maize, where houses were just visible.

'It is the Feast of the Kings. You are invited.'

They seemed truly happy that we had arrived at this propitious moment, their happiness no less sincere for having been released by some of the corn beer they carried in the pots.

It was a wonderful chance. The Indians continued across the hill and we found our own roundabout way there.

Otavi is a small town of cobbled streets and adobe houses built on a steep hillside. We climbed the main street still buoyed up by the gaiety and splendour of the Indians we had met on the road. Then I began to realize that the village was in the grip of a quite different mood. There were many people on the sidewalks, standing, leaning, squatting. No one moved. No one spoke. I had the impression of walking through a museum of ethnic culture.

Of course there was sound and movement of a kind. People still breathed, and scratched themselves and raised coca leaves to their mouths. They followed us with their eyes, but a spell had been cast over them and it was like being watched by pebbles on a beach.

On our left was a house with a more imposing roof. A sign identified it as the 'Corregimiento', or magistrate's office. The somnolent bystanders were thickest here. The doors were open to reveal people arguing and gesturing, in strange contrast to the entranced pavements outside.