Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (40 page)

We stood wondering what to do. Already I was absorbed in this world
of stone, plaster, lime-wash, natural wood and hide, sun-bleached wool and bright vegetable dyes arranged in brilliant traditional patterns. Then another man looking as outlandish as we did, in a green corduroy jacket and a pork pie hat, came hurrying down the hill towards us like the White Rabbit in Wonderland.

He spoke fluently and eloquently in Spanish, which was unusual out there, and he wanted to tell us about his fish. This was a fish he had brought with him from Argentina, but I was never able to grasp its significance because he was quite drunk.

Another man with a crazy black face came to join us then. He was altogether too drunk to speak at all, but he waved his arms in large meaningful swoops, and the two of them surrounded us and bore us away on a tour.

'Churchill, Franco, de Gaulle, Truman. I know them all
’
said White Rabbit. He spoke with abandon about economic imperialism, military juntas and exploitation, while Crazy Face conducted the flow of words with his arms. We strolled on past the rows of enchanted spectators, and it at last came through to me that everybody in town was simultaneously stoned and squiffy on cocaine and alcohol. It transpired that the
corregidor
had forbidden the annual procession and fiesta. Great negotiations were in progress while the would-be revellers could do nothing but drink their
chicha,
chew their leaf, and become silently blotto.

Two women walked past side by side, crooning and carrying white flags, followed by several children and an old man with a long curved bamboo woodwind, but this unofficial procession died before our eyes. The old man tried to play for us, producing three dismal honking notes and sprays of saliva as his drunken lips failed to hold on to the mouthpiece.

We inspected the chapel at the top of the hill. Most of the stucco had peeled off it, and old crones sat in the shade of the entrance leaning stupefied against the chapel walls.

Yet there were some energetic spirits and they were determined to create some sort of pageant around us, and they pressed us to stay and drink and wait for the fun to start. Inevitably we were nervous, wondering what would happen to us if this whole damned drunken town should spring to life in a full-blooded fiesta. We had to decide because we were a group, and if we wanted to get to Potosi that day we would have to leave soon. Somehow we let our fears speak for us in the name of wisdom and we left.

Alone, I would have stayed, and learned much more about those people. The chance did not come my way again.

There is a way to convert fear into positive energy. When I had discovered it for myself along the way, I used it quite deliberately to project

confidence and sympathy. It had never failed me, and it gave me an unusual and exhilarating sense of power over circumstance. But it seemed to function only when I was alone.

So as I left Abancay and started climbing the dirt road I wondered whether it was time, again, to go on alone, not to go faster but because I thought I might lose my power in the group. Then I put the matter aside, satisfied with having brought it to my attention, thinking TT
I
know when the moment comes', and I set about looking for a place where we could cook and eat and sleep.

The least we needed was a level area to park the van and pitch a tent. For a while there was nothing. Small, terraced allotments, heavily cultivated, occupied every corner of open ground among the rocks and bushes. Then, at the tenth kilometre stone, a path opened off to the right into a gently sloping field sparsely planted with olive trees. It was dry and stony, and not very inviting, but it would do.

It was just the time of day when my hallucinations came to try me out. They were of the crassest kind possible. Usually they began with nothing more original than a cold bottle of beer. When my appetite was sufficiently inflamed I would go on to lobster, roast beef and real coffee, followed by an accidental meeting with a perfect and most loving woman in a large, clean bed. Sometimes I would conjure up the settings for these indulgences but it was hardly worth bothering. They were always roughly similar, and involved clean table linen, polished glassware, bathrooms with towels and an abundance of friendly hospitality and admiration. As the afternoons turned to evenings and I began to wonder where I would eat and sleep that night, this television set turned on in my head and subjected me to trial by advertisement, hitting me inexorably with every one of my known cravings in turn.

It was not my appetite for cold beer or perfect loving women that shamed and appalled me at those times, it was the fact that I allowed these images to oppress me when they were clearly unattainable, and to make what was there and real and within my grasp seem undesirable. Under the influence of these lobster and champagne ravings I became the perfect sucker, vulnerable to the shoddiest substitutes. For lack of cold beer I would waste money on warm coke, and hate it. I would fall prey to any hotel sign, knowing full well that far from enjoying a clean bed and loving women I would be shut up in a dirty, foetid box with a hundred mosquitoes.

It is said that at three or four in the morning the body is physically at its lowest ebb, but it was at five in the afternoon, at the cocktail hour, that my morale slumped, and the temptations came to me in the wilderness. I fought them as best I could through all the years of the journey and always, when I won, I was handsomely rewarded. I carried a stock of memories of magical evenings out alone in the wild, completely satisfied by the simple food I had cooked, listening to the silence and toasting the stars in a glass of tea, and I used these memories as my blindfold against the gross sirens that beckoned with their neon smiles. Success was built on success, and sometimes I was able to carry through a victorious campaign for days or weeks on end, becoming hardier and happier with each succeeding day. But the war could never be truly won. Sooner or later some warm generous person on my tail would offer, unsolicited, some or even all of the delights I had learned to ignore. Then, when it was time to leave, the struggle would begin all over again. Like a general I was only as good as my last battle.

Yet the torment only ever lasted for an hour in every twenty-four. During the day, out in the world, no matter how hard or cold or wet the road might be, I never wished I were safe in the Ritz. More often the road was neither cold nor wet, and I felt myself to be the most privileged person on earth to be able to pass through where others saw only normality, and to think myself in paradise. While at night I swam lazily among mysterious and potent dreams.

And still ... during the days before I met Antoine and Bruno at La Quiaca my morale had been sagging badly. I had left Santiago with a heavy heart. I wanted company, and I knew that was why I was not ready to leave them. They protected me from my five o'clock follies, and I was grateful to know they were chugging up the road behind me, pleasant and familiar friends.

So on that evening outside Abancay my cerebral TV channel was showing a different programme. As clearly as if I stood before it, the white building in the distance became the stately hacienda that somewhere in South America I had always hoped to encounter. I saw the richly moulded plaster work framing heavy wooden doors studded with black iron; floors of gleaming hardwood polished and hammered by generations of leather boots; ancestral portraits of Spanish swordsmen in lace and breastplate; stiff white table linen splashed with the crimson geometry of candlelight passing through cut glass goblets of wine; and myself deep in a leather armchair, listening to my host tell tales of the Conquest, as I gazed up at the white faces of his perfect daughters flitting coyly behind the rails of the gallery beneath the coffered ceiling.

With a sigh I stopped the bike and waited. It was not many minutes before the dusty white van laboured into sight. We turned into the field and chose a good spot. Antoine got out the plastic water carrier and we all drank some warmish water. I threw my red bag and jacket to the ground, and added my helmet to the pile. Bruno lifted the hood of the van and began again to wonder what he could do to the engine.

'There's a house over there,' I said. They had not noticed.

'I'll
see who's there and tell them what we're doing. Maybe I can get some meat,' I added, thinking about the wine and the girls on the gallery. I rode along the path, about five hundred yards, past an area of thick marshy grass. The house and its courtyards were enclosed by a high wall and as I approached, the house became hidden from view. A van stood outside the broken iron gate, and three men were talking. Two of them said 'Adios' and looked at me curiously, then got into their van and drove off. The third man watched me, without expression, as I parked the bike and walked towards him. He was so placed that I still could see nothing of the house.
'Buenas dias
’
I said.

'Buenas dias
’
he replied, and waited as I composed my Spanish. 'We are in the field down there,' I said. 'We are three. We hope to spend the night there.'

'If you like,' he said, and fell silent again. He was half Spanish and wore shabby Western clothing. His shirt was buttoned tightly at the neck, and I noticed a great many red dots on his skin above the collar and on his arms below the short sleeves.

'We would like to buy some meat if you please.'

'There is no meat,' he said, without emphasis or explanation.

‘If
possible, we would like to buy a chicken.' I suggested.

'There is no chicken,' he said.

This time I simply watched him, patiently, until he felt obliged to fill the vacuum.

'We sell all our meat to the buyer of meat. You can ask him.' 'Thank you, Senor. I will try. Where is his house?' 'At thirty-three kilometres,' he said.

I could not make sense of his reply as I felt sure the buyer would be in town, and pointed that way.

'No,' he said. 'At the thirty-third kilometre,' and waved towards the mountain.

'He has a house?' I asked. It was a poor question, but I could think of nothing better. Already I was feeling slightly uneasy.

'Yes, he has a house,' he replied. Again silence. He was shrouded in silence. Or he was listening to sounds I could not hear.

'Bueno. Muchas gracias.'
Slowly I turned towards the bike, hoping that he might add something, but he simply stood and watched me ride away.

It meant riding nineteen kilometres. I told Bruno and Antoine what I was doing and set off up the road. It continued to climb steeply and the air grew cooler. The trees were leafier, and a pleasant brook bubbled along the roadside. Some goats, startled on their way home, skittered up an almost vertical face of rocks and bushes, and a small girl, half their size, shouted and rushed after them at the same speed, her long skirts flying. Where the road curved round a spur a few mud and wattle huts stood among banana trees on a shelf of ground overhanging the valley. An Indian woman was hoeing her corn. I asked for 'the man who buys meat' but she shook her head helplessly. Beyond these huts there was no further sign of human habitation. I passed the 33rd kilometre stone. The vegetation thinned, and large areas of the mountainside were bare. It seemed absurd to suppose that a meat wholesaler would have his warehouse at the top of a mountain. My embarrassment and indignation welled up a tide of fury. I had allowed myself to want the meat (and the sherry and the daughters) and it had made me stupid.

I turned around, storing up anger for the man who had sent me on this mad errand, determined to confront him, preparing phrases which would shame him into telling me the truth. I could not conceive that he had invented the meat buyer, but at the same time I imagined his laughter as he watched me roaring off and up the mountain.

As I passed Bruno and Antoine I could hardly get a word out. Astonishingly, the man was still standing near the gate. As before he watched me get off the bike and walk towards him.

'There is nobody up there, Senor,' I said, tightlipped.

'You could not find him?' he asked.

'There is nothing there,' I said. 'No house, no people.'

'Well,' he said, 'there is some meat. Please come with me.'

His face betrayed no reaction, no hint of mockery, but the voice was, I thought, faintly tinged with interest. Bewildered, I followed him through the gate.

The house was now revealed in all its glory, but it was the glory of total decay. Windows without frames stared blankly from peeling and cracked walls. Broken shutters hung drunkenly by one hinge. A once magnificent porch was littered with wrecked furniture and masonry rubbish, and the lath and plaster ceiling above it bellied down like the breastbones of a decomposing whale. We walked towards it across a muddy and unkempt yard. A wave of athletic pigs swept across our path, driving frantic hens in all directions. In a dark corner of the porch an old Indian woman bundled up in black sat spinning yarn, all her life apparently concentrated in her fingers as the floss of wool flowed from her right hand to the twirling bobbin in her left. There were a few younger men and women moving or standing but I could not tell whether they had any purpose. The sense of collapse was general and overwhelming.

The man with the spots asked me to wait a moment while he went into the house. I wish I had gone in with him, for I never saw the inside, but my attention was caught by a large blueprint pinned to the wall. It was a diagram headed 'Co-operative del 24 Juni
o', and it set out the organiza
tion of the co-operative, with the chairman and his council on top and the descending chain of command and responsibility. It was sufficiently elaborate to be interesting, and simple enough to be credible. In faraway Lima I imagined this piece of paper must have impressed a number of people. 'Now here we have our "24 Junio". You see, our reforms are going well. The people are really taking the land into their own hands. They have a fine building there too, for their meetings and recreation. The original landlord described it to me. He is a friend of mine, you know - a friend of the revolution. He lives in Lima, of course, with his four perfect daughters . . .'