Chasing Che (34 page)

Before I could fully comprehend what this meant, the leader spoke. “Well, Father, thank you for coming to meet us.”

I mumbled noncommittally, still trying to shake the praying woman off my hand. “Actually,” I said, my mouth going dry, “I’m not the father.”

“You are his assistant?” the man asked.

And here I sinned. These poor pilgrims had probably marched for hours over twelve-thousand-foot mountains to reach Chincheros. Some of them were barefoot. It was Good Friday, one of the most important days in their religious calendar. They had sacrificed much to get there. Of course they expected a welcome from the priest. Of course they weren’t surprised that the priest was a tall white foreigner (they usually were) circulating through the parish on a motorcycle (they usually did).

I now realized that I was wearing black trousers and a black leather jacket zipped tight to the neck. From a distance I could be mistaken easily for a priest. It all made sense to them. They wanted their pilgrimage to be noted, to be important enough that a priest rode out of town to guide them in. They wanted me to be that priest.

“Yes,” I responded.

As quickly as possible, I extracted myself, explaining that I had to go on to the next town, Andahuaylas. The lie was transparent, ridiculous, and offensive, but I had blurted it out in the confusion of the moment, unwilling to disappoint them. They, in turn, seemed content to hear that I was the priest’s assistant.

“Where is the father?” the old woman who had been praying on my hand now asked. She was smiling.

“Uhm,” I said, sure I was about to be exposed, “he’s … he’s waiting for you. Down there. In the … church.” They promptly marched off to town, happy that their journey was over. But mine
was not. I realized at once that I had to get out of the province. They could probably shoot you for masquerading as a priest.

It was almost dark now, and the road led up into that cruel bank of fog. I turned the key and stared at the emerald diode on the dash. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be ashamed of myself. “Well, Kooky,” I said to nobody, “we’ve been promoted.”

I slunk over the mountains, driving into the night and a dense fog that wet me to my bones. The road was awful. Just after midnight—sixteen hours, but only a hundred and sixty miles after leaving Ayacucho—I dropped down a last set of switchbacks into Andahuaylas, chased the final two miles by a pack of furious dogs. There was a checkpoint on the edge of town. Roused by the barking, a sergeant came out and looked at my papers. He only asked me one question.

“Are you a priest?”

I denied everything.

E
rnesto had been suffering an unusually bitter attack of asthma. His normal cure—shots of adrenaline alternated with heavy doses of black tobacco—could not contain the problem this time, and when their truck arrived in Andahuaylas the two G’s headed straight for the little town’s only hospital, where they received the usual rough lodging and hospitality from their medical colleagues.

I had to rely on the town’s hotel, of which there were two. The better of these did not have whores streaming in and out of the front door, and cost eight soles a night. The bed was good and the manager—an adorable nine-year-old boy—let me ride Kooky up the front steps and into the lobby. During the days he sat by the front door watching Mexican soap operas, and at night he slept on the floor behind the desk. Sometimes he was eating a bowl of rice, but I never saw an adult in the place in four days. He stared at the motorbike sometimes, but looked away if I caught him doing so as though he were afraid of me.

I waited for the rain to stop falling, just as Ernesto and Alberto had waited days here for a truck that would carry them. In the meantime I toured the hospital and tried to uncover any records of asthma patients from 1952. The doctors looked at me with a vague discomfort when I explained that Che Guevara had once been a guest in their wards, and they said there were no old records. They preferred to talk about the lack of funding from Lima that kept medicines in short supply. It was a small, dirty hospital but they were not ignorant or backward in their skills. The entire staff was consumed at one point by a two-day seminar on neurological repair led by a physician from Miami. They had little interest in the past.

The Argentines had visited a leper colony—long since closed—in the nearby hills. Ernesto wrote with great feeling about the suffering of those locked inside, with no reprieve from the mosquitoes and the psychological isolation. They made the trip there on horses which Ernesto praised and Alberto criticized.

Once, leaving the front gate of the hospital to walk through the muddy streets toward the hotel, I heard drumming. I followed the beat past the farmer’s market, stacked with oranges and potatoes, and came to a back street where a crowd of fifty had gathered. A terrified beauty queen sat in the bed of a pickup truck while various men leered at her, but most in the audience were watching a set of six male dancers reenact the conquest from the point of view of the losers. The dancers wore “helmets” of wool that mimicked those of the conquistadors, and donned papier-mâché masks painted with the unfamiliar physiognomy of those who had come to enslave them—pink skin, blue eyes, and yellow beards. Their costumes were decorated with gold braid, beads, pom-poms, and bright sashes, and they carried whips and cardboard swords. The overall effect was Gilbert and Sullivan meets the Holocaust.

In the first dance a small girl in a ruffled pink-and-white gown stepped through a slow minuet with the devil (his tunic identified him as
EL DIABLO
). Then the dancers pounded each other’s legs with whips, and finally two men squared off, one posing as the bull, symbol
of the Spaniard, the other as a condor, symbol of the Inca. In the dance, unlike in real life, their encounter was peaceful.

The audience, like the dancers, was drunk. Slowly, people in the crowd noticed me at the rear, and more and more red eyes turned to watch me. Bottles passed freely from hand to hand while a drummer pounded a relentless marching rhythm and the dancers swirled to the skirl of a fiddle and a
quena
, or pan pipe. The whips cracked the air, and the devil consorted with the crowd, trying to claim young ladies. A nauseating sense of time slippage invaded me, a kind of friction between the past and the present. My own blue eyes and eight-day beard mocked the papier-mâché villains at the center of the circle. The costumes were both ancient and modern—relics of a dance born five hundred years ago in a bitter conflict but updated with nylon fabrics and Adidas sneakers. There was no purity or simplicity in the way a historical memory was handed down by a people in dance and music. This was not, in fact, a ritual or even a tradition, which implied some kind of codified meaning, but a living dance, as much a document of the present as of the past. Some in the audience wore blue jeans; others homespun; a few town boys laughed at the ignorant mountain girl who had come for market day and stood at the edge of things, terrified by all the sights of the city. I had never seen them or Andahuaylas before; it was virtually certain that they had all seen New York City on the television many times.

The friction of time was also a friction of mutual expectations. Foreigners sought out the “pure” and “unspoiled” indigenous culture of the Andes but found the reality of modern intermingling even here. There was an ancient dance at the center of the crowd, and a boy in a Metallica T-shirt watched raptly. Just as subatomic particles were altered by the act of observing them, our own presence was a corruption of the thing we came so far to see. Maybe Douglas Tompkins was right: perhaps it was better to have no audience at all, to let a vacuum of silence fall over the last examples of a disappearing culture. If these dancers were going to be museum pieces, then at least lock the door to the museum and let them play in peace.

But that was impossible, of course. There was no escaping this friction, no closing off the complexities of a society interrupted and rerouted. The conquest had dropped like a rock into the pond of history, the waves still rippling out and bouncing back, doubling up or canceling one another in infinite combinations of past and present, nylon and wool, languages brushing past one another, the blue eyes of the observer locked, across the crowd, with the devil’s own blue-eyed gaze in return.

The dancers were proud of their craft, and afterward posed for my pictures. They asked me to bring a video camera and put them on television, but night was falling, the crowd was increasingly drunk and the devil danced toward me, menacing me with a pair of shears and his dead gaze, so I moved on.

E
arly the next morning I said good-bye to the mute nine-year-old and stopped at a barbershop offering a haircut called “the John Travolta.” I didn’t need a cut but I did need to quiz the local drivers, who lounged about the place inspecting themselves in mirrors. I had a conversation there that stands in my mind for all the ridiculous conversations of this type that I had, day after day, on the entire trip. My goal was simply to learn how long it would take to reach Cuzco, but it was impossible to get a straight answer from these vain, loathsome men. Where I wanted information they offered boasts: Cuzco was not in any fixed place, apparently, but moved closer or farther away depending on the mood of the respondent, his estimate of my driving skills, a visual inspection of the motorcycle, and other incalculable factors such as how many other drivers were listening. No professional driver could stand to admit how long it actually took to reach Cuzco; his fellow drivers would mock him if he spoke the truth, so all engaged in a round of fictional calculations. The answers rained down on me: Cuzco was six hours, or four hours, or only two hours away. They informed me that I could “fly” there on such a big motorcycle. I persisted, asking for hard kilometer figures rather than
wishful thinking, but the dozen men who drove from there to Cuzco regularly could simply not agree. The best I could learn was that a bus took about twelve hours to make the trip; still, they insisted that I could do it in as little as six or even four, or maybe in just two hours on “that thing.” I left town no better informed than before the discussion.

A couple of hours after I left, climbing up a high rampart of mountains, it began to rain. I spent the day bouncing over a moonscape of valleys and ridges, the road pockmarked with holes and lined with wallows of mud so deep that I often had to ride on the shoulder—which was sometimes an area just six inches across with a steep drop on the other side. The world was deserted, except for the hourly trucks slamming in the opposite direction or, once, an astonished teenage herder standing with his llamas in the middle of the road. He called out to me in shocked Quechua and then laughed and jumped up and down, as though he had never seen a gringo on a motorcycle before.

In a dark downpour late that day, at roughly twelve thousand feet, the smell of something burning roused me from my trance, and I stopped the bike and discovered that the luggage rack had snapped, allowing the saddlebags to fall inward. The friction of the wheel had then burned a large hole in the fiberglass of the left case. After five minutes of staring at this insoluble problem I heard an engine in the distance, and eventually a red pickup truck approached. The driver was a fortyish fellow with curly hair. He discussed my options with me and agreed I had none. I could not move with the saddlebags where they were; the bags could not fit anywhere else on the bike; nor was it possible to repair the break without welding. The driver commiserated briefly and then offered the only solution that seemed possible: he would carry all the luggage to Cuzco in the crowded bed of his truck, and I could ride on by myself and collect the gear in a couple of days.

A couple of days? “You won’t make it tonight, believe me,” he said. I put everything into the bed of his truck. He handed me a slip of paper with an address on it and got behind the wheel. We shook
hands through the window, and he drove up a set of switchbacks into the freezing rain, the little red truck disappearing into the bottom of a cloud.

I was left alone, with only my wallet and a map. My boots had soaked through and the rain drummed on my helmet. The clouds swirled around me and I stood there trying not to feel anything.
This is fine. This will be fine
.

Incapable of anything else, I merely kept breathing. Each breath was the cleanest I had ever tasted. After a while the relentless coming and going of mountain air did its work. An ember of defiance caught slowly and glowed faintly. Take whatever you want, world. Take it all. I don’t care.

This moment of life, alone at dusk in the rain at twelve thousand feet with nothing, is still enough. A slow dread spread through my bones, warming me, as I realized that I would go on regardless. I could live through the rain and the darkness and the bad roads and everything I owned disappearing into the bottom of a cloud. But I could not live without the trip, without some movement. In a life of restless longing, the only hope lies somewhere ahead.

Key on and look for the green light. Kickstand up, clutch in, left foot on the peg. Throttle in, clutch out, and then pull away. I climbed up into the bottom of the cloud and rode a long time in those mountains, and then spent the night on the floor of an abandoned gas station. I went on after that, and saw many more things, and eventually I crawled into Cuzco twelve days after leaving the coast.

“A
T LAST: CUZCO!” Ernesto crowed with capitalized pleasure upon reaching this clean, cool city at 11,500 feet. His diary described three separate places, all layered on top of one another. The foundation stones were the massive blocks laid by the Incas; the conquistadors were next, raising cathedrals on the ruins they had created; finally there was mestizo Cuzco, the origin point of half-breed South America.

The city had changed, but only to become even more what it had been. The acceleration of the modern world was everywhere: Boeings roared into the valley from Lima and, balanced on their wing tips, turned inside the mountain range and dropped onto the runway like bricks to disgorge tourists in bright coats with water filters and phrase books and bits of paper leaking from their pockets like straw stuffing from a scarecrow. There were pubs full of drunken Englishmen, and restaurants with the menu in Hebrew, and many, many young people arguing about who got a better exchange rate in Bolivia or where the drugs were best in Ecuador. I found a small hostel that I remembered from years before, the kind perennially filled with languid young women from northern Europe, ice climbers shouting in various languages, and guitar-strumming troubadours. Over it all hung a sign:
PLEASE TO BE QUIET, THE TOURIST IS SLIPING
. The staff seemed terrified of us.