To Run Across the Sea (14 page)

José Paez, author of a book and many newspaper articles about the town, accompanied me on a final stroll through the streets. It was the last day of the fiesta and there were girls by the hundred in Sevillian-style costumes, roaming in groups, clicking their castanets, dancing and singing in their high-pitched voices. Sometimes a man went with them as they passed from street to street, banging a drum, leaving no corner or alleyway unvisited, as if beating the bounds of the town. José agreed that what we were witnessing must be the vestiges of some bygone ceremony by which the town had been cleansed of evil influences. The dancers seemed moved by compulsion, communicating a little of this to onlookers or passers-by in their vicinity. As the current of excitement took possession, women put down shopping bags and abandoned babies in prams to join in, and once in a while a man, correctly dressed for the routine of an office or bank, would stop to dance a few steps. It was a moment when one saw the fiesta in a new guise, not merely as the vehicle of popular enjoyment, but—at least in part—as a ritual left over from pre-history, once seen as essential to the wellbeing of the community.

Our walk ended in the splendid and gracious Alameda Gardens, laid out in 1807 by a mayor who hit upon the ingenious and wholly successful method of raising funds for this project by imposing stiff fines upon citizens heard to blaspheme. Ronda is full of wildlife, and it was present here in concentrated form. The pines wore haloes of winged insects, chased by innumerable miniature bats, many of them said to roost in the balconies of the post office. Enormous diurnal moths hung like humming-birds in suspension before the flowers they probed with a long proboscis. José, a student of nature, has produced a most interesting theory after a study of the behaviour of vultures which appear at this time every year without fail to circle in the sky for an hour or so before flying off. It was at least 50 years, he said, since the horses killed in the bull-ring had been dragged to the edge of the cliff and thrown over for disposal by the vultures. Nevertheless, every year the birds brought their young here on their first flights to pass on to them, as he supposed, the knowledge of the place where once there had been food in abundance and which might possibly provide food again.

We strolled to the edge of the cliff. The sun had just set and shortly, stripped of its light, the sierras would lose both colour and depth. Within half an hour night would suddenly fall, and the mountainous shapes, reduced to a sharp-edged cut-out against the still-luminous sky, would come very close to the town, filling the gardens with the hootings of enormous owls.

José said, ‘I regard this town where I was born as an earthly paradise, and although I have travelled in many countries I always return to it with gratitude and relief.’ After a moment of thought, he added, ‘People come to this spot to commit suicide. Sometimes I ask myself, why do they not look at the view and change their minds?’

A
CHACACHI IS A
beautiful, squalid town under the high peaks of the Bolivian Andes. I was up there looking at the fearsome one-man tin-mines that are a feature of the area when the Aymara guide, Jorge, picked up a rumour that a
huaquero
had found treasure on an island in Lake Titicaca.
Huaquerós
are professional grave-robbers, of which there are hundreds—possibly thousands—in Bolivia and Peru. The perils of their profession compel them to flit from site to site, shrouding their doings and whereabouts in secrecy. According to the report, this man was to be found at the moment in the village of Suma, near the shore of the lake. No one could provide his name, or be quite sure even where the village was. We drove 100 miles north along the lake road in the direction of the Peruvian frontier, asking all the way, and eventually found it.

Suma was a cluster of brown huts at about 14,000 feet, under the Sierra de las Muñecas—a string of ice-peaks thrusting up abruptly from the great grey spread of the Altiplano, important enough for Jorge to bow to as they came into sight. We ran into an instant complication. The village was celebrating an important feast. ‘The Indians are ceremonious,’ Jorge said. ‘It would be ill-mannered to approach them directly and ask for this man. If they invite us we must drink and dance with them a little. We should enter into the spirit of the occasion and gain their confidence. Then I will ask.’

We left the car and walked down to the village, with the scattering of llamas and yellow dogs on its outskirts, and men and women dancing in its centre. A man crawled through a two-foot-high doorway to intercept us hospitably with a platter of
chuchawasi
bark, chewed locally to confer telepathic powers. This it was in order to reject. The village, he told us, was celebrating the second funeral of a man who had died six months before. Until this day his spirit had continued to live in his house, but now it was to be escorted to the grave already containing the body, given a tremendous farewell party, and begged not to return. Such villages possess a single shop selling nothing but the fancy-dress required to cope with an unending succession of ceremonies, and now we approached the dancers: a hundred or so drunken men and women, plumed, masked and festooned with glittering baubles, holding each other up and traipsing round to the squealing of flutes. The village priest had had himself carried out in a chair, his face bandaged like a mummy’s against the sun, to observe these goings-on, while the villagers—a number of them with bottles in their hands—rotated round him like the moving figurines on a Bavarian clock. The carcase of a sacrificed llama was suspended upside down from a frame, and newcomers arriving to join the dance dipped their fingers in the small puddle of its blood, then daubed it on their foreheads.

It occurred to me that a priest, always the best-informed man in such localities, might be able to help us in our search for the
huaquero
, but Jorge vetoed my appeal for his assistance. He had learned that the priest had been sent to coventry after criticising the villagers on the score of their over-sophisticated sexual practices. As my guide admitted in their defence, the Aymaras were ‘subtle and romantic’ in their lovemaking. A further worsening in relations between the Indians and the Church had occurred over the details of the present fiesta. The priest had insisted that the dead man, a notorious evil-doer, should be buried in unconsecrated ground. He had overridden the villagers’ appeal for the grave to be dug in the closest possible proximity to those of persons who had led impeccable lives, to allow the evil to be diluted with the good. Our involvement with him, Jorge said, would be seen as tantamount to consorting with the enemy.

Jorge found the
huaquero
through a go-between he happened to dance with, who made the man sound elusive and difficult. What did we want with him? No more than to see whatever it was he had found, before he had had time to melt the gold down. The go-between said that before having any truck with us or anybody else, the
huaquero
would have to be assured of our sincerity. This could only be done by seeking the advice of Tio, the Devil, who would demand a sacrifice of tobacco, coca leaves, alcohol and a llama’s foetus.

The outlay was small enough, and was agreed, but a slight problem arose in the matter of the foetus (regarded in Bolivia as the indispensable accessory of magic operations of all kinds) for which demand always exceeds supply. The two men went off together to make enquiries as to where one could be had. Jorge was nervous about leaving me alone among the drunken, machete-waving celebrants. ‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘Be very polite to them. Go along with anything they say.’

I watched the gyration of Indians dancing round the priest in his bandages and dark glasses. A glacier full of sharp winking reflections broke out of the mist, then a blizzard blotted it out. The wind kicked and thumped at the walls of the huts, and the flutes squealed shrilly. An Aymara wearing chain-mail with fragments of mirror-glass tied to it danced up with a jug of alcohol and splashed a little on my lips. Then Jorge was back, trailing after him the
huaquero
, a small, haunted man, the first grey-haired Aymara I had ever seen. He held a carrier bag given away by a La Paz store. A foetus had been found, and the bag contained the sacrificial item I had just paid for. Paranoia flickered continually in his expression.
Huaqueros
, Jorge explained, were like this. They led stressful lives, obliged continually, like the tin-miners, to fork out money to keep the Devil sweet, and to meet their end through the collapse of a tunnel, while burrowing into some ancient burial mound.

The
huaquero
shot me a hostile glance, clambered into the back of the car, and we set off for the lake, about five miles away. As we breasted the summit of a low hill it came into sight, clouded purple by the plankton in its depths. There was no wind here, and through some optical illusion bred of ice and sky, the surface curved smoothly like glass sheeting down to the horizon. Three reed boats were tied up in the shallows. The fishermen had taken their catch up to a nearby shack to be cooked, exchanging some for spirits, so that by the time we arrived they were all drunk.

We sat down with them to grilled trout, and the
huaquero
, clutching his carrier bag went off in the direction of a cluster of huts where it was to be supposed the treasure was hidden, and where Jorge said he would conduct his sacrifice. Presently he was back, but it was clear from his expression and indignant gestures that something had gone wrong. A rattle of depressed gutturals passed between them, and Jorge explained that Tio had rejected his offerings. In consequence he had now decided not to show us the gold objects—one of them he mentioned was a jewel in the form of a butterfly. These were now destined to be melted down for the few grammes of the metal they contained. He had brought along something to help appease our curiosity, and saying this, he unwrapped a paper parcel to reveal a foot-long ceramic jaguar. This he would not allow us to hold.

It was a moment that provided one of the great surprises of my life, for in the museums of Lima and La Paz I had never seen anything remotely resembling this object. It was impossible that this blue terracotta figure, decorated with hieroglyphics, could have originated in Bolivia. The pottery of the Incas, who had dominated the area, has been described as trite. The Mochicas of the great preceding civilisation produced portrait-vases of incomparable genius, but they were concerned with the surface of things. The jaguar was the product of a different brand of inspiration and a different mind. This could only have been the work of a Mayan artist, in search of spiritual essence rather than outward appearance, who had set out in this case to interpret malignity concealed in animal form.

The question was how had the jaguar come to be where it had been found? Honduras in Central America, the nearest outpost of the ancient Mayan civilisation, was 2,500 miles away, and although Mayan traders are supposed to have moved freely between Yucatán in Mexico and Panama in the south it is hard to believe that any trader of those days could have accomplished the terrific journey to Bolivia, offering, moreover, articles for sale that could have had little appeal for a people with alien canons of taste.

The only solution to this enigma, if one existed, seemed to lie with the art historians of La Paz. I asked the
huaquero
if he was willing to sell the jaguar, to which he replied that he would not accept money for it, but would agree to an exchange for a suitable watch. I was wearing a wrist-watch of reasonable quality but this he rejected as being too small. Unhappily, Jorge’s watch, too, was small by his standards and an offer of the two watches for the jaguar was turned down out of hand. It was clear that value in this case was equated with size. Separating thumb and forefinger he measured out about two and a half inches. This was to be the minimum diameter of the dial, which had to be coloured red or blue. He told us that such watches, hugely prized among the Aymara, were on sale on the market stalls of La Paz. This I knew to be true, and that the price was about the equivalent of £4.

It was a wretched predicament, for I could see that the man would settle for nothing less. The offer of all the money we were carrying, amounting to some £50, plus the watches, was received with a contemptuous smile. It was two days to La Paz and back. In the meanwhile Jorge said, the man might have changed his mind. Moreover,
huaqueros
could only save themselves from the robbers, who continually stalked them, by covering their tracks and staying on the move. ‘Whatever arrangement we make with this man,’ he said, ‘he will not be there. We shall never see him again.’

The
huaquero
rewrapped the jaguar in the newspaper and put it back in his carrier bag. Refusing a lift, he turned away and walked off, leaving behind a mystery never to be solved.

‘He saw you were excited,’ Jorge said, ‘so he believed it must be valuable and he wished not to let it go.’

‘And what will happen to the jaguar now?’

‘No one else will want it. It was interesting only to you. He will keep it for good luck, I think. If the luck turns bad, maybe he will give it to the Devil.’

T
HE FIRST TIME I
went to Goa I stayed in its capital, Panjim, in the charming old Hotel Central. Among its many attractions was the fact that the windows, constructed at a time when glass was hard to come by, were made from tiny squared-off panes of mother-of-pearl from oyster shells. A talking mynah I assumed to have escaped its cage had taken up residence in the garden and sometimes greeted me cheerfully in English, although with a marked Indian accent. Another endearing feature was the atmosphere of trust fostered by the absence of locks on any of the doors. When at the time of moving in I commented on this no one seemed surprised. They had never bothered with locks, the manager said. No one would touch any of my possessions. Nevertheless, he thought it a wise precaution to keep the splendid windows closed when I left the room, purely to keep out the crows. These, he said, had the bad habit of collecting objects like sunglasses with which to decorate their nests. They were the only thieves in Goa.