Cloud Road (41 page)

Juan spoke with the tenderness of affectionate memory. ‘In old age, she contracted Parkinson’s, and would lie in a friend’s swimming pool, swimming with infinite slowness to exercise her muscles. Always she said, “When I die don’t take me back to Germany, bury me here in Nazca, to look after my lines.”’ She died in 1998, aged ninety-five, and lies beneath a memorial stone in a small neat lawn, not looking east, to the resurrection, but to her lines.

My final stop was Pisco, a fishing town, and home of the grape brandy used in
pisco
sours. When the bus arrived, I knew there had been a mistake. It was new, with reclining seats, radio, video and earphones. I was back in the modern world. Outside, gleaners in the fields were bent over like fishhooks: their white scarves the maggot bait. We ran into the modern resort of Paracas past gated luxury hotels with top-hatted commissionaires. Up the hill to our right was the old town, where Tello found the fabulous textiles worked on by Maria Reiche. We ran a
few miles further south into Pisco itself, sandwiched between the desert and the fishmeal and canning factories. The name Pisco means bird in the pre-Inca language of the Auki. I was here to see the Islas Ballestas, which support one of the greatest sea-bird populations in the world. It would close another circle, one begun with my first book, tracing the route of the square riggers my great-grandfather sailed back from Peru and Chile, laden with nitrate-rich guano. Along the shore, the old wooden fishing fleet was on the beach: small family boats. Out in the mist hanging over the Humboldt Current were steel trawlers, sieving the seas barren.

I was nearly out of cash, so I booked into a good hotel that took credit cards. When I found out they had hot water I showered every two hours, and swam slowly in their pool, admiring my clean, white fingernails. Early next morning, I waited on the beach, cadging scraps from the fishermen to feed the Peruvian pelicans. A small launch took me out through sluggish, torpid water, towards the blocky, stone islets outside the bay. The boatman, Martín, told me, ‘Officially the rainfall here is 1.86 mm a year but I was twenty-two before I saw rain, and only then because I was visiting family in Cuzco.’

Sea lions appeared around us, bloodied silver fish in their sharp yellow teeth. For some time I could not see the birds which colonise the islands and whose droppings made millionaires of the shippers in the days up to the First World War, before nitrates could be synthesised. Suddenly my eyes clued in. There were dark strings lying far off on the water. More were faintly discernible in the sky. From all directions, lines of thousands upon
thousands
of neo-tropical, red-legged and guanay cormorants
were flying to and from their nests, filling their gullets from one of the richest fisheries on the planet. Soon, two overlapping V’s of birds passed low over us, necks eagerly outstretched. Ripples passed along each string until they looked like black ribbons blowing in the wind. As the birds approached the island, they broke formation to find their own nests, collapsing in a tumble of outstretched feathers. In among the flying cormorants, I could pick out larger, paler birds, the head, neck and breast white, the wings patterned finely in creams and browns. Peruvian boobies belong to the same family as gannets, and are shaped exactly like them. A group peeled away, and, one by one, folded back their long, elegant wings, and arrowed into the water.

We slipped in among the islands, below the crude wooden loading platforms where sacks of the penetrating fine dust were lowered slowly into holds. The Incas had known of the richness of the guano; it was punishable by death to kill the birds or to land during the nesting season and disturb the birds. Above my head flitted a very special tern, the slatey-grey Inca tern, with brilliant crimson beak and legs and curls of feathers trailing like long moustaches from below the eye.

Tonight, a
pisco
sour. Tomorrow, home. Elaine. I wondered how we would feel after another two months’ separation. She sometimes hides from me when I get home, once working late at a job she loathed. I try to understand why she finds reunions as hard as farewells. I think about phoning, but my money and credit are nearly spent, and tomorrow we will be speaking face to face.

In the late afternoon I followed San Martín Avenue down the gentle hill to the shore road. I drank my
pisco
sour overlooking the narrow beach. The city of Pisco is physically turning its back to the sea whose riches made it possible to live here, in this Arabian Nights land, where it never rains on the shore of the world’s biggest ocean. The coastal Indians defied the Incas when they came here.

It was an astonishing insight to realise that religion expression is cultural, growing out of a people’s
circumstances
, and is not an absolute truth. Europe would take another four hundred years to think like this. But insight into your enemy’s culture isn’t always the conclusive factor. Four months later, Inca Capac Yupanqui tired of a largely tactical and diplomatic campaign, and said if they didn’t surrender he would behead the whole nation and repopulate the land with new peoples. They surrendered.

The shore road has a few ill-starred buildings here and there along its ragged tarmac, like worn patches on an old
bicycle tire. Where San Martín meets it, there is a small square on the seaward side, and a statue of Christopher Columbus, who never saw this Pacific Ocean. Just as well: it ruined his whole cosmology. He insisted that he had reached China, so the Americas, this New World, this other Eden, were just wished away. But he now stands for eternity on a pedestal overlooking it. It is the first thing he sees every sunrise, as an endless flow of dawns steals over the Andes, throwing their sun into the metallic air. It is the last thing he sees, when the sun collapses into it each night. Behind him, over his half-averted shoulder, is a circular porphyry fountain, it triggers memory, Tennyson’s line:
a fin winked in the porphyry font.
The lowest ring is a smooth seat; I sit and listen to the Carlos Santana guitar solo blasting out from the open doors of the empty bar to my left. On either side of me, grizzled men tap their feet. A mottled dog gives me a thorough sniffing; I am wearing the clothes I wore to the islands, and they smell of the fish bits and prawns I threw to the pelicans, an olfactory seascape. On my right is the Gran Hotel, the first hotel in the town. Now it looks as if scavengers are cannibalising it from the roof down. Even sixty years ago visitors were greeted by a monkey’s grinning gums, paint-box macaws, their soft, grey tongues shrieking like dry axles. But for years, only the ground floor has been painted and
maintained
, and now the windows are barred or shuttered, and life has drained down through it and evaporated. A small tower on the roof, built to capture delicate zephyrs on slow afternoons, has been reduced to a skeletal frame drawing black geometries on the sky. On the first floor, there are shallow balconies fenced with turned spindles and hardwood rails, but the windows have gone and grey
pigeon dung lies like cold lava on the rafters. The carved and fretted eaves are fractured; the quality of the remaining fragments an embarrassed reminder of how far the property has fallen: a tramp with a lace handkerchief.

The once splendid building opposite has magnificent wood and wrought-iron doors that tower fifteen feet high in poisonous dark blue. The building is a crude
checkerboard
of whatever paint was left standing in unattended lorries. Carlos Santana:
‘Samba Pa Ti’
pulls at the heart, his guitar builds wild Antonio Gaudí facades. Music lives in the passing vibrations in the air, these tremblings which ripple out from the lonely bar, over the dusty grey roofs, along the empty coast road, over the salt-tanged shore and quarrelling gulls, the glinting terns, flying over the cold waters of the Humboldt Current out into the blue void, quieter than the ear can sense, already the record of something past.

On the other side of the hotel there is an alley leading to a single wooden pier running out through the shallows looking for the deepwater Pacific. It is seven hundred yards long and appears to be growing longer as the sun falls. In the dark rooms above me, the emaciated General San Martín, his eyes glowing like a panther’s from opiates taken to control the pain of his rheumatism, plotted the fall of an overblown empire as showy and flimsy as these peeling façades. They landed here to free the slaves of the coastal cotton and sugar plantations and enlist them in their army of liberation. But the landowners had taken them all inland; there were to be no reinforcements. Soldiers who had waited too long and seen too much to sleep well sweated out strange foreign fevers in the arms of half-drunk mistresses tired of trying to put young men
back together between the luminous, moonlit sheets. They watched in amorous sorrow as the men spilled rum from crystal glasses or dropped cigars from confused lips over the frail balconies to fall fizzing into the fountain.

Sometimes the past presses in close, tonight there is just a dark pane which holds it pinned back in the dusty cool of tall languid rooms. Memories like moths’ antennae press against the glass, driven forward blindly, destructively, by their soft wings’ insistent beat. You feel you could reach out and unfurl the memories and look at their tiny secrets, but like the feathery genius of the antennae, they would break and crumple to nothing, leaving faint grey blemishes on your fingertips.

I turn to look at the sun, growing larger to the eye as it falls nearer the earth. The Incas believed it actually fell into the ocean, consuming huge cataracts of water, then travelled beneath the earth to appear again in the east. The guitar solo is collapsing in gentle fragments. The low bank of cloud far out over the ocean is the rich grey of the back of an Inca tern and is pressing flat the lower lip of the sun’s disc. The sun is going to set exactly opposite the end of the pier, which is becoming a near-black silhouette of abandoned hoists, drunken stairways, flagpoles and davits. The long boards lead down the pier and out to sea, trodden smooth by the century’s feet, the planks begin to glow red in the seconds that remain. The sun is the pier’s vanishing point and if I throw down my things now, and go, arms open, suspended by these lumpen timbers above the ocean’s slow rollings, maybe, in this instant, I could cross over this bridge, and walk to the sun.

Sun lost in the sea.

Darkness.

It is impossible to come home and tell your friends what you have been doing for five months of your life. You carry the life with you like a secret, until there are times when a small part can come out in conversation. It was easier to bring Elaine up to date about the final two months, because she had seen some of this amazing country. She listened, turning the carved gourd from Cochas Grande over in her hands and finding
Por Elaine, Mi Amor.

I began writing the week I got back. I was keen to write while recollection is fresh, and I finished the first section of the book swiftly. Ironically, my back, which had withstood so much walking and carrying, could not cope with sitting at a computer for ten hours a day. My lower spine began to come apart. Injections helped for a while, but the last one had no effect, and I had to ration my writing to keep the pain under control. I continued, wondering whether I would ever be able to make a journey like this again.

In the end, my lower back disintegrated, and I could not work at all. I lay spaced out on painkillers and dreamed of walking all day through the mountain spaces. Elaine toiled on her PhD, her completion date receding like an Andean skyline: three years, four years, nearly five. The date for the operation to rebuild the base of my spine was continually postponed because of National Health Service backlogs; I waited two years. By coincidence our two deadlines converged. In hospital, Elaine came to visit. Afterwards, the man in the opposite bed, knee
replacement
(in hospital, we become our deficiencies), said in a
fine Cardiff accent, ‘Your missus doesn’t fuckin’ stay long, do she?’

I shifted in bed, creating electric pain. ‘She was awarded her PhD yesterday. She’s waited a long time for this. We both have.’ But while she had sat by the bed, she had never touched me. I went home and slowly bent the new, reconstructed back to take clean socks from my drawer. It was full of her things. So were the other drawers. All my things were in the spare room.

The same month she admitted she was dating another woman. She looked me in the face with hard eyes I had not seen before. ‘It’s your fault. You were never there for me. Those trips, they were just for you.’

Now my back is fine. Strong enough for anything.

More pictures, a full bibliography and recommended reading all appear on my website: www.cloudroad.co.uk

This book has been greatly assisted by two grants, from the Arts Council of Wales and the Academy, the first to meet some of the expenses of the reconnaissance trip for the journey, and the second to buy me six months’ time, on my return from the main trip, to write it. During that time I was able to almost completely finish the first draft, while the events were fresh, avoiding the fatal distraction of undertaking unrelated work to pay bills. Special thanks for that to Tony Bianchi, Peter Finch and Lleuci Siencyn.

Nancy Watson was a steadfast friend in tough times, and a tireless terrier in tracking down material.

Much thanks also to: Charles and Pat Aithie, Shirley Cuba Aliaga, Margaret Anstee, Armando Lecaros de Cossío,
Sixto Durán-Ballén, Peter Frost, Gloria Fuentes, Marilyn Godfrey, Mari Griffiths, John Hemming, Amanda Hopkinson, Jonah Jones, Máximo Kateri, Judy Lane, Jacqueline Mijicic, Jeanette Minns, James Moore, John Pilkington.

Celia Ansdell gave love and support during final editing, when I am least sane and reasonable.

Thanks also to Elaine, for the good years.

The following works were quoted from.

Quechua varies throughout the route I followed, and spelling conventions have changed in recent years. There is a Cuzco Quechua, the equivalent of Oxford English, but I met few who spoke it. I have usually followed local spelling unless I had reason not to. Quechua scholars will no doubt discover errors and inconsistencies. Let me apologise to them now, and invite corrections, via the website.