DAY THIRTEEN. TUESDAY AUGUST 9th.
The Silence in the Jungle.
Following on from the recordings made with the Asháninka at Marankiari, the gifts and exchanges, the way the women responded with such excitement to Arthur’s photographs of ‘King Chokery’ and his wife, the sense of kinship, and then the presentation of the copy of the original contract between the government and the Peruvian Corporation, we felt that certain parts of the story were being withheld or glossed as myth. Bertha Rodriguez de Caleb agreed to talk to us, in the twilight, beside a smoking fire, only because of the intercession of Beliza, as intermediary and translator; a fellow Asháninka who had already helped and advised over the meal prepared by the river. Bertha knew about the cave of Juan Santos Atahualpa, the messianic leader of the uprising in the 1740s, but she told the story without revealing any details about a possible pilgrim route. The paths over the plateau above the Perené, and the significance of the journeys to the Salt Mountain, Cerro de la Sal, always seemed to invoke the names of those neighbouring settlements, Metraro and Mariscal Cáceras, working plantations right at the outer limits of land controlled by the Peruvian Corporation.
‘We entered the great Trans-Andean forest after crossing the Pucartambo river,’ Arthur wrote. ‘We were a goodly company to start with, consisting of seven Europeans, as many Cholos, and a score of mules. The shade of gigantic trees seemed grateful at first… But the road was a villainous rut at a gradient of about one in three, a width of about eighteen inches, and knee deep in something like liquid glue. Before we had gone five miles one-half the cavalcade had come to grief, and it was some weeks ere we saw our pack mules again; indeed, I believe some of them lie there still… Shortly after six o’clock we were overtaken in inky darkness, yet we plodded on, bespattered with mud, tired, bitten, and blistered by various insects.’
Lucho’s headlong velocity – ‘Come on, vamos, let’s go’ – is neutered by the obligations of hospitality, that a meal, lunch, must be prepared as a social event with advice coming from all sides, with many participants, donors, casual witnesses. Root vegetables, variants on the inevitable yucca, are being hacked by machete on the mud floor of an outhouse shack, set conveniently close to the box with the hole for relieving urgent bodily functions.
Lucho intended to bring pork as his offering, but remembered in time that this would not sit well with Seventh Day Adventists, followers of Fernando Stahl. He went early to the market in La Merced and chose a nice mix of prehistoric mud creatures, all bone and spine, and plump piranhas with rictus grins. They smoked and simmered. And made for a fine broth. After which, the dialogue could begin.
It had been hinted that, if all went well, we would be guided to the shrine of Juan Santos, a short distance from the village. The post-prandial gathering at Metraro showed no interest in Arthur’s photographs, but the locals were engaged by the letters and documentation dealing with the transactions of the Peruvian Corporation. They were shocked to discover, confirmed in writing, the duplicity of Stahl. The Adventist missionary offered, if he was permitted to establish settlements and schools, to make the Asháninka biddable, sober and willing to work on the coffee plantations. Soon he was conducting baptisms in the Perené.
The spokesman of the village, in long plaid shorts and sandals, mounted a motorbike piloted by a character in a cap with a DOPE signature and cannabis leaf design. And we were instructed to follow: we would be taken to the path that led to the cave of the reincarnation of the betrayed and slaughtered Inca, Atahualpa.
‘At last,’ Arthur continued, ‘there was a slight opening in the forest, and the ruins of an old thatched shed were discovered, with one end of a broken beam still resting upon an upright post, sufficient to shelter us from the heavy dews. It turned out to be the tomb of some old Inca chief whose bones have lain there for over 300 years, and there on the damp earth, we lay down beside them, just as we were. Our dinner consisted of a few sardines, which we ate, I shall not say greedily, for I felt tired and sulky, keeping a suspicious eye upon the Jesuit priests…
We were told, by the way, that the bones we were handling were the bones of Atahualpa, so treacherously murdered by Pizarro; but in Peru, of course, every such tale must be taken cum grano salis, and in this case the remains turned out to be those of a pretender who died about 1740…’
Juan Santos Atahualpa has become an authentic icon of resistance for the Peruvian tourist industry. In the main plaza at Pichanaki, on the back of a hoarding placed alongside a giant coffee cup for a recent festival, is Juan Santos, looking like Colonel Gaddafi about to greet Tony Blair in his tent, stern desert gaze and tribal robes. But the resting place of his bones remains obscure: hut, cave, shrine or, as some accounts have it, carried to Tarma.
We are hacking through the cloud jungle, trying to keep pace with the men from Metraro. Pressed hard against dripping rocks, reaching for vines. The village leader pushes ahead to test the path, overgrown, blocked by fallen trees, to the sacred cave. His bike jockey, the man in the Dope cap, holds us back. This is the moment of the silence in the jungle. Nobody moves. The birds are hushed. Everything is in green suspension. We catch our breaths. A moist and luxuriant interval, standing, not talking, but already suspecting that this is as far as we will be allowed to go. None of those miraculous old women will manifest to wave us through to the next stage of enlightenment.
The leader returns: it’s impassable, we must retreat. We follow the motorbike through a golden-hour landscape of small farms and thickets of dead and dying banana palms. Our guides dismount and walk down a dusty road beside the ghostly barracks of a diminished coffee plantation. Here is the final and most unexpected revelation, a tall blue and white pyramid, triggering memories of the pyramid in the grounds of Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s in Limehouse. But this alien structure has a memorial function, it is dedicated to the Adventist and colonial prophet, Fernando Stahl.
‘He must have been a Mason,’ Lucho pronounced. ‘Like all those Jesuits and bankers and politicians in Lima.’
It was that time of day. ‘I shall never forget that calm, bright Sunday afternoon when we looked out for the first time on the great interminable forests of the upper valleys of the Amazon,’ Arthur wrote. ‘The faint buzzing of bees, the subdued chirping of finely feathered birds, the flutter of brilliant butterflies, are the only commotion in the air… What crops of vegetables and fruit might not be produced in such a climate and in such a soil.’
   
As part of Open City Documentary Festival this year, we have an event with artist and psychogeographer Laura Grace Ford. She’s curating a screening of archival television documentaries from the early 90s, exploring the poll tax riots, housing, architecture and the politics of the time. One of these will be an episode from the series ‘Summer on the Estate’, set on the old Kingsland estate, whilst the other is “The Battle of Trafalgar’ which looks at London more generally.
Her work is really interesting, and she’ll be present to introduce and discuss the work she’s chosen, placing it within an idea of these films being “catalysts for new social imaginaries.” I thought this event might be of interest to you, considering that Iain Sinclair reviewed Laura’s book Savage Messiah for the Guardian back in 2011, and they’ve worked together on projects also.
At @OpenCityDocs 2019, artist and writer Laura Grace Ford (@LauraOF) will host ‘An Act of Unforgetting’: a programme of archival TV documentaries centred around social and political upheaval in London during the summer of 1990: http://bit.ly/LauraGraceFordOCDF
Links:
Novelist and Gothic literature specialist Elizabeth Lowry joins the writer, documentarist, film-maker and psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair to discuss the dark glitter of the Gothic and the work of the American poet Edgar Allan Poe, with presenter Matthew Sweet.
Elizabeth Lowry’s latest book is entitled ‘Dark Water’
“A rare radio appearance last night, talking about Poe in the interval of the BBC proms. Available as podcast” (Iain Sinclair)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07k6xyp
By Iain Sinclair
DAY SEVEN. WEDNESDAY July 3rd. SAN LUIS DE SHUARO.
After Tarma and the old Spanish hacienda, with the stand of eucalyptus trees, the stepped gardens, the white and yellow irises, the scarlet geraniums, the green parrot, the dogs and chickens, the running water, an oasis much appreciated by Arthur, we are firmly established on the road travelled by my great-grandfather. So much so that for the first time I begin to hear his voice, to feel the portrait I’m carrying taking form against the curtainless window.
‘We stayed here for some days,’ Arthur wrote, ‘greatly enjoying its splendid climate – a paradise for consumptive patients.’ And then they took the route we were now following. ‘We halted for breakfast at Acombamba, only six miles from Tarma, from which we had been rather late in starting. Acombamba is a beautifully situated but decaying hamlet, with about 1,500 rather seedy-looking inhabitants.’
Dropping through a gorge, where trucks and cars flirt at every bend with disaster, throwing dirt over the wayside shrines of previous victims, and slowing only for landslides and craters being repaired by ragged bands of children and old people, freelancing for pitiful alms, we made the shift to La Merced, the town on the border of the territory we want to explore. The first intimations of a more humid jungle culture. ‘The valley opens out, and the vegetation assumes a more luxuriant aspect,’ Arthur reports. ‘The moist steamy heat tells us that we are truly in the tropics.’
The turning point in the original Sinclair/Ross expedition of 1891 comes when they make contact at the Convent of San Luis de Shuaro with the priests who will guide them through the territory of the Asháninka to the point on the Rio Perené where they will take to the water, to survey the land granted by the Peruvian Government to those remote investors, the Peruvian Corporation of London. Arthur does his best, as he confesses, to put aside his native bias against the perceived iniquities of ‘the Spanish priesthood’.
‘I honestly tried to go forward unprejudiced, thinking only of the monks of old, and the good they did in their day. But this convent was a revelation to us. We had never seen anything quite so filthy and suspicious looking before, and would gladly have escaped within an hour; indeed, did so, and began erecting our tent at a safe distance; but were implored not to insult the reverend fathers by refusing to accept their hospitality, an infliction which we bore patiently for several days.’
Arthur does not name their tonsured guides, but claims that they ‘knew as little about the path as we did ourselves’. Arthur’s companion, Alexander Ross, is more forthcoming. The man taking them forward is none other than the celebrated Padre Gabriel Sala, a Franciscan missionary of fierce temperament; a well-armed backwoodsman, bounty hunter, chronicled for rounding up souls for Christ, filling the fortress of his newly-established convent with children and other cursed or damaged outsiders.
Our own guide, Lucho, knows nothing of this history or the status of the vanished buildings. But I have seen Sala’s pioneering large-scale map in the convent at Santa Rosa de Ocapo, with its drawings of buildings and river traffic, and I recognise the shape of the wall beside the new church. And right in front of it there is a statue of Sala, up on a high pedestal like a stylite; grim-faced, gripping his bible like a grenade. As I lift my camera, Lucho calls out. He has found an old Chinese lady, Maria Genoveva Leon Perez, keeper of the church keys. Here is one of those magical presences, usually female, usually bright-eyed but mature, spirits of place stepping from forest or river to put pilgrims who have put in the necessary miles on the right path.
Maria gets on well with Farne. We are invited into her house, where she tells us how the convent collapsed in an earthquake and was never restored. She knew about life in the Colony, the harshness of the rule of the Peruvian Corporation. Yes, there were schools and hospitals – but only for sanctioned employees. Otherwise, all that land along the river was enclosed, forbidden.
We visit the church and then, at the back, the rough ground on which Sala’s border-post convent once stood. Arthur’s story has moved into an active present tense. In the earth I find a rusted machete and a stand for votive candles. On the wall somebody, at some past moment, has painted FS – as if waiting for Farne Sinclair, who has now arrived to confirm the prophecy.
If nothing else, Sala inspired Arthur to try out a phrase that has become a standard in contemporary politics.
The worst weakness of the Hispano-Peruvian race is their inability to tell truthfully the little they know… The common people are born and bred to it, but their lies are clumsy, palpable, and comparatively harmless. With the priests and privileged classes, however, it becomes a studied art. “We must dissimulate,” said the chief priest of the convent, and I will give him credit for consistency in this; for during the three weeks I had the opportunity of studying this great economist of the truth, I never once knew him to utter a word that could be relied upon.
   
DAY TWO. FRIDAY July 28th. LIMA TO HUANCAYO.
The second-highest train ride in the world is now a carefully managed, once-a-month tourist experience. For tourists with the confidence to boast of how they beat soroche, the almost compulsory dose of altitude sickness. Potential headaches, nosebleeds, vomiting: with spectacular views. And regular folk dances and halts at strange, melancholy, deserted platforms. And many miles of dust discriminations in pulling away from the endless sprawl of Lima. The railway, promoted by the American Henry Meiggs, and designed by the Polish engineer, Ernest Malinowski, was a monument to colonial enterprise, the will to conquer nature.
Arthur Sinclair was impressed:
‘By rail to Chicla, 87 miles, thence on mule-back. This railway, it will be remembered, is, without exception, the highest in the world, and the engineering the most audacious. “We know of no difficulties,” the consulting engineer said to me; “we would hang the rails from balloons if necessary.”’
The 1891 party disembarked at Matucana (7, 788 feet above sea level), where they ‘resolved to stop for two days in order to get accustomed to the rarefied air’. Unconvinced tourists, we stood, awestruck and blinking from the dust and grit, in the open observation car. As the train swayed and shook, I discovered the true meaning of the term ‘branch line’, when a sprightly sapling ripped across my face.
Lungs prepared after a couple of days of gentle introduction to mule transport, Arthur remounted the train and continued to Chicla (altitude: 12, 215 feet). ‘A dreary enough spot,’ he said. ‘Horses and mules from the low country frequently drop down dead here from failure of the heart’s action.’
The present operation, we were told, could be made more commercial by carrying cargo from the smelting plant at La Oroya (still in the top ten of most polluted places on earth), or agricultural produce and coffee from the farms of the cloud jungle. But freight traffic is too profitable a deal for haulage interests. And the political impulse is to let the heroic railway fade quietly away. The spectacular Lima terminal, Estacion Desamparados, once the offices of the Peruvian Corporation of London (sponsors of Arthur’s expedition), was now a library dedicated to Nobel prizewinning novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa. Who choose for many years to live in London.
‘Leaving Chicla, the real tug of war begins,’ Arthur reported. ‘A wretched road, made worse by the debris from the railway, which, for the first fifteen miles, we saw being constructed still far above us, the navvies hung over the cliffs by ropes… Higher and still higher goes this extraordinary zig-zagging railway, boring into the bowels of the mountain and emerging again at least a dozen times before it takes it final plunge for the eastern side of the Andes.’
We step down from the train at La Galera. This was the highest station in the world before the Chinese, who are much in evidence here too, constructed the pan-Himalayan line through Tibet. It felt like coming ashore after a long voyage. Farne admits that moving from her seat might have been a mistake. She developed the worst headache of her life. Every step on the ground was a slow-motion adventure. Taking advice, I had dosed myself on coca tea (approved by Arthur) and the trick of learning to hold my breath as long as possible, before letting it slowly out. In fact, having taken one giant breath in Lima, I’m not sure if I remembered to take another until we disembarked, in the pulsing dark, all honking taxis, dogs, luggage, managed by a single policewoman in Huancayo. Our guide, the one who was supposed to meet us, was nowhere to be found.
   
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