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My planned route to Ayacucho led from Lima through Puerta del
Sol, eastward over the Andean continental divide at Ticlio, through
the Mantaro Valley and the city of Huancayo and into the
Department of Huancavelica. Lima seemed to stretch on forever,
becoming poorer and dirtier the farther I got from the city center.
Visible signs of poverty downtown were mostly limited to street
vendors and the homeless. Children, as young as five or six and
dressed in rags, sold Chiclets, shoe shines or cut flowers on every
block. Most were shoeless and dirty. Some were spectrally thin
with big, brown, pleading eyes, while others looked stringy, tough
and shrewd. I tried to speculate about the world they lived in,
about reality as they perceived it, and I was thwarted by the horror
of the mental pictures I conjured. Along the highway, I did a
double-take at a man squatting alongside the road, pants
accordioned around his knees, defecating. Farther along, whole
settlements rose improbably from the sand. Constructed of found
materials, they looked less like neighborhoods than animated
landfills exerting structure on their surfaces in a grotesque parody
of suburbia.
From Lima to Puerta del Sol, the road was flat and busy and
the Jeep's engine ticked along. At one point, the urban squalor
gave way suddenly to a rural landscape with no transition through
middle-class suburbs. The predominant view consisted of open
spaces planted with dusty orchards or the remains of crops.
Somewhere in each expanse of field or orchard sat one or two
small buildings, mostly constructed of adobe blocks and
corrugated steel, that could have been animal sheds or very
minimal human dwellings.
Everything was covered with a layer of dust. Dry ditches ran
alongside the two-lane highway. Alongside the ditches ran narrow
walking paths, dusty tracks worn through dust-covered grass or
tamped and smoothed into rougher patches of dirt the same dusty
color. Even the sky looked like dust.
The open spaces were interrupted here and there by walled
properties with impressive gates. On those walls grew the only
exceptions to a monochromatic universe. Virtually every wall was
clad in bougainvillea. In some cases, the flowering vines grew
along the tops of the walls like brilliant, ropy ice cream toppings.
In other places, heavy tendrils reached over the walls as if groping
for some invisible prize on the other side. Elsewhere, entire walls
were hidden by cascades of color. Vivid reds clashed with hot
magentas and flirted with muted yellows. A few walls shunned the
flamboyant bougainvillea for the more modestly dressed and
Catholic vines of passion fruit with their bizarre flowers evoking
the crosses on Calvary.
At Puerta del Sol, the gateway to the Andes, I encountered a
Guardia Civil roadblock - more men with machine guns. I queued
up behind a small cargo truck and a microbus burgeoning with
passengers. A soldier commanded the truck driver to pull over to
the side of the road and get out of his cab while uniformed officers
made a show of studying his documents. It looked like he was
going to be there a while. Another officer approached the driver's
window of the micro, papers were passed and the bus was cleared
to go on.
My turn. I pulled forward to where the officer stood waiting.
"Buenos días," I ventured.
"Documentos, por favor," was the gruff response. I produced
my international driver's license, my passport and the letter of
credentials from the Cultural Institute. He gave them all a once
over then, without returning them, said, "Los documentos del
vehículo."
I started getting nervous. I produced all the papers that I had
received when purchasing the Jeep, including the bill of sale.
"Estos no están en orden." Not in order? What did that mean?
"You are going to have to come with me to the station."
"The station?" I was starting to feel panicky.
"Sí, la estación. The fine for incomplete paperwork is one
thousand soles. Of course I will also have to impound the vehicle
until the papers are in order. The price of the impound is one
thousand soles. You can probably have the vehicle back in, oh …
I'd say … three or four days."
Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit. Goddamngoddamngoddamn. My
brain short-circuited in a string of helpless obscenities. I was a fish
with a hook set firmly in the roof of my mouth.
"Of course," continued the humorless officer, "if your time is
valuable, it might be possible to clear things up here."
The fisherman was feeding me line.
"How much would that cost?"
I ran with the line and jumped from the water.
"Five thousand soles." Zip! He reset the hook and reeled me in.
Of course I paid. The amount came to less than fifty bucks US
- a gringo tax. The soldiers waved me on, and I ground my gears
getting started. Driving away from the roadblock, I experienced a
weird combination of relief, optimism and nausea.
From there on, the road climbed relentlessly and became more
and more degraded. The rapidly increasing altitude started taking
its toll on the Jeep's power. By the time I got to the town of
Matucana, I was struggling along in second and resisting the need
to drop down into the granny gear. In a way, it was just as well that
I had to drive so slowly. I was so constantly astonished by the
world around me that at higher speeds I probably would have
driven off the road or shaken the poor Jeep to pieces. Just as I
approached Matucana, I hit the brakes and sat staring in
amazement and delight. Crossing the road was an old man with
deeply furrowed brown skin and posture like a question mark
leading a string of llamas. It was a scene I would soon come to
regard as commonplace, but there and then it felt like an exotic
discovery, a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
Since I had already stopped, I decided to tinker with the
carburetor. Pretty soon, by trial and error, I had the engine running
smoothly again. Feeling pretty hungry, I pulled up to a café called
the Restaurante Vicuña. It was a small, whitewashed cinder block
building with a door and window to the front and the name of the
establishment lettered in blue on the side wall. In keeping with the
theme of adventure, I ordered frogs' legs and fried potatoes. It felt
great to be there. I opened my notebook and jotted some
impressions:
These mountains are as dramatic as I expected, but
in a different way. They lack the cragginess of the
Rockies and look, instead, like enormous piles of
loose stone. The exception is where sufficient
water allows for cultivation. Even steep slopes are
planted. According to the server in the café, the
main crops are potatoes, barley and habas, a broad
white bean. In a few places the steep mountainsides
are terraced with stone walls to create flatter
ground for planting and water retention. This
terracing dates back to the time of the Inca.
From Matucana I continued, drunk on the scenery, and
occasionally grinding a gear, to Ticlio and the summit of the pass
into the Central Andes. Less than five hours out of Lima, this was
the spine of the continent. All the water I'd seen so far had been on
its way to the Pacific Ocean. Any drop hitting the ground in front
of me now would eventually join the flow of the Amazon on its
way to the Atlantic. According to the sign there, Ticlio was the
highest point on the planet with a working railroad station. The
station was no more than a worn wooden platform. At around
fifteen thousand feet of elevation, it was also the highest I had ever
been, outside of an airplane. Even in my mountaineering in the
Cascades and the Rockies, I had reached summits of only twelve
to fourteen thousand feet. At that elevation those peaks had been
permanently snow-capped and glaciated. Here at Ticlio, because of
proximity to the equator, and because all the precipitation falls
during the summer months, the ground was bare except for
scattered patches of thin, crusty snow. Flanking Ticlio on the north
and the south rose peaks that must have reached seventeen or
eighteen thousand feet. There the snow was permanent.
Curious about the effects of the altitude, I parked the Jeep at
the side of the road, got out, and began to jog. After about a
hundred yards on a slight downgrade I still felt pretty energetic
despite what I knew had to be a profound lack of oxygen. I turned
around and began to jog back toward the Jeep. The very slight
upgrade took its toll after only a few steps. By the time I reached
the Jeep, I was gasping for air and remembering jealously the
mighty lungs and heart of Moisés Blas.
A minute or two later, my breathing almost back to normal, I
bent slowly at the waist to stretch my hamstrings, straightened
back up, and took one last long drink of scenery. The top of the
world, I thought. Here it was more than just a cliché. Then, with
my shadow stretching out in front of me, I determined it was time
to go. I reached for the key in the ignition, but a sedan coming
from the other direction pulled off the road and stopped in front of
me. Two uniformed members of the Guardia Civil emerged from
the car.
Shit. Not again. I'm about to get hit for another bribe.
"Buenas tardes," I greeted them warily as I stepped down from
the Jeep.
"¡No te muevas!" Don't move, came the response from the
man on the left. He was a slight man with gray hair and epaulets
on his shirt. The man on the right, the driver of the car, was short
and fat and held a lower rank. He had a glistening divot of straight
black hair and a reddish mole the size of a raspberry clinging to his
upper lip. Both men wore pistols on their hips, and Fatso had
drawn his.
I held my hands out to my sides, palms up, in a questioning
gesture. For a microsecond, I'd been tempted to raise my hands
above my head, but had caught myself and avoided acting out the
embarrassing American television stereotype.
"What are you doing here?" asked gray-hair-and-epaulets.
Fatso had moved around to stand at my side and just slightly
behind me.
"I'm just enjoying the scenery."
Fatso gestured with his gun as he spoke. It seemed like a
natural extension of his hand. "What the lieutenant means is: what
is the nature of your business?"
"I'm an anthropologist," I said, then added, "working with the
National Institute of Peruvian Culture."
"Your papers," demanded the lieutenant.
I pulled the letter of credential from my shirt pocket. The
lieutenant snatched it away and began to scan it.
"Not this," he said. "Your identification papers."
I nodded my understanding. "They're in my bag."
I reached for my flight bag and, at that instant, Fatso drove a
fist into my side, just below the rib cage, doubling me over. For
the second time in the last few minutes, I was gasping for breath.
"You need to get down," he said, resting his pistol with
surprising weight on my shoulder, its barrel cold against the side
of my neck. I got to my hands and knees, but that didn't satisfy
Fatso. He put one booted foot against my back and sent me
sprawling face first into the dirt and gravel.
Still sucking wind from the lack of oxygen and the belly punch,
I coughed and wheezed. My lungs burned with inhaled dust. I
tasted gravel. I blinked in an unsuccessful effort to clear the grit
from my eyes. I didn't dare try to move my arms. Instinctively, I
had landed with my left arm stretched forward to cushion my
impact and my right arm crooked beneath my face for the same
reason. With my chin planted on my right forearm, moving only
my eyes in their sockets, I could see my left arm from the elbow
forward, a dun landscape stretching from just under my nose in
monotonous detail to a very near horizon of pavement, two sharp
creased pant legs from about the thighs down, a dusty pair of black
oxfords with one frayed shoelace, and the lower third of the Jeep.
The lieutenant emptied my bag onto the ground next to the
Jeep and scattered the contents with the toe of his shoe. He picked
up the leather wallet that doubled as my passport holder.
"Gringo," he said, practically spitting the word. My passport
hit the dirt at his feet. "Let's see what else we have: International
driver's license, traveler's checks … Hmm…" I could hear the
sliding, rustling movement of paper money. My wallet landed
about a foot from my passport.
I tried to lie perfectly still. I did, except for the irregular
heaving of my diaphragm. I struggled to calm my heart and
regulate my breathing. Meanwhile, the lieutenant proceeded to
examine every inch of the Jeep. He searched under the hood,
beneath the dash, under the single seat and inside the fender wells.
Anything that wasn't fastened down he tossed to the roadside.
"Aquí no hay nada." The lieutenant sounded disappointed to
have found nothing of value. "Go figure. A gringo driving such a
total piece of shit."
"¿Le mato?" Fatso asked if he should kill me in the same tone
of voice he might have used to ask, "Care for a drink?" I couldn't
believe what I was hearing or how powerless I was to do anything
about it. My heart raced like an engine about to throw a rod.
"Espérate," said the lieutenant. Yes! Wait! I thought.
At that moment, the clattering sound of a diesel motor
announced the imminent arrival of a truck along the highway.
"Don't move a muscle," commanded Fatso, his voice coming
from a point ominously close behind me. I strained my eyes to see
as much as I could in the direction of the highway. Moving from
the top to the bottom of my weirdly orthogonal field of vision, a
farm truck rolled past to the labored sound of gears shifting. A row
of solemn brown faces peered out between the wooden slats of the
bed. Witnesses, I thought.
Fatso's knee came down on my rib cage, grinding with the
force of his weight. "I think you should stay here for a while," he
said. Suddenly, lightning flashed in my head and everything went
black.

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