Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [109]
“In other words, he was saying ‘Don’t even try to cross the river,’” Paolo said. Keep out. The spot marked “Saw Mill” appears on later maps as “Maquina,” the rusted piece of machinery that Bingham had seen near Melchor Arteaga’s hut at Mandor Pampa. Paolo believed that the machine in question was a sawmill that Berns had planned to use to make railroad ties.
“What you have to remember is that Berns was an estafador, a scammer,” Paolo said. After failing to scare up investors for his dubious claims of silver and gold, Berns changed his strategy. He established a company to loot the huacas, or holy places, of the Incas, where he could unearth their priceless relics. “Helped by my professional knowledge and casual circumstances,” Berns wrote in a prospectus sent to would-be investors in 1887 (about a year before Hiram Bingham III made his first attempt to escape Hawaii), he had been able “to discover the existence of significant rustic buildings and underground structures that had been closed with stones, some of them carefully carved, which will undoubtedly contain objects of great value, and form part of those treasures of the Incas.”
To Paolo, the inference was obvious. “Berns was a crook. He lived across the river from Machu Picchu pretty much constantly for four years, from 1867 on. He knew where every family lived on the opposite side of the river—all twenty-four huts are on that map. He searched for ruins, specifically to loot them, using locals as guides.”
For years, Paolo shared his theory with anyone who would listen. Professional academics mostly condescended to him. Then he published his Bingham story in 2008.
“And suddenly you were famous as the guy who proved that Bingham hadn’t discovered Machu Picchu,” I said.
Paolo got agitated and spilled his coffee. “I don’t give a shit about fame!” he said, mopping up the mess with napkins. “All these newspapers said that I said that Berns discovered Machu Picchu. I don’t like that word.”
“What word?”
“Discovered. No gringo discovered Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu was never forgotten.”
Paolo talked for a while about various persons in Peru who were trying to steal credit for his research, but a jazz combo started tuning up and Paolo couldn’t hear a word I was saying. We walked back through the damp night to the South American Explorers clubhouse. The building was a converted home. We sat down in easy chairs, beneath an enormous map of Peru, in what had been the living room.
Like Bingham himself, Paolo had moved on from asking lots of little questions about Machu Picchu to trying to answer the Big One—what had Machu Picchu actually been? And like Bingham, he thought he might have found the solution to this riddle in the writings of a Spanish chronicler with an unusual personal history. Juan de Betanzos was considered the Spaniards’ finest interpreter of Quechua and married an extremely well-connected widow named Doña Angelina Yupanqui. She had been the child bride of the emperor Atahualpa and was with the Inca before and after he was captured at Cajamarca. After his execution, she later became the mistress of the man who ordered his death, Francisco Pizarro, with whom she had two sons. So when Betanzos wrote his comprehensive history Narrative of the Incas, published in 1557, he had pillow-talk access to inside information. Most of Betanzos’s work was unknown to Bingham; a copy of the last forty-six of the Narrative’s sixty-four chapters turned up in a private collection on the Mediterranean island of Palma de Mallorca, in 1987.
What’s fascinating about the new Betanzos information, in conjunction with the discovery that Machu Picchu was likely part of Pachacutec’s estate, is that Betanzos’s work may shed some light on why Pachacutec might have ordered Machu Picchu’s construction. Paolo had just spent several weeks out at Machu Picchu as the guest of the chief INC archaeologist.