Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [125]
“This is phenomenal,” I said to John, who was videotaping the view.
“When you walk through here you realize that this was the only possible route for the Inca to take to Machu Picchu,” he said.
John was speaking aesthetically. There’s a school of thought that the Inca Trail had been plotted like a good adventure yarn, with twists and turns, rising and falling action, and foreshadowing of the big climax: Machu Picchu. It’s a suspenseful tale broken up by surprises. Looked at from a different angle, the Inca Trail is like the narrative of Alice in Wonderland—dreamlike and open to interpretation. In which case crossing Dead Woman’s Pass was the moment we fell down the rabbit hole. Things only got stranger from this point forward.
“Come on, I want to show you something,” Efrain said. We walked down the stairs for a couple minutes, until we were in the shadows again, then turned back toward the sunlit pass. “From here, you can see why they call it Dead Woman’s Pass. There’s the face, the breast, the belly.” It really did look like a woman on her back, her strong facial features aimed skyward.
The trail descended steeply for a while, but John slowed down. His stomach was troubling him.
“Looks like the early score today is Giardia 1, Leivers 0,” I said when he caught up.
“More like Giardia 40, Leivers 2,” he said, leaning hard on his bamboo pole. “Go on ahead. I’ll find you.”
Efrain and I walked ahead alone. He started humming. I asked him what the tune was.
“Oh that? It’s called ‘Apu Yaya Jesucristo.’ It’s a song you sing in mountain churches.”
“What does the name mean?”
“Basically it talks about how the apus are connected to Jesus Christ.”
Since this suggested a marriage between Catholicism and what the Vatican would probably deem paganism, I asked if this was the sort of thing one discussed publicly in the Andes.
“In Peru, we have two religions, futbol and Catholicism. But everybody in Cusco still gives offerings in August.” August 1 is Pachamama Day, a major holiday in Cusco. “I’m Catholic, I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. And I give offerings.” Efrain explained that this was a long-standing tradition in the mountains. If one looked at the most famous paintings in the cathedrals of Cusco, one saw that native painters often combined elements of Catholicism with their traditional beliefs. The Virgin Mary might be painted in the shape of a mountain, or with a snake, or under a moon. “Of course the most famous one is of the Last Supper with the cuy—you know, the guinea pig,” Efrain reminded me.
According to Efrain, this spiritual hybrid went all the way back to the Spanish Conquest. “Mountain people mix traditional beliefs, Catholicism, and ancestor worship,” he said. “My father died when I was very young. After fifteen years, they had to dig up his coffin. So my mother brought his skull back to our house so he could watch over us. Where did this tradition come from? From the Incas.”
(I wondered for a moment if Efrain was pulling my leg, but realized that he was far too earnest about Andean traditions to joke about something so important. I later read a news story about a candidate for mayor in a southern Peru town who tried to blackmail his opponent into dropping out of the race by digging up the skull of the man’s father and holding it hostage.)
I told Efrain that the Catholic priests I’d known in my life were not always the most open-minded individuals regarding spiritual matters. Pantheism wasn’t high on their list of likes. “Are the priests around here okay with this stuff?”
“They have to learn to balance the two,” he said. “If a priest says anything bad about the apus, two