• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

TWENTY-ONE

Sixpac Manco

Huancacalle, Peru

Two towns sit below the ruins of Vitcos: Puquiura and Huancacalle. Remember those bucolic little burgs that courier companies used to feature in their commercials to demontrate how willing they were to deliver packages to the ends of the earth? (“Look, my grandson in America spent the equivalent of three oxen to send me this handmade birthday card!”) Puquiura looked like that. Compared to Huancacalle—where we were staying—Puquiura was like Vegas. Huancacalle had two streets and a few dozen houses, almost all jerry-built of mud brick. None of them seemed a wise place to be visiting when one of Peru’s infamous earthquakes struck.

Far and away the nicest thing going in Huancacalle was the Sixpac Manco, the hostelry run by the Cobos family. If there is a finer place in the universe to stay for $5 a night, I have yet to encounter it. The second part of the hotel’s name was taken from the rebel Inca. The Sixpac part refers to the preferred beverage of the explorer Vincent Lee, a Cobos family friend who helped bankroll the operation.

John and I wandered into the Sixpac courtyard with the mules and unloaded our gear. The muleteers lined up to be paid for the first part of the journey, and I handed each his tip with a handshake and a “muchisimas gracias.” Julián, by far the least experienced of the crew, was the most excited to get paid. (Probably because I pretended to have forgotten Juvenal’s earlier suggestion that Julián would work for tips.) He was also the only muleteer who gave the traditional soft Quechua handshake. Bingham had been so unnerved by this “extremely fishy” grip that he had a group of men hooked up to a dynamometer and found the average squeeze strength to be “only about half of that found among American white adults of sedentary habits.” The soft handclasps I received along the trail seemed more like acts of gentleness than failures of manliness; each time I met a stranger, I felt like I was being handed a baby bird.

Mateo and Julián marched off to their nearby farms to spend a few days with their families. Juvenal walked up the hill to see his wife. Justo unpacked his gear in the Sixpac Manco kitchen. John disappeared into his room and threw his stuff around noisily for a few minutes. I had nothing to do except attend to my filthy clothes, which I washed out in the garden with a bar of soap and a scrub brush. My two shirts and two pairs of pants took half an hour to get passably clean. When I finished, I peeled the electrical tape off my toes and took a luxurious lukewarm shower in the open-air bathroom. The water was supposed to be heated by an electric contraption attached to the shower head that had all sorts of wires sticking out of it; this in turn was connected directly to the town’s main power cable. “Electrocuted while bathing” seemed a rather pathetic cause of death. So I let the tepid water run over me and tried to think of what I might be doing in New York at that hour. Then I realized that I didn’t even know what day it was.

Huancacalle was a lot less isolated than it had been just a few years ago. The Cobos family had a telephone that could make calls within Peru, though service was dependent on the positions of satellites and could be disrupted by things like high winds, clouds and sun spots. Juvenal’s daughter Rosa said that it was possible to make international calls at a shop just up the hill, the one with the parabolic antenna outside. I wasn’t sure exactly how many days it had been since I’d spoken with Aurita, but I did know it was the longest stretch since we’d collided on that New York street sixteen years earlier. Rosa giggled and shooed me toward the door when I explained why I needed to find a phone, but John seemed baffled by my desire to call home.

“I call my family back in Australia once a year, and they’re fine with it,” he said. He had spoken with his eighty-nine-year-old mum not long before we’d departed. “If she gets a call she knows something’s gone wrong.”

“I’m beginning to understand why