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Walking up to the general store, I felt like a gunslinger strolling through Dodge City. The road was dirt, the buildings were dusty, and the only people visible were peering out at me from dark windows and doorways. Only one thing felt off: I was marching up a crazily steep hill. The sheriff in a Huancacalle gunfight would need to aim his pistol as if he were shooting skeet.

I found the store and stepped over the wooden dog gate in the doorway. The proprietress, a young mother in her twenties, stood behind a glass case filled with candy, toiletries and matches. It smelled like dried soup mix and disinfectant inside the store, like it does sometimes in old people’s houses.

“Good day, it would please me to make an international call to the Estados Unidos,” I said in carefully measured Spanish.

From behind me a loud voice interjected. “Well, someone wants to make a call to THE EH-STAH-DOS OO-NEE-DOS.” I hadn’t noticed that the shoplady’s husband was sitting at a table in the corner, picking apart a chicken carcass and drinking (judging from the impressive collection of empty Cusqueña bottles) his eleventh beer of the afternoon.

“Um, yes, that is correct. It is possible?”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said. “Let me find the code for the United States.”

“EH-STAH-DOS OO-NEE-DOS!” shouted the husband, pointing at me with a drumstick bone. It was hard to tell if he was angry, or mocking my pronunciation, or practicing his geography.

I dialed, but no one answered. I dialed again. Then I did a quick calculation and remembered—of course, no one was home because it was Columbus Day in the United States. The arrival of Europeans in the New World was not a major cause for celebration in the Andes.

“It seems to me that no one is in the house,” I said to the woman. “I am going to call another time later.”

“Call the EH-STAH-DOS OO-NEE-DOS,” her husband added. He had a look in his eye that any American who has spent time around non-American drunks may recognize, the leer that precedes either projectile vomiting or a lecture about the CIA. Sometimes both. I hopped the dog gate in the doorway and hurried downhill.

Back at the Sixpac Manco, Justo had prepared a feast of stuffed potatoes with breaded chicken cutlets, choclo (Peruvian corn with huge white kernels), and rice pudding for dessert. I had read somewhere that chewing coca helped the body break down carbohydrates, but I’d begun to wonder if the Spaniards had banished green vegetables along with the Incas’ pagan rituals. Justo dug deep into one of his conga drums and produced a box of red wine. John poured out mugs for Rosa, Juvenal, Justo and the two of us. Justo and Juvenal stood and lifted their drinks overhead, shouted “Salud!,” tossed the wine back in a single gulp, sat back down and resumed the conversation they were having in Quechua. John pulled out his maps of Vitcos and tried to explain how one of the most important sites in the Inca empire could be forgotten for centuries even though it was located a short walk from two towns.

Part of the obfuscation may have arisen from popularity of the name Vilcabamba. In the region to the west of Machu Picchu, Vilcabamba is about as common a name as Peachtree is in Atlanta. On John’s maps, I could see a Vilcabamba region, which spread across hundreds of square miles; a Vilcabamba River, which flowed west of the Urubamba; the Cordillera Vilcabamba, a mountain range that included the apu Salcantay and Machu Picchu; a town called Vilcabamba the New, founded by the Spanish; and the archaeological site of Vilcabamba the Old, also known as Espiritu Pampa, where we’d be heading in a few days. During Manco’s reign, the entire rebel state was known as Vilcabamba.

An hour later, my head numb with dancing Vilcabambas, Quechua gossip and Chilean merlot, I walked back to my room, climbed beneath clean sheets and thick wool blankets and slept the sleep of the dead.

TWENTY-TWO

The More Things Change

Lost in Puquiura

Andean folk are my kind of people—early risers. At five-thirty in the morning at