• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 448 0

Sixpac Manco the kitchen was full. Florencia Cobos, Juvenal’s wife, was collecting scraps for their guinea pigs; she wrapped the fruit peelings and moldy bread in a large manta, a hand-woven cloth. She dressed traditionally, with layered skirts, a long braid and a tall hat that John Smith might have worn on a date with Pocahontas. Her daughter Rosa wore a Polartec fleece pullover and jeans. She fed twigs into the wood-burning stove and told me she was stressed out because her son, who was attending school in Cusco, needed a laptop and it had been a slow year for tourism. Justo prepared breakfast—twenty tiny trout that he had pulled out of the river, God knows when—and listened to his radio, which was blaring pop songs sung in Quechua. The tune sounded awfully familiar. Or familiarly awful.

“Justo, I feel like I know this song. What’s he singing?”

“Oh, this song, Señor Mark? This is a great one. It goes: “Es el ojo del tigre . . .” Translation: It’s the eye of the tiger. “I’m going over to Puquiura today to buy some chicken. You can’t get anything in Huancacalle on Tuesdays. You want to visit the hospital to get some cream for those bug bites?”

What became an epic search for a tube of anti-itch cream later reminded me of a couple of major beefs that Bingham had with the Andean people. One was that it was nearly impossible to get anyone started on a project. His writings are loaded with crabby memories of cooling his heels while some Indian muleteer took half the morning to get the animals loaded and ready to move.

His second big complaint was that Peruvians would tell him whatever they thought he wanted to hear, just to make him happy. A foreman at one hacienda near Huancacalle told Bingham that he had seen spectacular ruins at a spot with a name that sounded like Yurak Rumi—Quechua for White Rock, one of the key clues to finding Vitcos. After waiting several days for a trail to be cleared, Bingham marched for several hours, only to find that this Yurak Rumi “consisted of the ruins of a single little rectangular Inca storehouse.” A decade later, Bingham was still piqued at the incident. “In this country one never can tell whether such a report is worthy of credence,” he wrote. “‘He may have been lying’ is a good footnote to affix to all hearsay evidence.” I had been advised that when traveling outside of Lima, I should get a second and third opinion even if I was just asking the time.

The only driver available in Huancacalle twice refused to take Justo and me to Puquiura; at first, he said, because he was finishing a very important bottle of soda, and then because it wasn’t worth his while to take only a single fare. After about half an hour sitting on the hood of his car, listening to Justo hold forth about the culinary preferences of past clients for whom he had cooked (“Italians—all they want is pasta, even at breakfast; with Spaniards, it’s ham, ham, ham”), the driver capitulated and drove us the two miles in about seven minutes.

Puquiura was a town of maybe a thousand inhabitants, with a central square and main street lined with brightly painted buildings. It also had a military checkpoint with a gate, manned by an armed soldier—presumably a holdover from Peru’s antiterrorism campaigns of the late eighties. Justo marched through with a mock salute to the guard. We asked an old woman where the hospital was.

“Go down to the river, you can’t miss it,” she said with a smile. We went down to the river. No hospital.

“It’s up on the hill,” said a man carrying a bucket of water. We went up the hill. No hospital.

“You need to go back to the center,” said a shopkeeper at the end of the road. We knew this couldn’t be right because we’d already done two laps of the middle of town.

Finally, a guy in a shirt that said (in English): NEW JERSEY, SINCE 1956, pointed at a building with a large cross painted on it. I bought some bug cream from the well-stocked hospital pharmacy—because of my language limitations, the pharmacist initially brought me a box of hemorrhoidal suppositories that contained cocaine as their active ingredient