Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [73]
Mateo and Julián prepped the mules for the walk back to Huancacalle. As a farewell gesture they grabbed Justo, hoisted him over their heads and threatened to lash him to the roof of the truck with the rest of the luggage. I handed out payments, we shook hands—firmly with Mateo, softly with Julián—and the rest of us took seats in the Toyota, except for Juvenal, who climbed in the back among the bags and fell asleep. “Good luck, Papi!” Mateo shouted into our dust, waving as we drove off.
“How about a little music?” Edgar asked.
Among the ideas I’d had time to chew over while walking was a theory about the surfeit of bad eighties music in Peru. Here’s my best guess: around 1992, the record companies in New York and London gathered together all the millions of cassettes and CDs that they couldn’t sell, even marked down to 99 cents at truck stops, and shipped them off to Peru, where they were air-dropped all across the country. How else to explain the fact that Edgar possessed a copy of the album that Pat Benatar released two albums after the album that had “Love Is a Battlefield” on it? How else to explain the extraordinary “Worst of the Eighties” mix that he played on repeat for the six-hour drive to Quillabamba? “Playing with the Queen of Hearts” was followed by “99 Luftballoons,” which segued into “Sister Christian” and “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.” Peru doesn’t give out knighthoods, but if they ever start, Kenny Loggins should probably get his tux pressed.
I was contemplating Bingham’s complaint that he had to hear someone play “Tonquinoise” on the piano every time he set foot in a new hacienda, when a song came on that I couldn’t remember ever having heard before, though it was so awful that I may have simply repressed the memory. It sounded as if Leonid Brezhnev had holed up in the Kremlin with a Casio keyboard and the cast from a junior-college production of Les Misérables. John, who had up to this point shown zero interest in any genre of music, sang along with gusto and pounded the back of Edgar’s headrest: “Moscow, Moscow, drinking vodka all night long/Keeps you happy, makes you strong/A ha ha ha ha ha!”
“My God, what is this?” I asked John.
“Theme from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Very big in Australia. You probably don’t know it because of the boycott.”
I made a mental note to send Jimmy Carter a thank-you card.
THIRTY-ONE
Waiting
Near Santa Teresa
We spent a night in Quillabamba, a small city with some features that struck me as overwhelmingly cosmopolitan after two weeks in the backcountry: two-way traffic, restaurants, couples holding hands. Juvenal unfolded himself from the back of the truck, grasped my hand, said, “Good luck, Marco,” and walked off into the sunset to catch a bus home to Huancacalle, leaving me to wonder if he’d known my name all along. The only memorable moment of our urban respite occurred when a pharmacist with whom I’d been conversing in Spanish made my year by asking whether I was visiting from Madrid. Because I’d learned to speak Castellano in Spain, I had a habit of pronouncing soft C’s with a European lisp that the muleteers found hilarious—a hypothetical order for five beers would come out of my mouth as “theenk-o ther-vay-thas.”
Not long ago, it had been possible to catch the train to Machu Picchu from our next stop, Santa Teresa. Or rather, from what used to be Santa Teresa. The original town was swept away during the El Niño climate craziness of 1998, by a mud slide caused when a chunk of glacial ice cracked off the side of a nearby mountain. A wave of earth and rocks roared down the valley, wiping out an entire train line,