Driving the Parish Priest's Car

I was named after my uncle the priest. At the time, Father Brendan was blazing an ecclesiastical trail in the US, hotly tipped (at least within our family) to be the first Irish pope. The reasoning behind my name was that I would inherit the fortune of the parish priest (at least). But shortly after being honoured with a namesake, with not a thought for the future of his nephew, Father Brendan left the priesthood, and all of a sudden I had to make my own way in the world.

Now, many many years later, Father Brendan is once more a priest (you can take the boy out of the God, but...) and finally the fortune of the parish priest is starting to faintly show its lustre. Last weekend, again through Livia's good offices, Padre Nicanor gave us the use of one of the Medical Centre's 4-wheel-drive pickups and we took to the countryside around Cusco.



The new face in the picture above is Natalie, tour guide and niece of Señora Paulina from the Medical Centre (nothing here is done without contacts - I feel like I'm back in Italy). It's all very well having your own wheels, but they're not much good if you don't know where to point them. Natalie guided us around the area that can roughly be described as the Sacred Valley for the entire weekend, helping us work out a good itinerary and giving us her insights into the history of the Inca. In some sense it was a magical mystery tour. Our ambitions in Cusco centred entirely around the city itself and Machu Picchu, and we had little or no research done on what else there was to see. Idiots. The land around Cusco is rich in magnificant historic remnants of the Inca Empire, and with Natalie's guidance we took in some of the more important ones.

First stop was a place called Moray which won't show up on many maps, and in effect doesn't have much of a road. We crawled our way up the gravel track, having already spent over an hour on sealed roads, stopping off to pick up locals who flagged us down for a lift. We parked (some of our passengers offered to pay for the lift - a humbling experience given their clearly meagre resourses) and walked to the edge, to where the ground seemed to fall away, still not sure exactly what awaited us...



These beautifully executed and wonderfully restored concentric circles, leading down to a depth of 30 meters or so, formed the world's first greenhouse according to Natalie. What you are looking at is an experiment in agriculture. A system that created different micro-climates, allowing Inca society to grow various crops all year round, and even to develop different varieties. Most importantly, this was the larder that filled the stomach on which the Inca army marched. During the phase of imperial expansion, this experiment was undertaken to help build up the surplus of food that must precede every military advance.

Nowadays it has another function. This site is considered by some as an important point of energy on the Earth's surface. When I hear the word 'energy' being used in this loose context, often by practicioners of alternative healing, I become immediately suspicious. But after climbing down to the very centre, still dealing with the altitude and heat, I was too breathless to put up a fight when Natalie suggested that we make a family offering to Pachamama. We didn't have coca leaves, we weren't inclined to sacrifice either of our daughters (given that they were well behaved that day) so we settled for one of the sweets that I constantly carry around in my pocket (we get them with the bill in Karl-Heinz's wonderful restaurant La Granja de Heidi across the road from our hotel - more on that in a later post). The Inca preferred even numbers apparently, so Natalie excluded herself from our offering. We buried the sweet, made a collective wish (which will remain as buried as the sweet itself until such time as it comes true), and struggled back to the edge of this enormous and breath-taking structure. Using steps like this...



Next on the itinerary was Ollantaytambo, another hours drive away. Guide books will often describe this as a fortress on the edge of a town, but Natalie began to show herself to be something of a maverick when it comes to interpreting Inca history. This time, the road was more civilised. We drove over the cobbles of the town and parked in the main plaza. So far it looked like a pretty, lively place. It's where the train to Machu Picchu leaves from, so there was quite a bit of tourist activity about. It wasn't until we left the plaza and walked north to the edge of the town that the vast ladder of terraces that characterized these ruins suddenly came into view. It took our already faint breath completely away. Twice in one day we had been ambushed by the Inca, despite the fact that they were swept away 500 years ago. Imagine the impression that this civilization must have made on those who lived in it, and those who came to conquer it.

We had lunch first, to prepare for the climb upwards, during which Natalie continued to give us her particular views on the nature of the Inca. She was slow to even use the word 'empire', and portrayed the way of life as a golden age for Peruvians. Nobody went hungry, the empire itself was build up by good example rather than at the end of the sword, everything was just dandy until the bloodthirsty Spaniards turned up. In our trip so far, we have seen the stamp of imperialism in every country we visited, and I feel I can say that the imprint is the same regardless of culture. The rationale behind empire, and many of its methodologies, are distinctly human and shared by British, Spanish, Papal, Mandarin, Mongol and Maori. I have learned to mistrust historical explanations that insist on exceptions to normal human behaviour. (In case this sounds fatalistic, and too pessimistic of human nature itself, I will try to give a fuller picture of what I mean in a later blog. I like to spread the pain - your pain that is - over time.)

Nina and Sara, faced with another climb, spat the dummy. So Livia volunteered to stay with them (quite happily, as she has seen all this before) while Letizia, Natalie and I hiked upwards.



In fairness to Natalie, it is hard to see the Ollantaytambo ruins as a fortress, given the lovely unguarded set of steps that run right up the middle of the terraces. The terraces themselves hold historical record of agriculture, just like back at Moray. Natalie's depiction of the site as a mixture of temple, agriculture and normal habitation made sense as she guided us up and across the structure. Always in the back of my mind, however, is the thought that only a centralized and powerful state, with endless cheap labour at its disposal, and methods of enforcing its will, can hope to construct edifices like this and Moray.

But I remain an ignoramus on all South American history and cultures, so I will have to wait until I read much, much more and compare what I have read to what I have seen, before offering anything other than these generalized and broad-sweep opinions.



Padre Nicanor has something of a reputation as a fast driver. Livia calls him Il Pirata (the pirate). Given that this was my first Peruvian driving experience, I was taking it nice and handy. I made sure, on returning the car at the end of the day, to apologise to the Padre, thorugh Livia, for destroying his reputation by tootling around the Cusco countryside like a pensioner, in a car marked with the Centro Medico de Belen. He laughed out loud and beamed at me. But there was something unpredictable and flammable about his glee, like an American caricature of a mafia godfather. I handed back the keys nervously and promised to do better the following day.

Waves

There are more ancient civilizations in South American than I can hope to remember. They all had their time, location language and culture. Some of them spread out from their points of origin and submerged others, like the waves I watched racing to the sand on Iquique beach a few days ago. The winners are the ones that we tend to remember. In Peru, the last two big winning waves were those of the Inca and the Spanish Conquistadores. On my one healthy morning in Arequipa we got a close up view of the faces of both of these cultures.

Juanita, as she is known to us today, was an Inca noble. She was about 12 years old when she walked hundreds of kilometers from Cusco to the volcanic mountain called Ampatu, about 100km from Arequipa, in the company of adults. Priests. They all climbed this mountain of more than 6000m, in sandals, using rough paths previously laid out in straw. In reaching this height - challenging even for today's well-equiped mountaineers - they were entering the world of the mountain gods. The rarefied air and exhaustion had already altered their states of mind. For Juanita, the privilige of walking amongst the gods with the priests, and the thoughts of what lay ahead, took her even further into a state of trance.

When they eventually reached the summit, Juanita was given some chichi, a beer made by the Incas. In her weakened state, the chichi made her lose consciousness. She wouldn't have felt a thing when one of the priests made a single blow to the right side of her head, just above her eye. That was all it took to end her life. In all probability, she was always destined to die this way. As part of a noble Inca family, she would have been selected early and educated with others like her about her role. She was priviliged. Her fate was to join the gods themselves, who according to the Inca priests had an appetite for young, beautiful and pure children, especially girls.

Almost six hundred years later, in the Universidad Católica di Santa María, at the end of a well-guided tour, we came face to face with Juanita. She never made it to the realm of the mountain gods. She lives in a Japanese-designed transparent freezer unit, alternating between the display location and the reseach lab (a routine she shares with the remains of several other sacrificed children of Inca times). She still bears the marks of the final blow. And you can still tell that when she was alive, she was very beautiful.

Not long after Juanita's death, a new wave broke on the West coast of South America. The conquistadores were armed with better germs, weapons (including horses) and political organization administered through the written word. The Inca were swept away.

About four blocks away from the Universidad is the Convent of Santa Catalina. It was founded a mere 100 years after Juanita's death, as part of the cloistered Dominican order by a wealthy widow of Arequipa. Aristocratic Spanish families would pay massive dowries to have their second daughter accepted as novices as the age of 12. This daughter would remain enclosed within the ever expanding walls of Santa Catalina for the rest of her life. Once a month she would be allowed a monitored 15 minute conversation through opaque grills with her family. She was permitted no news of the outside world. If she considered leaving the convent, her shamed family would have disowned her. She had nowhere else to go. She would live a comfortable life, with servants and even slaves (some of the servents were lower-class, Indian nuns), silently praying, conversing only when sewing. When she finally died, she was laid out for a day in the mortuary before being buried in the convent's own graveyard. Her family was not invited to the funeral.

As I stood looking in though the mortuary door, with my own two daughters beside me, I noticed it was lined with the portraits of many nuns, each with their eyes closed. The guide explained that while they were still alive, it was considered vanity for the nuns to have their image painted. Only when they were dead was this permitted.

Then the portraits were sent to the dead woman's family.

This last detail hit me like rabbit punch. Up until now I had been scoffing my way through the tour, making all the predictable comments that you'd expect from an unbeliever when shown the harsh and pointless regime of a misguided cult. But sending the portrait of the freshly-deceased daughter to the family that had gone without her company since she was 12!? This seemed like the unholiest of cruelties. Spiteful. I remained silent for a while, trying to collect myself, and looked at my own second daughter, shuddering at the idea of her being born into another place or time than 21st century Europe. Into Juanita's time. Into the time of Santa Catalina.