Down in the jungles it was the season of rains and floods. In Chachapoyas, the barren Sierra town about 8,000 feet up in the Andes, there were also rains, cold and dismal, falling from clouds that billowed up every afternoon to incredible heights.
I had flown to Chachapoyas from the low-lying jungle town of Moyobamba—a journey of perhaps forty-five minutes by air, but which Sandoval, my Indian guide, had traveled on foot, up from steamy forests over high mountain passes and glaciered punas. One sleeps in caves on the journey and eats gracefully what meagre food one can buy on the trail. Food in this remote region is not plentiful, an suspicious, if not downright hostile, Indians are reluctant to sell.
Sandoval’s journey required ten days, and he arrived in the Sierra town thin and tired, needing food and rest.
My days of wailing had been unhappy; the populate was unaccustomed to Gringas—I think I was the only one the newly inaugurated little airline had ever brought, except perhaps a missionary whom the mixed blood Peruvian (an Catholic) populate could understand. My reputation got off to a bad start from the moment I arrived.
The tiny one-motored plane deposited me on a ragged field on the top of a mountain. On the top of another mountain in the distance was the town of red-tiled roofs, gleaming brightly in the late afternoon sun. It looked a little like a Chinese village, and I was glad to be out of the jungles. Our expedition was dragging on to unforeseen lengths up and down and across the Andes, into remote corners of the Amazonas. It was delicious to be in cold mountain air again.
An old, ponchoed Indian picked up my stained and battered duffle bags and a sheaf of feathered war arrows I had collected in savage Indian country. He led me to a saddle waiting pony. I hadn’t foreseen riding that way from the plane; so, as I mounted, my skirt quite naturally went up over my knees, which were bare. (I hadn’t seen a pair of stockings in something like a year.) A handsome Guardia Civil, Indian and hawk-like, muttered,“Que escandalo! Showing her knees!”
All the way down the mountain and up the next I kept vainly pulling my skirt down over my knees, and so did the old Indian—disapprovingly. By the next morning my reputation in the little town was gone. The mountain Indian women, whose costumes stem from the court of Louis XIV—huge gypsy skirts and innumerable petticoats—thought my short ones indecent. Perhaps I was a little mad; also, I might be a witch because the feather rumor got twisted into a story that I wore them on my head. Fancy! Feathers on her head!
The only available room in the lone inn was the most cheerless place it has ever been my lot to spend two weeks. It faced a barren courtyard through which there was incessant traffic. The whitewashed room had a large door, but was completely innocent of windows. It was rather like living in a Fifth Avenue show-window. And the food was, to say the least, indifferent.
It was with great anticipation that Sandoval and I, after he had rested, made our plans for departure. On his way over the mountains he had heard that the rare silver-grey bear which we sought was to be found about a week’s journey to the south, on the edge of a great, unexplored territory. A sub-prefect of a wayside village had told him that, sin duda, if we made that journey, our weary search would be over. News had come to him that a campesino, a peasant, had captured a baby bear and was bringing it up in his own house.
So we planned the two weeks’ mule trip. Food, of course, was the first consideration in that remote region. For two days we haunted the open market, rising in the cold of early morning to get the best of anything obtainable. We bought flour, dried beans—the big kind called paillaires and the small, black, spotted ones—from old, bright-eyed Indian women in brilliant skirts and striped shawls, over which fell long black braids. We stocked up well on the ubiquitous fideos—spaghetti—as that, like the beans, was something easily carried without spoiling. That factor had to be considered, since we should shuttle down to the jungles and up into the mountains again many times before the journey would be finished, running the gamut of many climates. What a boon American dehydrated food would have been to us then!
Rice and onions were a good stand-by. Rock salt, the hot red pepper known as ahi, and aho, which is garlic, we bought in small quantity. A little dried mutton was available, which even when cooked a long time defies the stoutest of teeth, but does impart a sort of flavor to beans and spaghetti. There was a curious item of which we bought a little as an experiment…dried frozen potatoes. The Indians peel and quarter them, then leave them on a convenient glacier to freeze. It seems not to matter to these hardy souls who play futbol at 14,000 feet that their Frigidaire may be a matter of many miles away. We didn’t care much for this delicacy, finding it rather flat in taste. We did buy goat’s milk cheese—a white, spongy kind with a mild flavor which was really excellent. We risked taking this with us in spite of the warning that unpasteurized goat’s milk might carry Malta fever.
Finally, the afternoon before we were to start, we purchased a supply of round, flat buns, and a large chunk of beef which we took to the inn and persuaded the Indian cook to pot-roast for use in a clay olla. We spent a long time in consultation over the question of eggs, but neither of us could devise a way in which they could be carried in saddle bags, or in the mule packs.
The morning we started was cold and bright, the Andean sky a clear and benevolent blue above us. My mule was a rangy white animal with a mind of his own, a cargo mule unaccustomed to the vagaries of a Gringa. He knew where he wanted to go and, in spite of all my blandishments, chose his own method of going there. He reminded me a little of Rosinante; in fact, the whole expedition had a sort of windmill-tilling air about it. Sandoval’s mule was a sad-eyed beast which, as the South Americans say, was muy mula, very mule. There were two cargo mules more or less to match.
But Juan, the mule driver—there was a bird of a different color! He was, I think, the only loquacious Indian I have ever known. We did about twenty miles the first day, and he, loping beside his animals, talked to them every inch of the way. Sometimes he spoke to them politely, and sometimes very intimately. He carried on long conversations with them about the passengers—the fine lady and gentleman they carried, which evidently they should consider an honor. Once, when a pack mule stumbled and fell and the load was loosened, he was severe. “Now thou and I, little mule, are not together worth a tenth of this fine cargo we carry. Doubtless it contains Champagne and fine sweets, delicate biscuits…” There his imagination seemed suddenly to fail him, for he sang out abruptly “Carajo, carajo, on with you!”
Later I emulated Juan when my beast, instead of going around a thicket, plunged through it, leaving me in a tangle of burrs and brush. “Carajo!” I said angrily. Juan came bouncing up in time to hear me. “Señora!“ he exclaimed in a shocked voice. “Ladies don’t use that word.”
The first night, we slept in the stone house of Indians known to Juan, but late in the afternoon of the second day we were deep in a beautiful but deserted woodland valley through which ran a noisy little river.
“We spend the night here,” said Sandoval. “It is too late to go farther.”
“But where do we sleep?” I asked, as I could see nothing but a bridge that spanned the stream. A very picturesque one, too, that reminded me of New England covered bridges, for this one was much like them except that its roof was of thatch. It was also a little reminiscent of the tile-roofed bridges of Western China.
“On the bridge, of course,” replied Sandoval.
“Oh,” I said.
Many are the strange places I have slept … Buddhist ghost temples, Tibetan lamaseries, Indian dak bungalows, once in the Shanghai customs house, caves, often in the open … but never on a bridge. As we progressed deeper into the country, the greeting of the infrequent travelers would be, “Where have you slept?” The answer was, “On the bridge of San Nicolas,” or whatever bridge it happened to be.
Sandoval unpacked and set up my camp cot (a luxury which he scorned), and we set about preparations for dinner. By the time Sandoval had a fire going on the flat stones at one end of the bridge, other travelers had arrived … two families of Indians, complete with a mule for each, and babies slung on their mothers’ backs.
We were both ravenously hungry, but we decided first to have coffee, as I was planning a rather elaborate meal and needed the two cooking pots at the same time. Sandoval sat sipping the scalding, black brew and feeding twigs to the fire, while I cut up the remnants of our pot-roasted beef (we’d eaten most of it at breakfast) and reheated it, adding a little water to speed the process. In the other pot I cooked some of the small, curly fideos with a generous quantity of chopped onions and a hit of the fiery abi. I thickened the combination to make a thin gravy, and when the spaghetti-onion mixture was done, put the two together. The resulting aroma, as it rose in the still-darkening air, was, I think, the most tantalizing ever to tickle my nostrils.
We ate the mixture poured over the flat, toasted buns on battered tin plates in the glow of the cooking fire, while the river under us sang of the glaciers of the high Andes. One of the Indians on the other end of the bridge brought us two oranges, and we gave him a little of our ambrosia in return.
One loses all sense of time on such a journey; you remember the sudden downpours of tropical rain that drench you in spite of a trench coat and a big palm-fibre hat, as umbrella. You remember arriving in the late afternoon soaking wet at an isolated chacra in a ragged forest clearing, the cheer of the kitchen fire, and the hospitality offered. Or a tiny settlement deep in a cultivated valley where there was a little bodega that sold coffee and oranges. We replenished our supply with coffee wrapped in newspaper, which I carefully smoothed out later. It was over twelve years old. At one place I asked what they thought of the war, and was met with questioning glances. What war?
There was the day when, in the late afternoon, we arrived at Omia—journey’s end, where we should find our rare zoological prize—the little silver-grey hear the campesino had. All day long we had gone up and down hill on the narrow trail that was at times a rock staircase; there had been rain, but as we followed the purling river for the last lap, the sun was hot, the sky blue, and the air filled with the chatter of parrots and the songs of brilliant birds. On the map Omia did not exist, but we knew it to be the last vestige of civilization.
The trail led through a tangled lemon grove and spilled us into the deserte plaza, which was really just a ragged field with a little crumbling adobe church at one end and a schoolhouse at the other.
It was deserted, except for a large bull lazily switching his tail under the orange tree that grew in the exact center of the square.
A small figure of a man came trotting toward us: a barefoot Indian in ragged trousers and raggeder shirt, who doffed his straw sombrero and bowed to us with the grace of a European diplomat. He was the governor of the district, and what could he do for us?
Lodgings? Ah, there was no inn, and he regretted sadly that his own small house could not accommodate us. Then approached the most enchanting old figure it has ever been my lot to behold. Tiny, tiny, bent and withered, with long, black braids that showed little grey over her shoulders, a copper face seamed, but wrinkling deeper in a friendly smile. She was barefoot (we later discovered that there was a pair of shoes in the village, and that they belonged to the school mistress), and wore a bright red, ankle-length skirt so full and stiff it made you think of an antique doll.
She took immediate charge of the situation.“My daughter,” she said, “will be pleased to have you stay with her. She has a big house,” she added proudly.
After the unfriendliness of the Sierra town, I found an unexpected lump in my throat, and when Sandoval said, “Muy simpatica … what a darling mamacita,” I couldn’t say anything at all.
We dismounted and followed her through the doll’s town. There were perhaps twenty-five or thirty little log houses. I’d never seen anything like them before, and never since. They were tiny things, the logs white-washed and put together like a rail fence, so that no windows were needed—just doorways, that had, of course, no doors—with low, thatched roofs. They all seemed to be of one room, with a fireplace of rocks in a corner, perhaps a rough table, and a hammock or pallet for sleeping.
The daughter’s house was big. It was, in fact, two houses, one the kitchen, and the other a long, low room with hard-packed earth floor furnished with built-in benches and table.
The daughter, a young woman with a tiny infant at her breast, came from the kitchen. She was rather tall, barefoot, and dressed much as the mamacita was, with black, shiny braids falling over the front of her low-cut white blouse that did not conceal her lush bosom. Her face completely stopped me. What part Indian she was, and what part Spanish, I never knew, and she may not have, but she was a woman of rare beauty. The same thought came instantly both to Sandoval and to me. Later he said dreamily, “I wish I were a great artist. I should paint her as the Virgin of the Andes.” And in that still, calm face lay the essence of all madonnas.
She took us to the main house, where Sandoval disposed of the gear and set up my cot. This was the guest room where he, the mule driver, and I were to sleep. The Virgin, her husband, and the baby slept in a loft which was reached by a toy outside staircase.
Very shortly, the villagers came drifting in to pay their respects to the strange phenomenon of visitors, and by the time dinner was served in the kitchen, at least half the population was there. I counted twenty-three people squatting around the walls on the earthen floor as Sandoval and I ate. Either they had eaten before or it was the custom to serve strangers separately, for we were the honored guests, with a tiny, low table laid for two at one end of the room. From somewhere a coarse white cloth was produced to cover it, and it was neatly laid with carved gourds, wooden spoons and forks. There was little from the outside world in Omia—the only things I remember now were a few knives and some cheap glass bottles.
The first course was soup with large pieces of yaca (a root which is somewhat like potato in flavor) and pieces of corn on the cob floating in it. There was a dark meat in the rich broth which Sandoval said was pavo del monte, wild turkey. The Virgin knelt over her cooking fire in a corner while we ate the soup.
The second course was also soup— chicken soup with yuca and a special kind of banana and generous chunks of breast of chicken. The third course was Guinea pig roasted in a clay olla. In all the houses of that region you found Guinea pigs, usually in the kitchen; as we ate they scurried about under the table, squeaking shrilly, being chased by kittens and puppies.
After we had finished, everybody drifted toward the other part of the house; and as I stepped into the tropic night bright with low-hung stars, from somewhere in the distance came the music of Quechua flutes. The rest of the village had come to call, and we must have been fifty in the big room while the Indians gave us music that hasn't changed in a thousand years—music of the Inca kings, strange cadences of harp, flute, and Indian violin.
The guests, holding the sleeping children, sat on the benches, on my cot, on the floor, all silent until the concert was finished. Then with formal bows and many muy buenas nocbes, they drifted away. Juan was soon snoring on a bench, and I was about to climb into my cot when it occurred to me that I had forgotten temporarily the reason for the long journey.
“Sandoval!” I exclaimed. “What about the little grey bear?”
He smiled slowly, a philosophic smile in the yellow light of our lantern, an said, “Señora, the little bear turned out to be a large and very unattractive black monkey which is now dead.” He paused. “We might as well start back in the morning.”
The mules were packed, and Juan was ready to take us back over the long trail of mountains, through rain and swollen streams. The Virgin, infant at breast, stood watching us, protesting plaintively. Why did we not stay and live with her for a time? Her husband and the mamacita came to ask us to stay longer. The husband produced a bottle of strong aguardiente from his pocket—at least we should have a stirrup cup. The bottle went around and we all had a swig of the raw liquor … even the Virgin. One by one the rest of the population appeared, every male with an inevitable bottle, and in order not to offend we must have a parting drink with each one. I became expert at tipping the bottle without drinking, but even at that a delicious lassitude crept over me, and I thought, why not stay? Sandoval became lyric. “Dear Virgin,” he began, and went off into an eloquent panegyric about the unsurpassed hospitality we had enjoyed.
By about noon, after a dozen abortive attempts had been made at departure, Sandoval the grave, the courtly, the dignified, somehow wavered on to his mule. The Virgin protested; Sandoval swept off his sombrero in an extravagant gesture, “Dear Virgin,” he said, “you do not know how beautiful it is to ride a mule when you are drunk.” And off he galloped with all of the men in swift pursuit to bring him back.
We were again feasted that night; there was more Incan music. The next morning there was another despedida. It took a slightly different form.
The old mamacita came crying, as we made to depart, that we couldn't go yet. She was roasting coffee for us—it would soon be ready. Another said that one of her children was gathering oranges for us. Wait. Just a few momentitos. Guavas were also being gathered, and the wife of the governor was preparing corn cakes in ashes. The school mistress came to say that school had been closed because we were in Omia. How then could we go?
We stayed for three days. In thinking back over it now … the hospitality of the Virgin and the little lost village that had never heard of a world war … I think the black monkey was worth the long journey to Omia.