“Y su aposento, donde está?” (Where is your lodging—i.e., native land?) he inquired.
When I had answered, he rode fully ten minutes in puzzled silence. Then he called out over his shoulder:
“Y ese país suyo, ese Esta’os Uni’os, es pueblo ó hacienda?” (That country of yours, is it a village or a plantation?)
The world, as he knew it—and his knowledge was on a par with that of thousands of dwellers in the Andes—was made up of those two divisions.
We left a curving river, labored over a divide, and descended to the Aranza, a furlong wide, roaring angrily. At sight of it the youth regretted the bargain he had made, fearing his horse could not breast the swift current under the weight of both of us, and suggested that I strip and swim, letting him carry my clothing and bundle. There seemed to be no way to avoid risking the wealth in my trousers; but these simple countrymen of the Andes are commonly more reliable in matters of trust than appearances suggest, and a well-directed bullet would avert any tendency to decamp. I strapped my revolver about my head and plunged in for a ten-minute struggle with the current, but it was not without relief that I landed beside the exhausted horse and regained my possessions. We were already within the territory of the “Hacienda San Pablo,” though still miles from the dwelling. On all sides, as far as the eye could strain, the river valley and the mountains above were unbroken wilderness, utterly uninhabited. Yet the region was rich in produce. The chirimoya, that vegetable icecream of the tropics, hung in car-loads from the trees; small, but compact and juicy wild lemons, carpeted the trail. Parrots and screaming bands of parrakeets flitted in and out of guayaba and sapote trees; here and there the dense-green dome of a mango tree shouldered its way up through its punier fellows of the forest.
It was nearing dusk, and I was near exhaustion under my load and the pitiless tropical sun of seven unbroken hours of swift, rough tramping, when my companion pointed out far ahead, where the wall of the Central Cordillera shut off the horizon, a red dot in the green immensity,—the hacienda house. Black night had fallen when we reached the half-constructed building, and we stumbled on for some time more before we came upon the rambling thatched ruin in which the owner still lived. He was Eduardo Medina, once a law student in the University of San Marcos of Lima, a sane, well-read, earnest man, contrasting strangely with the uncouth countrymen about him. His wife, a handsome limeña, was the first woman of education I had so far seen in rural South America. This extraordinary Latin-American couple, noting the swarms of lawyers that vegetate in provincial capitals, had renounced the uninspiring fleshpots of the cities, and purchasing for a song some twenty-five square leagues of semi-tropical solitude, had come to start life anew in this wilderness with the shaggy world piled up on all sides, and set their race a much needed example. Here was such a welcome as the wilderness traveler often dreams, but seldom attains. Not merely did they offer the accommodation Andean custom requires all hacendados to furnish travelers, each according to his caste, but their hospitality was genuine and active. The adobe lean-to into which I was led, for the astonishing Andean purpose of “washing up before supper,” had not only a real bed, mattress and all, on springs of split bamboo, but the first sheets and pillows and suggestion of civilized comfort I had seen in Peru. It did not require the reminder that the morrow was Sunday, and Medina’s assertion that they were famished for civilized conversation, to make me accept his invitation to prolong my stay. My companion of the day never recovered from his astonishment at seeing the “patrón” seat at his own table and treat as an equal a man who traveled on foot; and as often as I caught his eye among the group that hovered about the door all the evening, he gazed at me in a manner that seemed to implore me not to mention the reals he had collected under the impression that I was a mere man, and not a caballero.
Fertile tracts of valleys and mountains twenty-five miles square can be bought in this section of Peru for $250. Yet this does not mean that wealth awaits the purchaser. “Faltan brazos,” as the Peruvian puts it; “arms” are lacking. The scanty population has no stimulus to exertion in a region where nature supplies their simple wants almost without labor, and to Medina life was a constant struggle for employees. In days of fiesta, when money was needed to pay the priest or celebrate a festival, many came to contract their services and accept an “advance,” but with no representative of government at hand, there was no means of forcing them to do the work for which they had been prepaid. Some labored languidly and intermittently a few weeks a year, none more than half the days that were not sacred to some festival and general drunkenness. On the hacienda were a scattered score of arrendatarios, native families who rent a patch of ground on which to build a hut and plant a bit of yuca and corn, with the right to pasture a few cattle on the estate, all for a yearly rental of $2, which was commonly as hard to collect as labor. The almost total lack of transportation gave no market for any excess of produce, and here was the extraordinary case of a university-educated man and wife owning what would be with us an entire county, living a hand-to-mouth existence very little above abject poverty. Oranges, which the owner asserted he would be only too happy to sell at five cents a hundred, rotted under the trees faster than the hogs could eat them; mangoes lay where they fell, and the splendid chirimoya was a mere worthless wild fruit no one took the trouble to gather, except as personal appetite prompted. The sugarcane they succeeded in raising they were glad to get any price for, after it had been squeezed in trapiches, crude presses run by hand, and the guarapo boiled down into blocks of rapadura and wrapped in banana leaves. Most of it was turned into aguardiente that could occasionally be sent to town.
My postal experience in Ayavaca recalled to Medina one of his own. Before they left Lima to take up their newly acquired residence, the couple had found there were two post-offices, at Ayavaca and Pacaipampa, about equal distance from it,—two days on muleback. It chanced that Señora Medina had ordered her “Modas Femininas” sent to Ayavaca, while her husband gave Pacaipampa as his address to the subscription department of the daily “El Comercio.” After the first few numbers only one or two copies of the newspaper adorned the weekly mail-bag of the hacienda. La señora also noted that she was not receiving her fashion journal regularly. The hacendado started an investigation. He found that the comely post-mistress of Ayavaca had recently acquired a considerable reputation as an authority on up-to-date fashions. In Pacaipampa he discovered that the government mail service was in the hands of an old man unusually well versed in the politics of the day. Husband and wife wrote to Lima ordering “El Comercio” sent to Ayavaca and the “Modas Femininas” by way of Pacaipampa. Since then both had received their respective journals as regularly as transportation conditions in these primitive regions made reasonable.
“You have no inconvenience in riding?” asked my host, as we set out on horseback to visit the estate on Sunday.
“Not at all, señor.”