“Un bisté fogoso!”
“Hasta cuando esos choclos?”
The high cost of living, like the railroad decreed by congress in 1864, had not yet climbed over the range into Cajamarca. The dishes are 2½ or five cents each. There are, to be sure, a few ten-cent ones, but these are what terrapin would be with us, and their consumption is not encouraged, being above the tone of Cajamarca. The first price covers a dozen delicacies, such as “patitas con arroz—pigs’ feetlets with rice,” fried brains, liver, or chupe, the Irish-stew of the Andes. At five cents the epicure to whom money is no object may have a breaded “bisté” with onions, rice, and potatoes, a “baefs teak paí,” “rosbif de cordero—roast beef of mutton—” “a beefsteak of pork,” and a score of even more endurable concoctions. Chocolate, which is native to the region and excellently made, is 2½ cents; a cup of coffee, which no one in Cajamarca knows how to make, costs twice that. Eggs “in any style” are two cents each, and a loaf of bread, of the size of a biscuit, one cent—for in Cajamarca the traveler first finds the huge copper one-cent and half-cent pieces. The greatest gourmand sailing the high seas could not spend more than fifteen, or possibly twenty cents, for a dinner in Cajamarca—and a “tip” is unknown.
The only wheeled vehicle I saw in Peru during my first three months in that country
One of the many unfinished churches of Cajamarca
I had been duly warned that the table-manners would be on a par with those of Colombia and Ecuador. Before I left Quito, Hays had written, “In Peru soup is eaten with brilliancy, the high notes being sustained with great verve.” The same table utensils reached both the shod minority and the Indians under their hats; the table de luxe was supplied, after that democratic South American manner, with one drinking-glass, the only washing of which was what it inadvertently received during its varied service.
Cajamarca, as everyone whose historical education was not criminally neglected knows, was not founded; it was found; and like anything else picked up by the Spaniards of those days, was never returned. It lay already—but unprepared—spread out in the extreme northwest corner of its long, fertile valley when Pizarro and his merry men came riding down upon it across the same broad páramo, and they caught much the same view of it as I, though in those days it was not half-hidden by the adorning eucalyptus trees of to-day, nor distantly musical with church-bells. The famous town, now capital of a department, which is to Peru what a state is with us, is more or less oval in shape, some ten by twenty blocks at its widest and longest, not counting the huts that straggle out at both ends along its principal “highway” and dot the outskirts and the widening plain. It is seven degrees below the equator and somewhat warmer than Quito. It stands 2814 meters above the sea, with some half-dozen inhabitants for every meter. In all but its history it is tiresomely like any other city of the Andes. The streets, monotonously right-angled, are rudely cobbled, with open sewers down the center, the sidewalks narrow, smooth-worn flagstones on which he who would walk must jostle Indians, donkeys, and stagnant groups of less useful residents. The adobe houses, often two-story and always toeing the street-line, are red-tile roofed and anciently whitewashed. Dingy little shops of odds and ends below, the flower-decked patios of even the best-provided families are surrounded on the ground floor by the dens of servants and the ragged and more numerous population, as in Quito. It was the first place in Peru where I had seen window-glass. By night its streets are “lighted” with faroles, miniature kerosene lamps inside square, glass-sided lanterns that are given to succumbing to the first strong puff of breeze, even if those whose duty it is to light them do not have more pressing engagements. The central plaza is enormous, square in form, but coinciding more or less with the triangular one in which Pizarro and the Inca collided on that dusty Saturday evening of an earlier century. Flower-plots, tended with less monotonous formality than those of Quito, bloom chiefly with geraniums, and among them the historically informed inhabitants point out the stone on which Atahuallpa succumbed to the garrote amid the heaven-opening ministrations of good old Father Greenvale. As in Quito, there remain almost no monuments of pre-Conquest days, for the Incas seem to have built here chiefly of adobe. The most intelligent of Cajamarca’s monks doubted whether there was even a Temple of the Sun or a House of the Virgins to transform into monastery or convent. Not far off the main plaza, however, set cornerwise in the center of a modern block, is the room that was to be filled with gold for Atahuallpa’s ransom, said to be of massive dressed stone, like the palaces of Cuzco. Stevenson, who was in Cajamarca just a hundred years before me, found still visible around the wall the mark that was to measure the height of the treasure, and the room, the residence of a cacique. To-day it is an orphanage, where a German nun was teaching a score of female “orphans” to earn a livelihood on American sewing-machines, and the treasure-mark, as well as all evidence of stone structure, had been whitewashed out of existence, as something of “los Gentiles” not worth preserving.
The unique characteristic of Cajamarca, and almost her only stone buildings, are her half-dozen splendid old churches, soft-browned by time as those of Salamanca, and having the appearance of being half-ruined by earthquakes. The natives asserted, however, that they were left incomplete because in colonial days every finished building must pay tribute to the King of Spain. Whatever the cause, their condition gives an unusual architectural effect that could not have been equalled by any design of man, and all who find pleasure in the “picturesque” must hope that Cajamarca will never grow wealthy enough to finish them—a misfortune that is not imminent. The Chilians came in August, 1882, and, taking a note from Pizarro’s note-book—or, more exactly, from that of his secretary, since the swine-herder of Estremadura was not fitted to keep his own—stole all the gold and jewels of the churches, even the laboratory equipment of the schools, and anything else that chanced to be lying around; though they found no one worth holding for ransom. One of the principal churches bears an inscription, now all but effaced by the ubiquitous whitewash, announcing that “This santa eglesia was erected at the cost of one million pesos and fifteen centavos,” the extra seven cents being the cost of bell-ropes. In the great monastery of San Francisco, facing the main plaza, some forty amiable but ignorant friars loll through life, chiefly in the breezy “retiring kiosk,” carpeted, like that of Quito, with burnt matches and cigarette butts. They knew nothing of the tomb of Atahuallpa, but the Spanish organist, who looked like a ninth-inning baseball “fan” on a hot day, led me to the church and played in my honor on “the largest and best pipe-organ in Peru” not only our national air, but several Spanish fandangos and a recent Broadway favorite that is seldom admitted to ecclesiastical circles.