Black night had long since settled down when I found myself surrounded by indistinct, low structures that turned out to be Acobamba, home of one Zambrano, for whom I bore a letter from the “Turks.” As often as I inquired for him, however, there came back that Spanish-American-Indian mumble of indifference and distrust, “Más arriba,”—higher up, until I felt like a District Attorney on the trail of “graft.” When a half-civilized youth in “store” clothes gave me the same identical, lackadaisical answer for the tenth or twentieth time, I caught him by the slack of the garments and jerked him into the street, with a polite ultimatum to conduct me in person to that elusive upper region.
He led the interminable, cobbled way down one street and up another, equally unlighted, and finally stopped before a zaguán with an “Aquí, señor.” I cut off his proposed escape, and drove him into the patio to summon the man of the house. He returned with the Indian mayordomo, and the information that the Zambrano who lived there was not the one I sought, and was, moreover, out of town. The youth proposed that he “go look for” the right Zambrano.
“No, indeed, my friend,” I countered. “You will stay right with me while we look for him.”
“Sí, señor,” said the youth in a shivering voice. Then he turned back across town and plaza by another route, and pointed out the Zambrano household exactly two doors from the one out of which I had originally snatched him. The flock of women who surged out upon me greeted me with the threadbare “No ’stá ’cá!” He never was—when I bore a letter to him. The wife spelled it out laboriously under the blinking light of a home-made tallow candle, then invited me into the earth-floored “parlor,” separated by a calico curtain from the little shop she kept.
“There is no one in Acobamba who prepares food for strangers,” she replied to my roundabout hint, “but we shall serve you such as we can here in our poor house.”
While the mystery to come was cooking, I managed to get inoffensively into her possession the price of a peck of grain for Chusquito—and some time later found the poor, misused animal munching about two cents’ worth of old, dry corn-husks in the corral.
“It is,” murmured the wife, in reply to my questioning gesture, “that there is no grain in town—at these hours.” But though she would have considered an insult any direct offer of a traveler consigned to her husband by letter to pay for his accommodation, she carefully avoided any further reference to the grain-money.
It would have been in the highest degree scandalous to have lodged a stranger in her own dwelling during the absence of the head of the household. But the delegation of females, having discovered, by dint of turning the house wrong-side out, the massive key of a mud-flanked door across the street, let me into an abandoned shop lumbered with the accumulated odds and ends of many years, an immense, woven-straw hogshead full of shelled corn bulking above the rest. A creaking board counter, barely five feet long, was the only available sleeping space. The only means of avoiding asphyxiation was to leave the door open to any passing sneak-thief or congenital hater of gringos. But even had the risk been great, the key would have proved an effective weapon. Unfortunately it would have been anti-simpático to have felled with it the solicitous night-hawks who called my frequent attention to the perils of night air, not merely by rapping on the door, but by prodding me in the ribs with their sticks.
It was butchering day in Acobamba when I awoke, and at the suggestion of my hostess I sent a servant to buy ten cents’ worth of meat. She returned with an entire basketful,—eight slabs of raw, red beef, each as large as an honest sirloin steak “for two.” Virtually every shop in town being a pulpería, it was easy to lay in supplies for the road ahead. But though competition was brisk in all other wares, for some reason I was never able to fathom, in all the region of the central Andes my favorite food was always hedged round with refusals. As often as I stepped into a shop where a basket of eggs was displayed, I was sure to be informed in a dull, uninviting monotone, “No están de venta.” “Of course they are not for sale,” the experienced Peruvian wayfarer soon learns to reply, “No Andean lady who considers herself a lady would think of selling eggs. But—er”—meanwhile picking out the largest specimens of the fruit in question—“I have taken a dozen. How much?”
The answer was sure to be a meek, “Dos reales—ten cents, señor.”