On the “road” to Ayacucho I overtook a lawyer who was importing a piano. It required three gangs of Indians and nearly a month’s time to transport the instrument less than 200 miles from the end of the railway line
Carrying the piano across one of the typical bridges of the Peruvian Andes. In many places the trail had to be widened or recut, and the instrument had now and then to be let down or hauled up with ropes, or block and tackle
Chusquito, who had appeared at last, all intact but as covered with fine sand as from a trip across the Sahara, was too tiny to have crossed the river without wetting my baggage. It was the cream-colored coast horse that saved me a detour of several miles to a bridge downstream. Except for the lawyer and his mayordomos, the expedition stripped to the waist and forded the stream inch by inch under the piano, slipping individually, but fortunately not in unison, on the stones at the bottom, and spending a half-hour in a precarious task that would have been impossible in any but the dry season. In the shade of a molle grove beyond, Anchorena, who had recently been won to up-to-date methods, dealt out a quinine pill to each of the Indians. Few were able to swallow them without chewing, and made wry faces and animal noises in consequence. Several surreptitiously got rid of the detested white man’s remedy while their master’s eyes were not upon them. Though the day was still young, the cavalcade was to camp on the edge of the drowsy, sand-carpeted town of Izcutaco, a bare mile above the river, and when I left them the cooks were already heating over a blazing fire of molle berries the enormous iron kettle, six feet in diameter, under which an Indian had plodded, bent double, all day. When I took leave of the lawyer, he hoped to reach Ayacucho in four days, making the journey from Huancayo three weeks in duration, at a total cost of about $250, without reckoning the labor lost on his hacienda while the three gangs were going and coming and recuperating from their unwonted toil.
The molle tree covered all the great, tilted plain before me, lending it an inviting green tinge in spite of its semi-desert character. Its leaves are not unlike those of the willow, and it produces in clusters great quantities of a peppery red berry somewhat resembling the currant in appearance, and those of our red cedar in taste. These are well supplied with saccharine and ferment readily, constituting the chief curse of the region, in the form of an intoxicant so cheap and plentiful that the inhabitants are more often drunk than working.
In Huanta the addressee of my Turkish letter was Don Emilio, ——, a hearty countryman pleasantly free from the tiresome “polish” of the Latin-American city-dweller. Early in our conversation he took pains to inform me that he never permitted a priest to cross his threshold. A fellow-townsman later confided to me that the prohibition dated from the day that the oldest daughter of my host had been betrayed through the ministrations of the confessional. There was something pleasantly reminiscent of old patriarchial days in the way we all sat at meat together around the long table in the back corredor, surrounded by a flock of servants, the older, shy-mannered girls rising now and then during the meal to tend shop. Yet it is not easy to make oneself agreeable to such a family, for lack of intellectual interests cuts down the conversation to the simplest matters. The women of the household preferred the guttural Quichua, but Don Emilio found that tongue more difficult than his accustomed Spanish. My host was one of the “city fathers,” and perhaps the best-read man in the community, yet he referred to the United States and Europe as “a place somewhere up the coast,” and desired to know whether Italy was in New York, or New York in Italy. I attempted, in my struggle to make conversation, to give the family some conception of our northern midwinters.
“Brr! Nearly as cold as Huancavelica, it must be,” shivered the wife.
“How high is the highest Andes in your United States?” asked Don Emilio, with a hint of suspicion in his voice.
I told him.