A typical “bed” in the guest-room provided for travelers by many Peruvian hacendados,—to wit: a stone or adobe divan on which the traveler may spread whatever bedding he brings with him. Note my alforjas, kitchenette, and bottle of fuel. An auto-picture taken by pinning a flash sheet on the opposite wall
But luck was with me. The dull-yellow world began to subside at last, and we came out far above a long, winding valley, in the dim end of which I could make out a green speck that was evidently that very Andahuaylas toward which we were headed. Far away, in the same direction which I must follow to reach the Navel of the Inca Empire, were tooth-shaped peaks, slightly snowclad, hung high in the sky, and below, and about, and beyond them to the ends of the earth, the suggestion, rather than the actual sight, of such a labyrinth of ranges as only the disordered imagination seemed capable of creating. We began to go down and forever down, so swiftly that we could have kicked each other in our disgust, now slipping and stumbling along toboggans of loose stones, now picking our way step by step down natural rock stairs, then descending across steep meadows of mountain grass on which Chusquito, with his caulk-less shoes, gave a ludicrous suggestion of some silly fellow attempting to skate on all fours. At length the slope moderated its pace and took on a thin garb of trees and vegetation, the mountain-tops on which we had been walking a bare two hours before now towering into the sky above. Below the village of Moyabamba, so renowned for its horse-stealing that we lost no time in leaving it behind us, the valley narrowed to a gorge, in which our progress was blocked by a mule-train of Ica wine. I fell in with the chief arriero at the rear, and plodded with him in the cloud of dust rising behind the shuffling mules like the mists of the morning from some seaside valley. Each of the animals bore two kegs of wine nicely balanced on his sawbuck-shaped pack-saddle, a total weight of 250 pounds. The journey from Ica to Andahuaylas averaged from three weeks to a month, the entire cost of transportation about $7.50 for each animal. In the morning, horsemen and pedestrians formed an almost unbroken procession along the rich and thickly inhabited valley of the little Chumbau river, for all the league from Talavera to the straggling town of Andahuaylas.
Manuel Richter, addressee of my letter, kept a little general-store on a corner of the plaza. Chusquito and I waited in the streak of shade before his shop until he had spelled out the missive with Teutonic deliberation, in marked contrast to the Latin-American quickness of welcome, which almost as quickly explodes into thin air. Our new host had first emigrated forty years before from Poland to New York, where he had lived several months in “Ghe-r-reen Schtreet,” a fact he never lost an opportunity to mention, evidently under the impression that it was still the aristocratic center of the city. During that time he had worked in a store “way uptown in Oonion Sqvare.” He still boasted a brother in the kosher district of Harlem, but for some reason that does not apply to most of his race he had drifted on to Peru and become a true Peruvian, even to taking off his hat when a tin Virgin passed in the street. Yet we spoke German together. He seemed to prefer it to Spanish, even after half a lifetime in the Andes and despite a Peruvian wife and half a dozen children entirely ignorant of the former tongue.
The Richter meals were more than substantial, and his family bubbled over with kind-heartedness. But he was forced to share the honor of a guest from far-off América del Norte with one Da Pozzo, who dwelt in solitary, topsy-turvy state in an ancient, two-story ruin on a knoll across the prattling Chumbau. He was a Venetian on the sadder side of forty, once an architect of high standing, who had laid out more than one Plaza de Armas in Peru and Bolivia. Several turns of the wheel of fate in the wrong direction, among them a Peruvian wife, the confessional, and the fiery waters that partly drown such memories, had reduced his ambition to a low level and his income to what may be picked up by the building of mud houses in these drowsy towns of the interior. In his customary condition he was maudlinly affectionate, to the point of making even my cheeks the target of his bewhiskered kisses, and vociferous in his assertion that he was a “masón” and a hater of priests in all lands and languages. But what mattered all this, or the fact that his junk-strewn ruin boasted only one wooden-floored bed, and that the rotting old balcony seemed always on the point of dropping from under one? For it overlooked splendid groves and rows of the slender, blue-black eucalyptus where birds sang merrily, as well as the brown flanks of the Andes rolling up out of both sides and ends of a valley enlivened by a constant going and coming of Indians along its broad roadway. Then, too, there was rich alfalfa on which Chusquito might gorge himself at no other expense than an occasional medio to the Indian boy assigned the task of cutting it—“that he have affection for you and your horse.”
Andahuaylas is really nothing but an example of how life may be made a perennial pastime, scattered almost thickly along the entire two leagues from Talavera to San Jerónimo. Yet its situation and climate give it a charm peculiarly its own, and it would be hard to imagine a better place in which to drift through life—as its inhabitants seem to recognize. Though the long valley is extremely fertile, it produces little. The Indians of more or less full blood that make up the bulk of the population will not work; the “white” man cannot, lest he forever lose his precious caste. The laziest American laborer known to charity bureaus will do more and better work in an hour, unwatched, than the liveliest Indian of Andahuaylas in a day, with a boss standing over him. Without in the least hurrying I could descend from the upper story of our ruin to the river, return with a pail of water, complete my toilet and throw out the water, before the Indian boy whose only duty in life was to attend me would, if called, appear from his seat directly below my balcony to get the pail—which he would smash before he got back, if there was any possible way of doing so, and into which he would certainly manage to get some sort of filth, if he had to pick it up and throw it in. The gente lay the blame of this condition on the escuelas fiscales, the free government-schools, complaining that “there is no longer service, for as soon as the cholo has been to school, he wants to be a person.” “Faltan brazos—arms are lacking,” they wail, gazing across the all but uncultivated valley; yet not one of them notices the two hanging idly at his own sides. A shower of medios failed to win from the Indian boy an affection sufficient to keep Chusquito from starvation. I obtained permission to tie the animal in a corner of the fat alfalfa field that would not come to him, and all day long I could see him across the little river, a contented dot of red against the deep green background of the field from which he never raised his head the whole day through.
Yet the products of the valley are cheap enough, when they exist. Eggs were five cents a dozen; one morning an Indian who needed the money came to the ruin to offer me eight for a medio (2 cents). Four liters of milk might be had for 7 cents. But let the harassed American householder pause a moment and reflect, before he sells his chattels and hurries down to Andahuaylas. To obtain those four liters one must take a pail and wander several miles along the valley at about nine in the morning, wait around some hacienda corral where the Indians have concluded not to abandon the daily milking, and never get home before noon. The “best families” have a special milk-servant who does nothing else—and frequently not even that—than go milk hunting; and on an average he is robbed on his way home of the contents of his pail about every third morning, by some group of Indians who come upon him out of sight of any member of the gente class.
There is a type of “white” Indian in the Andahuaylas valley, apparently without admixture of European blood, yet with a very light skin and delicate pink cheeks. In the color of their garments they nearly rival those of Quito. The heavy woolen socks and hairy sandals of more lofty regions are unknown, and the barefoot patter again reigns supreme. In manner the aboriginal is cringing and timorous, yet if the word of the shod minority was trustworthy, he has more than once been known to sneak up on a sleeping gringo and mash his head with a rock. Nor will he “squeal” on one of his own race, even when put to the torture.
In the wilderness of weeds that passed for the local cemetery I came upon three Indians digging a child’s grave. One muscular loafer stood less than waist-deep in the hole, scratching into a blanket spread out at his feet a bit of dust, with a hoe Adam might have thrown away in disgust during the first week of his existence, before he invented a better one. To corners of the blanket were tied ropes, by which a pair of equally muscular Indians standing on the ground above hauled up every ten minutes or so nearly a shovelful of earth. Of course, at “coca time,” or a dog-fight, or the passing of a drunken man, a foreigner, a bird, or a milk-pail, they paused from their strenuous labors a half-hour or so to stare after the attraction. At least half the time left they spent in bandying a skull and a pair of thigh bones back and forth between themselves and a pair of Indian women lounging in the grass nearby.
In the church forming one side of the plaza the chief among many absurdities testifying to the local absence of a sense of humor were the figures in the main side-chapel. These were life-size statues of Christ and the Virgin, the former in a sort of “precieux” gown and a broad-brimmed red hat with a pink band, the latter in a still broader blue one, giving the pair a ludicrous resemblance to the “shepherds” into which the nobles of the French court of two centuries ago used to disguise themselves, an impression increased by the cross between a golf-stick and a back-of-the-scenes hook carried by the Cristo. Yet the simple Indians pattered in all through the day to kneel and gaze with a beatified expression, in which there was not the shadow of a smile, at these absurd figures, no doubt considering them the last word in beauty.