It was a concept, I’ve since thought, that would have resonated with the Inca, who called their huge, yet short-lived empire, Tahuantinsuyo, Land of the Four Quarters. At the time of the first European contact with the Americas, Tahuantinsuyo was the largest nation on earth. At its center was the glittering city of Cuzco, the navel of the Inca universe, just as Campina Vieja was to become the heart of this drama.
From the northern quarter, if you count my point of origin, Chinchaysuyu for the Inca, came I, the Narrator perhaps, or worse yet, the Fool. For me, the journey from the comforting cocoon of Lima, possessing as it does that essence that all large cities share, was an exercise in shedding my old identity, along with preconceptions, as a snake sheds its skin. It was not so much that the journey was extraordinary, just one filled with quirky moments, that made it clear that Rebecca wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
The flight to Trujillo had been uneventful, unless you count playing bingo rather than watching a movie an event, and I found the Vulkano bus station without difficulty. A bus trip in that part of the country, apparently, is an exercise in participative democracy. Passengers preoccupied themselves with shouting instructions to the driver, telling him he was lingering too long at any given stop, or that he wasn’t driving to their particular specifications.
We were on the Panamericana Norte, the Pan-American highway, that hugs a narrow strip of desert crisscrossed by river valleys, most of them dry, between the sea on one side and the Andes on the other. From time to time we’d pass a little town, sometimes a small forest or some farmland, but by and large the land on either side of the highway was desert, very dry. Sometimes I could see tire tracks leading off the highway, in what appeared to be a straight line to nowhere. In the distance are the mountains, looming up out of the sand. As austere as it may sound, it was actually quite beautiful, the colors of the desert, the golds, browns, the burnt greens, cinnamons, and dusty rose, playing against the blue-green of the sea, and the hundreds of greys, greens, navy blues, and purples of the mountains.
And what of the other characters? the other quarters? From the south, Collasuyu, comes the Magician.
With the help of several vocal backseat drivers, the bus driver stopped regularly to disgorge passengers and pick up others, sometimes in little towns, more often than not at a marker—a little stand or a sign— at the side of the highway.
At one of these stops, a young couple loaded down with enormous backpacks got on. They both looked about fifteen to me, but to be realistic I’d put them in their early twenties. Gringos. She wore jeans with holes at the knees; a halter top that revealed her suntanned middle and a hint of navel; lots of jewelry, most notably silver rings on every finger and a pair of long silver earrings that looked vaguely Navaho; and a halo of long wavy hair around a small face that gave her the appearance of a Titian Madonna. He had hair almost as long as hers, cutoff jeans, a T-shirt frayed at the shoulders where the sleeves had been removed, and a neat little row of tiny safety pins in one ear. On one arm he had a large tattoo with a skull and crossbones and a succinct suggestion that the Establishment—such an antiquated term—perform an anatomical impossibility on itself. As they passed my seat, I idly wondered if their parents, particularly hers, knew where they were and what they were doing. Advancing middle age can be tiresome.
Several moments after the bus started rolling again, the young man walked to the front of the bus and, turning to face the crowd, pulled out a deck of cards. He spoke no Spanish, and, with the exception of me, no one else on the bus spoke English, but he kept up a patter that would have made a showman proud, and soon had everyone’s attention as he demonstrated several card tricks. After that, he took a newspaper, asked in sign language for one of the men sitting in the front seats to check it out carefully, folded it into a cone shape, and then, pulling a bottle of water out of a bag he carried with him, poured the water into the cone. He then very quickly inverted the cone over the head of the nearest passenger, who ducked away, much to the amusement of the other passengers. No water came out of the cone. There was a smattering of applause. He grinned, and then, still talking, poured water out of the cone and back into the jar.
There was even louder applause this time and I could certainly see why. While I’m not exactly a fan of magic acts, I had to admit the young man was very good. He had no sleeves in which to hide anything, and I was close enough to be able to watch him pretty carefully. I could not see how he had done it. He did a couple of other tricks, one with a coin, and another with a plastic tube, both of them equally baffling. As he came to the end of his performance, the young woman made her way from the back of the bus with a baseball cap and began to collect tips. I could see that those ahead of me had given very small coins, brown ones which I knew to be almost worthless by North American standards, and although I knew I had to be careful with money, I gave the Peruvian equivalent of about three dollars. The young woman looked suitably impressed with my generosity as my coins dropped into the hat, and a few minutes after the act was finished, the young man plopped into the seat beside me.
“Speak English?” he asked. I nodded. He was an American.
“The name’s Puma, after the wild cat that roams around here,” he said. “My girlfriend’s name is Pachamama. That’s the native word for Mother Earth. They aren’t our real names,” he added, “just ones we’re using for now.”
I would never have guessed. Not that I could be judgmental. “I’m Rebecca,” I said, taking his proffered handshake and complimenting him on his magic act.
“What are you doin‘ in the back of beyond?” he said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I’m going to work at an archaeological site,” I replied.
“Wow!” he exclaimed. “Amazing!”
“How about you?” I asked politely.
“We’ve been doin‘ the sites, Inca mainly, down south. But now we’re gonna join a bunch of people, a commune sorta, not too far from here. We’re gonna grow our own food and stuff.”
How sixties, I thought. “What a lovely idea,” I said.
He looked carefully at me to see if I was kidding, and apparently concluded I was taking him sufficiently seriously. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered solemnly. “We’re here to ‘excape’ the end of the world.” Inwardly, I groaned.
“There’s gonna be a huge ‘pocalypse, you know,” he added. He didn’t appear to know or care that apocalypse starts with an “a.” “Earthquakes, fire, volcanoes, floods, everything. Followed by nuclear holocaust.” It sounded like overkill to me.
“Right at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999,” he went on. “I seen it, in my head, I mean. All the capitalist countries, the United States, Europe, everything, will be destroyed. You’re lucky to be here.”
We were silent for a moment or two after that conversation stopper. Then he went on. “I’m a little worried about your archaeology site, now that I think about it. You might find a tomb or something and unleash some terrible curse.”
“I’ll try not to do that,” I replied.
“Good.” He grinned, getting up and heading back to his seat. “Thanks for the donation.”
I turned back to watch the scenery flashing by. Peru, it seemed to me, was a land of geographic extremes, from the world’s driest desert, the Atacama in the south; to some of the richest ocean waters, teeming with marine life, created by the cold Humboldt from Antarctica and the warmer Pacific current coming south; to the Andes, the world’s second greatest mountain range. In this part of the world, there are no foothills. You could crawl out of the Pacific, cross a few miles of arid desert, and come upon a wall of rock rising almost vertically from the desert floor. Beyond that is the rain forest, in some cases, in others huge grassy plateaus and jagged valleys.