Capricorn and Cancer Read online

  The tender drew alongside the jetty and Don José-Maria hastily followed his black tin trunk ashore and into the customs shed. Gabar went in search of the inspector, for he never paid customs duties on his own west coast. He would have indignantly denied that he bribed, but he took great satisfaction in being on friendly—genuinely friendly—terms with all those in authority. He especially liked to give christening presents to their children. As he seldom entered any port more than once in nine months, he was sure to find that the inspector’s señora was either expecting or recovering.

  The inspector, with tears in his eyes and gestures of arms and shoulders which violently suggested the upward movement of a corkscrew, was explaining to Gabar the latest obstetrical problem when a customs officer saluted and interrupted them.

  ‘There’s a priest,’ he said. ‘A mad priest! He put a curse on me in Quechua. Not of course that I believe in such nonsense, being an educated man and a servant of the republic. Still, it is an insult to the uniform and one is not comfortable—’

  ‘One is not,’ said Gabar, instantly making a friend for life. ‘And so I will remove the curse.’

  He pronounced an impressive blessing in the Indian language.

  ‘You all know that I am no friend of the Church,’ he explained. ‘It does not fit into our system. But this old fool is in my charge.’

  ‘In that case, friend Pisco, it is different,’ said the inspector cordially.

  They found José-Maria sitting broodily on his tin trunk and glaring, so far as it was possible for his eyes to glare, at an interested crowd of idlers.

  ‘He shall not touch it, Don Manuel! He asked me to open it and I opened it, but he shall not put his hands inside. It is sacrilege. I cannot allow it!’

  ‘You see, señor Pisco, he is mad! I said so!’ exclaimed the customs officer triumphantly. ‘My hands are clean—look at them! And I am always ready to use discretion. I would never embarrass a traveller by exposing to the public what he would rather they did not see!’

  ‘I am sure of it,’ said Gabar solemnly. ‘But the reverend padre is very obstinate, and we do not want discussions.’

  The inspector, for the sake of the onlookers, sternly ordered José-Maria’s trunk to be carried to his office, and from there sent it through the gates with Pisco’s baggage, which naturally was not examined. On the way to the station the priest overwhelmed Pisco with thanks, which he waved aside with the remark that had he known Don José-Maria did not wish to expose the contents of his trunk it could have been arranged without so much fuss.

  ‘What have you got there?’ he asked. ‘More empty bottles?’

  ‘Don Manuel,’ replied José-Maria, ‘if I had not received so many favours from you, I should not forgive that question. I am a sinner, but not so wretched that I would pack the signs of my folly next to a sacred garment.’

  Gabar was so surprised by this answer that he apologised. The old man had suddenly and unexpectedly put on the full authority of the Church. José-Maria retreated into a dignified silence, while Gabar let himself go in mental abuse of priests in general and this particular nuisance that had been inflicted on him. It occurred to him, however, that he only really liked José-Maria when he was a nuisance. His theory was promptly proved right at the station, for there the priest discovered that he had forgotten the fourth essential which Don Jesús had told him not to forget. It was his return ticket. As José-Maria had only a few centavos in his pocket, Gabar paid his fare to Arequipa. Don José-Maria, who had no idea of how to get money from Arequipa to Mollendo and had had gloomy indefinite visions of sleeping on the streets and growing his own maize on the rubbish heaps, was correspondingly grateful.

  Gabar’s gold-peddling had not yet been discussed. José-Maria had heard of it from Don Jesús and wished to invite the trader to bring a stock of goods to Huanca del Niño. He hesitated to do so because he did not consider a few ounces of gold worth weeks of travelling, and, feeling very dependent on Gabar’s kindliness, did not wish to abuse it. Pisco, on his part, had given little thought to Don Jesús’ advice to ask José-Maria about gold, believing it on later reflection to be a jesuitical lie.

  Now that the train was climbing fussily up into the desert foothills and no further difficulties immediately threatened, José-Maria asked Gabar what route he would take on his next journey.

  ‘To Cuzco and north,’ answered Gabar, ‘unless anything offers at this end of the country.’

  José-Maria was silent for a minute or two while he considered whether or not he should accept, without further polite preliminaries, this invitation to talk.

  ‘It’s very hot in the train,’ Gabar said, taking down from the rack a fresh bottle of pisco which he had bought on the way to the station and handing it to José-Maria. The priest said a short grace and applied his lips to the bottle. He decided that he might take courage.

  ‘How much gold would you expect, Don Manuel, to make it worth your while, if you were to take a long, a very difficult journey to a very distant pueblo?’

  ‘As much as a man can carry and still carry his food,’ Gabar replied.

  ‘Not more?’

  ‘Hombre! I’ve seldom got so much!’

  ‘I think if you came to Huanca and Chiquibamba,’ said José-Maria timidly, ‘we could trade you all you could carry. That is—if you stayed a little while.’

  Gabar took a pull at the bottle.

  ‘Where do your people get their gold?’ he asked. ‘Have you found an Inca treasure or do you pan streams?’

  ‘Neither one nor the other, Don Manuel. There is a bank of pebbles, and when we have enough water in the stream we wash them down a trough and a little gold remains behind at the bottom.’

  ‘Good God! But with pumps and hoses you could get millions out of those gravel beds!’

  ‘It may be so, Don Manuel. I know nothing of that. But there is hardly enough water for ourselves, and none for the troughs except in the two months of rain.’

  ‘In that case it looks like my usual business,’ said Gabar calmly—he was used to having his dreams of instant wealth swiftly shattered. ‘How do I get to Huanca? Isn’t there a road from the altiplano without going down to the Inambari?’

  ‘Ay! If only there were! There was such a road in colonial days. But many years ago, before my time, perhaps two hundred years ago, the western side of the hill was washed away. And now a man must go down from Cuzco to the Montaña and up again to Huanca. But you will travel with me, Don Manuel, and a guide will show us the way.’

  ‘Another pisco?’ suggested Gabar, avoiding the invitation.

  ‘Thank you, Don Manuel. It is indeed hot in the train.’

  ‘I know the way to the foot of your mountain,’ Gabar said. ‘But what happens then?’

  ‘You follow the track up, always up, till you come to a steep gully which cuts a line of cliffs. Here one must turn right or left along the foot of the cliffs. The right path leads to Huanca and the left to Chiquibamba. There is a patch of bog below the fork.’

  ‘What would you like me to bring your people?’

  ‘Some tools and rough steel for working, Don Manuel, and a few pretty things for the women. I like to see them look well at mass. And some images. St Joseph, I advise.’

  ‘I will not encourage superstition,’ declared Gabar firmly. ‘No saints!’

  ‘What a pity you do not believe! It is a shame that so good a man should be a heathen! But do not be angry with me if I ask you to bring some little St Josephs. Quite little ones, Don Manuel. The Child and his Blessed Mother can never feel neglected by us, but my parishioners have so little to put them in mind of poor St Joseph. And they will pay you well, Don Manuel. Gold for little St Josephs that only cost you a sol apiece at Cuzco!’

  ‘It’s against my principles,’ said Gabar. ‘I can’t be bought. And I will not be a party to perpetuating the present system!’

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Don José-Maria unhappily. ‘How is it possible that you can hate what is so
simple and good? I will pray for you, Don Manuel.’

  ‘If it gives you any pleasure,’ remarked Gabar shrugging his shoulders, ‘you can add the other hundred million workers who don’t believe fairy tales.’

  At Arequipa Gabar handed over Don José-Maria to a bevy of local churchmen who were at the station to meet him. The priest intended to stay there for a week or two while he made arrangements for a guide and transport to take him home. Gabar, although he had developed a toleration for José-Maria, had no intention of being his companion on a journey which would certainly last ten days and possibly more. When he saw the old man again, he pleaded urgent business in the north and roundly declared that if he were to go to Huanca at all it must be immediately. He made a selection of the goods he had in store at Arequipa and took them by rail to Cuzco where he bought two llamas and a mule. Within a week he was on his way to the upper Inambari.

  It needed a fine eye for country to cross half a dozen of the great herring-bones of ravines and ridges lying with their heads up against the main range and their tails in the Brazilian forest. Pisco Gabar travelled partly by instinct and partly by enquiry from occasional Indians. A compass was useless, since most of the time he was travelling in the only direction allowed by the ribs of the herring, which was never at any given moment the direction in which he wanted to go. Movement for man and animals was appallingly hard. A day’s march was a scramble up from a gorge, a laborious working in zigzags through semi-tropical forest, where the mincing steps and high-carried heads of the llamas well expressed their distaste for such vulgar luxuriance; rough trampling over the scrub above the tree-line; and a rush over the barren hilltop in order to get out of the wind and down into shelter for the night’s camp—twenty miles across-country from the previous camp, but not more than three by the straight line of an imaginary tunnel.

  There were, however, few serious discomforts, for that part of the Montaña was a paradise of trees, flowers and running water. Even the insects were more spectacular than bloodthirsty. Pisco was accustomed to the utter loneliness of the Montaña, and loved it. His religious emotions—he himself would never have called them such—were satisfied by the worship of Nature. He delighted to muse by his camp-fire on the curious habits of orchids, pumas, caverns and storms, and to find explanations; but he was unaware that his own appreciation of them also demanded an explanation.

  On the evening of the eighth day he camped on the upper Inambari at the foot of the track which led to Huanca del Niño. He was up before dawn, and two hours later on top of the ridge that bordered the river. A close-set group of conical mountains faced him, their peaks rising to an average height of 16,000 feet. This was the eastern rampart of the main range. The high points which appeared to be peaks were not really such, but bluffs rising comparatively little from the altiplano beyond. On one of them he saw again the straight yellowish-white line of a pre-Inca wall, flattening the top of the escarpment and marking the site of Huanca del Niño.

  The track dived off the ridge into a last valley and then began to climb the irregular ravine that separated the height of Huanca from its neighbour, which was, he supposed, Chiquibamba. The llamas quickened their pace towards the undecorated horizon of their desires.

  Pisco, plodding ahead of his animals, was fascinated by the track. What the Indians had told him about it was true. It had a purposefulness lacking in the familiar paths of the Montaña. The latter scuttered from cover to cover like the savages who had made them. They had been widened and deepened by arrieros and their pack animals, but they preserved their inconsequential lines. The track which he now followed was narrow and rough, but it struck out boldly along the contour lines and had a certain air of triumph in surmounting rather than circumventing the minor obstacles in its path. Pisco was aware of pride in it. It was not the absurd self-satisfaction of an American arrogating to himself, merely by virtue of living on the same continent, the achievements of a people without the remotest relationship to him in blood or culture, but a pride of closer parentage. Pisco was unconscious of his Indian blood when he was dealing with white civilisation or forest savages, yet he felt a community of thought and interest, which did not at all fit his habitual conception of himself, with the builders of this road.

  The trees had given place to low scrub when he came to the little patch of bog which José-Maria had described. He was right up against the main escarpment. The ravine rose sharply ahead of him in a tumble of rocks. A natural platform which the hand of man had certainly aided by levelling and facing overhung the bog, and two paths led off it, at right angles to the track up which he had come. The right-hand path, leading to Huanca, looked a hair-raising piece of mountaineering. It followed the foot of the cliff while the slope beneath it grew steeper and steeper until the path was a mere ledge on a sheer face of rock. Pisco decided to tackle it in the morning and camped on the platform.

  With the rising sun throwing its angle into stronger relief, the path clung more firmly to the mountainside. It was definitely, though primitively, engineered, paved here and there with massive stones and cut a little back into the cliffs where the natural slopes and ledges were not wide enough for easy passage. After leading him up for some two thousand feet, the track turned on to the northern shoulder of the mountain. At the bend was a niche in the rock marked, so that no traveller should miss it, with a black cross. A three-foot cow’s horn hung from a hook within the niche. Pisco Gabar had seen a similar horn in the Argentine Andes and knew its use. It invited the passerby to give warning of his approach, since the path was about to become so narrow that two mules could not pass abreast. He put it to his lips and blew a doleful blast that might have proceeded from the cow itself. Then he waited twenty minutes in case an arriero should be already on the path, meanwhile tightening the girths of his three animals.

  Gabar found the track spectacular rather than alarming, for he had as good a head for heights as his own llamas. It was about three feet wide with a slope on the inner side which, while not quite perpendicular, was quite unclimbable, and a sheer drop on the outer side. The path, varying little in width, clung to the edge of this precipice for a full mile. Then it opened out, passed another horn for the use of descending travellers and wound up a windswept slope of scanty turf and gravel which continued as far as the wall of Huanca del Niño.

  There were no pure whites in Huanca, though half the population of the pueblo had a little white blood. They preferred to speak Quechua, but, if Spanish were required, they spoke it with a perfect accent, an archaic diction and a very limited vocabulary. Gabar was welcomed with grave, unquestioning hospitality, and then, when he said he had come by invitation of Don José-Maria, with frank curiosity and good-fellowship. There was a drink-shop which called itself an inn and was used as one when an occasional trader or arriero visited Huanca. Gabar was given the room of honour which had been prepared for the diocesan inspector a year earlier with furniture lent by the whole pueblo. Since they were not a little proud of the room and it was easier to leave the furniture where it was than to take it back, the place had remained a permanent exhibition of their treasures. It would have been pretty clean had not the chickens adopted two Talavera chamber-pots as nesting-places.

  Every evening the patio of the inn became a shop where all the inhabitants congregated whether or not they had gold to sell. Business was accompanied by leisurely drinking and interminable stories. There was plenty of gold. Tiny quantities of dust were even used as an internal currency, as small change to adjust the equitable exchange of commodities. After a week Gabar had traded goods worth about £40 in Arequipa, including one of his llamas, for over a pound and a half of gold dust—which meant that he had more than trebled his outlay. Finding that he had then exhausted the market, he decided to try his luck at Chiquibamba. He left Huanca in the early afternoon, intending to camp for the night at the natural platform above the bog.

  Pisco Gabar swung down the path in an excellent humour. Huanca del Niño could make him a nice little fortune
, especially if he visited it after the rainy season when the inhabitants would work their gravel bank intensively and hold the proceeds for his coming. At the same time he was treated by the pueblo as a benefactor and even as an easy mark for keen traders, for he haggled no more than was necessary to gain their respect. He had not a care in the world. All of three senses were thoroughly satisfied. The smell of the animals, of leather and mountain air tickled his nostrils. His belly regurgitated a pleasing flavour of rice, roast kid and alcohol. His fingers toyed with the wash-leather bags in his belt, squeezing the soft, heavy dust. The mule and the llama tripped confidently after him. At this moment, rounding a bend in the path, he came face to face with Don José-Maria.

  ‘Padre de mi alma! How are you?’

  José-Maria looked at him with mingled fear and pleasure.

  ‘Don Manuel! I am glad to see you! That goes without saying. But what are we going to do? How was I to know you were on the way down?’

  Gabar awoke to a sense of his surroundings.

  ‘Condenado that I am! I forgot to blow the horn!’

  He strung together some blazing jewels of oaths which ended before completing their rhythmical pattern, partly from respect for Don José-Maria and partly because Gabar had suddenly looked down past his left knee and become aware of the emptiness beyond.

  ‘And you, padre! You did not blow the horn either!’

  ‘I blew it, my son. But it was not very loud. I have been so long in the lowlands that my breath does not come as easily as it did. Yet you would have heard had you waited and listened.’

  ‘The fault is mine,’ admitted Gabar. ‘And now, how are we going to pass?’

  They stood facing one another like a metope carved on the face of the rock. The two men formed the high and central point of the design. Behind José-Maria were a mule, carrying his tin trunk, and a donkey for riding; behind Gabar, his pack-mule and the remaining llama.