Living in Peru : your everyday companion

Revista Generacción
Cesar Klauer

The ruins are up there, the child's head moved a little towards the top of the mountain. His little wide awake eyes looked at us from top to bottom while he chewed a twig and scratched his head under the hat which once long ago had been white but now had spots of dried mud; brown the freshest ones, yellow the oldest. His wooly dog walked around us with his long tongue doodling on our shoes, the duster of his tail scrubbed his happiness on our knees. Right in front of our tired breath, the slope projected into the blue cloak stained with faint cotton pieces, the bright green mass called us full of screams of birds, parrots and insects. But there was no path.

That's the way up, our new friend said. I didn´t see anything. Neither did my wife and her sister. The little boy's eyes reflected the thick tree branches that we had picked up on our way and we used as canes. In reality, we had picked them up to open our way into the wood. The wisdom of the millenary sierra materialized in one metre twenty with hat and dog: You won´t open your way with that, his little dancing eyes revealed it was not the first time that naive city people thought they knew everything.

I looked at my wife and she understood why my eyes stabbed her in silence. The day before I had gone shopping to the market of Chachapoyas and had found what I wanted, for two purposes. One: make it an ornament for my living room. In its leather case, it was destined to preside the place. Two: open us a path through the thorned plants that, I imagined, lived on the way up to the Chachapoya ruins that the book I got at the local National Culture Institute said there were. What do you want a machete for? My wife had looked at me with that expression that only wives have, Don´t you dare take it with you tomorrow, she sentenced with the security of those who don´t know what they are going to find. How embarrassing! My mistake was to listen to her, in the end, she was not going to carry it. Now that the boy laughed silently at the Limeños, I needed the silver blade badly.

We started the ascension through a space that seemed to be some kind of path made by somebody. The trees didn´t give us too much work, sometimes it even seemed as if they were giving way happily. They sang, jumped around us, blew fresh air on our sweaty bright faces, stopped the burning midday sun that made our enthusiasm go weak. Our stride was happy, we joked, we followed the chaos of the path without blinking: we were going up and that was what we wanted: the ruins were on top of this little hill. I wanted to take a photo to immortalize the moment when I became Julio C. Tello, Walter Alva, Indiana Jones, but I had left the camera at home. That was a relief.

Then the bushes opened and showed us a wall of stone bricks from where tree twigs and flowers grew: The ruins! But we were only half way up, these could not be the ruins we were looking for. Let us see, what does the book say? Well, there are many turrets scattered on the hill slope. This must be one of them, I announced with the open page and my index finger planted on the exact paragraph. But the problem was now that the wall, pretty with those flowers and twigs, prevented us from going forward.

We went round it, literally, because it was a circular wall, characteristic of the Chachapoyas culture architecture. We found the confirmation of its origin when a feline eye stared at us. Umbro in Chachapoyas? No. The eye that the builders put in their constructions is identical to the logo of the famous Manchester brand. Some steps ahead, a stone brick had a relief of a little face. Round and with slanted eyes. What does this mean? The book didn't say. We continued our way up. The bushes got more aggressive. It seemed as if they did not want us to reach the ruins. The sun fought with the tree tops to penetrate and sometimes it managed to. We could see bright ropes hanging down from the noisy ceiling, they reached the reddish floor and entered it happily. They were incandescent light bars that our silhouettes cut through in single file. I turned around to see my wife and her sister and I found two profiles darkened by the brightness of the golden rays. Were they tired? Of course they were. They wanted to go back. But my adventurous instinct made me deny that possibility. There has to be a path somewhere, I knelt and went through a vegetable tunnel. Now we could give a good use to the machete, couldn´t we? 

Silence came back. The branch turned from cane to path opener. That was when a bush punished me for my lack of respect and stuck a thorn the size of a knitting needle in a place that prevented me from sitting straight for a couple of days. Right away, another bush told my arm off. And another reprehended my leg. My companions had also been scorned. Once out of the tunnel, we could see the scratches on our arms and my machete on the dinning table. We picked up our steps. We went past the oriental face, the feline eye, the gold bars that were now tired and were trying to lie down on the smoothness of the ground.

Finally, we made it to the foot of the hill. The boy wasn´t there any more. I looked at the mountain and imagined the circular ruins – not Borges´s but the real ones of Chachapoyas.

Originally published in Revista Generaccion