John Haigh

For all that it is late December, the sun is beating down and the streets are hot. I have flown in on a Christmas eve, from a European winter. Flying down the Andes from Bogota I look out on grey-red wrinkled mountains, snow-capped peaks standing above them, crevassed valleys turning to green, and then as we come down towards the coast we are in thick cloud, until we drop below and cruise above the beach, with its jetties and container storage yards, fishing boats floating on swirls of dark blue, and dry brown rocky hillsides rising up above the plain. There is a river channel, with ugly concrete sides and a brown swirling current staining the sea.

The plane flies low over flat roofed buildings of board and block, with narrow lanes between, then wasteland, brown and lifeless, then touches down on a concrete runway as the sun sets below the sea.

A taxi takes me to “El Condorcito”, a decent hotel in tourist Lima, at $100 dollars a night. I will start a teaching job in a month’s time, on the edge of Lima. I need a place to stay and the basics.

I take a bus out to La Molina – seven kilometres away, an hour on public transport. And I walk around the streets, looking for signs “alquilo” to rent, posted in the windows. I see a garden shed erected in a passageway, three dryboard rooms on a rooftop with a shared bathroom, and a basement room with a hole in the roof for a skylight. I opt for room with the hole in the roof.

Each morning I walk to the roundaboutwhere photos of the victims of terrorism in the 1980s are displayed on pedestals. I catch a bus to the Panaderia. Pa-na-de-ri-a I say to the bus conductor, and they looked at me in confusion and repeat – A-ve-nid-da-del-Sol? Hi-po-li-to-s?

And the man next to me says a-a-r-i-a and they give him his ticket without question.

The house is in an estate closed off with high iron railings. I can enter through doorways in the fencing, but there is only one access for cars, with a security guard who checks for identification. On the southern side is the main highway, a dual carriageway, with the two sides of the road separated by a broad green linear park, thirty metres wide, running through the neighbourhood. To the north an equally broad road, but more peaceful. It passes a football stadium and a reconstructed Inca building of moulded clay before reaching to a dead end facing a hillside. After several weeks I see that a stream runs down the centre of the green park. Every Wednesday. There are birds.

The school is at the upper end of a residential estate, surrounded by fencing and security guards. The people entering the estate with me in the morning are teachers, gardeners, cleaners, maids. We each show our identification. The students arrive by private car – usually large, high wheelbase, black SUVs with darkened windows.

My challenge as I explore the city is to decode and interpret what I see. And so I start to write.

Forward to 1 – To begin in the beginning…

Back to 001 – The Road to 256 Shades

  In March 1990 two bodies were found at a rock shelter over the left margin of Matanza river, 15 km from Cusi-Cusi, a small village in Santa Catalina department of north west Argentina.

The bodies had been buried with blankets and them were small cylindrical containers, tiny measuring spoons, flat tablets and short narrow tubes.

Any follower of late 20^th century western culture would recognise this – the tubes of choice in the 1990s were rolled up hundred dollar bills, or twenty pound notes, the flat surface was a mirror, cocaine spoons were made of silver, and the little cylinder was replaced by a plastic bag. The spoons, tubes and tablets look like drug paraphernalia.

But these bodies were mummified and buried at the back of a cave. They had skull deformations. Their blankets were of fine alpaca, the tablets were carved in stone and the snuffing tubes were of decorated bone. They were most probably 1000 years old. Inhaling hallucinogens is not new.

Such drug paraphernalia – inhaling tubes, tablets, containers and spoons – has been found throughout the area of the Tiwuanuco culture from 1200 to a thousand years ago, centred on Lake Titicaca high in the Andes.

Continues … 101b

In the high clear skies of the Andes, people see a great stream of brightness crossing the heavens. Within this are areas of darkness which appear to have the form of earthly creatures, llamas, toads, serpents and foxes. There is a metaphor in the night skies of life on earth, and its seasonal cycles.

Archaeologist Gary Upton spent several years living and working with villagers in the rural community of Misminay, high in the Andes close to Cusco. The results of his conversations and interviews, published in “Animals and Astronomy in the Quechua Universe”, present a deep and broad cosmovision linking the night sky with events on earth through the seasons and, more fundamentally, with the fertility and order of the natural world.

 Gary Urton’s village collaborators told him that they saw a parallel between the Vilcanota river, and the Mayu in the sky. The two ran together, one above and one below, the earthly river taking water down to the sea during the day whilst the celestial river retuns it to the heights at night. The Vilcanota runs from the south east to the north west. The Milky Way, the Mayu, runs roughly north to south. 

Huarochiri, the highlands where the waters of the Rio Mala have their source, is far from the village of Misminay, 450 kilometres as the falcon flies, but the Huarochiri Manuscript narrator describes the same interpretation of the skies as Gary Urton found in the village above the Urubamba valley.

“They say the Yacana, the animating spirit of llamas, moves through the middle of the sky. We can see it as a black spot. The Yacana moves inside the Milky Way, the River. It is big, really big. It becomes blacker as it approaches through the sky, with two eyes and a very large neck.”

Continues … 75b

It has been eighteen months since I left Peru with Mayra and Amy. We still have not taken a ride on a red London bus, because things happened.

I am all for making plans. I spent years following a vague compass bearing, and random reactions to outside forces left me like a particle of pollen in water, moving, certainly, and putting some distance between me and my starting point, perhaps, but not heading in any particular direction. So I took to plans, late in life, enthusiastically.

Mayra rejects the concept. “There is no point in making plans,” she says, “because something else will happen.”

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I returned to Europe, to political stability, a more mature discourse, shared values, to a fortress of civilisation as anarchic populism spreads across the world like a contagious disease.

We all know a bit more about that now.

Here in central Germany, within sight of the Rhine as it flows past vineyards heading north towards the English Channel, it feels civilised and stable.

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At first I was wary of the dogs let loose of their leads in the meadows behind the house. Lima dogs were delinquent. You could assess the security of a district by the behaviour of the dogs. In stylish Barranco with its square, it fountain and its marbles statues, there were few dogs, on leads. But four blocks inland around the market the dogs were wild, eating from the gutter. Some had owners, but nevertheless were free to scour the streets for food. More than once I was attacked by a stray whilst walking to school. On a few occasions an owner would appear and call the dog off, but when I looked at them they walked on, shifty eyed. No apology.

German dogs, I have learnt, are largely civilised.

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We were full of hope and uncertainty when we left Peru. At Schipol in the Netherlands, we took photographs of each other in the airport, sitting on the squashy pillow men, cast in steel. Then I flew to the UK whilst Mayra and Amy went to visit a cousin in Wiesbaden.

I had barely visited my large, untidy house in seven years. When I left, the quiet town in Wiltshire had a post office, two banks, several estate agents, an Indian restaurant and a fish and chip shop, and seven public houses. Now I found it had gained a nail salon and three coffee shops, but lost a bank. Some of the pubs are struggling.

My tenant, Larry, had been in the house for ten years. I did not know him well, but we had a history. Now I planned to ask him to leave and do some basic maintenance on the property.

I was fond of the original sash windows, more than a hundred years old. But the rear of the house had been taking a battering from the rain and wind off the Atlantic for more than a hundred years. Repeated coats of paint had failed to hide the damage. I wondered if I should replace them with some modern weather-proof PVC. And then there were the floors. New carpets? One landing had a ludicrous cartoon-like print of an iron, burnt into the brown nyl0n, the evidence of a over-hasty early morning preparation for a London business meeting. Or strip back to the bare wood, sanded and waxed? I had tried to do that myself, spending several weekends with a machine with a mind of its own, before backtracking to less challenging task.

I spent four happy weeks sleeping on a camp bed downstairs and making lists. I fixed a leak under the shower, re-mortaring a brick wall, and planted some bulbs for the spring. Then I walked along the canal to a country pub and ate food which might not have matched the best of Lima for gastronomic ingenuity, but scored high on nostalgia – gammon and chips with a pineapple ring, lamb cutlets with mint sauce. It was a lovely October. There were mushrooms in the woods. I spent a day digging up invasive plum tree shoots which were spreading across a former vegetable patch, and .

In early March I flew back to Germany, taking the train to Reading, the bus to Heathrow and then a flight to Frankfurt. I stayed in a hotel close to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof and then took a train to Kronberg, on the northern side of Frankfurt.

At the time, none of these transport links were important. A few months later, I had stopped using public transport altogether.

At Heathrow, I saw a long line of schoolchildren waiting in line to board a flight to Spain.

At the flight check in, an Asian man in front of me sneezed. I suggested to the German girl behind me that she could take my place. “He did not cover his mouth or nose” I said. “That’s so funny!” she replied, and happily took my place.

It was early October, in the evening twilight. A deer stood in reeds besides the river Kennet.

What is the shape of this book

People, conversations, Jill, Larry, Sue,

Job in germany, move to Eschborn, weird landllord, health threats, garden gone

Escape to Sonnenberg

Political background – UK

German background – Roman limes, Germanic tribes.

After three months in Lima, looking for a reason to get out of the noisy grey city, I read on a blog that “Calango houses an enormous stone with magico-religious symbols … that performs miracles for women that wish to become pregnant”. Calango is a small village, a little inland from the coastal town of Mala south of Lima. The next  Saturday morning I hail a taxi in downtown Miraflores and tell the driver “I want the bus to Mala!”

He takes me through a grid of dirty back streets on the edge of the town centre, past several blocks lined with stores and stalls selling bicycles and bicycle parts, a cascade of wheels and frames hanging from shop fronts and spilling across the roadway. The ticket sellers calling “Mala Mala Mala Mala…” offer a clue. Within 20 minutes the bus is full and takes me on a 90 minute journey south along the PanAmerican highway to reach the bus station or “Landport”, Termino Terrestial, of Mala.

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