Diarios de Peru - 4

"Why you not like my paintings",  says a noble son of the Sun

Sitting in the plaza de las Armas of Cuzco, the gravity and import of the occasion slowly sunk in.  This was it then!  the capital of the mighty Inca empire, the greatest pre-Columbine empire in the Americas, the people who built spectacular cities, paved a network of roads throughout the Andes, the tales of whose legendary riches led the rapacious Conquistadors on, and then the tragic story of their destruction, the betrayal of Atahualpa, the brutal colonization of South America.  I felt I had to do something different here.  So I wrote my journal entry in Bangla, sitting in a bench in  the town square of Cuzco,  trying to feed groundnuts to a bushy hill dog that had chosen to give me some company, and quietly relishing the incongruity of the situation.   The Bangla entry alludes to various characters in Bengali travel&adventure fiction (Ghona da most notably),  expresses caustic rage (possibly a shared one) at the colonial bandits, and evokes a certain kind of romanticism that has built up in the Bengali consciousness around various hill towns, most notably Darjeeling.  Attempting to translate all that would be akin to translating a celebration of a goal by a Spanish commentator during a football game into English. 

Cuzco is built in a flat piece of land surrounded by very green looking hills, at an elevation of about 12,000 feet.  You won't find cities so big built so high up in the Himalayas.  This is true of other places in Peru and the Andean part of South America too. La Paz, Bolivia for example, is the highest capital city in the world.  It is important to acclimatize slowly to this altitude if you don't want to get mountain sickness. The local Quechua people call it soroche, and chew coca leaves to counter it. (note : the Aymara people live in the desert plateaus or Altiplano, the Quechua people whose ancestors built the Inca empire live in the Andean mountains and valleys. This division is primarily linguistic.)   I had planned things well.  So I would fly back from Cuzco to Lima to catch my return flight back to Florida to save time, but I hadn't flown into Cuzco because I wanted time to acclimatize to the altitude.

Cuzco looks like a colonial city, but not quite.  The town square has the trademark cathedral and governor's house, but look carefully and you will see older layers of history.  The square is built in the central lowest part of town, and narrow roads and alleyways  radiate up in all directions.  Most of them are only about one car wide and you fear for your kneecaps when the taxis hurtle past.  The houses are built in typical colonial Latin American style, with brightly colored verandahs,  but they stand on Inca foundations.  You can see the stone masonry of the Incas everywhere, the roads are made of Inca stone, the bases of the buildings as well,  you can see the palace of Qorikancha or the fort of Saqsayhuaman (pronounced like "sexy woman" as one tour guide cheekily noted) and other Inca ruins in the outskirts of Cuzco. The stones are large, grey and look crudely piled on top of each other.  Modern engineers have not been able to find any kind of cementing material that holds them together, nor is it completely understood how the Inca transported such large rocks without even knowing about the wheel!  Yet when earthquakes happened, the Inca foundations survived, and the colonial buildings came crashing down.  This is perhaps why the colonialists have decided to spare the Inca masonry here, unlike in Mexico where all Aztec constructions were pulled down, and cathedrals built with them.

Cuzco with all its charming alleyways and verdant hills is a pleasant place in summer.  But major irritants are present at every step.  It wears the look of a tourist trap. The town square is bustling with touts, people who would sell you tour tickets or want to shine your shoes, all in the brash way of a town that takes its tourists for granted. Reliable information is hard to come by.  My LP guidebook is two years outdated and all the street names seem to have changed since then (like my home city Calcutta/Kolkata,  Cuzco/Qosqo has this recently discovered a nationalistic passion to change all the Spanish colonial names into indigenous Quechua ones).  The tourist information center is hidden away in such an obscure corner that it needs another information center to find.  Food is almost as expensive in the US, and it is hard to find anything below 15 soles ( 1 USD = 3 soles, and believe me you can find food much cheaper than 5$ in most of Latin America).  A whole day goes by in trying to figure out train tickets to Machu Pichhu and air ticket back to Lima (the train timings and routes to Machu Pichhu keep changing, and tickets are always in high demand, so this is something one must get out of the way soon).

Back in the town square I enter the cathedral when service is going on.  Strictly speaking tourists are not allowed to enter at this time, but I do, to experience mass with the locals.  My camera is well concealed and I do my best pious impersonation with head bowed and all and standing respectfully with the others as the Padre waxes eloquent about love, peace and fraternity (the few Spanish words I could follow).  This is where years of being an Indian schoolboy in a Christian school helped too.  Suddenly the sermon ends and people grab their neighbors and kiss them on the cheek.  My neighbor was a middle aged lady who takes me by surprise and does the same to me.  Well, only if I had known, I would have stood next to someone younger.

The cathedral is full of giant frescoes, the most famous of them is a clever reworking of The Last Supper, that has Christ and his apostles feasting on a roasted guinea pig (this is an Andean delicacy and Peru's national dish).  This is a paradise for art historians - masters of the Andean Renaissance have taken Christian themes and worked local traditions and folklore into them - typefying the enthusiastic but subversive adoption of the colonial religion by Latin America's indigenous peoples.   As I step out into the square, I am accosted by another tout, who wants to sell me his "pintura" or painting.  I am not a keen buyer of artworks and I just make an annoyed expression at him.  This seems to stir his proud Inca blood.  He looks at me murderously and shouts in English,  "Why you not like my paintings?"   I am not amused at the prospect of being forced to critically appraise some piece of kitschy art at the end of a tired day either, and just walk away defiantly.

Later another day, I would visit the other Inca sights around Cuzco with a tour company, because I figured it would be faster than taking public transport and cheaper than taking a taxi. This tour group was all Spanish, and the matriarchal tour guide seemed annoyed that she would have to repeat herself in English just for me (I had made sure that there would be English-speaking guides available while buying the tour ticket).  I somehow managed to get left behind  by the tour group twice and they sent a girl to pick me up in a taxi  to catch up with the group who were in the tour bus. As we got down, it started raining, and as we dashed across the muddy sidewalk from one ruin to the next, she tried to give me a condensed version of the standard guide commentary I had missed.   She was a slightly built girl,  a little built shy, and looked purely indigenous.  I hold out my umbrella to hear and she shyly refuses even if she is getting wet.  I wonder if being under the same umbrella has same import of intimacy/familiarity here as well like they show in Hindi films. And we skip from stone to stone talking about stones when I wanted to talk about so much else.