chapter 9 - bigger than all of us

I must have had more wine than I thought. I just can’t drink like that anymore, altitude or no. There were a few faces absent from breakfast, the drink outdid the drinkers, so I suppose we can feel proud of our dubious accomplishment of having risen at all. We said farewell to Sebastian who goes off to climb volcanoes. I imagine we’ll see him again. Probably on our doorstep. Every time we are at home for any length of time, we invariably get a few fellow travellers knocking on our door and asking to stay for a day or two, which often becomes a week or two or a month or two. It’s our own fault of course. We invite them. And then have the gall to enjoy their company.

It seems every other traveler is doing the Inca trail, which of course is why we won’t. I have heard tales of litter and erosion as well as inflated expense and exploitation of the locals who carry everything for a pittance. And I want to try something different, something outside the trail that I have mapped and followed enough through my work. It's very big these days - I must have worked on three publications at least. We chose instead to explore the Sacred Valley.

The little local bus to Pisac makes a dramatic hop over the mountain and down into the head of the valley, made more exciting by the fact that the driver preferred the curves of his girlfriend to those of the road. Peruvean buses always seem to include the driver’s girlfiend, little more than a girl, who sits in the front right seat, flirting and giggling with a high pitched warble, a distraction that is always conspicuously loud regardless of whether it’s day or night.

On the way we relived our days in Cusco, when I’d passed beyond my emotional abyss and stuffed it inside again. Rambles over Incan ruins at Sacsayhuaman, a name I can only remember by the mnemonic device ‘Sexy Woman”, hushed visits to churches awash with gold and silver, enormous oil paintings and mirrors reflecting back the pious gloom. The pulpit at San Blas was among the loveliest examples of wood carving I’ve even seen. “The Last Supper” in the Cathedral painted in quiet rebellion against Catholic conversion, guinea pig and chicha substituting bread and wine. A depiction of the 1650 earthquake including a black Jesus in procession instead of the usual pale ‘Spanish’ one. Incan sun and moon gods carved into altars, undetected by the conquistadors who mistook the Incas’ affinity to prayer a result of their influence. There is an irony in that every earthquake topples another bit of Spanish and post-Spanish architecuture, revealing the original foundations underneath, unshakeable, the Incan gods reigning supreme over the European one.

As I get older I understand the attraction of belief more. Not of organized religion with its rigidity and impositions where brotherly love relates to some brothers but not to others, but faith I suppose. Modern life is more and more disenfranchised. The world used to be so small. Then as new lands and foreign seas were discovered it grew larger. Some of these were conquered, some were colonized, some were merely found and mapped, the unknown gradually known, then visited, exploited, taken for granted, used up. Now the world is small again and in danger of becoming smaller, indifference and ignorance of what goes on beyond familiar borders. Technology and speed and urban living remove us from nature’s seasons and the essentials of life. Electricity has banished night, and removed the effects of cold and wind as well as the wonder of the skies and stars. When everything is available to us so easily we have no motive to go out and seek it. Sitting there in a tiny church amid the gold and silver and incense, the musty air, the whispers, I took a step outside of myself, felt that sense of wonder of being part of humanity. Knowing the world really is a big place. I think that’s what religion, or rather faith, can really give people.