Chapter XVI: The City of the Sun (3)

A visit to any Latin-American cemetery is equal to sitting through a well-played comedy, so lacking is the native sense of propriety. Between the padlocked iron reja and the bulkhead of each grave is a narrow space which it is à la mode to fill with flowers. But as flowerpots are rare and expensive in Cuzco, there were substituted cans that had once held “Horiman’s Tea,” or “Smith’s Mixed Pickles,” many with gay labels adorned with the portraits of scantily clad actresses of international notoriety still upon them. Here and there a family with a praiseworthy sense of economy had caused the grave-head to be marked with the brass name-plate that formerly graced the place of business of the deceased; others had “Renewed to 1918” crudely scratched in the cement, bearing witness to an unusually tenacious grief on the part of the survivors—or to a well-drawn will. Many tombs were decorated with atrocious photographs of the occupant; others had verses—no doubt the author would call them poems—some printed, some laboriously hand-written, pasted against them and glassed over, like the photographs. Here and there the bulkhead of a well-to-do member of society was entirely covered by a painting depicting the untold grief of those left behind,—in most cases a picture of the coffin of the deceased, with a string of his male relatives and friends on one side and the female mourners opposite, all dressed in their most correct attire—or the best the painter could furnish them from his palette—and standing exact distances apart in exactly the same attitude of weeping copiously into a large handkerchief á dos reales in any shop. Only, as the painter, who is seldom a direct descendant of Murillo, always paints in the eyes _above_ the handkerchief, the impression conveyed is that the entire group is suffering from a bad cold, that the funeral was inadvertently put off too long, or that each is keeping a worldly eye out for any suspicious move on the part of the others.

The hospital of Cuzco is a part of the same structure as the cemetery, with a door between—a very foresighted and convenient arrangement for such a hospital. The building is roomy, but not much else can be said for it. Indians and half-Indians, male and female, lie closely packed together in long rows of aged cots along ill-ventilated halls. Hardy as seem these mountain Indians, once they are subjected to the changed life of the barracks, with food, clothing, and shoes to which they are not accustomed, they succumb with surprising ease to a long list of ailments. From kitchen to drug-shop, from nurses to Indian servants, stalked that ubiquitous uncleanliness of the Andes. Several idiots and insane persons were confined in noisome dens unworthy of animal occupancy. In a dismal, half-underground corner a handsome, powerfully built young cholo lay on a heap of rags that constituted absolutely the only furnishings. He had been _capellan_ of the cathedral, and whenever a church-bell rang—which was most of the time—he sprang up from the uneven earth floor and began to sing Latin hymns at the top of his voice, shaking and gnawing the heavy wooden bars that confined him. The four most deadly diseases of Cuzco, in their order, are typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, and smallpox. The doctors, physicians of the town who drop in casually and hurriedly each morning, are paid $27.50 a month. La Superiora draws $10, the first cook and the grave-diggers $5, general male servants $3.50, and female servants $2 a month, with food and a spot to lay their “beds” on. What they do with all that money I cannot say. The hospital cannot afford disinfectants, and when a surgical operation is to be performed the instruments are washed in hot water—if there happens to be fuel. Patients are allowed 13 cents a day for food, employees, 15, and the woman in charge, 20.

Indian women of the market-place, wearing the “pancake” hat of Cuzco]

An Indian of Cuzco, speaking only Quichua]

I visited most of the institutions of learning in Cuzco. The German head of the Colegio, or high school for boys, wore his cap and overcoat even in the class-rooms; and no one could have blamed him for it in this dismal rainy season. An army officer had been detailed as gymnasium instructor, the national government requiring a certain amount of physical training of all students. He led the way to an earth-floored building in the rear, where the pupils took turns in falling over the crude apparatus without removing even their coats. To appear in shirt-sleeves, even in a gymnasium, would be an inexcusable breach of etiquette in South America. School ran from 8 to 11, and from 1 to 5, with a ten-minute recess between each fifty-minute class, that must be spent in the corredor and not used in study. Among the students was one Juan Inca, of pure Indian type, and the great majority showed more or less aboriginal blood. The chemistry class, in a laboratory with a floor of unlevelled, trodden earth, had a peon to arrange the experiments for the professor, who performed most of them in person. Few of the students could be coaxed to soil their own never-washed hands in the interests of science, and those who broke or spilled anything were sure to cry out, “He, muchacho!”—or more likely, “Yau, huarma,” since in their excitement their native tongue came first to their lips—and in trotted an Indian boy to clean up the mess. The newly arrived limeño teacher, who had tried to get them to do their own experiments, was informed that they were not peons. Yet nine tenths of them would have been run out of the least exacting American workshop for their evidences of avoiding the bath. It may be that the poor, proud fellows had no servants at home to take it for them. Upon his arrival the teacher had established the rule that, as his class began at 1:10, any boy not in his seat by 1:11 would be reported tardy. The students sent a telegram of protest to the government in Lima, and word came back from the Minister of Education:

“Professor ——, Colegio, Cuzco: Do not put too much stress on small and unimportant matters.”

As if there were any matter on which the Latin-American is more sadly in need of education!

The class miscalled “English” was in charge of a native youth who had spent a year in a well-known but not particularly famous institution in our Middle West, unfortunately favored by most Cuzco youths permitted to top off their education in the United States. When I entered some sixty boys, of about the age at which the Latin-American begins precociously to turn rake, were floundering through some “I want a dog” sentences. The teacher’s knowledge of his subject was such as might be gathered in the dormitories of that seat of jesuitical learning above mentioned, but was not exactly what he might have learned had he been permitted to mingle with the profane outside world. It would not have been so bad had he been content to stick to his Cortina grammar, though his pronunciation was at best mirth-provoking. But like so many half-learned persons, he regarded himself as the source of all wisdom and insisted on using his own judgment, when he possessed none. He was dictating dialogues between two American boys, and forcing his students to learn to mis-mumble them; just such expressions as we have all, no doubt, heard American boys use to each other daily. Here are a few of the gems I copied from the blackboard:

“Mys cheek it is pinkes”—which had not even the doubtful virtue of being true.

“By Gosh, Huzle up!” The Jesuited instructor had no doubt often heard this hasty, unLatin-American word in the dormitories, but having never chanced to see it in print, he had chosen his own spelling, with this happy result.

“We now shall go to the exam.” The longer word for that distressing experience he seemed never to have heard.

“My watch it goes too fast.”

“At your service, John, thank you. What are the news?” Several students made the error of using a singular verb in this sentence, but they were quickly and sarcastically reminded that the noun _news_ ends in an s, which any fool knows is a sign of the plural in English, as in Spanish.

“I shall long for you after you are gone away”; the blackboard continued, and so on, always with a distinctly home-made pronunciation. The traveler can scarcely blame himself if he does not understand his native tongue when it is shouted after him in the streets of Cuzco by the proud students of the Colegio.

The higher institution is the ancient University of Cuzco, founded nearly a half-century before our oldest, and occupying the great stone cloisters of the former Jesuit monastery. A young and enthusiastic American rector has done much to give it new impulse; but one man single-handed cannot reform the Latin-American character. Its 160 students from the four surrounding departments have increased both in numbers and diligence since the “conservative” professors were thrown out, but their point of view is still not exactly that of our own college men. Among others I attended a class on “Special Literature.” It was a third-year course, of seven students; the hour, from three to four. I arrived at 3:15 and found the professor, a Ph.D. (Cuzco) whose wide nostrils, broad face, and prominent cheek bones proved him chiefly of aboriginal blood, pacing up and down the second-story corredor smoking a cigarette. At 3:20 a white youth of about twenty-three, with a mustache, drifted languidly across the patio swinging his cane. He and the professor bowed low, shook hands, exchanged the unavoidable “Buenas tardes, señor. Cómo está usted? Cómo está la familia?” lifted their hats, and at length broke the clinch. The professor produced from his pocket a massive key and opened a cubical, whitewashed room, having installed himself in which, he began to “lecture” on Calderón de la Barca. At 3:28 a half-Indian student stamped into the room and interrupted the proceedings with a loud “Buenas tardes, señor,” causing the professor to lose the thread of his discourse for a minute or more. When the interruption had subsided, he continued to lecture, pausing now and then to look at his outline notes, more often to inhale the smoke of the cigarette he still held backward between his fingers. The white youth soon fell asleep, woke as his head dropped, spat on the floor, and then frankly and openly laid his head back against the wall and slept. The other half of the class sat with the filmy, half-closed eyes of a man who is dreaming of his cholita of not too unobliging morals in some hut on the outskirts of town. It would have been ill-bred of the professor, and galling to the “pride” of his class, to have waked them. He finished his cigarette and droned unbrokenly on. At 3:46 another haughty half-Indian, his silver-headed cane held at the approved Parisian angle, broke in upon the lecture with a greeting, which the professor interrupted his remarks to acknowledge. At 3:50 he took advantage of the awakening caused by the new arrival to begin a quiz, asking the white student something about the subject of his discourse. The usual long preliminary sparring for wind in the form of “Ah-oh-ah, Señor Don Pedro Calderón de la Garca, one of the most important authors of his epoch in Spain,” and so through a long list of stock phrases, was followed by a mumbling of some vague and general rubbish he could easily have framed up had he not known whether Señor Don Pedro was man, woman, or priest. When he had said nothing for about two minutes, one of the others was given the floor—no doubt the professor apologized later for being obliged to call upon them because of the presence of a distinguished foreign visitor—and launched forth in another set of phrases. Like the other, he did not know the title of any of Calderón’s dramas, who left only a hundred or two to choose from, though the class had “studied” several of those works during the year’s course. After each question the professor broke in upon the meaningless mumble to answer his query himself, and as he named the works one by one, the student cried out each time with a great display of wisdom, “Ah, sí, señor!” “Es verdad, señor!” as he would have done had the former inadvertently included “Quo Vadis” or “Evangeline.” At 3:56 the professor carefully called the roll to find out how many of the seven were present, entered that important fact on an official blank to be left with the rector at the end of the day, and with much bowing and ceremonious formality the class took leave of themselves, lighted their cigarettes, tucked their canes under their arms, and faded away.

Having long wished to attend a trial, I carried a note of introduction to a judge of the supreme court of the department of Cuzco.

“Trial? Certainly, señor. When do you wish to see one?”

“Any time there happens to be one.”

“Choose for yourself.”

“Well, shall we say Wednesday, at one?”

“It shall be done. I shall have something of importance arranged for you. How would this new burglary case do? Or the recent suicide? The burglary? Very good, then, señor; Wednesday at one. Su servidor, adiós, caballero.”

Luckily there were cases pending, thus sparing the judge the trouble of having to arrange to have the crime committed.

An Indian required to pay for the day’s mass proudly clings to his
staff of office]

Youths from a village near Cuzco, each with a coca cud in his cheek]

Jury trial is unknown in Peru, as in most, if not all Spanish-America. In the first place, if the uncle of the accused is a compadre, or his nephew a padrino or a nineteenth cousin of the father-in-law of the judge or anyone else high in authority, the chances are that the matter will be dropped. Favored with none of these advantages, he must let the law take its rigorous, snail-like course. The trial is entirely on paper, back in the recesses of some dingy office. The one I entered at the hour and day set reminded me of some scene from the pages of Dickens. I was bowed to an ancient couch at one side of the dismal adobe room, the secretary, in an aged overcoat of various degrees of fadedness and an enormous neck muffler, sitting at a medieval table. My friend, the “Judge of the First Instance,” in sartorial splendor, sat at another, his silk hat upside down before him. He had “arranged” the case of an Italian shopkeeper who had been robbed the Saturday before. The Italian, being summoned, entered, bowed, remained standing, gave his name, age, _religion_, and other personal details, took the oath. Then he told his story in his own words to the judge, who asked questions but made no attempt at cross-examination, rather helping the witness in his answers when he stumbled or paused for want of a Spanish word. Meanwhile the secretary busied himself with rolling and consuming innumerable cigarettes. When he had finished his tale, the Italian was shown for the purpose of identification some articles sent over from the Intendencia as taken from the prisoner’s pocket, after which they still remained “in the hands of justice.” Then the witness sat down and the judge himself dictated the story in his own words to the secretary. The latter armed himself with a steel pen, dipped it incessantly into a viceregal inkwell, and peering over the top of his glasses, laboriously wrote in a copybook hand three words at a time, repeating them aloud. Shorthand is unknown in the government offices of the Andes. It would be too much to ask a political henchman to learn stenography, or anything else, for the mere purpose of holding a government position; typewriters are expensive; moreover, typewritten documents are not legal in most governmental formalities; so ultra-modern a system would be lacking in dignity for such solemn purposes, and its introduction would require new effort on the part of secretaries whose only asset is the medieval art of penmanship. The endless task over and the Italian dismissed, one of the prisoners, a half-breed boy of eighteen, of degenerate type, was brought in by an Indian soldier and “testified” in the same manner as the plaintiff had done. He was not required to take the oath, but was warned to tell the truth. Again it was his own story, just as he chose to tell it, with no attempt to trip him up, and even occasional assistance. This the judge redictated in his own more cultured language, that the archives of Cuzco should not be marred by the undignified speech of the masses; and the “trial” was over. A deaf-mute wished to testify in the case, but as there are no schools in Peru for those so afflicted, there was no one who could understand him.

In short, a trial in Spanish-America consists of nothing but the making of affidavits, there called _declaraciones_. These are seen only by the judge, not even the prisoner’s lawyer being permitted—legally—access to them. Later, if there is found time for it, comes the _sumario_ in which the judge reads in his private study the various declarations and passes judgment and sentence, likewise in privacy, which sentence must be reviewed by the Superior Court of the Department. The curious may ask where the lawyer for the prisoner comes in. I was informed that “he sees the prisoner first and tells him what to say in his declaration.” Thus is the secret, mysterious “justice” of Latin-America, “a joke at so much a word,” as they call it in Ecuador, administered. If one has a man arrested, one must hire a lawyer to find out what happened to him.

I next went with the judge, in his gleaming stove-pipe hat and surrounded by his suite of courtiers, to the prison on the banks of the noisome Huatenay. The departmental place of confinement consisted of an old-fashioned Spanish dwelling built around a large courtyard, a dismal patio in which were gathered prisoners from all parts of Peru’s largest department, from white men of the capital to half-wild Indians of the _montaña_, who know so little of the ways of government that they thought they were being held by their tribal enemies. Everyone was doing whatever he chose, with a freedom from restraint that recalled the debtors’ prisons of England a century ago. As in most Latin-American penal institutions, there was no evidence of cruelty or unkindness to inmates, except the passive cruelty of neglect, most of the outward forms of courtesy being kept up between officials and prisoners. By night the latter slept in mud cells of the rambling adobe building, on earth floors as bare as those of an Indian hut unless, like the traveler in the Sierra, they brought their own “beds” with them. No food worthy the name was furnished. Outside the patio, separated from it by a massive iron wicket, were the wives, temporary or otherwise, of the prisoners, who had brought them dinner in baskets, pots, or knotted cloths. This custom of having the judge visit the place of confinement is not without its advantages; at least, it gives him a personal knowledge of what a sentence means. As long as we remained, a constant line of prisoners crowded around my companion to tell their grievances. Those who wore hats carried them in their hands, but the cringing Indians, who mumbled their complaints in Quichua, did not remove their earlap “skating” caps. The petitioners ranged all the way from four “wildmen” from the hot-lands to the east, to a white and well-educated youth who began:

“Your Honor excuses me, but I have now been here seven months, and if you could be pleased to arrange that they have my trial some day before long....”

It is a short but rather breathless climb in this altitude from the level of the town to the ancient fortress of Sacsahuaman, frowning down upon Cuzco from 700 feet above. On the city side the hill hangs almost precipitous, the town piled part way up it; but a flanking road soon brings one out beside the most massive monument of aboriginal art on the American continent. The cyclopean ruins are, as Garsilaso put it, “rather cliffs than walls,” and how these enormous boulders, of which mathematicians compute the largest to weigh a little matter of 360 tons, were set in position on this lofty headland by a race that knew neither horses nor oxen will ever remain as great a mystery as the building of the pyramids. Only one thing is certain; that the builders had unlimited labor at their command and that time was no object. Prescott’s “so finely wrought it was impossible to detect the line of junction between the rocks” is scarcely true; the detection is more than easy. But it is hard to believe these monster walls were constructed by the ancestors of the stolid and ambitionless Indians one sees to-day peddling their wares in the market-place of Cuzco. These downtrodden descendants take the amazing works of their forebears for granted, as we accept the constructions of nature, and never dream of attempting to imitate them. Indeed, many contend that they were not built, but grew up by enchantment. Nations, like individuals, have enthusiasm and initiative for great enterprises in their youth, and are apt to settle down to contentment with the mediocre in middle age, which there are hints that the race we roughly call Inca had reached at the time of the Conquest. The massive triple walls of the fortress were built in zigzag form, with salient angles from which the defenders within could fall upon their enemies, making it sufficient protection to the Imperial city without the necessity of surrounding that with walls. Even after the effete modern inhabitants have tumbled all the stones they could move down into the city to build their own temples and dwellings—the efforts of Lilliputians among giants—and despite the damage wrought by ruthless treasure-hunters, the main portion of the great fortress of Sacsahuaman still remains intact, to bring upon the beholder a rage that Pizarro and his fellow-tramps should have destroyed, like bulls in a china-shop, the Empire that wrought such marvels, a wonder at what might have been had the Conquest of Peru never taken place.

In ancient days, whenever the son of an Inca put a bent pin of champi in the Imperial chair the resulting box on the ear must have been accompanied with a “Here, you aslla supay, go out and carve another step in that boulder!” There is no other rational explanation of the mutilation which every rock and ground-stone for a circuit of many miles around the City of the Sun suffered before the Conquest. Everywhere huge, house-large rocks, dull-gray in color, are fantastically carved in every imaginable form, with seats, crannies, grottoes, and stairways, as if for mere whim or amusement. There was no “scamping” of work in those days, no “good enough” to the straw bosses of the Incas, only one grade,—the perfect. The hardest rock is cut with exquisite care and finish, the angles perfectly sharp, the flat parts smooth as if cast in a mould. To the modern inhabitants every such carved seat is a “throne of the Incas”—as if the Inca had nothing to do but sit around admiring the widespread view from those aërial points of vantage of which his dynasty was so fond. The imagination likes to picture him watching athletic games on the little plain before Sacsahuaman, and chuckling behind his Imperial mask at the antics of children sliding down the Rodadero, or toboggan-stone, as do still those youths of Cuzco who are low enough in caste not to jeopardize their dignity by such antics.

Over behind the ruins and carved rocks I found all the provincial “authorities” gathered one Sunday to uncover another of the many immense boulders that had lain for centuries disguised as a mound of earth. The gobernadores and tenientes, in more or less “European” garb, confined their labor to bossing; the actual work was done by the alguaciles, jealously clinging to their silver-mounted staffs of office, even as they toiled. The digging brought to light not only another huge, fantastically carved ground-rock, but a hint of how Sacsahuaman might have been built. The Incas had but to call in men from all the district roundabout, under their commanders of tens, and if a thousand did not suffice to move a stone, nothing was easier than to summon two, or five, or ten thousand. Thus the government of to-day has continued many of the ancient ways, as the Church has grafted its own forms on the religion of the Children of the Sun.

Our party setting out for Machu Picchu across the high plains about
Cuzco]

Ollantaytambo, the end of the first day’s journey, in the valley of
the Urubamba. In the upper left-hand corner is seen the
bright-yellow “school” of Inca days]

But more striking even than prehistoric ruins is the view of Cuzco from the foot of the inevitable wooden cross at the summit of Sacsahuaman. So steep is the hill on this side, and so close to the town, that it seems almost to bulge out over it, and all the Imperial city lies spread out beneath, as from an aeroplane, its every plaza and patio in full view to its very depths, the activities of every family as plainly visible as if some magic wand had lifted away the concealing roofs. Here and there, even on a Sunday, an Indian in crude-colored garments and his pancake hat crawls along the fortress hill behind his oxen and wooden plow, with the Imperial city of his forefathers as a background. Beyond, the greenish valley of the Huatenay stretches away southward between velvety-brown, wrinkled hills, the four royal highways diverging from the main plaza as principal streets and sallying forth to the “Four Corners of the Earth” as directly as the configurations of the Andes permit. But always the eye drifts back to the city below, spread out in every slightest detail. Under the Incas it may have been “bright and shining with gold and gay with color, its long and narrow streets, crossing each other at right angles with perfect regularity, adorned with beautiful palaces and temples”; even to-day, under the rays of the unclouded Andean sun, it is a scene no mere words can bring to him who has not looked down upon it in person. The soft red of its aged tile roofs and the rich brown of its bulking churches leaves no need for golden adornment. The Sunday-morning noises come up distinctly,—school-boys playing in the patios of monasteries, fighting-cocks haughtily challenging the world to combat, a weary bell booming a belated summons, the half-barbarous, half-inspiring screech of trumpets rising as a regiment of the garrison that keeps Cuzco loyal to “those degenerate negroes of Lima” sets out on a march; yet all blending together into a sort of pagan music that carries the imagination bodily back to the pre-Conquest days of long ago.