by Jordan Deitcher

 

Sunday September 1, 1985

It was January 27, Max’s birthday, shared mystically with Mozart, and I was in Magickal Childe on West 19th Street to buy a set of Tarot cards to replace that infernal Rider deck to which he’d become so attached. I eased my way through the narrow aisles of shelves laden with orbs and herbs and gothic seasonings, magical talismans and books of arcane knowledge, until I came upon an alcove in which a dizzying array of Tarot decks was on display. Squeezing past an elegant witch absorbed in an earthy-looking tome, I managed to position myself in front of them, but was so close that the lurid images began to move and merge, overwhelming me. I started to run from the store empty-handed, but as I passed the illuminated checkout counter something caught my eye. I turned back to see that, in the center of a shallow glass bowl filled with all kinds and colours of small gemstones, an agate was glowing brightly in the light, pulsing orange and red through a network of arteries and veins. I found myself reaching for it, my hand hovering over it for a long moment before I brought it to my eye.

Monday September 2

For the next few days I was never without it, either marveling at it in the light or, with an urge I couldn’t explain, sucking on it. There was no denying the ease that doing this brought me, to my breath, to my belly. I looked up the human heart in Webster’s and found a black and white sketch which showed my little agate to be identical, both in shape and in the configuration of its major arteries. A miniature human heart made of stone.

Linda, who was always wearing a crystal somewhere, suggested that I purify it from negative energies by soaking it in salt water for seven days. I filled a drinking glass with the salt solution, dropped in the stone and put it on my desk in the sun so that I could watch it as I worked. From time to time undissolved salt would settle on it like in a snow globe, and I’d stir it up with my pen, wincing as the stone clattered against the glass.

Seven days later to the hour my “heart of stone” was rinsed off and back in my mouth. The feeling that rippled through me made me almost giddy. I went up to Enid while she was working at her bench and placed it on her upper back where she carries her cares. A shudder swept through her, and then her shoulders relaxed and she took in a full, satisfying breath. She looked at me wide-eyed. “What was that?”

Maybe this was a healing stone. I began showing it to friends, holding it to the light, telling them how I found it, gently challenging the skeptical to try it out. Day-to-day validation had been proving elusive, and I guess I was looking for it in a special way, on a magical plane.

Tuesday September 3

In March Enid and I decided to go backpacking in Peru for two months. We had talked about such a trip for several years, but its eventuality had always seemed as remote as the region. Nevertheless, having committed to it, we began to discuss plans in increasingly concrete terms. The hitch was that I didn’t have the money for such an indulgence, and with just months to go it was looking unlikely that I’d be able to raise my half of the $3500 we estimated it would cost.

One day I was startled to discover a possible solution in the mail. Our landlord’s insurance company had written saying it expected a claim for some water damage that we had incurred. Of course they weren’t about to make it easy, but after going to work on the bureaucracy and the ranks of recalcitrant claims adjusters, I finally received a cheque for $1750, exactly half our projected expenses for the trip. With just two weeks to go I had (magically?) come up with my share.

Wednesday, September 4

So why Peru? I was born at noon on a Sunday in the month of the sun. Peru is the land of the Sun. It has the Sun on its money and on its flag. After the great flood, our Father the Sun sent his two children to the Island of the Sun on Lake Titicaca, the highest lake in the world, to found the race of Incan emperors. Temples of the Sun were built throughout the land, their walls plated with gold, the sweat of the Sun. The most important of these temples was in Cuzco, the Navel of the World, the City of the Sun, sitting in the center of the greatest electromagnetic field on earth. The summer solstice, the holiest day of the Incan year, was the day on which Enid and I had married. Perhaps I could build on this personal mythology.

At the same time, I knew that, after 36 years of being tall, as Marie-Claude put it, it was time to get my feet on the ground. Peru was a land of granite mountains and monuments, of people who fashioned their lives from stone. A potent land upon which to set my feet. This, I promised myself, was going to be a journey loaded with significance. And to record it I was going to keep a journal, a big step for me, as nothing intimidated me more than writing. Writing had always been about making things up, and I despaired of having the imagination for it. This would take me off the hook.

Thursday, September 5

The first part of the trip did not go easily. Arriving in Lima to the persistent grayness of the coastal winter, to the roar of traffic and the choke of diesel fumes, we hastily boarded a bus heading south and, after passing through a horrifying slum built up the side of a hill, found ourselves in a barren and colourless desert over which sprawled the pitiful woven grass shacks of a people indescribably poor. In the distance, colourfully clothed figures scratched at meager patches of stony field. How were they able to survive? There was, however, an overabundance of oranges – though from the road we never saw a tree – spilling out of large pens woven of the same grasses as the shacks in which they lived.

For the next several days we rode through the desert in dilapidated school buses, rejects sent down from Mexico, which in turn were the rejects sent from the US, stopping each evening in the small towns – Pisco, Paracas, Ica – each with its Plaza de Armes and its few tall palms carrying the rare bit of green dishearteningly out of reach. And everywhere there were beggars sitting on the ground, their legs drawn up in front of them, their hands up near their heads, which hung vacantly to one side.

In the museum in Ica we saw over a dozen mummies in large glass cases, wrapped in tattered but intricately woven funerary garments now the colour of sand, sitting with their legs drawn up, their hands to their heads, their heads fallen to one side. Their eyes were empty, their skin was parchment and their teeth were bared in a desiccated grimace. These were the remains of royalty. Their beggars had turned to dust long ago.

We stepped out of the darkness of the museum, covering our eyes from the harsh daylight. I took my heartstone from my pocket for the first time since we’d arrived, and held it up to the hazy pulsing sun. What the hell were we doing here?

Friday, September 6

In Ica, the first signs of the struggle to come began to appear. We had spent every last sol, and nobody would cash a traveler’s cheque, not even the banks. We spent hours going from one establishment to the next, even returning to some, feeling the town getting smaller and smaller as our pace became increasingly frantic. It was only when Enid, putting her faith in her rusty Spanish, appealed for the third time to the small-minded machismo of the manager of one of the banks, asking him how he would feel if this were his daughter stranded in New York City, did we get a cheque cashed and the last bus of the day for the eight hour ride to Nazca.

Late the following morning found us flat on our backs on the airport tarmac following a nauseatingly bumpy flight in a four-seater over the desert to see the Nazca lines. As we were lying there trying to recover, we were passed by a couple of locals, one of whom laughed and proclaimed us “las ruinas de Nazca.”

Saturday, September 7

It was thus depleted that we began to head inland. On a much delayed overnight bus to the promised oasis of Arequipa, I became violently ill, throwing up repeatedly out the window until dawn, when the bus mercifully stopped in Camana, a horrible truckstop town stuck in the middle of the coastal desert plain. I could go no further, much to Enid’s chagrin, and staggered out of the heat and dust to collapse from exhaustion onto an undersized cot in a steamy little room in a seamy little hostal. I awoke hours later, starving but unable to eat, desperate to leave but unable to face getting on another bus. I opened my hand in which I had been clutching my heartstone for I don’t know how long, and began to cry.

We waited all day for a car to pass so that we could hitch a ride, but not a single vehicle came through. The bus to Arequipa passed again in the middle of the night, and after the driver arranged for me to sit up front, I shakily climbed the twisted steps to my seat.

Arequipa is a pretty colonial mountain town at the base of El Misti, a perfect snowcapped volcano cone. It is here that the oppressiveness of the Spanish conquistadors begins to make itself felt – in the gaudiness of the many churches, in the angry eyes of the Peruvian peasants. Camera-wielding tourists walk blindly by silent squatting beggars, their filthy children sleeping with their faces in the dirt, and from every wall in every store the Pope gazes benignly down on his army of soldiers for Christ. In every church and every convent are depictions of the cruelest martyrdoms and bloodiest hearts against which the suffering of the people seems but modest self-denial. They appeal fervently to the Blessed Virgin, a life-sized children’s doll dressed for a fairytale ball whose eyes likely close if you lay it down. Day-to-day salvation having proved illusive, they pray for it in the life to come.

After this depressing morning, we sat down for lunch at an unassuming little restaurant. I asked the owner, who was chatting with a friend at a table near the kitchen and hadn’t bothered to greet us, if the fresh chillies, which had been laid out as usual with wedges of lime, were too hot for gringos. He waved off my concern dismissively, and since my samplings so far hadn’t led to too much distress, I took a tiny nibble from the tip. In seconds I was in agony. In my dismay I accidentally touched my face near the corner of my eye and suddenly I was aflame there, too. I began to panic. Enid didn’t know what to do and appealed desperately to the owner, who reluctantly got up, went into the kitchen and, after too long, emerged with a bowl of white rice for me to stuff in my mouth. People, as I say, were angry.

Sunday, September 8

On the overnight train to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, we reflected on our first ten days in the land of the sun. We had just had our first peaceful day, lying in the grass in the hot sun watching men and women washing their clothes and themselves in the river, wandering quiet streets and eating quiet food. We found ourselves savouring every minute of it, as if tranquility would never again be ours, for never while traveling had either of us experienced the daily headaches, the lack of fluidity and the general physical dis-ease that had frustrated our early hopes and my expectations of magic.

In my journal (I was writing, though not without anxiety) I was charting both the impediments to our progress and the turbulent dreams which were waking me several times each night. We were trying to frame these first weeks as a purging of poisons prior to our pilgrimage to Machu Picchu. The strain for perspective finally wore us out, and we slept fitfully while the ancient train carried us to 12,000 feet.

At about 7:30 the next morning the train made a brief rest stop on the pampas, with Lake Titicaca and Puno visible in the distance. We alit into the hazy golden glow of the early sun, stretching our limbs, trying to acclimatize to the high altitude, and as we were looking around at the wide wide plain of yellowish tufted grass, it began to move. The land seemed to be fragmenting into squares, forming virtual grids which were slipping over and under each other, back and forth and from side to side. Altitude, I said, and suddenly remembered a dream from a few months ago of being at Lake Titicaca and the very same thing happening.

What was with these dreams? While Enid tried to sleep off altitude sickness at our hostal, I spent hours scouring the market for a poncho I could put on when I’d wake up to write down my dreams. But they were heavy, and we still had six weeks to go, so… There was a beautiful gray one I should have taken. It was beautiful.

The next morning we took a three-hour boat ride to Isla Taquile, a stony island rising steeply from Lake Titicaca, the highest and deepest lake in the world. It is covered from one end to the other with Incan terracing and capped on the high points with pre-Incan ruins. It is communally run, and we were assigned to stay in the small thatched adobe compound of Augustine and his family, in a room so low that I had to stay stooped. There was no electricity on the island and no running water. Everybody dressed as they had when those ancient ruins were still in use.

The scene in their kitchen that night was suspended in time: the cooking fire fed by twigs in a small adobe hearth, a single Aladdin’s lamp on the floor, two pots boiling, a large mattress of straw on which the grandfather sat huddled in the corner and the two little girls played shyly with Enid, Augustine, his future son-in-law Andres, who was knitting a hat while Julia, his intended, squatted near the fire with her mother, tending the pots. Wonderfully warm and congenial. The meal, consisting of potatoes and rice, both fried in oil, was one of the worst I’ve ever had. They were so poor, they couldn’t even afford fish from the lake. Enid and I shared with them a pineapple we had brought, which seemed to be an almost unheard-of treat.

So here we were, in the stillest place so far, trying to be still. We were both experiencing severe headaches from the altitude, but after a couple of days of exploring this tranquil island we began to relax, to breathe, to let go. My dreams became increasingly vivid and detailed, and the third day found me sitting naked and alone in one of the ruins, my heartstone on the grass beside me soaking up the Incan sun, feverishly trying to remember and write down a climactic series of dreams from the preceding night.

We felt ready to head for Cuzco and Machu Picchu. As we prepared to leave Taquile, though, a storm came up and Augustine, who ran the harbor, wouldn’t let any of the boats leave. We spent the night huddled in our sleeping bags, laid out like sardines with six other people in a small hut by the dock, and at 5:00 in the morning were awakened to begin a rough crossing back to Puno.

We were greeted on arrival with the news that the trains were on strike, but that perhaps one small emergency train would be going to Cuzco first thing next morning. So at 5:30 AM we were up and near the head of the line for the few tickets that would be sold, if indeed there would be a train. At 8 o’clock the ticket seller arrived to open the booth, accompanied by a guardia civil with a machine gun, and immediately people representing several travel agencies pushed to the front of the line and proceeded to buy up all the tickets, the guard protecting their right to do so. I became incensed and started to shout at the ticket seller and the guard, pushing agents out of the line, demanding to be sold a ticket. Towering over them as I did, I must have seemed rather imposing, but the guard, obviously bribed and with his integrity at stake, tried to push me out of the way, using the machine gun like a staff. But I was having none of it and pushed right back until, to the delight of the others in the line, especially the Quechua locals, he backed off, the agents disappeared and we all got tickets. I never ever did anything like that before.

I was pretty proud of myself, but was left feeling depressed. Why were we so out of sync with this country? We seemed to be mired in an unhappy standoff between gods, between the colonizers and the occupied, fighting for every step, though it was hard not to take what was happening to us personally. Maybe we weren’t supposed to be here.

Monday, September 9

As the train was pulling into Cuzco the lies began. A bunch of touts flooded on board before it had even come to a stop, each representing several hostals in this the tourist capital of Peru, promising excellent accommodations and generous discounts. But as we followed one of them to one dive then another, the story changed and the prices rose until finally we took off alone through the now dark streets to try our luck.

Cuzco was bracing for its busiest two weeks of the year, when thousands of school kids from all over the country converge to be introduced to their ancestry. Rooms were scarce, and we covered a lot of territory before finally settling on a somewhat more expensive place than we were used to. Although our room was separated from the one next to it by only a flimsy door with an open transom, the manager promised that he would keep it empty that night. An hour later, after we had already turned out the lights, someone was shown into that room. I went down to the manager to complain, whereupon the unsuspecting interloper, a Peruvian, was asked to leave. In the middle of the night, however, the room was again taken by one of the hotel’s employees, who felt no obligation to be quiet either then or early the next morning when he was awakened for duty. We went out first thing to find other accommodations and then returned to get our packs and pay the manager the rate for a semiprivate room.

We settled in to our new hotel, a 370-year-old palace called Las Marquesas, which had carved wooden everything. After putting our stuff down, we went onto our balcony overlooking the beautiful inner courtyard to try to settle down and take a breath. I took the heartstone from my pocket and saw, to the astonishment of my doubting eyes, that it had turned a much deeper red, which was confirmed by the look on Enid’s face. Could it be that magic was in store after all? Maybe it held an explanation for all the difficulties we kept having to confront.

That afternoon we met Doug, a 46-year-old ex-patriot Canadian of Russian descent who was a former world karate champion, a former soloist with the San Francisco ballet, a former concert guitarist and teacher, a former head of the Lambda nuclear research project, a major investor in one of Peru’s two largest gold companies, and who now made a living by giving massages to passing pilgrims in order to maintain a necessarily low profile.

So we each had a massage – mine was interrupted constantly by phone calls he was getting, while Enid reported no such interruptions and that she had gotten an excellent breast massage. We knew Cuzco’s reputation for being the biggest den of thieves in South America. Why even Doug himself told us that it was safe to trust no one. Too much of this trip had been spent getting angry and fighting, and I was beginning to believe that somebody’s god was toying with us. So far getting my feet on the ground was not proving very satisfying.

Cuzco is a beautiful town of Spanish colonial design, and if it hadn’t been for a recent earthquake exposing the superb stonework of the Coricancha, the Garden of the Sun, once a large field of corn and life-sized shepherds, animals and birds all crafted in gold, silver and gemstones, one might never have known that, with the aid of superstition, a small army of thieves and murderers had eradicated a civilization, and had melted to ingots the finest art in gold and silver that the world has ever produced. And for these deeds the king of Spain had honoured this scum. And because of these deeds an entire people today hate themselves and the glorious culture in which they are rooted, and envy all those to whom they continue to be subjugated. Ironically, it is the tourists who have forged a link between indigenous Peruvians and their past through a demand for copies of Incan and pre-Incan art. And now an awareness is developing that if the gringos like it maybe it’s worth something. So the primary goal of Cuzcanos is to exploit the tourists, to make them pay in every way.

We were at the train station at the proper time to buy tickets to Machu Picchu and, typically, were told that none were left. Amazing.

At 5:30 the next morning we managed to get the very last two seats in a car laden with students. The first thing they asked us was if we knew the words to We are the World, which we all spent the next four hours singing until we were hoarse.

Tuesday, September 10

At 10 AM we arrived at Aguas Calientes, a dilapidated train stop at the base of the mountain atop which sit the ruins of Machu Picchu. We couldn’t believe we were actually here. The terrain is incredibly powerful, with huge vertical granite faces and even taller peaks thrusting like daggers into the sky. The area marks the beginning of the jungle, and all around a luxurious green was dotted with exotic flowers of all colors. The photos we’d seen had not even come close to conveying the majesty and scale, which now held us silent and awed. We had finally made it. As we waited for the bus that would take us up the rough series of switchbacks to the top, I took my stone from my pocket, held it to the sun and gazed at it intently. It was darker still.

When we got to the top, Enid was full of energy and ready to go, whereas I, much to my surprise, started to feel very heavy, like I needed to lie down. I was beginning to wonder if this is what was meant by getting in touch with the earth. Otherwise I wasn’t feeling much of anything. As we walked around I kept checking my stone for some clue as to what might be ailing me.

Machu Picchu is a city terraced and built from stone, with a commercial district, a jail, a living section and holy places on the higher areas, each of which contains a large special rock carved in a distinctively tiered fashion. And as we visited each of these altars – the Hitching Post of the Sun, the Sacred Rock, the Temple of Three Windows – I would put my stone on the uppermost knob to see if anything would happen.

As evening came on I was feeling really exhausted. We returned to Aguas Calientes for a disgusting meal, an unsatisfying soak in the tepid water of the hot springs ruins and a night of fitful sleep in the earthen-floored hovel that is Gringo Bill’s.

The following morning we ascended to the ruins once again, managing to slip our sleeping bags past the guard at the entrance, for we hoped to spend the night. We climbed up well past the Funerary Rock, hid our gear in some bushes, then headed for the Temple of the Sun. Once again I placed my stone on the altar. Nothing.

What happened next I recorded in my journal.

Sunday, August 4

Bop’s birthday

We’re sitting on top of Huayna Picchu, looking down at Machu Picchu. Well, something has happened. During our tour of the ruins yesterday I kept putting my stone on different altars – The Sacred Rock, the Hitching Post of the Sun…. Today we stashed our gear near the Funerary Rock, where we may sleep tonight, then went to the Temple of the Sun, where I again placed my stone for a minute or two. Underneath it is a grotto called the Royal Tomb, although someone told us that it’s probably not a tomb at all. This is a wonderful place, cozy and secret, with a ceiling that is one great slanted slab of stone keeping the mountain from collapsing into it. Inside is an intriguingly carved rock with a knob sticking up, on which I naturally put my stone. I went to sit with Enid on another rock just inside the entrance, where we spent a little while taking it all in. We then began the daunting climb up Huayna Picchu, and were one third of the way up when I realized that I had left my stone in the grotto.

I couldn’t decide whether to continue up or go back down. We had climbed this far, often having to pull ourselves up the steeper pitches with ropes and iron handholds embedded in the rock, and we knew that if we went down now we’d probably not go up again.

So here I am, trying to take in the incredible view of the ruins from the top of Huayna Picchu, but with my heart in the grotto over a thousand feet below. As I was climbing up the rest of the way, it occurred to me that I seem to have been a courier of some kind. As if after having visited various ritual stations with the heart of stone, I then left it on this tomb, as I was supposed to. Very spooky, considering it had been in my constant possession ever since I bought it. I wonder if it’ll be there when we climb back down. Probably not. Taken by some tourist or absorbed by the tomb. I don’t know whether I feel upset or completed.

Great view. Some nice English people from Oxford.

So now I’m sitting in the Royal Tomb after having looked for my stone. It’s gone. Two German couples came in and helped me look for it. I described it and, when they asked me why I had put it there, told them the whole story, sitting on the altar with them silhouetted in the entrance, feeling like a madman. They were very nice and one said he could imagine how I felt. How do I feel? Like I’ve lost a friend. He feels buried in the rock, in the ground.

Monday August 5

We were planning to spend the night in the ruins, but Enid’s mummy bag (hmm) was stolen, even though it was green and buried right next to my more-visible blue sleeping bag, which was untouched. We considered staying anyway and sharing my bag, but as we were discussing it dark clouds gathered swiftly from out of nowhere, turning the blue sky ominously dark. A flash of lightning was followed by an almost simultaneous clap of thunder. Watching the weather roll in so quickly, I said that maybe we should go back down as we weren’t equipped for rain, and it didn’t seem like there would even be a sunset to enjoy. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, the clouds vanished and the sky instantly cleared, like in a television cartoon. The guard then saw us and chased us out, and I began to feel that perhaps this was for our own good, that something was going to happen that we weren’t ready to see. Now that I had completed my task, the gods had finished with me and I wasn’t to be allowed to witness its results. Were we being cheated, toyed with or protected?

Anyway, we’re safely back at Gringo Bill’s and the heavens haven’t parted and the mountains haven’t split, dammit.

Just realized that the stone was lost on the exact midpoint of our trip. At noon on a Sunday in the month of the sun.

Tuesday, August 6

It is a tomb! The Bingham book says that it’s the burial place of Pachacuti VI, last of the Amautas. If this is true, says the book, it is the holiest place in the whole complex. I seem to have returned the heart to the tomb of the last Incan emperor. Will the dynasty rise again? Have to check back in thirty years.

It may have been worth losing the stone after all, though I miss it. I don’t even have a photograph.

Wednesday, September 11

The rest of the trip was a breeze, as if the gods no longer had a reason to impede us now that the delivery had been made. We were free to carry on swiftly and safely, if not always gently, with the rest of our journey. From that moment on doors kept opening: as we were preparing to leave Cuzco, an adventurer type from a mining company fulfilled our dream of going to the Amazon by offering us a ride in his Cessna to Puerto Maldonado, a rough jungle town on the Rio Madre de Dios. At the dock we were staked out by Alejandro, who ended up taking us downriver in his handmade canoe with its peki-peki motor for an intense three days, reassuring us with a smile and a nod as we slipped past the hundreds of crocodiles lining both banks, jaws open, some slithering into the water to join the piranhas in greeting us.

A week later we were in the stunning Andean town of Huaras high up in the Cordillera Blanca, after another nauseating bus ride to altitude up countless narrow switchbacks, each and every one festooned with clusters of crosses, memorials to those who had plunged to their deaths in their vehicles thousands of feet below. From there we did a tough trek to 15,000 feet, as intoxicating for the myriad fragrances that competed for our attention at every step as for the overwhelming landscape which, along with the altitude, took our breath away. We were camping at the edge of Laguna Churup, a large granite bowl fed by icy runoff from the pristine glacier looming above it, its water so cold that washing up was almost too painful.

And two weeks later still, after getting to see just about all of the places we had hoped to, and after having had the unnerving experience of waking up one morning to a minor earthquake in the Andean village of Yungay where, fifteen years before, the deadliest quake in history had killed 70,000 people inside of three minutes, we were back home in our loft perched above the canyons of NYC, trying to absorb all that had happened.

Reading my journal entry from Machu Picchu, I’m left with some questions, the first one being, Why was I able to recognize what was going on even as it was happening? How did it even occur to me that I was just a messenger in a greater drama? I had always thought that it was necessary to occupy the center of one’s mythic journey.

What dawned on me was that my own journey to Peru had been playing out in two stories, with two vastly different time frames. The first took place on the ground, with the grinding difficulties that kept slowing us down as we tried to make our way to Machu Picchu. It had all seemed so senseless, even unfair, and it was only when I helplessly turned to the stone for some kind of illumination that I recognized the role I was playing in the other, larger story unfolding in the context of 600 years of Incan civilization, on the magical plane I so desired for my personal mythology. With my eyes opened to both, everything snapped into focus, and suddenly it all made sense. Once I was able to see where I was, the world became easier to navigate. Nothing was a fight anymore. Everything became effortless.

Now that we’re safely back indoors and I’ve had a chance to revisit the daily details and dynamics recorded in my journal, the arc of the story just leaps out. Connect the dots and there it is. I don’t have to make things up after all. I just have to pay attention.

One last interesting note. Since that fateful day at the Royal Tomb, my left eye, its laziness evident in photos since I was young, no longer drifts. Both eyes focus straight and true. How’s that for magic?