The Gold Machine: In the Tracks of the Mule Dancers by Iain Sinclair

Author:Iain Sinclair [Sinclair, Iain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays & Travelogues, Peru, Travel, social history, South America, history, Peru;Colonial;Colonial past;Colony;Empire;Ghosts of empire;Journey;Adventure;Exploration;Explorers;Expedition;Missionaries;Indigenous peoples;Gold;South America;Psychogeography;Dark past
ISBN: 9780861540716
Google: b4IjEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-09-02T00:08:20.743523+00:00

Lucho was in good spirits too. We will be heading, before too many days, to his cloud jungle farm. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ We hurtle on and down, admiring the numerous crushed-metal installations on the banks of the river, far below. There is a pretty, freshly painted shrine at every hairpin turn. Paying tribute to mudslides and collisions.

We recognise an established ecology of the road. First come the motorised police, who never position themselves far from a good restaurant or drive-through bordello. To advance, you need the right paperwork, stamps proving that payment has already been made. Only sanctioned taxis are permitted to leave town. But then, as the road surface deteriorates, a desperate troop of old folk and very young barefoot children, with sticks, shovels, rudimentary brooms, appear from nowhere to fill potholes and drag boulders, at the last moment, from the path of overloaded lorries. These are the unofficial, unregistered and unpaid facilitators. It is up to travellers to throw them the odd coin. Where damage is most severe, and risk critical, you will find them. Their presence forewarns of blind bends and improvised detours around tunnels that have already collapsed.

‘Though not unaccustomed to dangerous bridle tracks in tropical mountain ranges,’ Alexander Ross told his audience at the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, ‘we felt by no means comfortable as our mules picked their way along the very edge of some beetling precipice, or tried to pass, at some dangerous point, a drove of donkeys laden with small barrels or kegs of rum, which they were conveying to the towns or mines… The present road gradually descends to about 4,000 feet, and, emerging from a narrow gorge through fields of sugar-cane, reaches the Chanchamayo Valley.’

Fruit, easily cultivated by small farmers, has no real value. It is not economically viable to ship it to Huancayo or Lima. As we approach the fertile valley, makeshift stalls and screened shelters have been set up, turning the busy road into a straggling market. Lucho decides that we should stop to sample the native produce. A woman with a machete expertly decapitates a pair of coconuts and provides us with straws, so that we can stand and suck the oversweet milk. Pink plastic catheters drilled into hairy bovine testicles. Passion fruit are cracked and shelled like picnic eggs. The air is kinder now, the colours louder and more confident. We are soon in La Merced.

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