Through where the Incas wander

When I wake up my mouth is as dry as if I had been chewing newspaper the whole night. The bus glasses are moist out of the humidity produced by 40 bodies breathing and snoring the whole night. Together with my also moist eyes, the bus glasses barely let me see through to the street where the still dark walls are slowly waking up with the rest of the city. I’m not even sure about where I am, it could be Cuzco or Beijing, it all looks the same after a night of light sleep woken up suddenly by an undesired and scarce breakfast. We arrive and I walk out the bus station. The backpack’s weight is trebled by the altitude, but each of my steps, already used to the height by many weeks lived with my hands touching the clouds, is slow and steady. After all there’s no rush. Walking up to the centre without still realising where I am, I suddenly bump for the first time into the perfectly aligned puzzle of a smoothly flattened and asymmetrically symmetrical Inca wall. I look at it amazed and amaze myself when I see that on top of this wall there is a church, one more church out of the many my Spanish neighbours planted here as they passed by. While I rub my eyes to check if I’m well awake a sudden ‘Didn’t they have anywhere else to build a church’ slips out of my mouth, but I instantly fall into my senses and remember this is no more than the need to demonstrate subjugation, in order to complete the destruction of an entire civilization in the name of pure greed for the silver and gold of these lands. I walk a bit further up and see more of the same, whole buildings, complete streets of aligned rocks that are used as foundations for many other buildings that do not belong here despite being stupidly beautiful. I walk up a long and narrow alley and feel myself go back in time while starting to see Incas walking by. These are people other than those who walk here now and who I can’t even imagine because for each step I take looking at the pavement one other is taken looking in front, and the buildings above do not let me go back in time for more than brief instants, short seconds of an inability to imagine other times that passed by too fast while the invader buried centuries of misunderstood evolution under rocks, buildings erected in the name of a greed masked as faith and that God himself knocked down once and again in successive earthquakes, which invariably left standing only the rocks underneath, the only ones that should be here. I move on, while thinking as a Portuguese that we did the same, maybe in a different way and in a different place, but basically the same and I feel bad about it. I zigzag in between the tourists and sellers, walk up and down streets, go in and out churches, cross looks with people who welcomes and distrusts me at once, take a couple of photos and, in spite of being in one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen during this journey, I think to myself: ‘Enough!’. I’m wandering the imperial Cuzco, through where the Incas still wander in the shadow of their own rocks, and it hurts it has to be like this.










Cuzco, Peru, August 2009