As if he can sense her scrutiny, Peter turns toward her and grins, “I thought I ought to be quiet for a while in case you were in some sort of contemplative state.”
Kate blushes a little, realizing that she hasn’t really thought much about prayer this morning. But to pray now would be to open her mind to the reasons for her flight, to Tom.
“I just thought I should be quiet so you could concentrate on your driving. These cliffs terrify me,” she smiles, relieved at his joke.
As they ascend a steep grade, Kate gazes out the window at the deep valleys opening before them. The road is dusty and very narrow. The rule is that the vehicle climbing has the right of way, since two cars or trucks can’t pass each other on the narrow curves. To alert oncoming cars, drivers sound their horns in warning when approaching turns.
“Tell me about yourself,” Kate says. “I’m afraid I did most of the talking last night.”
Peter draws on his cigarette. “Not much to tell, really. I was born in Surrey; my father was in the RAF, shot down over Berlin toward the end of the war. I was fourteen; my sister was twelve. I went on to Cambridge to read history and then got interested in anthropology. I did some field work in Egypt, then back to Cambridge for another degree, and finally I was given a research position there.”
“Why Peru?” It seems safer to keep talking about him.
“I’ve been interested in Peru since I was a child and read The Bridge of San Luis Rey. So here I am.”
“You never married?”
“No, but there were a couple of close calls.”
“What about your mother? You haven’t mentioned her.”
“I can’t stand my mother.” He looks over to see how she takes this.
Kate is shocked; she has never heard any grown-up say this, she realizes. Most people forgave their parents as they got older. Kate has been exasperated by her parents, sometimes embarrassed by her father’s explosive bursts of anger, but loving them was natural, like breathing or sleeping. She doesn’t know what to say, so falls silent, watching the road dip and curve.
“She’s a selfish, whining bitch,” he continued. “Sorry. Anyway, let’s talk about you and why you’re here, shall we?”
“Do you mean here in this jeep or here in Peru?”
He laughs. “Let me guess. You came to Peru to help the people here liberate themselves from the oppression they’ve suffered under since the Spanish conquistadors.”
Kate decides to ignore his laughter. “Well, something like that. Actually I think I’m just beginning to discover day by day why I’m here. Last week a couple of teenagers asked me if I had any American records. So I set up our old phonograph in the hall and made some Kool-Aid and we sat around and tried to talk to each other. One boy told me how he’d like to go to the city to school. Their parents won’t let them go out walking with each other. They asked me questions about my family and how I could bear to leave them to come so far away. They wondered why I don’t have any children.” Kate raises her chin defiantly. “I think for one thing I can show them another way to be a woman, that women can do something else besides work the fields and bear children.”
Peter grins. “Somehow I never thought of nuns as feminists. Aren’t you interested in proselytizing? You know, don’t you, that your Dominican habit could have bad associations for the people up here?” Kate watches him without saying anything. “The Incas were betrayed by Pizarro and his men in Cajamarca. Do you remember the story?”
“Yes, but why would my habit have bad associations?”
“The Spaniards came with a Dominican priest, Vicente de Valverde. On the night of July 26, after Atahualpa had kept his promise and filled a room with the treasure of his kingdom, the Spaniards led him out and tied him to the stake. Friar Vicente gave him a crash course in Christianity, and encouraged him to convert so that he could be hanged as a Christian rather than be burned at the stake as a heathen.”
Peter laughs as he sees Kate wince; she hasn’t heard that part of the story. Well, she isn’t going to defend the mentality of that long-ago Dominican. She’d try another tack.
“Do you think Peru was better off before the Spaniards came?”
Peter’s eyes light up. He looks away from the road for a moment to see if her question was sincere. “In some ways, yes. Under the Incas, Peru had a totally organic society. Religion and work were unified. People worked the land in cooperatives, and no one was hungry. The earth was the mother, Pachamama. Lake Titicaca was female also, and the people made offerings to her.” Peter lights another cigarette, and Kate finds the smell familiar, reassuring.
He squints at the rising sun, the cigarette hanging from his lips as he continues. “Divers have found boxes with gold and silver statues buried in the silt. Some of the Aymara around Juliaca believe that the Lake is the wife of the mountain, Illampu-Ancohuma. They believe that the Lake is the source of the sun as well as of man himself.”
Kate thinks back to the outing on the Lake, the way Raul hurried them into port when the storm came up. Maybe she should have studied anthropology before coming here.
Peter is driving faster now, taking the turns recklessly. “The really interesting thing is how the indigenous people got Christianity mixed in with their own belief system. An old Aymara man told me once, ‘God is very distant. We must deal with his mountains, the intermediaries.’”
Kate nods. “Yes, Father Tom is always saying that this mixture of
