Journey to Cutivireni
After the long journey - it took us two days to reach Cutivirene - it seemed as though we were walking into Eden. A flock of small Campa children scattered as the aeroplane touched down onto the runway, a bumpy clearing that looked as if someone had dropped a credit card in a field of clover.
Everyone was delighted to see Padre Mariano.
This part of the Amazon jungle, called the Gran Pajonal, lies east of Lima beyond the Andes. The road takes you out of the coastal desert plain and up into the Andes over breathtaking panoramas of mountains and lakes. At the highest point, Ticlio, you reach almost five thousand metres above sea level, when even to put one foot in front of another leaves you gasping for breath.
As the road falls down the other side of the mountains, the vegetation, a bleak covering of scrub grass, imperceptively changes. Grey green eucalyptus trees and hedges of silvery cactus plants, red and orange earth; yellow gorse bushes line the river valleys where terraced fields cover the slopes of the hills. Indian women with cheeks red from the altitude, in brightly coloured clothes and bowler hats, tend flocks of llamas. The smell of eucalyptus is wafted over the breeze...This is the sierra, the land of the Incas.
Small villages straddle the road; Huancayo, Mendoza, and then Tarma with a colonial cathedral like a Christmas cake surrounded by bizarre topiary bushes. Here on Easter Sunday the Indians from the surrounding hills gather at dawn and process through the main square which they cover with the petals of flowers laid down in exotic patterns.
Beyond, the road deteriorates into a muddy track as though nature has overwhelmingly won the battle to control her. Landslides sweep away the road every rainy season and JCB diggers lie around to patch them up where they can.
Part of Peru's problems hinge on the difficulty of communications. In nowhere remotely accessible can food be grown and where it can, with uncontrollable fertility, it cannot be reached.
A bridge was broken which meant that we would have to join a queueof lorries lumbering across an impossibly deep and turbid river. We left the bus. Mariano disappeared and I sat down to paint.
Six hours later we still had not moved. The lorries were stuck or washed down the river, the bus driver was drunk and I was rather relieved that he couldn't move even if he had wanted to. On the move again and we reached another bridge further up the river: a perilous hair-pin, helter-skelter ride to reach it, and we had crossed the churning water. The driver fell asleep and we crashed into a bank , losing a wheel. By nightfall we lurched into San Ramon like some great wounded armadillo.
The next morning we flew to Cuti, following the now slow brown river through impenetrable jungle.
The mission lies above the rivers Ene and Cuti overlooking a distance of a few hundred miles. At dusk you can see the last sun reflected in fourteen distant waterfalls. I had been there four years earlier, before settlers from Ayacucho, come to grow cocaine, burnt down everything Mariano had built for the Campas over fifteen years - a school, a medical post, a farm....
It's very inaccessibility has turned this region into some kind of chess board. Sendero Luminoso terrorists, cocaine traffickers, settlers, gold prospectors vie with each other for land, and the Campa Indians, to whom the jungle belongs or rather who belong to the jungle, are being driven further and further back whre eventually they will be trapped on the other side by the deforstation in Brazil.
Walking through the jungle, sun - sprinkled, damp red earth, early morning half-light, the overhead foliage a heavy curtain of leaves with chinks of blue...the Campas materialise, pass you siently, cautiously like wild animals. You can smell wood smoke on their garments. Vast tree trunks and electric whistles from the shadowy background and then we are in the open again, crossing a dry river bed. Baking sand and coloured stones, the footprints of a tapir....
We followed the river upstream, now a brook, clear water breaking over large flat stones, then waterfalls,heady orchid scent and huge spangled butterflies. We continued following the water until we were climbing through a tunnel of leaves and wading through the water waist high. And suddenly we were in the open again, facing a vast waterfall thundering out the the hillside. We swam behind it and were covered with yellow butterflies as we lay in the sun.
Downstream we rode a balsa raft lent by a Campa in exchange for some cigarettes. We were hurled over the rapids by the current, but capsized only when dogs tried to jump onboard. As the river widened and became calmer, the light grew mellower and turned the sand into gold and the leaves into emerald. We reached the village as the men were leaving with their bows and arrows to hunt. Cocaine aeroplanes buzzed overhead on the last run of the day.
I painted a life size composition for Mariano's church: the figure of Christ a s a Campa warrior giving the lands to his people. My model was the Curandero of the village, its witch doctor or "shaman". In their own religion the creator shows himself in a bolt of lightening and his presence is felt when a white humming bird is seen.
My pictue would involve these images. I was honoured and amazed when it transpired that the village was to hold a ceremony at which they would take ayahuasca, a strong hallucinogenic drug, under the influence of which they can speak to the spirts of their ancestors. They said that they would ask for me to see the lightning so that I could paint it for them.
The painting was finished as the rains were almost beginning. The river was too turbulent to swim in - cracks and bursts of lightning threw the sky into confusion.
We waited a week for the airoplane to arrive and flew through a complete circle of rainbow. The small sick Campa child whom we were bringing to hospital died before he reached it. His family had painted his face with war paint for the journey out of Cutivirene. He was not afraid. 1987