Page 17 of The Bedlam Stacks

His was one of the houses opposite the crumbling church. In Lima or Cuzco it would probably have seemed poky, but here it was palatial. There were shutters on the windows and, when we went inside, deep rugs over a tiled floor. I leaned gratefully on my cane and held the door open for the boys and the two Indian men who had rescued our bags without being asked. They put the bags down in the hallway and went straight back out to see to the mules and the horses, nodding for me to go in alone. I pulled the door shut behind them. It fitted well and didn’t let in a draught.

When I turned back, the hallway led out into a broad room with bearskin rugs everywhere and a fire tall enough to fill the big hearth, and candles all over the place, because the shutters were closed against the storm. In front of the fire was a table. They were halfway through a meal. Or, someone had been halfway through. It was only laid for one.

‘Sorry to have disturbed you,’ I said. I frowned into the effort that Spanish had become. I hadn’t noticed before, but parts of my mind were shut off in the anorexic air.

‘Don’t be silly,’ the Spanish man laughed. He was lifting Clem onto the couch near the fire. His face was broad, harsh strokes that would have been ugly if he hadn’t had huge eyes and a sweep of well-cut hair. His clothes were meticulous too, his coat richly cut with a green velvet collar that would have been dandy on me but suited him. Everything about him was expansive and I had a feeling he might be the Spanish version of Clem.

‘Thank you,’ I said, feeling shabby and English in the fallingapart, ill-looking way English people always seem whenever you stand them next to someone from a healthier latitude. I moved to the side as the Indians came back in with the smell of damp leather from their coats. One of them had such long hair that the tip of his plait flicked my elbow as he passed.

‘My name is Martel, I’m a trader here,’ said our unexpected host, and something about the way he inclined his head said he could see that I felt shabby and wanted me not to. ‘Will you give your coat to Hernandez there?’ He nodded to the younger of the Indians. ‘I know it seems cold now but you’ll warm up in no time.’

I did as I was told and Hernandez took my coat. ‘We can pay you for the night, if we can have some blankets and some floor.’

‘My God, don’t worry about money. There’s a spare room, you can have a whole bed.’ He was looking down at Clem. ‘Well – he’s fainted clean away, but he’ll come round soon. It’s just the altitude. Has someone got some coca?’ For a second I misheard and thought he meant chocolate, which seemed inexplicable and benign, until the other Indian handed over a little canvas bag that rustled with dry leaves.

‘You give it to him, I think, Hernandez, I don’t know how much is right. Quispe – go upstairs and fetch Raphael out. Make sure he’s fit for human company. Mr . . .?’ he added to me.

‘Tremayne. That’s . . . Mr Markham. He’s normally the one who makes the good conversation.’

‘Oh, never mind, you and I shall manage. Come and sit down, there’s plenty to go round.’

Almost as soon as I’d sat down, new crockery appeared in front of me, and a girl with more food. I gave the first serving to the boys and she looked perturbed, but fetched down two more bowls. I handed along the next one too and nearly fainted into the third. Martel motioned for the boys to sit by the fire. They knelt down with Hernandez to use the hearth as a table. If they were offended not to be invited to sit at the real table, they didn’t show it.

‘Actually, why don’t you all go into the kitchen?’ Martel said to them.

‘I promised their mother not to let them out of my sight, if you don’t mind,’ I said quickly, in case the kitchen fire was less grand.

‘They’re grown men, I’m sure they don’t need watching,’ he laughed.

‘I did promise.’

‘I suppose the world would come to nothing whatever if we broke promises to people’s mothers. Is she Spanish?’ he said curiously. ‘Are you mestizos, boys?’

‘What does mestizo mean?’ I asked before they could say anything.

‘It means half-white and half-Indian.’

‘Is that different to mulatto? My Spanish isn’t very good, sorry. Especially . . . not up here,’ I said.

‘God, don’t worry about that, of course it’s hard. Arriving here for the first time is like breathing with one lung. Mulatto is half-black. Mestizo is half-Indian. And if one parent is mestizo and the other is Indian, that’s something else again.’ Martel smiled. ‘We’re so short of real white men out here that mestizos tend to be counted as white these days, I’m afraid. It’s shocking, but . . . well, we’re all Peruvian now, of course. No more Spain.’

I watched him while he was talking. I couldn’t tell if he was the kind of person he would have been if he had said it in English in London, the kind who wanted to round up all the Jews and sink them in the Thames again. He was cheerfuller and gentler than that type at home. Although we had crossed Peru widthwise by then, we had never stopped anywhere for long enough to have a proper conversation with anybody, and I had only a hazy idea of where the walls built by the good men were, and what they walled in or out. The only thing I was sure of was that the boundaries would be different to the English kind. Not as different as China, I hoped, because that had been exhausting – to be friends with people who were kind and amiable to me but kept their wives like crippled prisoners in a back room somewhere – but it would be different.

‘You look very thoughtful,’ he laughed.

‘No, I’m just slow.’ I pushed my hand across my forehead. The altitude headache had become familiar and comfortable, but I could nearly see the fog. I would have been able to decide what sort of person he was at sea level, easily. I looked up when Hernandez set some coca leaves down by me too. Martel smiled a little as he leaned across and dropped them in a cup, which he filled with water from the kettle between us. A deep grassy smell steamed up from it.

‘The Indians say it’s a crime to have it as tea, but I think sometimes half the problem is the cold,’ he explained. ‘Just give it until it goes green.’

‘Thank you,’ I said again. I faded back in my chair, listening to my heart thump loud around the bones inside my ears, which hurt.

‘Pardon me, but did you say your name was Tremayne?’ Martel said. He had taken his coat off too and underneath he had a beautiful brocade waistcoat, the same red as the wine. ‘I feel sure that sounds familiar?’

‘My family have been here before. My grandfather came in . . .’ The unexpected numbers pulled me up short. They never had in London. Like a fever echo, I heard how slowly I was talking. It wasn’t unnatural, not like being drunk, but it was noticeable. I prodded the coca leaves with a spoon to hurry them along and tried a sip while I hauled together the names of the years. It tasted like any other herbal tea. ‘Seventeen . . . eighty?’

Martel nodded encouragingly.

‘He was stealing quinine bark. He got caught and he had to hide in an Indian village for a while, then got interested in Quechua and kept coming back for twenty years or so. My father was born there. He came for a few months every year.’