BOSSY BLADDERS, WANTON WATERS, AND COCA CAPERS
Myrtle did indeed seem to have a rather dainty bladder. Nevertheless, it had a loud voice, and Myrtle had developed over the years some inventive ways to meet its needs. There were no bathrooms in Sacsayhuaman, and the ones they installed at Machu Picchu were out by the parking lot.
At Machu Picchu on our second day there we were in the residence of the high priest, which happens to have the only indoor toilet in the entire complex. This was basically a hole in the floor slates in a closet-sized room where I guess his Royal Highness squatted to do his stuff and then his slaves threw buckets of water on the slanting floor to wash it all down the hole.
Well, Myrtle was doing just fine with the potty thing until the guide went on and on about the high priest and his special bathroom.
As our group left the area, Myrtle took a quick peek out the door and promptly dashed over to the hole, pulled down her knickers and let go. Then of course she asked if I had some toilet paper for her!
She did manage to toss that used tissue down into the hole, but there were some dribbles around the hole and a telltale smell in the air.
As we exited the room and a new tour group started to appear, Myrtle said loudly in her best school-teacher voice, “It is quite astonishing that you can still smell the urine from the Inca High Priest in here.”
That generated a bit of interested sniffing by the newcomers, but Myrtle and I slipped out and followed our group into the area where the Sun King slept.
There we learned these fascinating tidbits: The King represented the Sun God on the earth, and every day he got a new alpaca skin.
Wow! The alpaca population must have taken a nose-dive at that time!
Water aqueducts were constructed underground to safeguard the purity of the water for the King because it seems people were always trying to kill him. Also, his servants had to taste all his food.
Myrtle said, sotto voce of course, “Well, if he was always killing off their virgins, no wonder they tried to kill him.”
At this point I had a great rejoinder: “Maybe they just coveted his indoor bathroom. Tee hee.”
Yes, Myrtle did seem to have a small bladder. I remember when our guide woke us up early one morning for another “learning experience”. We took a bus out into the high countryside, at an elevation of about 10,000 feet, to watch the farmers going about their early morning tasks: taking their sheep up the mountain to graze, hauling produce to market, tilling the fields, weeding potatoes, cutting down eucalyptus logs for firewood, and making mud bricks for their homes.
This last process was the most interesting to us all.
We watched as a man and his wife worked together making bricks for their home. They had been at it since daybreak, and now, two hours later, already had 75 bricks made and drying in the sun.
The man did the mixing and stomping and pouring and lifting and the woman brought him the supplies. She brought a wheelbarrow of clay, then one of grass straw, sometimes some feathers and human hair for strength, then a bucket of water, then a container of salt, and then a pitcher of something our guide informed us quietly was human urine.
At that point I saw Myrtle’s ears perk up.
The farmer put the right amount of ingredients into a large bucket on the ground, then proceeded to stomp it all together in the bucket with his bare feet until he was satisfied with the consistency.
Then he poured the thick mixture into wooden molds. When he had the molds filled, he took each one and carefully turned it out onto a section of flat dirt, where the bricks would be left to dry.
If the weather remained free of rain, the bricks would be hard and ready to use in one week. If it rained, the bricks would take two to three weeks to dry.
As we all watched the brick-making process, I realized Myrtle was no longer at my side. I edged to the back of our group and turned around slowly and quietly until I found her.
She had taken advantage of the farmer’s wife’s absence to quickly position herself on top of the pitcher of urine and deposit her contribution. She was just readjusting her clothes when the wife came around the corner.
Myrtle, of course, gave the woman her famous blinding smile and made a big show of walking all around and looking intently off into the distance while returning to our group.
I watched the woman pick up the pitcher of urine with a puzzled expression on her face, and then she sniffed it and recoiled and quickly tossed the urine into the nearby bushes. I guess our gringo pee smells different from theirs, and it obviously is no good for building bricks! Who knew?
But at least Myrtle solved her peeing problem momentarily, so that she was a model tourist as we dutifully fed alfalfa to the guanaco and alpaca camelids (isn’t THAT a great word?) as instructed, watched the dyeing and weaving of wool into gorgeous items of apparel, and ate guinea pigs for lunch.
Unfortunately, I think we offended our lunch hostess a bit because none of us could eat very much of those cute little furry critters we had been petting just the day before.
We did love the freshly baked empanadas, though, and we drank a lot of that beverage they make from purple corn.
Then there arose some disagreement among the group about exactly how many varieties of corn and potatoes there are in Peru.
All I kept thinking was, “Come ON, guys! Do we really care if there are 2000 or 3000 kinds of potatoes and 1000 or 2000 kinds of corn?”
But Myrtle got right into the thick of things and at one point threw her arm back, the one carrying the lethal purse.
I grabbed the purse and yanked her out of the fray, which, of course, generated no gratitude from her.
When we got to Tambomachay and visited the Temple of the Water of Youth there, which I overheard one of our crowd talking about as a fertility grotto, I quickly handed Myrtle a small paper cup of the water we were offered, telling her it was water for good health.
Then when our guide got us all assembled and told us that women come here to drink the water because it is said to promote fertility, Myrtle gasped a bit, recovered quickly, and spit the rest of her water right at little old ME! Can you believe it?! Talk about ingratitude!
She didn’t even appreciate the fact that many people who live around here have twins.
Just between you and me, I wondered if the fertility rate might be a result of the elevation. If you can live at 12,600 feet, maybe you are some kind of superwoman?
It soon became painfully obvious to me that I was no kind of superwoman at all. I found out all about altitude sickness in Cusco, elevation 11,152 feet.
On the plane to Cusco our guide had told us that the Cusco region has a lot of earthquakes. There is shaking nearly every day from the Nazca Plate, and as a result, no building in Cusco can be higher than six floors.
So I had earthquakes on the brain as we landed, and when we reached our hotel room I said to Myrtle, “Oh, oh! We are having an earthquake. Can you feel the building swaying? Maybe we need to go downstairs.”
Myrtle scoffed at me and said, “The building is not swaying – YOU are swaying. You must have altitude sickness. Let’s go down to chew some coca leaves like our guide said.”
Well, I drank enough coca leaf tea to drown an elephant and chewed so many coca leaves that my lips grew numb. And I think my brain went numb as well because I started to dump those bowls of coca leaves into my handbag until Myrtle slapped my hand and asked what in the world I was doing.
I think I had been planning to take advantage of a great economic opportunity by snagging a big bunch of coca leaves here and selling them for big bucks back in the U.S.A. After Myrtle so rudely interrupted my daydream, I remembered that I would probably be arrested and certainly jailed if I attempted something like that.
But I did keep drinking coca leaf tea and chewing coca leaves.
Despite all my efforts, I still developed a headache that wound its constricting coils around my head like a vengeful boa and refused to budge.
To my chagrin Myrtle seemed to be unaffected. It was so not fair!
I was the one who had fallen instantly in love with the mountains, with Cusco, with the breathtaking views of the Sacred Valley, with the feeling of being so close to the sky in that so-clean and pure thin air in the cloud forest. I loved it all, and it was just so unfair that the altitude did not love me back.
The guide gave us coffee candies to help us manage our educational tours of the piazzas and churches, showing us in exquisite and everlasting detail the exact stones the Spaniards had pilfered from the Inca ruins to build their churches, their loggias, and their town buildings, many of which were built right on top of the Inca buildings. For example, the Dominican Church in Cusco was built on top of the Coricancha, the most important temple of the Incas in Cusco.
Coricancha means House of Gold. Many of the Inca buildings were covered with gold, and in 1533 the Conquistadores, of course, took all those tons of gold and silver, melted them down and sent them to Spain.
I saw Myrtle once again mumbling her strange incantations, which I had learned were incantations to the Inca gods of thunder, storm and lightning, that they would smote the descendants of the conquerors who destroyed the Incas.
Really! You would never believe how blood-thirsty my little Myrtle is!
She told me that at the height of the Inca Empire, there were 20 million people in the Empire, 100,000 in Cusco alone, the center of the Inca Empire, and that the word “Cusco” means “Navel of the World.” Then the invading Spaniards came and effectively wiped out this amazing civilization. Myrtle was fairly steaming.
She wouldn’t even listen to me as I tried to remind her of the story our guide’s friend had told us, that the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in South America both had a religious belief that a god would come from the sea, part man and part animal, and his appearance would signify the end of the world for them.
The result was, so the story goes, that when the Spaniards arrived, the Incas fell to their feet and worshipped those helmeted invaders who came in all their shining glory on their tall horses.
How simple it would have been to kill off your enemies when those enemies were kissing your feet!
Come to think of it, that may well have been where the Incas got the Smallpox virus that is said to have killed off about 94% of them! So don’t even THINK of kissing anyone’s feet, dear readers.
That evening Myrtle and I were in the market plaza by San Pedro’s church watching what looked like a homemade play production. We learned that the play was about Manuela Saenz, the noblewoman rebel and lover of Simon Bolivar. Myrtle was hooked.
There were also a lot of people milling around makeshift tables where people were buying and selling things, and there seemed to be a crap game in progress.
Myrtle was so intent on the play, following the Spanish words, that she did not notice the three teenage boys starting to circle us.
I knew they would go after Myrtle first because of her size, so quick as a wink I yanked her purse out of her hand even as one boy tried to grab for it, and in a really neat martial arts move, I pirouetted and swung around, belting him with her purse.
Myrtle screamed her famous scream and the boys of course melted into the crowd as I smiled and clapped my hands and yelled, “Bravo, bravo!”
The spectators did not seem to appreciate my spontaneous outburst of applause, which unfortunately brought the play to a screeching halt. I decided it was time to get Myrtle and me out of there.
But I was pretty proud of myself, and after we got back to the hotel, Myrtle was surprisingly effusive in her gratitude, even to buying me a Pisco Sour.
I even had two, because I thought maybe it would get rid of my headache.
No luck. That headache stayed with me all night. I walked the hall, drank water, chewed coca leaves, ate crackers, even soaked my head in cold water.
Finally, about 4:00 am I sat by the window and fell into an exhausted sleep with my head smushed up against the window pane. When I woke with a jerk an hour or so later, my headache was gone! Wow! Myrtle called it Inca magic.
To be continued…