Free Cloud Road by John Harrison Page B

the wood before painting. He ushered in a period where the limbs became a little longer and more slender, exemplifying a Christ in greater repose with his suffering. But even José Olmos’s best crucifixion has a Christ whose back is in ribbons: love is expressed by blood. Were they telling the Incas and the Aztecs anything new? Both had long known that the gods demanded the blood of the most perfect. There was simply an inversion: a religion in which people were sacrificed for the gods was replaced by one in which a god was sacrificed for people.
    By contrast, the cathedral concealed a wonderfulsurprise. The exterior is classic early colonial; exuberant carving romps over the whole façade. But the renovated chapel has a series of modern murals which are native in style and subversive in subject matter. The disciples at the Last Supper are modern Ecuadorians; the ordinary people who every day bend their knees at the pews. Christ is the only bearded figure – native Sierra men have little or no facial hair – and he is not central, but seated to one side. He cups a handful of soil in which a seedling is uncurling, an image central to traditional fertility beliefs. The focus of the composition is a woman in native dress, breaking bread. She is the Inca Earth-Mother: Pachamama. Around the table, next to bowls of local fruits and roast guinea pig, a lute lies ready for the dancing which will follow. On the walls are celebrations of the richness of the life of the Andes: hummingbirds sip nectar from garlands of flowers. Men and women dance in close, and mildly drunken, embrace. Small children stand on tiptoe to hug the warm neck of a favourite llama. A businessman appears as a basin-jawed pinstriped thug. One half of his face is a skull topped by a general’s hat. He is white, of course. Judas is a reporter with a cassette recorder and microphone. Resistance to the conquest continues.
    I gave my feet a holiday and took a coach day trip along the road to Baños to look for living fossils of the Inca empire: the people of Salasaca. As we left the town, street vendors invaded at every junction, walking the aisle, touting banana chips, lemonade, water, apples, mandarins, four scented pens for a dollar, sweets and ice creams. A man dressed like an evangelist made a wellprepared speech to introduce us to a particularly uplifting chocolate bar promotion he was running.
    Salasaca straggled aimlessly along the dusty main road, then stopped abruptly because it had run out of ideas. The very first man I saw was wearing a broad-brimmed white hat, white shirt and trousers and a soft black woollen poncho. It is a traditional outfit that the people in this small area still wear, but it is not from Ecuador, or even neighbouring Peru. He is a political exile, and his ancestors were brought here from Bolivia over five hundred years ago by the Incas, as part of their imperial policy for pacifying newly conquered lands.
    For as far back as we can see, Andean history has always gone through cycles of unification and disintegration. Major cultural expansion and empire building were only favoured when rainfall was reliable. Otherwise, the huge vertical changes in climate, and therefore agriculture, encouraged small cultures closely adapted to local conditions. Occasionally, opportunism and ambition united them. The most astounding expansion was that of a small hill tribe. In little more than a hundred years, the Incas expanded from their heartland around Cuzco to create what was then the greatest empire in the world, stretching 3,400 miles from the south Colombian border to central Chile. They did not, like the Mongols in Asia, operate as a purely military force. Where possible, they preferred to absorb rather than conquer, and exercised considerable diplomatic efforts to avoid outright war. Where they met military resistance, they responded with two main strategies: either conciliatory negotiation, assuring the enemy of the Inca’s kindly future