The Second Ceremony in Cabanaconde

On the way from the kindergarten to the elementary school, we had to climb over ditches and piles of rubble. They were gradually paving the streets of Cabanaconde.
"When we were looking for Asher," Ofer told me, "the whole town was dug up like this. He could have been buried anywhere."
That's what we had been afraid of. Maybe Asher had made the wrong man angry at him, gotten into a fight, and been murdered. The killer could have thrown him over the edge of the canyon or buried him under the rubble in the village streets. No one would have known.
In the two or three weeks between the time that Boaz and Ofer came back empty-handed from Peru to the time when the body was found, we were preparing to hire a team of Israeli specialists to go and look for him. One of the men who would have been on the team said that among the first things they would do would be to check for new and unmarked graves in the cemeteries.
The school building was a simple concrete structure, but large, airy, and attractive. The kids, dressed in uniforms, had gathered in a big courtyard behind the school, and tables had been set up, laden with the books, materials, and equipment we had bought. I was pleased to see piles of world classics in simplified school editions: Cervantes, Moliere, even Moby Dick.
The ceremony at the elementary school was longer and more formal. I spoke in Hebrew, and Ofer translated into Spanish for me. The mayor spoke, saying that Asher wasn't the first person who died accidentally in the Colca Canyon, but we were the first family who ever thought of doing something for the people of Cabanaconde. The Governor spoke, and with my meager Spanish I heard him mention Israel, which was one of the things we had in mind. Then the kids sang a few songs and a five or six of them came up by turns and recited poems in Spanish, with sweeping theatrical movements of their arms and deep bows. One was a patriotic poem about Peru, how they would defend it against all enemies.
Then we gave a notebook, a pencil, and a ballpoint pen to each of the students.
Then, before we left, they gave us presents - Peruvian handicrafts.
Diego, the man who found Asher's body, showed up. His eight-year-old daughter attended the school, and she had been one of the kids who recited poems.
It was two-thirty or so by then. We were all hungry. Ofer invited Diego and his family to meet us in the square, so we could take them out for lunch.
He came with his daughter and his twelve-year old son, but without his wife, who wasn't feeling well, he said.
We headed for a place down the street from the corner of the square, but before we got there we passed a little hotel, which had a restaurant, but whose shutters were drawn. Diego's daughter insisted that she wanted to eat there, saying (I think) that it was her aunt's place. So we knocked, someone rolled up the shutters, and we went in.
Communication with Diego was awkward, since it all went through Ofer, but we could tell he was a kind, very modest person, shy and self-effacing.

The First Ceremony in Cabanaconde

Before leaving the lookout at Cruz del Condor we ate avocado sandwiches in the triangular rolls typical of this part of Peru, and that was our last food for quite a while that day. We checked into our rather whimsical hotel, the Kunturwassi (which we later learned meant, "Home of the Condor"), without any baggage, at 12:30. We were due to meet the school principals in half an hour. There was no time to eat, so I rested.
At one o'clock we walked down the narrow street from out hotel to the main square of Cabanaconde, past a little house with a Jehova's Witnesses sign on it, and there Mario and Norma were waiting for us.
We were concerned. A ceremony was planned at the two schools, at which we'd display the gifts and distribute things to the children, but the truck was stranded. How could we hold the ceremony?
Just as we reached the square and greeted Mario and Norma, the truck rolled in. The situation was saved.
We followed the truck down a narrow, unpaved road and began to get an impression of Cabanaconde: a grid of narrow unpaved roads lined with adobe houses, mainly roofed with galvanized steel sheets. There were animals in almost all the courtyards. A few hundred yards down the street, the truck stopped in front of a low, white building, identified as "INSTITUCION EDUCATIONAL INICIAL CABANACONDE," and the mountain rescue men started unloading the truck.
Norma ushered us into her kindergarten. About forty little kids were sitting against the walls of the large courtyard, beneath a large brownish yellow mural, with Peace written on it in Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic. An Israeli, who had signed his name as Lior, had preceded us in Cabanaconde!
While they were unpacking the things we had bought, I went over and sat with the children. Once had I taken a couple of pictures of them and showed them the pictures on the display of my digital camera, I was mobbed - what a pleasure!
Then the ceremony began. Cabezon, the driver, organized the pupils into lines, and they sang some songs for us. The teacher who led them in singing clearly enjoyed what she was doing. The children were all clean and well-behaved. They stood quietly in their lines while we gave each of them a notebook and a couple of pencils.
The mayor of the village and the governor of the district (a man appointed by the central government) were in attendance. In the end, as we were leaving, Norma draped necklaces of dried corncobs around our necks. Then we headed for the elementary school for a more elaborate ceremony.
At the kindergarten we also met Dante, a young man with a smooth, brown face who spoke pretty good English. In fact he told us that he taught it in an adult education program that he had set up. His son was one of the kids in the kindergarten, and he'd been invited to attend the ceremony.

Two Stops on the Way to Cabanaconde

Early the next morning we piled into and onto the police vehicle, loading it beyond what anyone would think it could take: eight people, suitcases, the school supplies and computers we had bought. The plan was to reach the lookout point, Cruz del Condor, by eight-thirty, so we'd have a chance of spotting the famous Colca Canyon condors.
Along the way we stopped in the village of Yanque, which has a vast central square and a monumental church, with beautiful stonework. We got out and walked around there, but we didn't have time to go into the church.
The unpaved road grew narrower as we drove along the edge of the canyon, seeing terraces that were probably built long before the Spanish arrived in Peru. We were taking the route that Asher took on the last day of his life, seeing the sights he saw, trying to imagine his response the landscape while responding to it ourselves.
Cruz del Condor, despite its remoteness, attracts hundreds of tourists every morning, busloads full of groups from all over the world, tourists hoping to catch a sight of the majestic birds. We got there almost too late to glimpse any condors, but, luckily, three or four of them did show up, as well as a couple of eagles.
Even if the condors don't oblige by soaring into view, the sight from Cruz del Condor into the Colca Canyon is majestic. We spent a lot of time there, just looking down at the river, a kilometer below us, around at the cliff faces and up at the vast sky.
We also looked over the merchandise exhibited by women in local costume, some of their own handicrafts and other thngs evidently provided by suppliers.
The drop is very steep from around Cruz del Condor, and it was possible that Asher might have fallen from there. We were aware that we were drawing closer and closer to the place where he died.
We continued on in the direction of Cabanaconde, the village from which hikers head down into the canyon. The main dirt road into the village was closed, so we had to take an even rougher back road that led behind the village's fields. After a few minutes, the left rear tire of the pickup truck burst, and there was no spare tire.
Why wasn't there any spare tire? I never found out.
Some of Robert's men were already in Cabanaconde. He telephoned them and told them to buy a spare tire. Meanwhile, we started to walk into the village, heading across the fields. All of us were glad of the excercise. The weather was sunny but cool, the setting was idyllic - small plots of land, down with corn and other crops, and even a pair of oxen plowing one of the fields, to make the scene more bucolic.
No one seems to be particularly upset by the flat tire. Robert and another rescue policeman walk with us, and Cabezon, the driver, waits with another man for a new tire to show up. It was only mid-morning. There was plenty of time.

Chivay (3) - Alejandro

Ofer attended two shamanistic ceremonies while searching for Asher with the High Mountain Rescue Unit.  They were both recorded on video, and we''ve seen them.  The first was with 

a woman, who told them that Asher was still alive, and the second, a few days later, was with a man named Alejandro, who told them that Asher was dead and where to look for his body.  He turned out to have been right 

both about Asher's fate and also about the approximate location of the body.  Alejandro said that he communicated to the spirit world through the condors.

The men of the unit insisted on getting supernatural help in their 

search, according to Ofer, and they would not have been motivated to go on looking without that input.

The ceremonies involved burning coca leaves, reciting incantations in the Quechua language, pouring libations, and offering llama fetuses to the gods.  They took place very early in the morning, at the edge of the canyon.

Ofer gave Alejandro about

 a hundred dollars worth of food in return for his assistance.  The men of the rescue unit said that if he gave Alejandro money, he would just drink it up.

Alejandro came to the rescue unit headquarters in Chivay shortly after we had finished with Asher's knapsack.  He was a short, slight man, in a huge black felt hat, so drunk that he was incoherent, and he had a black eye.  He came with his wife and their eighth child, an infant.  His wife was thin and worn, sad-looking.  Though she was probably only about forty, she seemed to be closer to sixty.

Ofer had wanted us to get up at four the following morning to take part in a reenaction of Alejandro's ceremony, but none of us saw the point in it.  His visit to the headquarters was in place of that ceremony.

Communication with Alejandro was difficult.  His Spanish, even if he had been sober, would have been too mixed with Quechua for Ofer to understand, so Robert had to explain to Ofer in ordinary Spanish, and Ofer explained to us in Hebrew.

Judith asked him how he had come by his supernatural powers.  He explained that eighteen years ago, he had been struck on the shoulder by a meteorite, which was in the shape of a condor, and since then he had possessed powers.  He took the piece of metal out of his pocket and showed it to us.

Alejandro works steadily at his profession of telling people's future, and he is paid pretty well for it.  In fact, he was just as glad not to go through the ceremony with us the following morning, because he had been called to another place.  However, he told us, his abilities will only last for another four years, after which he'd have to work at something else.

By the time Alejandro showed up, I was suffering terribly from altitude sickness, not to mention the intense emotions that arose when we went through Asher's belongings.  My head ached, and I could barely focus on what was happening.  Otherwise I'm sure I would have been interested in hearing just what powers Alejandro possesses, whether he is also a medium, for example.

Look how far Asher took us - to the genuine folk religion of the Andes.  He would have been fascinated by Alejandro and would have enjoyed him, because there was a kind of sweetness and innocence about Alejandro.  He was no charlatan.  He believed in his own powers as much as the people of Chivay believed in them.

Part of me is shouting: What good did any of it do?  Asher's death is an undeniable, unchangeable, empirical truth.  But the fact that we involved so many people, who helped us as much as they could, is a kind of good.

In Chivay (2)

After lunch came one of the hardest moments of our trip.  We assembled at the local headquarters of the High Mountain Rescue Unit, not far from the main square of Chivay, and sat down on low, worn out armchairs around a table.  A short, ordinary looking man appeared, wearing civilian clothes.  We were told that he worked for the regular police force in Chivay, and he wasthe one  responsible for keeping Asher's knapsack.
In early January, when Diego discovered Asher's body at the bottom of a cliff, he saw Asher's hat and his knapsack before he saw the body itself.  He rushed up to report to the police, who returned to the scene.  The High Mountain Rescue Unit was responsible for recovering the body, but the regular police took the knapsack - ostensibly for investigative purposes.  In Ofer's presence an inventory was taken of the contents of the knapsack, but the police wouldn't release it, although the body itself was taken to Arequipa for an autopsy and then released to the Jewish Community of Lima after Ofer identified it.
Although there was no suspicion of foul play, the police retained the knapsack as evidence of some kind, apparently until we, his parents, came to claim it.  This is one of those situations where we could get no clear answers from anyone.  Was it necessary for us to come all way from Israel to Peru to obtain release of the knapsack, or could we have delegated someone to get it?  What did the local police want it for?
Now we were given the choice.  We could go with the man from the police department and pick up the knapsack there, or we could wait at the Rescue Unit's headquarters and he would bring it to us.  We chose to wait.  The man left and came back shortly with the small green canvas knapsack Asher had taken with him on an excursion that was supposed to have been short.
The procedure was formal and bureaucratic.  The man from the police department brought with him an official list of the contents of the knapsack, which we had to sign.  With a straight face, he told us that four hundred soles (about $130) in paper money, that had been with Asher, had completely disintegrated.

Everything else in the knapsack was in surprisingly good condition, dry and intact.  We took items out one by one.

There was his camping gear: a sleeping bag, a silk liner for the sleeping bag, a poncho, a first aid kit, a compass.

There was a transistor radio, a good pocket knife from Granada, Spain, which we had bought there and given him years ago, his excellent digital reflex camera (which was irreparably broken by his fall), and some other personal things.

There were disposable contact lenses, condoms, dirty clothes, a couple of knitted wool hats, and his journal - written in Hebrew.

There were a couple of CDs, a waterlogged Spanish dictionary, and that was about it.

Nothing so valuable that the police had to keep it for a year.

Sorting through his belongings, invading his privacy, really, brought him intensely close and infinitely far away.  Every thing that we touched was a reminder that he is really dead.

I haven't read the journal yet.  He left another one in his large pack in the hotel in Arequipa, an intensely personal, self-revealing document that Ofer read last year, when they found it, hoping to find some clue about what had happened to Asher.  I looked at a few pages of it and saw that the material is privatel, so I set it aside.  Were he alive, he would never have shown it to me, and I think it's wrong to invade his inner life.  But I can't bring myself to throw it away either.  Perhaps some time I will want to know more about him.

According to Ofer, Boaz, and Hannah, who have read it, his travel journal, the one that he had taken in his small pack, is simply an enthusiastic description of where he'd been and what he'd done.  His handwriting is hard to read, but within the next month or two I intend to transcribe it and translate it into English.  I'll post it here, if it's interesting.

We were hoping that the memory chip that was in his camera would contain more pictures from Peru, aside from the ones he'd emailed to us, and perhaps give us an idea of where he was before he fell.  But, there was no chip in the camera, and the one that was in the camera case had no pictures from Peru on it, as we found out when we returned to Israel.  The chip that was in the camera has disappeared, along with Asher's banknotes.

In Chivay (1)

Our second stop on the way to Chivay was at the highest point along the way, where everybody stops for the view. The air was thin and cold. Here, too, women had laid out piles of knitted and woven goods. I bought a brown and white striped alpaca wool jacket to go under the black felt hat I'd bought in the market in Arequipa. I paid fifty soles for it, less than twenty dollars, and I've been wearing it steadily ever since. (The picture was not taken where I bought the jacket, but some time later, at an Inca site near Cuzco).
The last part of the road to Chivay descends steeply. In the last email that he sent us, from Chivay, Asher described the terraces cut into the mountains above the town. He spent the night there, and we never found out where he slept. That was one of the mysteries that haunted us during the time he was missing.
In November, 2007, Boaz mainly stayed in Chivay while Ofer was searching for Asher with the Mountain Police. Boaz and Ofer took a room in a hostel on the town square, and when they left, the owner had refused to accept payment. She had been very involved in the search, anxious not only to help but also to show that no foul play had been involved - for the sake of the town's good name and the tourism business.
Judith bought some Christian souvenirs of Jerusalem for her, but she was out of town, and we couldn't give them to her personally.
She bought similar presents for the owners of a restaurant, relatives of the hostel's owner, who had treated Boaz and Ofer to a couple of free meals while they were there. After we ate lunch, the couple who own the restaurant and their daughter came up to the dining room to meet us. Along with the presents for them, we gave them the gifts we'd brought for the hostel owner.
Ofer translated for us as we gave the gifts and told them we were grateful for their kindness and concern.
They were very pleased with the religious items Judith had bought for them. They explained that they were "charismatic" Catholics and hoped to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
When it was time to go, I told them, through Ofer, that I very much wanted to pay for the meal we had enjoyed there, and they answered that they very much wanted to treat us to it. I accepted their hospitality.

Getting Closer

Early on Sunday  morning, October 12, 2008, the Rescue Unit pickup truck took us from Arequipa, a city of with with a population of about 750,000 people, to Chivay, with a population of about 5,000.  Somehow Robert loaded our suitcases,  all the equipment we had bought for the schools, and eight people (six in the cab and two in the back) on the pickup truck, and off we went.

The altitude of Arequipa is 2,380 meters, and that of Chivay is 3,600 meters, and 

on the way you go as high as 4,700 meters.  Until then I hadn't been feeling the effect of the the altitude, but it got to me that day.

All the way I was thinking that these were among the sights that Asher saw on the second to last day of his life, when he took the morning bus to Chivay.

The distance from Arequipa to Chivay is only about 100 kilometers, but it takes three or four hours to cover it on the narrow, winding, climbing and descending roads.  The landscape is barren.  The road traverses a vast, arid plateau with jagged mountains on the horizon.  Part of the region is a nature preserve, and we saw a lot of vicunas, alpacas, and llamas.  We stopped at a way station with a restaurant and stalls where women sold their handicrafts.  We drank some coca tea and examined the woven and knitted garments on sale.

Everything was entirely new to me.