Wolfgang Schüler

Desolation row: A campesino at the tinku provides a charango soundtrack.

It took two days to get to San Pedro by four-wheel drive. My friend Wolfgang Schüler, a German photographer who's lived in La Paz for 16 years and seen more tinkus than just about any nonfighter, thought there still might be a tinku there. Ten years ago he'd seen a thriving festival with mass campesino weddings and thrilling fights. Whether it still existed was anybody's guess. And so one day in early winter Wolf and I and my anthropologist boyfriend, David Guss, along with Wolf's driver-sidekick, Don René Irahola, a retired mechanic whose stated age ranges from 72 to 90, loaded Wolf's aging Nissan with 75 liters of extra gasoline and left La Paz to find out.

The first night we crossed a boiling river, its steam eerily brilliant in our headlights. Dead people's clothes were washed here, a funeral custom. We chose not to stop. The next day we lurched out of the last depressed mining town, past mountains of slag dug into hideous goblin-warrens by palliris, workers who rinse tin ore from crushed rock for as little as one boliviano, about 15 cents, a day. We ate dust, climbing in and out of valleys where the earth swirled violet, rust, black, gray, white, green. In one hamlet, every person was stone-drunk. They stood swaying blankly as we passed, like victims of some enchantment.

I'd never come so far into the altiplano as to taste its bitterness. Windowless hovels hunched against the frigid wind. A raddled, barefoot family trampled frozen potatoes into the black and vaguely oily staple, chuño. Billboards blaring the names of politicians and foreign-aid projects only added to the sense of desolation. All you could see were mountains upon mountains, an ocean of ranges rippling. Ears roaring with altitude and light, I began to wonder about my notion that all distances could be covered.

We saw no signs of a war. Instead, on lonely curves, we'd pass a young man in a tall, conical knitted hat and a bright embroidered jacket, walking along playing a tiny guitar, a charango, to himself. No village in sight. Once he would have been a warrior for the Incas; now he was a subsistence farmer, with a life expectancy of 46. We drove all day, until San Pedro rose from the confluence—the tinku—of three rivers. We arrived just after dark to find its main plaza full of excited vendors preparing to sleep in places they'd staked out. The fountain's silver-painted swan glinted in the moonlight; the air, at a mere 2,400 meters—less than 8,000 feet—felt edible compared to the altiplano's, more than a kilometer above the town. Alas, Wolf's friend, one of the two local priests, had other guests, but he steered us to a UNICEF dormitory at the far end of town.

The electricity went off for the night, leaving us to the music of charangos and to a crawling and nipping in my bed—which I hoped was fleas, not vinchuca beetles, carriers of fatal Chagas' disease. I lay awake, listening to the shimmering music that would drift through all our tinku days and nights. I thought of the words of Marcelo Fernández, an Aymara writer in La Paz. He'd said tinku was the last ferocious expression of the ayllus‹an education in courage. The need for courage here seemed great.

At dawn, I went out alone. Beyond a stubbled field was the vast riverbed; then stark, pale, folded mountains. This end of town was filling up with trucks disgorging tinku-goers and livestock. People were driving loaded donkeys up from the river and cooking by the roadside. Passed-out drunks lay where they'd fallen.

Men wore bits of traditional clothing, knitted hats and tight, bright jackets mixed with T-shirts and jeans. Women were more conservative, in full skirts and beribboned white felt hats. Black skirts were altiplánico; printed or synthetic ones, valluno. Later I'd hear that Aymaras from the highlands would fight Quechuas from the river, but also that in the contest of tinku, the rules of engagement between ayllus were far too intricate to summarize. White people didn't fight. Their outfits wouldn't be out of place in Boston. To make things even more complex, nearly everyone in Bolivia has indigenous ancestry, so most "whites" are actually mestizo‹as are many indígenas. And of course all foreign tourists are "white," in our uniforms of pants and sunglasses.

Trudging uphill, I fell in beside two campesinos carrying 200-liter earthen jars. "What are those?" I asked one of the men. I was pretty sure they were for chicha, Andean corn beer. "Chicken coops," he sourly lied. I climbed past the clinic and a jail out of a spaghetti western. The jail was empty. I'd learn that its former jailer was now an inmate, convicted (to everyone's amazement) of beating another mestizo's campesino to death‹but that he and the other two prisoners had been freed for the festival.

Past the market, where hundreds of liters of grain alcohol stood for sale in big pink cans, I came to the small plaza where the fights would take place. It was remarkably unremarkable, a rocky, tilted, piss-stained triangle rimmed by house fronts and raw adobe walls. I was standing there, depressed, when a man in his later forties with a reddish complexion and a neat mustache, dressed in khaki pants and shirt, came strolling up. Taking him for an official, I offered a tentative hello. He introduced himself as Saúl Villagómez. "Come with me!" he cried, and led me through a patio and upstairs to a room where eight men lay on straw mattresses.

They sat up and immediately produced a bucket of chicha, and we began toasting. Over my protests that I had a "husband" down the hill, Saúl introduced me as his love, called for a charango, and began improvising, singing lewdly of his golden "pingo," and (since I had a husband) begging to be hired as my gardener. "Oh, let me labor in your garden," he crooned, "to dig your earth will make me—Ah, the roses and the lilies!"

He was really good. The men clapped along; Saúl played behind his head, gazing into my eyes. All along, a fox-faced fellow sat sharpening a table knife to a deadly point. He slipped out to slaughter cattle for the upcoming feasts.

More guitars appeared; new men sang. I turned down a gourd of chicha, on grounds that it was not yet 8 a.m. "The fiesta knows no day or night!" Saúl insisted. Most of San Pedro's mestizo upper crust was assembled in that room. Their lands, nearby, were worked by campesino sharecroppers. Only two lived in town; the rest had emigrated to cities as children, after the uprising of 1958 when thousands of campesinos had besieged the town, vowing to drink blood from the skulls of its inhabitants. Saúl told me that his aunt, Erlinda, had foretold the rebellion. Asked how she knew, she said, "I sleep with the Devil, and he gives me money." Her husband had scoffed until, Saúl said, "el diablo lo violó per detrás" ("the Devil fucked him in the ass") one night. The uprising was put down, its leader's severed head hung on the pacay tree in front of the church. Nonetheless it was fear‹along with the lack of schools, roads, mail, telephones, electricity‹that led San Pedro's gentry to decide there was no future here.

Still, there is a past, and each year the town's mestizo sons and daughters return for this festival, reoccupying crumbling ancestral homes. This year's celebrations were sponsored by one of Saúl's friends, Joél Murillo, patrón of the valley's biggest hacienda and son of the town's great patriarch, Don Ángel Murillo. A quiet man of 35, Joél had ordered the making of 30,000 liters of chicha and brought in a brass band from Oruro; tomorrow he'd sponsor a mass animal sacrifice, the uywanakaku, and then cockfights, a bonfire, fireworks, masses, two saints' processions—a weeklong party. (Campesinos had separate festivities, culminating in the tinku itself, which would begin in four days.) The extravaganza stood to cost Joél the equivalent of $5,000, more than a decade's average income around here. He planned to take advantage of the occasion to marry Prima, his pregnant wife (they'd had a civil ceremony years ago), in a church ceremony. The priests forbade campesino weddings in San Pedro, citing tinku-goers' drunkenness among their reasons, but apparently pregnancy was no problem.

"This town," Saúl whispered to me, "outwardly, it looks like pig's urine. But inwardly, it's our souls' home. People travel days and days to get here."