She is the age of Shakespeare's Juliet—14 years old—and, like Juliet, she has a romantic and tragic history. She is, in her extraordinary way, beautiful, particularly in profile. Her exotic face, lengthened by high cheekbones and large, slanting eyes, suggests a distant oriental ancestry. Her mouth is open, as if defying the world with the whiteness of her perfect teeth, which jut forth slightly and squeeze her top lip in a coquettish grimace. Her long black hair, collected together in bunches, frames her face like the habit of a young nun newly admitted to a convent. The hair then folds together in a plait which goes all the way down her back and curls around her waist. She is silent and perfectly still, like a figure out of Japanese theatre, in her clothes of the finest alpaca. She is called Juanita. She was born more than 500 years ago in some place in the Andes. Now she lives in a glass cabinet (which is actually a disguised computer), in a glacial atmosphere of 19 degrees centigrade below zero, to save her from human touch and from decomposition.
I hate mummies, and all those I have seen, in museums, tombs or private collections, have inspired a deep sense of repugnance in me. I have never felt any attraction to those staring skulls, with their empty holes and chalky bones, which bear witness to civilisations long since departed. They remind me of our perishability and of the awful substances we become if we choose not to be incinerated.
I did, however, agree to visit Juanita in the small museum especially constructed for her in the Catholic University of Arequipa, because my friend, the painter Fernando de Szyszlo, who has a passion for pre-Columbian remains, was so excited by the idea. I was sure that the spectacle of the ancient child skeleton would churn up my insides. But it wasn't like that. As soon as I saw her, I was moved; taken up by the beauty of Juanita. If it were not for what people might say, I would have stolen her and installed her in my house as if she were the mistress of my life.
Her story is as exotic as her delicate features and her uncertain position in life: for she might plausibly have been both a submissive slave and a despotic empress. On the 18th September 1995, the anthropologist Johan Reinhard, accompanied by the Andean guide, Miguel Zárate, found himself scaling the summit of the Ampato volcano (6,310 metres high) in southern Peru. They were not looking for prehistoric remains, but for a closer picture of the neighbouring volcano, the snowy Sabancaya, which was in the process of erupting. Clouds of white, burning ash were raining down on Ampato and the ash had begun to destroy the heart of the ice cap on the summit.
When they got to the top, Zárate started to separate the rocks which began to emerge from the snow; among them he suddenly found a display of colours. These turned out to be the feathers of a headdress or an Inca tocado. Scraping around it, they soon found the rest: a funeral bundle which, because of the melting ice caps on the summit, had come to the surface and rolled 70 metres from the place where, five centuries earlier, it had been buried. The fall had not damaged Juanita (baptised by her namesake, Johan Reinhard); it had merely torn the first blanket in which she was wrapped. In the 23 years he had been scaling mountains—eight in the Himalayas, 15 in the Andes—searching for traces from the past, Reinhard had never felt anything like the way he felt that morning, 6,000 metres above sea level, under a pale sun, when he took that young Inca lady in his arms. Johan is a sympathetic gringo, who told me everything about that adventure with an archaeological over-excitement which, for the first time in my life, I found completely justified.
They were convinced that if they left Juanita in the intemperate conditions at that height, before returning to find her with an expedition party, they would run the risk of her being stolen by grave robbers, or being buried beneath an alluvial flood. So they decided to take her with them. The story of the three days it took to take Juanita down the steep foothills of the Ampato mountain-the funeral bundle 80 pounds in weight, well-wrapped in the knapsack of the anthropologist-has all the colour and excitement of a good film which, no doubt, will sooner or later have to be made.
In the two and a half years which have passed since then, the beautiful Juanita has become an international celebrity. National Geographic took her to the US, where she was visited by a quarter of a million people-among them, President Clinton. A famous orthodontist wrote: "If only North American girls had such a full set of white and healthy teeth as this young Peruvian girl."
She went through many kinds of high tech machines in the laboratories of Johns Hopkins University; she was examined, dissected and speculated upon by armies of analysts, savants and technicians until, finally, she was returned to Arequipa in the computerised display cabinet especially constructed for her. All these devices have made it possible to reconstruct, with a precision which borders on science fiction, Juanita's entire story.
This girl was sacrificed to Apu, the god of Ampato, on the same summit as the volcano, both to placate him and so that he would bring prosperity to the Inca settlements of the region. Exactly six hours before her execution, she was given a soup of greens to eat. The recipe of that menu is being reconstructed by a team of biologists. She was neither strangled nor asphyxiated. Her death was caused by a firm blow to the right temple from a stick. "So perfectly executed that she ought not to have felt the least pain," the doctor Jose Antonio Chavez assured me. He has co-directed a further expedition to the volcanoes, where they found the tombs of two boys who were also sacrificed to the voracious appetite of Apu.
Having been chosen as a sacrificial victim, it is likely that Juanita was worshipped and paraded through the Andes—perhaps she had been taken up to Cuzco and presented to the Inca—before starting out on the ritual procession. From the valley of the Colca, followed by glittering flames, musicians and dancers, and hundreds of devotees, she would have been taken up through the steep foothills of the Ampato to the edge of the crater to stand on the sacrificial platform. Was Juanita frightened, or panicked in those final moments? To judge by the absolute serenity im-printed on her delicate skull, and by the tranquil arrogance with which she receives the looks of her innumerable visitors, one would say not. Perhaps she accepted that swift but brutal episode with resignation or even joy, because it would take her to the world of the Andean gods, where she herself would become a god.
She was buried in a lavishly-decorated garment, her head adorned with a rainbow-feathered headdress, her body wrapped in three layers of finely woven alpaca wool, and her feet sheathed in light leather sandals. Silver brooches, cut glass, a chicha flask (chicha being the Andean drink of maize liquor), a plate of maize and an array of precious metals and other useful or beautiful objects-all of which were found intact-accompanied her in her long repose by the mouth of that volcano, until the accidental warming of the Ampato icecap destroyed the walls which had protected her rest and threw her, more or less, into the arms of Reinhard and Zárate.
There she is now, in a little house in the middle-class area of the city where I was born. She has begun a new chapter of her life in a computerised cabinet, preserved from extinction by a polar temperature, which will perhaps last another 500 years. Depending on the glass through which you look, she stands there giving evidence, on the one hand, of the ceremonial richness and the mysterious beliefs of a lost civilisation; on the other, of the infinite cruelty with which human stupidity exorcises its fears.
