Tom Knox: The Babylon rite

Trujillo, Peru

It was a very strange place to build a museum. Under a Texaco gas station, where the dismal suburbs of Trujillo met the cold and foggy deserts of north Peru, in a wasteland of concrete warehouses and sleazy cantinas. But somehow this sense of being hidden away, this strange, sequestered location, made the Museo Casinelli feel even more intriguing: as if it really was a secret museum.

Jessica liked coming here, whenever she drove down to Trujillo from Zana. And today she had remembered to bring a camera, to gather crucial evidence.

She opened the door at the rear of the garage and smiled at the old curator, who stood, and bowed, as courteous as ever. ‘Ah, Senorita Silverton! You are here again? You must like the, eh, naughty pottery?’ Her shrug was a little bashful; his smile was gently teasing. ‘But I fear the keys are in the other desk… Un minuto?’

‘Of course.’

Pablo disappeared into a room at the back. As she waited, Jessica checked her cellphone, for the fifth time today: she was expecting an important call, from Steve Venturi, the best forensic anthropologist she knew.

A week ago, she had arrived in Trujillo — taking a break from her studies amongst the pyramids of Zana; she’d brought with her a box full of fifteen-hundred-year-old Moche bones. This package had in turn been despatched to California, to her old tutor in UCLA: Venturi.

Any day now she would get Steve’s answer. Was she right about the neckbones? Was her audacious insight correct? The anxiety of waiting for the verdict was increasingly unbearable. Jess felt like a teenager awaiting exam results.

She looked up from the silent phone. Pablo had returned from his vestibule flourishing two keys, one big, one small. As he offered them, he winked. ‘ La sala privada? ’

Jessica’s Spanish was still pretty mediocre, and for that reason she and the kindly curator normally conversed in English — but she understood that phrase well enough. The private room.

‘Si!’

She took both keys from Pablo and saw how he noticed her slightly trembling hand. ‘It’s OK. Just need a coca.’

Pablo frowned. ‘ La diabetes? ’

‘I’m OK. Really.’

The frown softened to a smile. ‘See you later.’

Jess descended the steps to the basement museum. Fumbling in the darkness, she found the larger key, and opened the door.

When she switched on the light it flooded the room with a reassuring glow, revealing an eccentric and exquisite treasure trove of ancient Peruvian ceramics, pottery, textiles and other artefacts — gleaned from the mysterious cultures of pre-Colombian Peru: the Moche, the Chan Chan, the Huari, the Chimu.

The light also shone on a dried monkey foetus, grimacing in a bell jar.

She tried not to look at it. This thing always creeped her out. Maybe it wasn’t even a monkey, maybe it was a dried sloth, or some human mutation preserved as a gruesome curio by Jose Casinelli, forever offering the world its sad little face.

Briskly she walked past the bell jar, and bent to the glass cabinets, the vitrines of pottery and treasures. Here were the stone pestles of the Chavin, and here the exquisite burial cloths of the Nazca in faded violet and purple; to the left was a brief, poignant line of Quingnam writing, the lost language of the Chimu. She took out her new camera and adjusted the tiny dial to compensate for the poor-quality light.

As she worked, Jessica recalled the first time she had come here, six months ago, when she had begun her sabbatical: researching the anthropology of the pre-Columbian Stone Age in north Peru, making a comparative study of religious cultures across ancient America. Back then she had been almost a total ingenue, unprepared for the shock she was about to encounter: the high weirdness of pre-Inca Peru, most especially the Moche. And their infamous ‘naughty pottery’.

It was time to visit the sala privada.

Taking out the smaller key, she opened the creaking side-door. A further, darker, tinier room lay beyond.

Few people came to the tiny Museo Casinelli, fewer still entered la sala privada. Even today a distinct aura of embarrassment surrounded the principal contents: the Moche sex pottery, the ceramicas eroticas. They were certainly too shocking and explicit to be shown to children, and conservative Peruvian Catholics would regard them as obscene works of the devil and be happy to see them smashed. Which was why they were kept in this dark and private antechamber, deep inside the secret museum.

Jess knelt, and squinted, preparing to be shocked all over again.

The first row of pots was asexual, merely distressing: on the left was a finely-crafted pot of a man with no nose and no lips, fired in exquisite black and gold. In the centre was a delicate ceramic representation of human sacrifice, with dismembered bodies at the foot of a mountain. And over here was a man tied to a tree, having his eyes pecked out by a vulture. Carefully, she took a photo of the last example.

Disturbing as these ceramics might be, they were just normal mad Moche pottery. The next shelves held the real deal: the ceramicas eroticas.

Working her way along them, Jess fired off dozens of photos. Why did the Moche go to the trouble of crafting erotic pottery like this? Sex with animals. Sex with the dead. Sex between skeletons. Perhaps it was just a metaphor, maybe even a joke; more likely it was a dreamtime, a mythology. It was certainly repellent, yet also fascinating.

Jessica took some final photos, using the camera flash this time, which reflected off the dusty glass of the vitrines. As she concluded her task, her thoughts whirled. The Museo Casinelli had done its job, as it always did; and the feeling was very satisfying. It really had been a good choice of hers, last year, to come out to north Peru, one of the final frontiers of history, maybe the last great terra incognita of archaeology and anthropology, full of unknown cultures and untouched sites.

Jessica shut off the lights and retreated. Upstairs, Pablo was trying to text something into his phone. He abandoned the effort, and smiled at her. ‘You are finished?’

‘Si! Gracias, Pablo.’

‘Then you must go and have some glucosa. You are my friend and I must look after you. Because you are the only scholar who comes here!’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Well. It is nearly true! I had some visitors last week, they were quite uncouth! Philistines seeking out… thrills. And they were unpleasant. Asking stupid questions. Everyone always asks the same stupid questions. Apart from you, Senorita, apart from you!’

Jess smiled, returned the keys, and stepped out into the polluted grey air of Truijllo.

The city greeted her with all its noise and grime. Guard dogs howled behind fences of corrugated iron; a man was pushing a glass trolley full of quails’ eggs past a dingy tyre shop; a blind beggar sat with a guitar on his lap — it had no strings. And above it all hung that endless grey depressing sky.

It should really all be lovely, Jessica thought, here at the equator. It should be tropical and sunny and full of palm trees, but the strange climate of north Peru dictated otherwise: this was a place of clouds and chilly sea-fog.

Her cellphone rang; immediately she reached into her bag. She’d expected it to be Steve Venturi but the screen said it was her boss at the dig at Zana, Daniel Kossoy, who was also the overall leader of TUMP, the Toronto University Moche Project. And, as of last month, also her lover.