The Coat Route (9 page)

“Bonita,”
I say when we get under way again. “
Mucho bonita
.” I know that isn’t quite right, but Antony and Alvaro smile and nod.

“Mira.”
Antony points ahead and I see more vicuñas—one small herd on a bare hill, their ivory chests bright in the sun, and then another group, grazing close to the road. We go by and they raise their heads and stare, taking us in—a black truck, rolling slowly, kicking up dust.

After about thirty minutes, we reach the
chaccu
site. It is a wide place in the road, bordered by two low stone buildings. An outhouse stands alone in a rocky expanse, its wooden door half off its hinges. The other CONOPA truck is already here. Parked near it is a shiny white bus with curtained green-tinted windows and futuristic-looking sculpted side mirrors. The words
COMUNIDAD CAMPESINA DE HUAYTARA
are painted on the side.

“That’s the community bus,” Jane says, as we unload our gear. “They bought it with vicuña money.”

It’s the first evidence I’ve seen that the vicuña management program is yielding dividends for the campesinos. That they purchased this fancy coach, in all its incongruous touring-rock-star glory, seems funny and a little sad, like a late-model Escalade in front of a dilapidated trailer. But it is a good-looking bus and it must make the townspeople proud.

We cross the road and head to the top of a rise where there is a makeshift corral, about twenty yards across and seven feet high and surrounded by burlap. From it, two lengths of net-lined fencing splay out down the hill in an ever-widening V. Antony sets up a video camera near the fence and points the lens down the slope. Jane and the CONOPA crew converse in Spanish. I can tell by the way they slap their hands together and stamp their feet that they are talking about how cold it is.

I walk away from them and find a rock to sit on. I feel lightheaded in the thin air, and my heart is racing. I will wait here, with my hands in my pockets, my chin tucked down behind the collar of my down jacket. The wind picks up and I pull my Red Sox cap down. For a moment, I see myself from above: alone on a rock, on the roof of the world, because of an overcoat hanging in a cedar-lined closet in a skyscraper in Vancouver, two pins on a map connected by a tenuous thread. It seems at once hilariously inconsequential and frighteningly profound. I look out over the burnt-yellow plain, scanning for signs of the roundup. But there is nothing to see yet, just the blue of the morning sky and the faint, tissue-paper disk of last night’s moon.

For the next hour, the campesinos and the CONOPA crew work on erecting a large blue tent, a gift to the community from Peru LNG and a key component of Jane’s project. It is designed to make the shearing process more efficient, and less vulnerable to the elements.

“The fleece used to just blow away,” Jane tells me.

Inside, there are stations for clipping, cleaning, and weighing the fleece. There is also a triage corner for any animals that might need medical treatment. Though the
chaccu
is based on Incan tradition, no one alive has memories of it, so it is open to interpretation. Some communities, especially those that attract tourists,
have been encouraged by private companies with stakes in the sale of the fiber to stage elaborate costumed pageants—and even to allow audience participation. Others, like this one way off the tourism grid, are all business. The participants are in jeans, windbreakers, and baseball caps.

The only nod to ritual was a small, private ceremony that was held the night before the roundup. On the mountaintop above Huaytara, Jane told me, the local shaman had lit on fire a container holding an alpaca fetus, cocoa leaves, and alpaca fat as an offering to the gods. A strong flame that completely consumed the contents of the tin would portend a successful
chaccu;
one that sputtered and died said the vicuña would not come.

I scan the horizon again and again, until finally, way off, I see movement. It is a kind of light-brown wave, cresting a distant knoll. Antony walks to his camera and looks through the viewfinder. The CONOPA guys are pointing down the hill. I head back over to Jane, who is now standing near the fence.

“Is that them?” I say. The wave is coming closer, and what seemed solid is now unraveling, streamers of tawny brown moving across the hill, then doubling back. As the herd gets closer, I can see that there are a hundred vicuñas, maybe more, running toward us. Behind them, a line of villagers holding a long rope festooned with colored streamers is pressing them forward. Adult and baby animals run along the fence line and traverse the rocky slope, looking for escape. Dust rises as they sprint up the hill toward the corral. Larger vicuñas try to leap the barrier and a few make it out. A small one gets caught up in the fencing and falls, its legs frantically bicycling in the air, until onlookers extricate it from the netting. Some stop in their tracks, nostrils flaring, then dip their heads and run again.

Children in hooded sweatshirts and dirt-caked sneakers join
the men for the last stage of the roundup, laughing and urging the vicuñas into the corral chute until, at last, every animal has squeezed into the enclosure and the gate has been closed behind them. I walk over and peer through an opening in the burlap panels. The animals stand still, eyes big, ears erect. They are remarkably calm. A few bleat softly. They smell damp and peaty.

When the shearing team is ready to start, they enter the corral, chase down an animal, pick it up in their arms, and carry it out. They stop first at the entrance to the tent for inspection by the CONOPA vets. If the vicuña is too young or has recently been shorn, it is released. If it has a kind of dandruff that makes the fiber undesirable, blood and skin scrapings are taken to be studied later, and then it is set free. If it is deemed healthy and has a full coat, it is fitted with a black hood. Though this is meant to keep the animal calm, the hood makes it look as if it’s about to face a firing squad.

Inside the tent, the animal is splayed out on a low wooden platform, its front and hind legs restrained and held tight by helpers. It’s hard to look at this without thinking of sacrificial altars. But this is a haircut, not a bloodletting. With electric clippers powered by a noisy generator, a skilled shearer removes the fleece from the back of the animal in one piece. The fluff is rolled, like a length of weightless sod, and delivered to the cleaning tables. Here two women with tissue plugs in their nose, so they won’t inhale the fine fibers or dust, shake the fleece over a screen table, pick out bits of grass and coarse hair, then place it in clear plastic bags. Then it is weighed and recorded and added to the stockpile. Later, the fleece will be warehoused, and eventually sold to spinners and weavers, most likely in either the U.K. or Italy.

When the shearing is done, the vicuña is carried to the exit doorway of the tent and the black hood is yanked off. The animal
stands frozen for a moment, blinking and sniffing the air—long enough for me to take pictures, which I do from behind a big rock—and then takes a few steps: a meandering uncertain trot, at first, then a more determined run down the hill to freedom.

It goes on all day, the wrangling and shearing. Though the work is hard, the mood is lighthearted. When an animal wriggles out of the arms of a handler, he and the crowd of onlookers laugh. Occasionally, a worker lets a child cradle a very young vicuña before it is released. The windowless tent warms as the morning goes by: more black hoods, more animals on the table, more humming clippers, more frantic hooves reaching for solid ground. The clear bags of tawny fluff mount up.

Late into the afternoon, the work continues. The campesinos have made the unusual decision to do a second roundup, and the corral is full again. We will be here for a while. I head over to the stone house and find Jane sitting on a bench. There is a big pot of something warming over a fire, attended to by a trio of local women in long embroidered skirts and flat-topped brimmed straw hats. One of them hands me a bowl of the clear broth, in which there are chunks of soft potato and a meaty knuckle of bone. “Alpaca, maybe?” Jane says, when I ask what she thinks it is. I stand by the fire and eat it—alpaca or not—grateful for the warmth of the bowl in my hands.

The temperature continues to drop as the sun dips toward the horizon and paints the altiplano in a pink honeyed light. Kids playing soccer on a dirt expanse near the house cast long shadows across the road. Jane and I get into the truck to try to get warm.

I ask her how many animals she thinks they will have shorn by the end of the day.

“Maybe two hundred. Worth about twenty-five thousand dollars.

“This was a good one,” she says. “You were lucky. Sometimes they don’t happen. An assistant of mine once walked for a few days to get to a really remote
chaccu
site, and when she got there they said they had done it the day before. She missed it. You never know.”

We take turns playing solitaire on her laptop and run the car to get some heat. Then we sit in silence, listening to the generator whir. It is getting cold again.

“I was just thinking,” Jane says after a while. “You know … I get so beaten down by the politics and everything. It’s sort of surprising … that all of this happened because of me, because of the work we’ve done.”

Finally, the shearing is finished and the trucks are loaded. We start the slow descent back to Huaytara. Antony flips through a CD case, selects one, and says something to Alvaro. Antony smiles and slides it into the slot on the dashboard. The music plays. It’s a liquid, ripe Caribbean-sounding jazz, and for some reason, under the high white moon on the spine of the Andes, it sounds just right. I stare out the window as we roll slowly around hairpin curves, our headlights occasionally illuminating Spanish-language road signs with exclamation points that I interpret as warnings about fog and falling rocks and narrow bridges and impending
muerte
.

Tomorrow, the vicuñas, shaved down to nappy plush, will be back on the steppe. The bags of fleece will be locked in a storehouse. The campesinos will return to the
chaccu
site to disassemble the blue tent and pack it away until next time. We’ll head to Lima. Jane will go back to her battles with the bank, and I’ll spend some time in the city on my own. I will have my first pisco sour, and my second. And in a high-end clothing store in Lima’s Larcomar, an open-air shopping complex above the fogged-over
Pacific, I’ll watch a tourist pick up a vicuña scarf and rub it between her fingers and thumb. Then she’ll put it down and walk away and think nothing more about that soft, pretty thing, too expensive to buy.

As we make the last turn and drive under Huaytara’s gate, I reach down and feel around my feet and realize that I left my empty camera bag by the rock where I had been sitting. I liked that bag. I bought it at Best Buy for $35, just for this trip. I picture it up there in the dark, lid unzipped, open to the big sky. And then I decide. I won’t think of it as a loss. I will think of it as an offering.

J
ohn Cutler spent the next several days thinking about the overcoat. An idea began to take shape. He was fifty-five years old. He had no successors. He was well aware that he was the last Cutler who would ever wield the family shears. His two grown sons had no interest in taking over—and why would they? Bespoke tailoring was a dying art. Cheap offshore manufacturing and an obsession with designer labels had brought custom-made to its knees—and a lack of young people willing to put in the years required to learn the trade would finish it off
.

What if he called on everything he knew about his craft to make this coat? What if he and his trusted workroom team made it entirely by hand—without a single machine stitch? What if he used the finest materials he could get his hands on? He already had the vicuña, of course, but what if he achieved that level of perfection with all the other components? Everything he used to make the coat would come from craftsmen who were as obsessed with quality as he was
.

When Keith came in to be measured, John opened a bottle of wine—a buttery New South Wales Chardonnay—and told him what he was envisioning
.

“I trust you,” Keith had said. “Do whatever you like.”

Then he had handed the tailor his black American Express card and said, “Take what you need.” He had not asked then—and he would never ask—how much the coat would cost
.

John got to work gathering the materials that he would need.
Some were easy. He already had premium silk threads and top-of-the-line horsehair canvases, which would be required to give the garment its shape
.

The lining, however, was trickier. The fabrics he had on the premises wouldn’t do. They were viscose blends—hardwearing and practical, yes, but this coat was not about practicality. It was about luxury. There was no question that the lining must be silk—and not just any silk. Only a few companies in the world produced the kind of quality John wanted. Hermès was one. He considered the possibility of stitching together several of the superb scarves. Stefano Ricci was another. John sold Stefano’s ties in the shop. Perhaps he could take some apart and fashion them into a patchwork lining. Then he got to wondering—why not just ask Stefano if would sell him a length of his silk?