“Better to have clear and high expectations than tolerate what shouldn’t be tolerated. The clearer you are, the faster you will achieve what you want.”
Emilio Mendez
Friend
A small window, I call it mine, is positioned exactly to observe the rear slope of Wakra Pukará. This is a magnificent yet rarely visited mountain and archaeological site located in Acomayo Province in the Peruvian Andes. It is as important as Machu Picchu but may receive only four visitors daily instead of the latter’s four thousand.
The hourlong trek to reach the cabin where the small window is found is made on horseback. At first, Edward Rimachi Yanqui accompanies me on Emperador, his spirited chestnut steed. Later, masterfully, I ride alone from Huayqui, the village where Yanqui lives.
My horse's name is Mayu, meaning “River of Stars” in Runasimi/Quechua. The experience of moving through the mountains while mounted on her back is extraordinary. Extraordinary in the true sense of the Latin roots of the word; beyond the boundaries of the routine. Now, from afar, I feel the vital essence of my mare in my whole being. I remain able to transport myself to this incredible place beyond the veil of time and space as if I were a shaman moving between worlds.
Mayu is the perfect size for me. Left foot in the stirrup, I mount her with relative ease, landing gently in the saddle. The muscles in my abdomen have tightened and toned and I have gained not only willpower but also confidence. As I head off under the stone colonial archway and down the rutted path, my body relaxes into a sway that mirrors Mayu's lilting stride. I sense her hip bones rising and falling alternately in a rhythm she has repeated over a thousand times. Her warm skin has the patina of distressed leather glowing in the shifting morning sunshine. Hers is a primal odor of wet earth and the sweetness of grass. As I touch her, heat radiates outward and the living pulse of her heartbeat synchronizes with mine.
Our path grows ever steeper, but I am secure in the knowledge that Mayu can navigate even the most treacherous terrain. Huge boulders rounded by streams are negotiated with ease. Sometimes Mayu slips on a damp, particularly smooth rock wedged into the hillside, but catches herself and remains upright. The Peruvian Paso horse is built for walking and this landscape, formidable to me, is normal to her.
Along the outer edges of the village, we pass directly in front of Ana's house. Chickens peck the dirt in a courtyard glimpsed through a partially opened doorway. Laundry hangs drying on a line. The house has been hand-built using stone, mud, water, sand and straw. Its construction is typical of the area, including that of the cabin I am headed toward, the cabin with the small window looking toward Wakra Pukará.
Beauty is the cabin’s natural state. Part of its splendor lies in its fashioning from materials that come from the land. Like Ana’s house, the cabin is formed with a foundation of locally harvested rocks. Its rock base is topped by adobe bricks that have the glamour of things made, not by machine, but by human artistry. The bricks appear perfect, but not so perfect as to be dull clones of each other. They have been created directly from the soil underneath our feet in a process that draws from 10,000 years of ancestral intelligence. Homo sapiens, it turns out, may have sculpted with clay from the outset, allowing us to feel between our fingers the raw material of the universe from which we are originated. The elements in our mortal frames come from the cosmos itself. We are, quite literally, forged from a river of stardust, and tangibly connected to these primal structures – the way the light falls on them, the way they smell, their texture, the mood they project and how they link us to the past.
The problem with the cabin is that, although beautiful, it is neither finished nor habitable.
Yanqui has had to contend with finding dependable construction workers to show up for the job. Those hired hands who do appear are young men whose knowledge of traditional Andean architectural practices is experiential. While this direct expertise shows positively in their work and they are as industrious as any laborer I have observed, the lack of equipment besides a hammer and human sweat means that the building process is slow.
Chicha, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn, sustains the youths, but its productivity value seems questionable. As convention demands, a communal boozing ritual occurs both before and during the course of the day’s toil. A hollowed-out cow’s horn cup holding the chicha is passed among our ragged little band. Not only do the men drink but so too does Pachamama. A drop of liquor is poured from the rhyton onto Mother Earth, honoring and entreating her to bring good fortune. Although, for me, chicha has the sour taste and consistency of liquefied vomit, imbibing it strengthens the bonds between people and is matter of collective inclusivity. If Kusi (meaning “happy” or “lucky” in Runasimi/Quechua), the toddler of one of the young men, is joining in, then I should probably join in too.
On June 12, I am in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is a curious convergence of factors that today is not only Edward Rimachi Yanqui's birthday but also the day, after many days that bleed into weeks and months, that I am finally capable of beginning to tell the story of the cabin.
Over the course of many hours of riding together on horseback, Yanqui and I discover that we each have dreams. What’s more, we recognize that our individual dreams could potentially overlap and lead us into an exciting joint project. Building a cabin where clients of his growing trekking business could spend a night or two has been a developing thought in Yanqui’s mind for a while. My desire is to ride horses as often as possible with or without a guide and find an isolated location where I can write. If Yanqui and I joined forces to build a cabin, perhaps we could kill two birds with one stone. Not only this, but perhaps he and I could collaborate going forward, creating more guest accommodations as his enterprise grew. Harnessing the power of plaster, we would create self portraits in ceramic, echoing structures that carried us back to a common awareness in Africa, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Spain and the Pueblos of Indigenous North America.
A comprehensive document details our mutual agreement and shared responsibilities. The project is extraordinarily compelling. Flexibility and compassion on my part are reasonable in the demanding conditions of a country like Peru where services are unreliable. I anticipate the silence, solitude and immensity of the stunning landscape that will be my home for eight weeks. Unsure of what might be triggered by the experience, I am comfortable with questions that cannot be answered in advance. I want the wind to blow through my heart, to disappear into the wild mercy of the mountains, becoming equal under the sky with my surroundings. I am returning to the still center of the hurricane as a way to reconnect with authentic joy. A loner in the middle of nowhere, I am placing myself where freedom to play, experiment and imagine will be unencumbered by layers of societal and familial teachings that block the creative process. I yearn for Earth’s ancient power to wash through me like a starlit sea of wonder so that words might magically flow from the tips of my hands onto the keyboard, becoming poetry without the control of conscious thought.
I see myself as if I were looking through a window from the comfort of my Santa Fe home. Listless under the shadow of my hat for hours, I squint at a sliver of yellow sky between my face and her angled brim. Perhaps my presence alone will cause the cabin walls to rise like magic from the entrails of the underworld. Rays of luminescence reflect off a buckle on Mayu’s saddle. Mayu herself is tethered to a shinny metal peg hammered into the ground. Her silhouette is monumental as I view her from below. She is not just my horse but shape shifted into all the magnificent horses who ever ran throughout the canyons of these mountains. A steel scythe, gleaming like a crescent moon in the darkness, lies in the grass. Later, before we return to the village, it will be used to cut alfalfa to feed the bull tied up in the adjacent field. Close by, the odor of manure is intense. A stallion, rarely released from his stable in order to ensure the management of his interactions with the mares, stands motionless except for the occasional flashing of his tail. The slick of oily water he drinks from a shaved-off tractor tire winks in shades of blue and pink as it catches the sun. I hear Yanqui chatting on his mobile phone in Runasimi/Quechua, the language spoken by his Inca predecessors. A flush of no-see-ums circles soundlessly around me, seeking a patch of exposed porcelain flesh.
Yanqui is seamlessly stitched into the cordilleras where he was born. A centaur, he appears somatically imprinted into the body of his horse, moving through the Andes with a fluidity that belies the union of two distinct forms, a testament to a deep and practiced connection. He completes the construction of the cabin’s kiva fireplace with the same ease, weaving twigs into a framework over which layers of mud are applied in sweeping caresses, softening edges. The form dries into a flawless organic surface.
But Yanqui proves to be as remote and elusive as the terrain that birthed him. What stirs his heart and mind remains obscured. Having once believed his hardened exterior personality would mellow to reveal the approachability of an emotionally evolved inner nature, time contradicted my expectations. The distance between us remains unbridgeable.
In retrospect, it is fortunate that the entire dollar amount as outlined in our agreement was not advanced to Yanqui before I left Santa Fe. We would buy furnishings for the cabin in Cuzco. At a locals' market, where prices for an individual with foreign currency are cheap, I scout for pots and pans. Yanqui already has the stove, he says. He has also researched options for a hot water shower and hardware for it will be forthcoming. Failing that, worst-case scenario, he will build an outdoor soaking tub. From underneath, a wood-burning fire will heat water from a hose.
While the view from the cabin is heavenly, the cabin itself is a hell of a letdown. Looking back, red flags surfaced early on, even before I arrived in Peru. Yanqui's reassurances were always the same, “Just a few more days.” Finally, he confesses that the cabin isn’t ready. He asks me to camp out in the village until the hideaway is finished.
Has the cabin now reached completion? Returned to Santa Fe, space-time compresses as I ride a reverie of stars from New Mexico back to Mayu. I have stopped expecting answers. Yanqui’s promised photographs never materialize and news from him is rare. (Trust him, he’s telling you white lies). But brash outrage and blaming can be a means for the cause-and-effect-orientated parts of the brain to establish control over a poorly understood, uncontrollable set of circumstances. This is not how I choose to use my energy, always fired up, overheated and angry.
As I dream of things that will never exist, what matters is that the small window is there – my window – I encountered its enduring allure in person, transformed by Yanqui’s ingenuity into an event horizon. Its edge exerts a gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape being drawn into the distinct reality that is Wakra Pukará, the gentler world it frames and that I traveled so far to reach.
Janice Jada Griffin is a graduate of Sotheby’s Institute Of Art in London, a designer and an internationally-sold painter who owned her own art gallery in Portland, Oregon, for a decade. She lives and works in Santa Fe, and is currently writing a book based on her ongoing experiences in Peru. For more information, visit avant-garde-art.com or email her at soul@avant-garde-art.com.
