Peruvian Indigenous spirituality joins Spanish Catholicism, the latter being cemented onto what was already there.
A celestial Christ looks over a terrestrial river possessing a Runasimi name – Apurímac, “The God Who Speaks.” Those Indigenous to South America as well as those of indigenous and Spanish heritage believe both in Mother Earth and Mother Mary. Cathedrals built by conquistadors using labor of Native enslaved people are packed altar-to-entrance every Easter Sunday with copper-complexioned descendants of those same enslaved people.
Creation stories of the Indigenous peoples of the Andes Mountains tell that the Milky Way is a river made of stars, a fundamental feature of their map of the heavens, and the source of all water on Earth. This sacred “moving road” reflects a 40,000 kilometer trail system, or Qhapaq Ñan, constructed by the Inca and stretching across their empire from the south Colombian border to central Chile. It connects sky with ground in another perfect syncopation.
My own direct and intimate experience relative to the world of wet and wild came unexpectedly far from any tourist trail. Edward Rimachi Yanqui and I, on horseback one tranquil evening, traversed a meadowland called Chosecani. An occasional ruminating bull stood stock still as if dumbfounded by the disappearance of his enemy, the picador. From our superior elevation, we could see past walls and into courtyards where chickens pecked the dirt, and children, all soft, pouting-cherub cheeks, gazed at us curiously and waved. Women, the shepherds of Andean communities, and whose constellations are found, not in stars themselves, but in the black, interstellar gas clouds between stars, headed for home behind their flocks. Edward and I ambled nonchalantly down rutted tracks at a rolling gait stopping just short of a strut.
Severely impoverished villages do not make easy viewing, especially seen through the twin lens of the staggering, raw beauty of the Andes. Slab houses supporting roofs thatched with the wiry, moorland grass called ichu, like something out of the Stone Age and identical to dwellings in Óscar Catacora’s film, “Wiñapacha”, evoke a host of feelings more easily absorbed from the back of a horse. Somehow, a designated few feet of separation form a protective zone because, the fact is, in a parallel universe, people you come upon could be you, and their lives yours. There is a moment when the mirror blinks and a fragment of your own self lies in the warm flesh and blood of the “other” facing you. It makes it even harder to know that, as a single individual, it’s impossible to alleviate cruel inequities, injustices that are a hangover from the insatiable thirst for conquest that is colonialism. Where the Spanish found harmony and wealth they created hell and want. Where ordinary subjects of their Inca rulers had fundamental rights but lacked autonomy, the Spanish enslaved and took away their rights. Peru’s postcolonial republic has made their highland descendants, particularly their southern highland descendants, citizens without power living in degrees of poverty. It cuts right through to the marrow.
Each stride on our journey felt like ritual meditation, a hero’s footstep along the Way of Saint James. A person might ride in darkness for hours, trusting their steed to securely thread the pilgrim’s path to Santiago de Compostela.
There is something magical about crossing water to reach a destination. I was familiar with the Urubamba, which, even when running low, is an untamed, 300-feet-wide surge of waves, whirlpools, rapids and cataracts. Following a stream beside a marshy bank, seeking certain passage, we were unable to surmise the depth of the racing channel. Attempting to jump across would be risky. A horse could drop a back leg in the splash zone and not touch bottom, incapable of reaching the opposing shore on all fours.
Yanqui, light-footed, as if gravity could lay no weight on him, transversed the arroyo before I had noticed. Ropes in hand, he guided all three ponies individually to the other side. “If you can do it, I can do it,” I shrieked prematurely, suddenly isolated, sinking into swampy loam.
In Peru, spring, summer, autumn and winter are foreign concepts. There are two seasons: wet and dry. Now, in mid-February, heavy rains had converted water to rust-dark muddiness. We could not recognize whether the trench’s depth was six inches or six feet. “Walk the embankment and see whether there is a narrower crossing place,” Edward shouted.
Certainly, I was not going to be the cause of us having to double back and take the long route at dusk to the place unnamed where we were headed. “It’s now or never,” I asserted, removing my mobile phone from its holster looped through my leather belt. “I know you can swim,” said Edward seriously, as my prized alpaca-wool hat followed my cell across the brink.
Edward threw me a line, thinking it would help me to leapfrog the flood if we each grasped one end, he pulling as I jumped.
“Don’t let go for anything,” he said.
“Uno, dos, tres!” we counted.
But our timing was completely off.
What do you think?
Writing is necessarily a solitary quest. In crafting what I hope will be yards of monthly columns and a window into my ongoing and breathlessly-fascinating adventure story in Latin America, taking YOU, the reader, along with me, how is this narrative affecting my audience, I wonder? What more would you like to know? I love hearing from you, and read all of your communications, so please ask me anything and share your comments to my email soul@avant-garde-art.com.
Accustomed to my guide’s reserved nature, I was surprised when he reached for my arm with a semblance of alarm. I looked up, breaking into a particularly purple outburst of expletives and earthy laughter, raucously intoxicated by life, assured of the strength in Edward’s unqualified presence enfolding me. In this fusion of self to the world, chivalrous knight-errant and stalwart squire became wholehearted friends. Moonlight encircled Edward as cascading droplets became silver jewels reflected in his eyes. Inside this shifting from reality to illusion and illusion to reality that seemed meant for the annals of all time, I understood that choices are not arbitrary, but based on all choices made previously. The otherworldly sea hungering for eternity, that need to know, to understand, to seek rushed in and my quixotic free play unleashed, unfurled, intensified and ripened the body and soul that I am.
Wearing cowboy boots and jeans, waist-deep-soaked and never touching floor, grasping for reeds and tree roots, my face silt-covered, I was baptized Catholic right-then-and-there in the Speaking God-Water of the Apurímac.
“Welcome to Peru,” Edward proclaimed. “Do you have an extra pair of trousers?”
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. Jada 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 herJada at soul@avant-garde-art.com.
