14
Chapter Fourteen
Pedro returned for his shots as he had promised, and I took this as a happy omen. When the course of treatment was finished as Lynn had prescribed, the leg seemed much improved, but there was still a small opening which drained slightly, and I suggested to Pedro that it would be much better if he did not return to his work in the marketplace.
“But, señorita, I have to work. There is no money, and my land is very little.”
“There are other ways to work, Pedro,” I said.
“Not for me. I am a poor man. There is no other work.”
“Pedro,” I said, “would you like to work for me?”
“For you?” he asked in surprise. “What work? What can I do?”
“I would give you a job at which you could sit down.”
“What, señorita? What do you mean, sit down?”
“Not only sit down, Pedro, but sit down in your own house!”
At this he laughed. “You want me to weave. Well, I am a good weaver, but I couldn’t earn enough money that way. I earn more money carrying loads.”
“No, Pedro. I don’t want you to weave for me. I want you to teach me to speak your language.”
“You will pay me for that?”
“Yes, Pedro, I will pay you for that If you will let me come to your house every week—perhaps two or three times each week—and tell me stories in your own language—your language, Pedro, not Spanish—I will pay you. We will sit and talk, and then, someday, when I learn to speak, you will help me to translate God’s word. I would pay you for that, too.”
“You want so much to speak my language that you say, ‘I will pay’?” Pedro was still not sure he had correctly understood me.
“Yes, Pedro, I say I will pay.”
The idea finally sank in, we agreed on a price, and we began to spend several hours a day three times a week on my lessons. In that time Pedro earned what he would have made in the market in a five- or six-day week, and he seemed pleased with the plan. Rosa was harder to convince, and kept asking Pedro when he was going to town. When he showed her the money she wanted to know what I had given it to him for.
On the days when I was to go to Pedro’s I tried to make my route different each time, and visit the huts I passed on the way. I had learned the elementary questions from Pedro and written them down on small cards which I carried in my pocket: “How are you?” “I am fine, and you?” “What is your name?” “Where do you live?” I practiced on a new and unsuspecting audience whenever I found one. Their initial astonishment usually gave place quickly to the urge to talk, and, having said as much as a sentence in Quichua, I found it hard to convince my listener that he had just heard the extent of my Quichua vocabulary. Fortunately this state of affairs did not continue for many days, and I was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which I learned to give and take in conversation with an Indian who was willing to make even a slight effort to slow down for me.
When I got to Pedro’s house we would sit down together by the fire sometimes, or, as I preferred, outdoors where the air was fresher and the light better. I liked the sunshine, in spite of cold wind and dust, but I think Pedro liked better the smell of smoke indoors and the snuffling of the guinea pigs. He loved to smoke as we talked, and very slowly and deliberately would roll his cigarettes, using any scrap of paper he had managed to find. He looked longingly at my small notebooks, the pages of which were exactly the size he needed, and I occasionally gave him a leaf although I knew he could not well afford to buy tobacco and I was not eager to encourage an expensive habit.
When I asked him about his grandparents, his crops or his children, he would sit for a long time, his knees pulled up under his poncho, his eyes fixed on the for mountains. He would blow a long blue curl of smoke, trying to think of the answer.
“My old fathers? The ones-who-lived-in-the-beginning? This whole valley, señorita—you see this valley?—this valley was filled with them, as many as the hair of your head.” He gave the lock which hung in front of his ear a shake. “Very, very many they were, and they lived very well. All the land was theirs, the corn and the potatoes and barley, all the towns and all the houses, all was theirs, all belonged to the old fathers. Then, after that, the white man coming fooled them. The white man said he was a friend and the old fathers thought, We will live well with these people, but they were deceived. We do not remember that time. My father did not remember that time. It was long ago, señorita, in the beginning time. My grandfather did not remember it, but he had heard about it, and he used to tell me and my brothers about the beginning time. But when I was the size of Romero my grandfather was walking home from the village one afternoon—the sun was just about there”—Pedro stretched his arm toward the western sky, indicating by the angle how near the sun was to setting—“and high in the mountains it began to rain. It was not raining here, but we could see the black clouds and hear the thunder up the ravine. My grandfather was in the quebrada—you know the big quebrada up by Lame Pedro’s house?—he was in there, coming home—he lived up there—and suddenly, suddenly the rain came, the water poured down like an avalanche through the quebrada and my grandfather died in the water. We found him the next morning at the bottom of the valley, down where the eucalyptus grows.”
I was disappointed in Pedro’s ignorance of the history of the Incas. He had no sense of heritage beyond the knowledge that his ancestors had once been free, and the owners of the land. Talk always turned to things he knew first- or second-hand. I asked him about his children, trying to find out if he had any idea of their ages.
“Romero was born the year the corn crop failed. I always sleep in my cornfield when it is ripe, but that year I slept in it for two months. No one had good corn, everyone wanted to steal. They would steal new corn, old corn, unripe corn. I hoped to save my corn, but in the end it was not worth the trouble. Let them steal it all, I said, take it, take it. And I went home from my field before the cock crowed and found that my wife had caused a child to be born, a man. But it was very small and thin and my wife said, ‘What will we eat? We will die anyway, this child will die, it is not worth raising, I will throw it away.’ So she went outside—still the cock had not crowed—and threw the child away, just outside the wall. But my brother came along and found the child and picked it up and brought it back to my wife and said, ‘Here, you must take care of this child, it is your child, is it not?’ And she said ‘It is my child,’ and gave it the breast, and it grew. That is Romero. A good child, after all.”
Pedro was intelligent enough to translate word for word when I asked for verb paradigms, and this was a great help in learning conjugations. It often happened, of course, that I asked him for a word which did not exist in Quichua, and he would then explain carefully in Spanish what the Spanish word I asked meant. He did not like to say that there was no Quichua equivalent. I could not resist asking why certain things were said in Quichua, why a suffix occurred here or an enclitic there, but soon came to understand that it was a useless question. What did I know of the whys of English? Why, for example, when it was correct to say “He went” was it not correct to say ‘Went he?” instead of “Did he go?” Suppose Pedro had asked me the meaning of get? I thought of the possibilities: get your coat, get married, get up, get in, get off, get caught, get out, this language gets me, get him to go, get away, get dinner, get lost. I was thankful I was not teaching English to Pedro.
Many hours were spent listening to stories the “old fathers” used to tell. Now that I had learned to follow the gist of a conversation or story I wanted to concentrate on specific forms of the language, and I taught Pedro to slow down and repeat. It took a great deal of effort to make him understand that by repeating I meant the very words he had spoken, rather than an interpretation or explanation. Finally he learned, and with the great patience characteristic of his people was eventually almost dictating legends and folk tales to me so that I could write every word in my notebooks and then study them at home, filing suffixes, words, syntax and sounds, memorizing phrases and analyzing forms. The content of the tales was just as fascinating to me, many of them dealing with the origins of things, the sun and stars, the seasons and animals, the winds and mountains and rocks. He told me of the legendary twins who, before they were born, guided their mother with instructions from the womb, and after their birth performed marvelous feats of magic and daring. Eventually the twins ascended into the heavens and became the morning and evening stars. There was the story of the condor who, like all other animals, had been a human being. His betrothed was the most beautiful virgin on earth, coveted by every man who saw her. The Sun God, too, saw her and wanted her for himself, so he took her off into the sky and the forsaken young man searched the earth until he became old and white-headed. Walking over the mountains in his black poncho, stooping to search every cranny for the beautiful girl, he finally was transformed into the huge bird which still hangs in the sky, his head bent toward the earth, his poncho outspread. “That is why he seizes our lambs, thinking to himself, ‘Here is my woman.’”
The afternoons often found me trekking across the hills again, stopping in the fields to talk with Indians as they rested from plowing or hoeing, calling at huts where I found women weaving or nursing their babies. I was happy in these days, confident that the language work was basic and would one day bear fruit which would remain; gratified, too, to be living simply in a small village, moving about among the farm people as Jesus must have done. The things he talked about—sowing seed and plowing, seasons and harvests, sheep and cattle, lilies of the fields, birds of the air—all these things had their place in the lives of my Indians, and it seemed to me that Jesus Himself at times drew near and walked with me. At such moments I was transported by the vision of the great work which had been put into my hands to do. I saw the valley, filled with godless Quichuas, as my parish, and the open Bible, written at last in the language they could understand, as my gift to them.
The little smoky huts with their fleas and stench and darkness, which had at first repelled me and later aroused in me a great pity, I now accepted, as homes, the homes of people I knew. They took on a different aspect entirely, became a part of the furniture of my life, no longer forts of hostility. Inside their blackened walls I learned to respect the people who had built them—how admirably they had adapted themselves to so hostile an environment! Thatch was the only available roofing material, and it belonged to the landscape, to the great stretches of brown grass that glowed and breathed in the wind. The huts had no windows, not because the Indian loved darkness rather than light (though I had once deplored their windowless huts as symbolic of a determination to do evil), but because windows would weaken the mud walls and let in the cold. As for the fleas, I did not learn to love them but was willing to grant after a time that fleas, too, probably had their place in the divine plan. My vehement dislike for them began to seem like a wasted passion alongside the Indians’ philosophical tolerance, for like hundreds of generations before them the Indians had cohabited with fleas and were not prepared to panic over them and spend hard-earned sucres on DDT just because the white man did.
I wished for every Indian a metal plow, a pair of good oxen, better soil and pasture land, and for the Indians who were still held by white patrons as serfs, I wished freedom. Someday, I hoped, someone would come who could bring these things—someone trained in agriculture, husbandry, crop rotation, soil conservation. But these were not in my province and I had to accept things as they were. I hardly realized that this acceptance became less and less difficult for me.
My life went on alongside the life of the Quichuas. I do not say with theirs, for the two remained separate. All my efforts to make myself one with them ended at the brink of the great abyss—I was not an Indian. The topography of the land associated itself in my mind with this fact. The high sierras of Ecuador are cracked with huge abysses—quebradas, they are called, “broken places”—and no one can travel far in any direction without having to descend, bridge or skirt such ravines. My white blood could never become Indian blood, and therein lay the abyss which I could by no means descend, bridge or skirt.
For a time I adopted Indian dress. I bought from Pedro’s wife Rosa two hand-woven woolen skirts and a shawl. In the town I found an embroidered blouse and a silver pin for my shawl. The shopkeeper supposed I was buying them for souvenirs—foreigners bought strange things as remembrances. But on the day that I first wore the clothes I met in the street the shopkeeper herself. At first she ignored me, thinking me an Indian, but then my height and gait told her that something was badly amiss. She shot me a look of horror which quickly changed to scorn.
It can’t be helped, I said to myself; I didn’t expect the whites to like the idea. One must choose the stratum of society with whom one will identify oneself, and rim the risk of offending the others. (How had Jesus come to choose the poor working class? I wondered. Might it not have been wiser to be middle class?) I had chosen the Indians and alienated the whites. The sooner I went on up the mountain where my friends were, the better.
The skirts felt very heavy and the blouse was uncomfortably baggy. The shawl scratched my arms. I could not get the pin to stay where I put it. Footwear presented the greatest problem. I had not been able to bring myself to go barefoot in such cold, and over such rough terrain. Impossible, I thought. But then the history of missions told of others who had become all things to all men, sometimes at great personal sacrifice. Hudson Taylor had grown a queue and worn a long Chinese gown. It never occurred to me that he might have minded doing this. When I had looked at the picture of my aunt in her sari I had thought it a very lovely and comfortable costume. But there were costumes which were not so comfortable or so becoming. This did not change the principle. Perhaps it was an unwillingness on my part, despite all I had proclaimed, to pay the price. What were cold feet—even bleeding feet—if they would make me a trifle less alien? But then I would not be able to walk so far, and perhaps even at all after a while. What could be gained? One must not go to extremes. I bought a pair of rope sandals, although women did not wear them. It seemed a sensible compromise. When I tried to walk in them, however, I was not convinced that they were an improvement over bare feet.
Rosa saw me coming and gazed in disbelief. I had told her when I bought the skirts that I was going to wear them, but the sight was a shock to her. A half smile played on her face—was this a kind of joke?
“Buenos días, Rosa,” I said, but she was too absorbed to reply. “I am a runa today.” It was the name the Indians called themselves. It meant “person.”
“You are wearing runa clothes for-no-particular-purpose?” She used the word yanga, a very useful word signifying the absence of a reason. It made a convenient reply to questions one did not wish to answer, and it was a way around explanations one did not wish to make. Rosa expected no better explanation than yanga.
“I wear them in order to be like you,” I said.
“Like us?”
“Yes.”
“You want to be like us?”
“Yes, Rosa. I want to be.”
“And . . . your nice clothes? Did you throw them away?”
“No, I have them.”
“What will you do with them?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes, when I go to the city, I will wear them.”
“Thinking to yourself, ‘Today I am a white’?”
Yes. Rosa saw what it would be. A fake Indian one day, a white the next. There was hope notwithstanding that this measure might open some doors. But it did not prove to be so. Indians who did not know me met me with doubled suspicion. This foreign woman was clearly up to no good. Indians who knew me looked at me, I thought, with pity, as though commiserating with me over such a reversal of fortune.
“It’s no good,” said Pedro to me at last, when I had dressed like a Quichua for only a few days. “You are a señorita, but you look spoiled. You should dress like a señorita. It’s no good for a señorita to become a runa.”
Spoiled. It was the Indians I had thought of as the “unspoiled,” but I saw now the unconscious irony of Pedro’s words. He and the others of his tribe did not mean to refuse me admittance. They had accepted me from the beginning as a white woman. I must accept myself that way and not ask of them an impossible thing.
Nor should I, I reflected with some contrition, charge God with a botched job. If He had wanted the Quichuas won by a Quichua, He would not have sent them a white woman. It appeared that He had sent them a white woman. And God saw that it was good. Pedro’s words helped me to see it, too.
It’s no good for a señorita to become a runa.”