6
Chapter Six
It was surprising how many days I managed to spend getting settled. It seemed that each day was full of little things that could not wait. I could not begin my work until my living routine was established and my house in order, and although I awoke each morning with the thought of going to visit Indian homes, each evening came before the thing was done. During the day I felt triumphant to see the time passing in useful ways, conscious that I was not sitting down and wasting time, but when evening came and I took stock of the day’s accomplishments I felt guilty to see that no breach had yet been made in heathenism. Hudson Taylor had made an impact on China, Mary Slessor on Calabar, John Paton on the South Sea Islands, David Livingstone on darkest Africa. Just exactly how had they begun? It was strange to find the actual daily doing of missionary work so unspecific, so lacking in direction. “Margaret Sparhawk is working among mountain Quichuas.” I could not get away from the image I knew I had projected at home, but here was the other side of the coin. “Working.” What does she do? Missionaries wrote of “doing” visitation, of “reaching” people, of “witnessing.” I did not need to read any more missionary books, prayer letters, or progress reports in magazines to learn the terminology. I needed to find out what was really basic in the operation, and I went back to the source, the Bible, and read avidly the Old Testament stories of men with a mission. Moses was sent to Pharaoh.
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
I read of Joshua. God said to him, “As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee.”
And of Samuel, who grew, and “the Lord was with him, and did let none of his words fall to the ground.”
There was a young sheepherder named David, ruddy and handsome, who had beautiful eyes. And the Lord said to Samuel, “Arise, anoint him: for this is he.” And when Samuel anointed him, “the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward.”
There was Matthew, in the New Testament, to whom Jesus said, “Follow me,” and he rose and followed. There was Peter, to whom He said, ‘Teed my sheep”; Paul, whom He struck blind and later led into a life of unprecedented service; there was, finally, the old exile John, to whom God gave the vision of the Book of Revelation, in which He said, “Fear not, I am the first and the last.”
The God of these men was my God, and if my faith was worth anything at all, I must act on it. I must start out somehow, and the logical place was in the open-air market—why, it was, in feet, the very place where Jesus and Paul had ministered. There I might meet Indians in a casual way, where they expected to encounter white people and would not be on their guard against us. I had already bought the most essential pieces of furniture for my house in a carpenter’s shop, but had learned afterward that cheaper furniture was sold on Thursdays in the market. I still needed a couple of chairs, and decided to combine this errand with the more serious objective of meeting individual Indians. In order to do this I rose early as they did. The wind had not yet begun to blow, and the air was cold and still as I left my gate and joined the trotting, spinning, burden-bearing file headed for the village. Great pale shawls of mist lay along the floor of the valley and the snowcaps floated above them, jagged, detached masses, faintly touched by the rising sun. My shoes tapped sharply on the cobblestones by contrast with the nearly noiseless movement of the Indians’ feet. A burro tethered to a stake beside the road followed me with his sleepy eyes, slowly moving one ear forward as I passed, as though he recognized the difference between me and the rest of the traffic. Grass grew between the stones in the road and the dew made them of one color, silver-gray in the wetness. In a very short time the sun would dry the stones to desert dryness and the road would be powdery with dust along the edges.
I was not accustomed to the dogtrot, especially at this altitude, and most of the people passed me, wives following then husbands, children—small versions of their parents, for they were dressed exactly like them—scurrying at the rear.
The sun was just slanting between the houses as I reached the marketplace, an open square almost in the center of town. Along one side were flimsy stalls with white cotton awnings or umbrellas, some of them walled with sheets of cardboard or rusted iron roofing. Brilliantly embroidered blouses and cheap nylon shirts flapped on hangers from the tops of some of these stalls; others displayed plastic tableware, thin aluminum pots and pans, gaudy glassware and old bottles. There were stalls of gorgeous flowers—white calla lilies, dahlias, asters, geraniums, bachelor buttons, marigolds, sweet peas—and stalls selling meat and cheeses. Great garlands of entrails, tripe, kidneys, brains and testicles from sheep, pigs and cattie adorned the front of the meat stalls, and huge limp mounds of bloody beef and pork lay open on the counters, the flies walking unmolested over them. Beyond the stalls women sat on the ground in front of their open sacks of beans, peas, potatoes of every description, and rice. Nearly every woman had a baby, either peering over her shoulder from a carrying cloth, or lying across her lap.
A foreigner was not a common sight in this market, and the women called to me continually, “What little thing, little madam?” (“Qué cosita, madamita?” It was a form of address I objected to—somehow the word madam with this diminutive suffix sounded incongruous, especially since I was anything but “little.” I hoped I would get used to the term—and after all, I realized, the diminutive was merely an affectionate ending—but it never failed to irritate me.) “What are you looking for, little madam? What may we offer?” I smiled and shook my head and kept walking, picking my way through the litter and trying not to get my shoes wet in the unidentified liquids which ran in the gutters. There was a smell of warm blood and fat from the meat stalls, fresh flowers with the dew still on them from the flower stalls, sour milk from the dairy stalls, high fish and fresh fish, frying tortillas and onions, garbage, wet wool and unwashed humanity—all of this mingled with the ever present stench of urine from the walls of the buildings surrounding the market and from the cobblestones underfoot.
At the far side of the square I could see straw mats, brooms, baskets, and furniture stacked in crazy heaps. As I walked toward them an Indian with a red poncho and navy blue pants partially covered with burlap approached me.
“What little thing, madamita? What do you want, señorita?”
“I am looking for chairs, senor.”
“Here! I have good chairs, madamita, which one do you like? Just go ahead and choose. This one, señorita? Or this?” Eagerly he snatched up one after another and planted them firmly in front of me. Another man ran up and beckoned to me.
“Come, señorita. I will show you good chairs. Come here, come this way, señorita. Come, madamita!”
“Just a moment!” I laughed. “I will look at these first” A woman shouted from down the line, “Come here, señorita! Here I have furniture of every kind. Whatever you want, señorita, everything. Anything at all.”
The chairs were mostly of simple design, roughly finished but sturdy looking. I picked one up. It was much heavier than it looked.
“An excellent piece of furniture, señorita,” the man said, looking up into my free with earnest hope. I thought of him as I had thought of the woman with the toy suitcases, working perhaps in a shop in the front part of his house, turning out the crude little chairs, and I wanted to help him. Then there was the other man, too, and the woman. I saw a problem created before me. Business matters in my own country had been easy enough, for my motives had been simple. Here, however, a project was at stake and I felt responsible to act in its interest. I must convince the Indians, in any way possible, of my good will, for it was not merely chairs that I wanted of them.
There were a few upholstered chairs in the market, constructed on the fat, ugly lines of the thirties, the sides forming quarter circles, the seats too low, covered with coarse cloth in appalling colors. To put one of those in my living room would be a high price to pay, even to promote my end. No, I would stick with the ordinary wooden ones. I walked along and looked at the others, all nearly the same, wondering how I was to choose the person I would please. I asked the prices.
“Sixty sucres, madamita,” was the first answer, followed by a shout from the man farther on, I’ll give you one for fifty-five.” The woman called to me, “Come, señorita. I am going to show you a good chair for forty-five sucres. Come here, señorita.”
There seemed to be no other customers and I felt myself the object of everyone’s undivided attention. Did they know that I wavered in the decision not because I was trying to decide which chair to buy but which salesman to gratify? I kept walking back and forth, not replying to their calls. I noticed that behind the mats which the woman was selling she had a pot of corn soup boiling on a little stove. A child of perhaps three or four wearing only a raveled sweater, lay asleep on a pile of rags beside the stove. He held a piece of blackened banana skin in his hand, and his breath came in short rasps.
“Is this your child?” I asked the woman.
“Yes, señorita. Buenos días.”
“Buenos días.” I had forgotten again. “Is he sick?”
“Yes, señorita. He has fever.”
“Where do you live?”
“Over that way.”
“You could not leave him at home?”
“How could I leave him at home, señorita? There is no one to care for him. I have to come to the market”
“You come here every Thursday?”
Yes, señorita. And I go to other towns for market on other days. That is how I live.”
The decision was suddenly simple.
“How much did you say this chair is worth?”
“Forty-five sucres, madamita.”
“I will give you forty.” It was standard practice to bargain, but even as I did it I felt condemned. The woman needed far more than forty-five sucres, even if that were clear profit.
“No, señorita. Forty-five is the minimum. You can see that I am poor.”
I gave her the money. Surprised, she looked at my face with gratitude—in feet, I thought, with something akin to love.
“Thank you, señorita. Shall I call a cargador to carry it for you?”
“Yes, please,” I said, and she hailed an Indian who stood nearby with a rope over his shoulder. He wore a pressed felt hat with a round crown and a warped narrow brim. It looked as stiff, as heavy, and as weather-resistant as asbestos, and it was a dirty, yellowish white, splotched here and there with darker stains. His hair was cut raggedly just under the level of the hat brim, a poor compromise, it seemed to me, between the white man’s style and the Dutch boy bob of Indians farther north. His face was broad and unlined with a few sparse whiskers on his chin which gave him a callow look that did not match the mixture of suspicion and question in his eyes. He wore loose, uncreased white trousers which reached almost to his ankles, and his poncho, which was blue-black, was folded so that the two outer edges rested on his shoulders. Underneath the poncho he had a homespun shirt of European cut, tightly buttoned at the cuffs and collar. I tried to decide if the poncho was what gave his torso such a top-heavy look, or whether perhaps Indians were normally shorter-legged than Americans.
“I carry this?” he said.
“Yes, please,” I said, and he silently strung the rope around the chair and passed the leather portion of it across his forehead, bowing slightly as he hoisted the chair to his back. He followed me patiently as I went from stall to stall, my main purchase made, choosing a few small things to furnish my house—a feather duster, a little brass basin with handles, a moss-green, dull-glaze piece of pottery to put on my windowsill. He collected the things as I bought them, finding a place to carry each. Then we started home.
“Do you live near here?” I asked the Indian as we climbed the hill.
“Yes, señorita, over that way.” He pointed with his chin toward the northwest. He did not look at me, for his face was bent downward with the strap across his forehead.
“Do you have a family?”
Yes, señorita.”
“Children?”
Yes, señorita.”
“How many?”
Silence. He plodded on slowly, giving no evidence that he had heard me.
“How many children do you have?” I asked again.
“How many will it be? Four? Four, señorita.”
“Tour alive?”
“Yes. And a baby too.”
“Then you have five?”
“Yes, five, señorita.”
“Did you have children who died?”
“Yes, señorita.”
“How many?” Perhaps I was being too inquisitive. But what did one talk about to an Indian? How was I to befriend him?
“I don’t know, señorita.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t remember. They are born and they die. Or they grow a little, and, sickening, they die. That is how it is, señorita.”
We walked on in silence for a while as I thought of this succinct statement of the man’s life. That is how it is.
“What is your name?” I finally asked.
“Pedro.”
“And your surname?”
He glanced at me through his eyebrows. If only I could get through to him. If only he knew how I longed to win him for Christ. He had probably had little experience of white foreigners, but his knowledge of other whites had made him suspicious. He regarded them as his enemies, people who were determined if not to destroy at least to exploit him. Since I was, furthermore, a woman, there was little hope that he would believe in my attempt at friendliness.
“Do you have land, Pedro?” I decided to forget the question about his surname for the time being.
“Yes, señorita.”
“Do you grow things on your land?”
“Yes, señorita.”
We had arrived at my gateway. I was reluctant to part with him without some hope of seeing him again.
“Does your wife ever come into town?”
“No, she takes care of the house.”
I opened the gate and he put the things down in the front yard.
“There, señorita.” I gave him three sucres.
“Gracias, señorita.” He turned and went out. I watched his broad short back as he shuffled down the street.
Was this the contact I had set out this morning to make, or had Pedro and the others to whom I had spoken merely slipped through my fingers? I had pictured myself, Bible in hand, against a backdrop of high mountains, talking—dealing was the word used by evangelists—with an Indian. Sadly I thought that this was how my praying friends pictured me, too, and the picture was not a true one. Things were just not working out quite as expected. What would I not give—O God, what would I not give—to make the picture come true? But perhaps I am impatient, I thought, as I went into the kitchen to make some coffee. I had, after all, found a nice chair, and that was one of my objects. Not the most important, of course. God forbid that visible things should mean more to me than invisible, but on the other hand I should not overlook tangible answers to prayer. If God had guided me to the right furniture there was reason to hope that He had guided me to the right man, the man who might eventually become a believer and be willing to help me with the task of Bible translation. My hopes leaped ahead and I saw already Pedro’s face, lit with joy, reading the Scriptures in Quichua. But it will take a long time, the MacDonalds had said. It is no easy thing to get next to the Indians. Perhaps I was taking too much for granted. Perhaps I had frightened Pedro by asking him so many questions. Well, the Lord could overrule that, too. I must tread softly. It was like putting salt on a bird’s tail.