We wandered into Sina late in the afternoon and I triumphantly laid my spoils before Lisa. Cans of peaches, dried corn, a wonderful Peruvian grain called quinoa.
I ate dinner and went to bed. Lisa informed me that the Sargent of the Sina Guardia Civil post had returned. The two kid guardias had vaguely mentioned to me that some kind of Sargent inhabited the post, referring to him as a "lone bird." I passed the post early the next morning while on my way to take my early morning dump, and saw him sitting sorting papers behind his table. He called me in, so I introduced myself and asked his name.
"I am the Sargent of the Post!" he flew back.
"Excuse me, I am on my way to take a shit," I replied and showed him my toilet paper to prove it. After all, I had friends in this town now, and I needn't worry about his lousy opinion.
I stopped in again later on in the morning and he asked after his fellow asshole who had so cleverly questioned me in Ananea. I told him that I had talked with his friend for quite a while.
"Did he stamp your passport?" he questioned importantly. He hadn't.
"Yes, of course he did," I immediately replied. "We talked for an hour and a half!"
"But he didn't stamp your passport?" queried the Sargent again.
"Yes, yes, he gave us a map showing us how to get here," I replied straightforwardly, hoping he would soon give me up as a hopelessly dumb foreigner. "Well, see you later. Thank you very much!" I nodded politely and left.
The rest of the day we spent down the valley -- after a twisted wet and green and slippery walk -- looking at Cristobal's new calf. With us came Clristobal and his lovely 6-year-old daughter Namea, and Idelsa, Emilio's sexy 15-year-old wife whd gave Lisa the creeps because she was always examining and feeling Lisa's clothes. Idelsa milked the cow and then we sat under our ponchos waiting for it to stop raining, which it didn't.
It was about that time that Lisa fell in love with Santiago. Santiago was one of the brothers of Roberto from whom we had rented the house. And it was about that time that I realized that Santiago had only one arm. The other one was gone. He had been around every other day or so for a week and I had never noticed, although I remember being surprised at shaking someone's left hand instead of their right shortly after ee had arrived. Santiago had fallen on a rock while playing soccer when he was only twelve years old or so. His right arm simply dried up and came off, all right there in Sina. So the story goes.
Monday after market day, like Sunday after market day, everything was quiet and settled in Sina. We had wandered across the valley over to Amelia's house and were admiring her scurry of patchwork longhaired guinea pigs. Peruvian guinea pigs have extremely long hair which grows out at entirely unpredictable angles all over their bodies. They look like little walking thatches of cowlick which chitter all over the floors of the Indian houses looking for all the world as though they might be on minute racing wheels, so obscured by their ridiculous cowlicks are their legs. They eat the garbage and their own crap, so there's nothing to do but let 'em be. We told Amelia that we'd never had one.
"Broiled or fried?" she asked. "I'll have one cooked up by four o'clock." We decided on fried.
Back on our own side of the river the kids had all come over to visit us. "Play!" one said and immediately hid her face laughing behind her hands.
"Play!" another one said and shyly giggled.
So I got my guitar and played them some songs. I sang "Streets of Laredo," and "Old Paint." We had lots of time. "Now you sing us a song," I said jokingly. About 15 children were standing in our house. They jiggled and jittered a bit, so I sang another song. By the time I had finished, the older girls had somehow organized themselves and were diligently singing us a song: "Las Trigales," (The Wheatfields). Namea, the saucy six-year-old daughter of Cristobal the schoolteacher, sang with them, only unlike the others, she wasn't really shy at all. She hid her face and giggled only because I guess she felt she had to. Six-year-old custom demanded it. "Oh Namea, don't be ridiculous!" Lisa would say in English. And the boys sang too. And before long they had sung the song through quite a few times and I wanted to sing again, so I sang 'em Johnny B. Goode, by Chuck Berry. "Go Johnny go!" One of the boys laughed and imitated the way the funny gringo was stomping his foot up and down: "Well down in Looziana close to New Orleans..." So I stomped my foot even more, and they stomped their feet even more and sang, "Go Johnny Go Johnny Go Johnny Go Johnny" and I looked out and saw that every kid in the place was jumping up and down as hard as he could with both feet shouting "Go Johnny Go!"
If only Chuck Berry could have been there. He would have seen that he had written perhaps the world's first truly universal song. I thought the music of the Andes was neat, but I could not find the rhythm and I could not learn the tunes. I'm sure the Indians had enjoyed my singing, but they always asked: "But don't you know such and such?"
"No, I don't," I would reply. "Your music and mine are very different and I still cannot learn it." And I would see that they were very frustrated, for they found nothing familiar in my rhythms and tunes -- until I played Johnny B. Goode.
So there we were, trying to learn the tune and words to "Los Trigales," when in walked a little boy with two plates heaped high with potatoes and fried guinea pig.
"Oh my God! I wonder what time it is?" Of course we didn't know, 'cause we never did, 'cause we didn't have no watch. Well we quit playing and started eating. Guinea pigs taste sort of like tough chicken. The kids eventually drifted off. We took our empty plates back to Amelia and told her we were sorry and asked her what time it was. It was about 5:30. We told her we had been playing music with the kids. She said her brother Jacob could play the harp.
"Oh, that one I saw inside?" I asked.
"That's the one." Before long Jacob himself came by. He played the harp outside while Amelia took turns dancing with me and Lisa "to show us how to dance." Jacob played with terrific precision. It was terrific music: Andean music, or "huaynos," as they are called. With the sun still in the sky, we drank toasts to each other after each dance. Amelia had run inside and fetched a bottle of alcohol.
"Salud!"
"Salud!"
"Salud!"
"Salud!"
The next day people from our own side of the valley told me they had seen us dancing. After it grew dark in the valley outside, we moved into Amelia's house. We danced and drank, and I could~ feel Peruvian music slowly creeping into my soul. But it'll have to creep quite a bit further before I'll actually be able to play any of it.
Late at night, at ten or eleven we finally finished dancing, and I left feeling we had had quite a successful fried guinea pig. I placed my foot on the lower stepping stone in Amelia's stone wall and the wall collapsed on my foot. I stumbled home wishing my left big toe would quit hurting, but it didn't. My toe kept me confined to Sina for the next week when otherwise I might have wandered down to the next village to have a look at it before leaving the valley. But there's plenty of time to do that.
The next morning we slept late. We manuvered our two blue mummy bags together and celebrated our still festive spirits. Ultimately we cooked a leisurely breakfast of rice and butter and salt with bacon and three eggs, canned peaches and boiled corn thrown in to boot. Then I had a coffee while Lisa enjoyed her ovaltine. Then I begann to boil potatoes, the only obvious thing to do in Sina, and while my potatoes boiled I thought of the USA and of some of my friends. I thought of Ken Kesey, a free soul who finally ran into the "big boys." The Authorities. The big authorities in the United States who bust kids who smoke pot. The big cops and spies and counter-spies. The guys whose business it is to squeal on other people. The guys who carry guns so they can shoot suspicious fugitives or put them in prison. In Sina I had been told: "Thieves? We kill them. Immediately." ...which made it quite plain to me that there had never been a thief in Sina. (Chicken thieves not being considered REAL thieves, of course.) Do I have the courage, I wondered, to walk up to one of these "big guys" in the USA and tell him that he has sold out on the human race? That he will never again be able to free himself from the untrustworthy world he has created for himself? That his soul would never again float freely with the song of mankind? That thus divorced frorn humanity he should be the last to presume to tell the squalling rabble what to do? Do I have the courage?
No, I'm not afraid, I grinned deep down inside myself. The answer still lies in the steady rhythm, the childish impulse, and the ability to free the orgiastic energy that is stored in the gut of every man! And Johnny B. Goode proves it!
I felt good. I added more water to the potatoes. No matter how many potatoes we boiled, they always seemed to be gone within an hour. For once I was determined to boil up enough. I wanted to be able to feel that I could eat as many as I wanted and still have some left over. So I sat on the floor boiling potatoes and peacefully writing down some of the things I had always wanted to write down.
I became a balloon. A helium balloon. The kind of balloon that tugs toward nothingness: toward the black space that lies behind the twigs of brittle trees at night. The black space that a man can depend on when all else fails: the space will still be there. I tugged toward the stars, old friends, twinkling their cold and honest light down and through the twigs. I tugged out there toward lonliness, that black place of no doubt where I can see dark death as he sees me. And I thought, 'By God I'm glad that Lisa's down there holding me by my string!'
I bobbed my orange head and said, "lt may be true I'm out beyond the step and fetch of homely boundward wings It may be true I've gone too far to rest my head on the green grass bosom of familiar hills I could dare to call my own. And cats and mats and all of that. That's kid stuff. (But hang on down there!) Maybe up there's the only place I can face death on his own terms, but if it weren't for that circus down there with its elephants and balloons... (Don't let me go too high!) Hang on to your balloon, dear Lisa. You've lost your ma and have only the string of your restless balloon left to clutch onto. Follow me! Follow your balloon! There's a circus full of people down there, out there -- I can hear the music now -- thank god for the world and its circus full of people:
"Step right up," (listen to him crying), "see the lions and tigers!" (Poor bastard said that a thousand times before). "Lobster boy. See the boy with no hands. Lobster boy. See the famous lobster boy, with claws instead of hands!" (Thank god for lobster boy!) Hurry hurry hurrrrrry! See the high trapeze! See the man risk death! See the superhuman feats of the man who lets an elephant stand on his chest! See the man who stands on one finger!" (You can go float off into space if YOU want to, me I'm gonna go see lobster boy!) "See the armies march on Rome! See the rape of Europe by Attila the Hun! By Gengis Khan! See the Blacks die! See the Blacks kill the white men!" (Thank god I'm not all alone!) "See the women die for love and the men die for women!" (Oh man, let me out on that battlefield!) "Watch them plant the seed and wait for summer. Come join in the Dance of Fire! And kill the Gooks! Kill the Gooks in Viet Nam!"
'I must not forget to thank these people,' I thought as I sat before my little stove. What a fine little potato I have here now all boiled my me for me to eat -- with a little salt! I must not forget to thank these people; to tell them how valuable they are in their crystal world of potatoes and no kings! That's it! Here in Sina there are no kings! Only an alcalde with a fiendish grin for capturing stray chickens.
"A-a-a-a-a-a-a! Vrrrooooom! A-a-a-a-a-a!" It's late at night and the Sargent is imitating machine guns and airplanes. "I wanna be in Viet Nam," he snarls and draws his 5-year-old pudgy body up to look like a tiger. His eyes are red and he's drunk. He pounds himself on the chest and says, "I'm the toughest of all!" while I and the two kid guardias look on amusedly.
This guy's gotta be kidding, I decide. "Tougher than all the birds," I add to see if he'll laugh. The two kid guardias laugh, but the Sargent doesn't; he's not sure if he heard right what I said. I decide I've had about enough. It's about time to leave.
Fuck this shit.
"I've killed 30 men," the Sargent brags.
"I don't like that," I say.
"What for did you kill 30 men?" one of the kid guardias is asking while I hear the Sargent mumbling: "...and with you, 31."
Can't leave on a note like that, I decide. This 5-year-old may have more than toy machine guns to play with. So now I've gotta stick around for a bit.
"Whadyou say?" I ask the Sargent. But the Sargent's progressed onward already. He doesn't; seem to be listening or talking either one. "Sing us a song," I tell him.
"What for?" he asks.
"So I can learn it. Sing that song about the mountain Ananea and Sina."
The Sargent starts bawling out his song. That's the Andean style: sound like you're bawling when you sing. The Sargent sings. Unsteadily. The two kid guardias and I try and sing along with him. His song is too unsteady. He doesn't listen. All he does is bawl.
Another man is there. A weaseley little stringy man, not actually small of stature, but his eyes make him look thin and stringy. My guitar is there and he's playing it. Sort of. He's acting like a fucking drunk cur. A sycophant. The greasy butler. "Oh, señor, do you like my song?" with a big squinty-eyed grin and rapidly nodding his head up and down.
"Sure I like your song. Play some more," I told him for a while. Eventually I couldn't stand it any more and decided to let the guy dig his own grave.
He fumbled out another chord. "Don't you like it?" I just looked at him. I took the guitar again and sang another song. Straight out I sang it. I handed the guitar back to him. He fumbled out a chord and one line and quit. "You like it?" he asked nodding and squinting. Four hundred years of history is behind us pushing on us. Gringo dominated history! Gringoes are gods. Gringoes have been gods ever since the conquest of the Incas. The fucking Conquest. I've had enough of that shit. I'm no better than you are, you asshole, and if you don't quit grovelling... What kind of horseshit is that! What kind of horseshit is this? Where did this guy come from? The people of Sina are not like that! This weasel only arrived two days ago and he's been standing around doing nothing ever since. What's he doing here with these Guardias? What's wrong with these fucking Guardias?
"Goodnight. I'm going to sleep."
"Ohhhh, Señor..."
"I'm going. Goodnight. See you in the morning. Don't forget to bring my guitar back to me in the morning."
The Sargent is looking at me. He hasn't said anything. Assholes like him are a real pain in the ass.
Back in our house Lisa is asleep, holding onto sweet circus balloons in her sleep. I quietly lift my sleeping bag and place it on two boards in the rafters above the door. There is a large window above the door which I can look out. If some asshole is gonna threaten my young life, I'm not gonna give it away for nothin', even if I KNOW the guy is fulla shit and din't never kill no 30 people. I heard the Sargent and the Sargent's assholes singing and shouting into the night. Breaking the peace is what they're doing. I lay real quiet in my bag on the boards above the window with my little 25 cal. automatic lying on the windowsill.
Two hours later I wake up. There's people whispering right below me right outside the door. They're so close I don't even dare breathe loud or move. They whisper and move around. I plan as to how to noiselessly get the gun in my hand. They move around. I don't move. What kinda horseshit is this. Cops and robbers. A pretty boring game. Eventually they move off around the side of the house. I had kept my head down and never saw for sure who it was. Or why. I finally begin to relax again. I think Lisa's asleep. She's not. Ten minutes later I hear the guitar again. Every 30 seconds or so a tired strum and the moan of a song. Suddenly a man staggers into view in front of the Governor's house. It's the weasel, banging on the now out-of-tune guitar and bawling out his verses. I wonder if the Governor is as pissed off as I am.
At first light I woke up and moved my sleeping bag back down to our bamboo platform and went back to sleep proper. An hour later someone's pounding on the door: "Wake up! Come out!"
"Who is it?"
"The Sargent!"
"What do you want?"
"Come out!"
"What for? I'm trying to sleep!"
"Come out!"
"I'll have to get up and get dressed!"
No answer. The Sargent has stumbled off back up toward the plaza. I get out of bed. I'm ready again to play his game. I find him sitting in front of his post. One of the kid Guardias is still with him, and Alberto is there. His eyes are red too.
"After you went to bed we went down and woke up Alberto," said the Sargent. "He is a good friend. He came and drank with US.
Alberto looks at me perplexed because I'm not smiling. He picks up my guitar and holds it out to me. "Play us a song," he offers.
"What did you want me for?" I ask the Sargent. "What did you want me for?"
"You are mad!" observed Alberto.
"I'm not mad at you, Alberto."
"Play us a song," said the kid guardia.
"What did you wake me up for?" I ask the Sargent.
The Sargent looks tired. He looks the other way.
"If there's nothing you want, I'm going back to bed then. I don't know why you woke me up."
"Oh please," says Alberto, "sing us just one song."
"No, I'm going back to sleep," and I walked off.
Potatoes and children. Potatoes and children. Where did this Sargent come from? I'll stick with my potatoes and children. Or go visit Amelia. Where 's Jacob and his harp? Cristobal's teaching school. So's Emilio. How's Ilateria? How's her blanket coming? I miss hearing her crisp, glottalized consonants. ''What is the Governor, Don Teofilo, doing these days? Why his wife has had her 8th child two days ago! Congratulations, Don Teofilo!
Cristobal and Emilio had invited us from the very beginning to come down and visit the school. By now we felt that we knew the kids well enough so that we could come and visit without making everyone hopelessly nervous. We asked Cristobal, and he told us that the following morning would be just fine. So we arrived bright and early and in time for me to play a bit of soccer with the boys in front of the schoolhouse. Then Cristobal called them and they all came and formed up in lines. Quite snappy. I began to realize that we were about to see a whole little world in action. While the remainder of Sina's 100 or so inhabitants were quietly hilling potatoes; washing clothes or maybe taking a trip somewhere -- the village activities to which we had become accustomed -- we 30 or so in the schoolhouse were about to conduct some separate business. That was why all these little pairs of feet were all lined up so purposefully. Cristobal announced very matter-of-factly that the school was going to have two visitors today, Don Felipe and Doña Lisa, and we all filed into two classrooms. Emilio had the 6 and 7 year olds and Cristobal had the 8 and 9 year olds. Lisa went in with the younger ones and I went in with Cristobal 's group.
Unfortunately as it turned out, Emilio had had an argument with his 15-year-old wife the night before and had stayed up all night drinking, so he was a little under the weather. He told Lisa to take over the class for him and disappeared.
Cristobal ran through some Spanish grammar and long division; but soon he got me to start talking, and once started, I didn't feel like shutting up. I stood up beside the map of the world which nas hanging on the wall and began spewing out anthropological theories. I explained about how their ancestors had been separated from us white men's ancestors for 50,000 years, so we were just like old friends meeting each other who hadn't seen each other for a long time. I explained about how their ancestors had migrated across the Bering Straits maybe 20,000-40,000 years ago. My only problem was I wasn't sure I was getting Alaska on one end of the map and Siberia on the other end of the map connected up in their minds. I didn't really know where to begin. I didn't know how they would try and relate what I was telling them to what they already knew because I didn't know what they already knew. So it turned out to be me who was ignorant. But some of them looked like they were listening anyway, and I had a ball rattling out what I thought I knew in Spanish.
After recess, Cristobal resumed with the arithmetic, so I wandered over to visit Lisa. The kids said they wanted to speak English, so we started in on some kind of English lesson, but it was soon time for lunch. I believe Emilio returned after lunch, so Lisa and I both took up our English instruction back in Cristobal's class with the older kids. We spent the whole afternoon at it. We just asked them what they wanted to know and answered their questions. I should say their "question," because the first question asked kept us preoccupied for the entire afternoon. Someone wanted to know about the verb "to be." We eventually managed to progress to the verb "to have," and finished off the afternoon with the sentence: "He has long ears." Lisa drew the appropriate pictures on the blackboard and I managed to utilize some words that I knew in Quechua as well as Spanish. Mainly, we got a good stout rhythm going and no one got bored. I'm sure we'll have to have a review, however, the next time we get back to Sina.
I generally studied Quechua for a couple of hours a night by candle-light after the rest of the village had gone to bed. And almost every day I wandered around with someone or other writing down new words and thereby compiling a little dictionary. One day I heard someone use the word "ñawpah,'' which I knew to mean "adelante" or "in front of" in a sentence which didn't seem to make sense at all, so I asked what "ñawpah" meant and was told that it meant "ante," or "earlier,'' or "before." I asked if "ñawpah" didn't also mean "adelante" or "in front of," and was told that indeed it did. That's funny, I thought, that the same word should be used to mean "in front of" (a forward direction in space) and "earlier" or "before'' (a backward direction in time), when the two concepts seemed so antithetical to my English-speaking mind. Maybe this is a clue to Quechua thinking, I excitedly wondered and began pondering the complexities of time and space. Then I suddenly realized that English does the same damn thing! We also have a single word which can express these same two "antithetical" concepts. We use the word "before'' spatially, as in "before the mast," and temporally, as in "before the rain."
Since there is no historical relation between Quechua and English, I wondered if maybe there could be something about space and time itself which would make human beings tend to equate a backward direction in time with a forward direction in space, thereby creating this odd pattern in word usage in two totally unrelated languages. Of course since language is so famous for confusing reality instead of accurately reflecting it, it's a silly place to go about searching for "realities'' concerning space and time anyway, but... About that time I realized that Spanish did the same bloody thing: the word "ante," which usually means "earlier" (in time), is found in "anteojos," the Spanish word for "glasses," which literally means "in front of the eyes." So we have three languages, one of which is totally unrelated to the other two, in which the same word can mean "before'' in space or "before" in time. If anyone has any ideas as to why this might be so, I would certainly be interested to hear about it.
One night about midnight, just after I had blown out my Quechua-studying candle and slipped into my sleeping bag, Lisa heard some noises outside. I listened and didn't hear anything, but shortly thereafter I felt something like a little clod of dirt land on my feet. I got into the spirit of the game and started sneaking out of my sleeping bag. It took a good five minutes for me to creep out and slide on my pants without making a sound. I snuck over to the door, and after listening for a minute I flung it open and stepped outside. No one was there, but quite a ways away I heard someone whistle. I looked around a few obvious hiding places that were close by and decided to take a piss.
"Don Felipe?"
I looked up and Cristobal was hanging out of his window. "I heard some noises," I explained, "but there's no one here."
"Probably some kids," Cristobal said.
"Well goodnight, Don Cristobal."
"Goodnight, Don Felipe," and we went back to bed.
A couple of days later, late in the afternoon, I went over to the tiny little thatched cooking hut which adjoined Cristobal's house. Namea and her friend Julia were inside boiling potatoes and frying them for Cristobal's dinner. So I sat down for a minute to watch their expert little 6-year-old hands tending the fire. Cristobal came in and soon we were all eating a pan of fried potatoes.
"We have business," said Cristobal.
"Oh yeah? What business?" I asked.
"A machine," he explained. And he went on to explain that if I would simply bring him the appropriate machine next time I came, he would print money with it and, since we were only a few miles from Bolivia, simply take it to La Paz. There it would be used to buy things for Sina, and Sina's problems would be solved! It is a common Andean belief that all gringoes have these machines with which we literally "make" money -- I suppose because we always seem to have all we need. Cristobal explained that once in his childhood a German had come through his village offering to sell just such a machine, but no one had had enough money to buy it.
I explained to Cristobal that I had no idea where to buy such a machine; that I expected such machines to be almost impossibly dangerous to try and obtain and that I was the last person in the world who would be likely to run into somebody who had one. Cristobal remained unconvinced however, for up until the last day I was there, he referred continually hopefully to "our business" and "the machine."
But before Cristobal and I had gotten all the details worked out over our fried potatoes that night, a middle-aged woman had come in, sat down, and proceeded to tearfully explain in the sobbing Quechua style which is adopted whenever a favor of any kind is being asked, about... I didn't know what until Cristobal told me later, because the sobbing obscures the nice sharp consonants on which I depend for understanding. And when there are eight sounds which are distinct in Quechua yet which to an English speaker all sound like "K's", the English speaker learns to aprreciate crisp speech. But as it was explained to me after she left, the lady was Idelsa's mother -- Idelsa being Emilio's 15-Year-old wife -- and Clristobal was being asked to please persuade Emilio to patch things up with Idelsa, as Cristobal was a compadre of Emilio's, as well as being natives of the same town (a village about 100 miles away). Cristobal assured her that he would discuss it with Emilio the next day at school, and didn't seem to take the problem very seriously himself. This said, Idelsa's mother's tears evaporated, her Quechua cleaned up and her toes stretched themselves happily as she turned herself to subjects I could understand.
Shortly thereafter I went over to my house to get a little more cooking oil (a very valuable commodity in Sina) and while I was getting it, a little boy timidly approached and said something which I understood as "My father is crying gou." A look in my dictionary showed me that I had mistaken one K for another as usual and that the real message was, "My father is calling you." So I said, "Let's go," and followed the little boy down to his father's house. His father turned out to be the same man to whom I had first given antibiotics when he had told me that "everything was wrong" with him. I had visited him since and discovered that he seemed to have recovered, but now he told me that his wife seemed to be sick. Her kidneys hurt. And she held her back over her kidneys to show where it hurt. So I returned to my house and got the last of our antibiotics and brought them down. I had already given the rest away to another man whose throat was so swollen shut he hadn't been able to eat for a week.
After I gave him the pills for his wife and explained again how to take them, we sat talking for a bit. He was a man who felt his Spanish was so poor that he preferred to communicate in Quechua with me. Consequently things were kind of slow. He said, "I understand that you heard some noises outside the other night."
"Why yes, that is so," I replied.
"Tell me," he asked, "just what time of night was this?"
"Oh, about midnight. It must have been some schoolboys looking through our window," I explained.
"At that hour of the night, sir, it could have been neither boy nor man. It was surely a..." And here he used a Quechua word I didn't know.
"What is that?" I inquired.
"A skull," he replied in Spanish. "You know, the Dead."
"Ohhhhh!"
"They often make noises and throw stones," he explained.
This was the only time in our entire stay that I heard any serious mention of anything supernatural. The town actually seemed little preoccupied with such, perhaps thanks to the absence of any Catholic clergy. It seemed there were none in the valley at all, so the town was perhaps able to go about its business of growing potatoes without having to worry too much about prostrating themselves continually before the Lord. This was in direct contrast to a town on the edge of Lake Titicaca which we visited later, where the town's orphans wailed piteously outside their houses for an hour after the sun went down, pleading for rain. Sina had two churches, but I was told that each one was used only once a year: for the two annual fiestas to which people from all up and down the valley came to eat, drink, play music and dance for several days. When I asked Cristobal about the possibility of skulls and ghosts, he laughed and said that it had surely been a couple of boys looking through our window. That I can understand, because I looked through plenty of windows myself when I was 12.
We crossed the valley early one morning without eating breakfast in order to take advantage of the sunshine and photograph the blanket which Lisa had helped to make. Sina was getting plenty of rain, and early morning was about the only time for sunshine. I had a little trouble with my back K's in speaking Quechua that morning because of an early morning sore throat, but when we got back to the other side, I discovered for the first time the real pleasures of cooking with firewood. The Governor's store had run out of kerosene, so we could no longer continue to use the primus stove which had been lent to us by Alberto on the first day of our visit. We used the last of the kerosene to cook some bacon and heat water for coffee while I fired up the clay stove. If you fiberglassed someone's underpants while they were still on them and then took them off after they were stiff and set them upside down on the ground with the fly wide onen, you would have something the shape of this stove. Two pots would fit on it while you stoked it through the front. Roberto, whose stove and house it was, showed me later how to be economical and use only three sticks of firewood at a time while almost continually blowing on them through a hollow tube called a pukuna, but I didn't know that to begin with, so I loaded it up to the gills. I had seen how Namea had used her pukuna, though, and how much more efficient blowing through a tube is than simply blowing, so I had borrowed her bamboo pukuna for a while and then made a cardboard one of my own. So I sat on the ground blowing through my cardboard pukuna every now and then, slowly nursing my fire, and wrote: "Right now life is reaching close to being a perfection of quiet tranquility..." Believe me, it's a pleasure to sit and live and die with nothing more than your small cooking fire! It does make life seem simple, doesn't it? I fried up the remainder of yesterday's potatoes in the bacon grease and then got down to the more serious business of boiling up some dried corn I had bought while up in the market at Iskay C ruz. I boiled it with lime according to Amelia's instructions -- for two hours. At some point Lisa and I interrupted the corn in order to heat up some baker's chocolate with sugar. Baker's chocolate was an item which the three little stores in Sina seemed to have, so Lisa and I developed quite extensive experimentation with it. We would cook it up to varous consistencies with sugar and milk, and then sit right down and eat it! After I finished boiling the corn, I boiled up a large pot of patatoes. Meanwhile I was just writing happily away, creating the skeleton of this here shit you're reading right now. The potatoes were done all too soon, so I put on some water to make toronjil mate (a local tea).
I was set to spend the entire day looking for things to cook, but Lisa suggested that we go on a wool-buying expedition. She was spinning up a storm at the time. She had learned to spin wool -- both sheep's and alpaca's -- using the little top-like contraption which the Indians used. Lisa was starting to look like a little Indian herself, in fact. She wore hand woven skirts which she had bought in the market in Juliaca, and for a few days she wore a beautifully woven likila (a shawl-like affair which all the women wear and use to carry everything from their children to firewood) which Idelsa and Emilio had lent her. It was so beautifully woven of such fine colors that we were busy offering more and more for it, just as we were trying to buy the blanket which Lisa had helped to weave. In the end we got neither one. They were simply not for sale at any price.
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