Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  And Lina?

  The girl went through an agony of exquisite embarrassment. Such a question. It was possible to look only at the floor. A boyfriend! The very thought . . .

  There was a new tape on the machine now, a Peruvian version of the lambada. Juana asked if I could dance. It occurred to me that in South America, the lambada, as they say in the movies, was "forbeedin." Somehow I couldn't imagine these shy young women performing a dance that looks like something the dog does to your leg.

  "Can't dance," I explained.

  A chorus of disbelief for a reply. If I was going to tease, Juana said, then I had to dance. She stood with her hands on her hips, staring at me, falsely stern. I stood, took her right hand in my left, put my other hand on her back, and she brushed it away. No, sir, please, don't: not like that. This was, apparently, a lambada in which you only touched your partner's hands. And nothing else.

  I had no idea how to proceed and spun Juana away from me in a kind of cowboy two-step. This was received with much laughter and applause. Soon Juana was whirling this way and that and would have looked right at home cutting a rug in any Montana saloon. I was very conscious of my heavy boots and Juana's bare feet.

  What kind of dance did I call that?

  It is, I said, a cowboy dance.

  And so, every night for the next week, at least once, Juana and I danced to the music of a tape deck connected to a car battery in a brown adobe room with the high country wind booming and whistling outside in the night. We danced the cowboy lambada.

  The next morning I had pancakes and coffee with the daughters of Sebastian, and started a walking tour of the island. In contrast to the freezing hail of the night before, the sun was now hot and harsh at 13,300 feet. It was, I knew, burning my face.

  About an hour from the village, I heard a rhythmic tap, tap, and stumbled upon three men, all of them dressed in the men's basic costume. There were two married men and one bachelor. Alejandro Flores and his two brothers were cutting stone that would be used to build a new schoolhouse. They were donating the work to the community. Tomorrow other men would cut stone for the school.

  215 A OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES

  Alejandro didn't mind talking while he worked. Everyone on the island donated a few hours of work to the community every week, he said. There were 2,000 people on the island, 318 families. Agriculture had to be very strictly controlled so that everyone could eat: The island was very small, and the weather very harsh. Each Sunday, after Catholic mass, the people met in the central courtyard, where the events of the past week were discussed and plans were made. The highest political authority was the first lieutenant governor.

  Sometimes, Alejandro said, men from the outside came to Ta-quile to "organize" the people. These men talked about inflation, insurgency, and police corruption. What did these things have to do with Taquile? There were no police on the island. The people did not want police. Where there are police, there are thieves. Everyone knew that.

  Alejandro had been tapping on a rock the size of a large footstool. He used a simple hammer and chisel, gently rapping along the grain of the rock. Suddenly, it fell apart, into two pieces, each of them almost perfectly square. He began trimming one of the pieces, and I recalled that the Incas were, perhaps, the finest stone workers in pre-Columbian America.

  The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and the temperature dropped 15 degrees in a matter of minutes. I dug around in my pack for a jacket, but Alejandro and his brothers continued working, apparently quite comfortable. The weather was harsh— it might be 75 during the day and 30 at night—yet people never wore jackets, nor did they strip off a shirt or vest in the sun. Layers of heavy wool, finely made, some anthropologists suggest, create a kind of personal microclimate around the people of Taquile.

  The curious uniform the islanders wore allowed a man or woman to work in the fields under all conditions. The clothes a person put on in the morning indicated his or her marital status, age group, relative wealth, and social position. The island existed on subsistence agriculture, but the textiles produced by the people represented the soul of Taquile.

  Why was it, I asked Alejandro, that the people of Taquile were so honest that they didn't need police?

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS ▲ 2l6

  Alejandro said that if a man stole a sheep, he would be taken before the community at the Sunday meeting; he would be forced to carry the sheep on his back six times around the square, and the traditional twelve authorities, the men who governed the six parts of the island, would whip the man as he passed with heavy woven ropes. If a man killed another man's sheep, he made the same humiliating walk wearing the intestines of the dead sheep wrapped around his head. Then he was taken to the mainland. That man could never return.

  "So you see," Alejandro said, "we have no need for police."

  Alejandro himself, it seemed, was running for the position of first lieutenant governor.

  What were the issues?

  "Natural fibers," Alejandro said without hesitation. "Natural colors."

  There were, it seemed, some people on the island who would knit hats or scarfs with synthetic material. They might even use artificial dyes to color the products and sell them to tourists like myself. Alejandro thought tourists could buy such things anywhere.

  People had such short sight. There was television everywhere in the world, Alejandro said. Why would people need it here? Or loud music. It was a quiet island, very traditional, and it should be kept that way. When the political men came to organize the island, Alejandro asked them, "And where do you stand on natural color?" The men had no answer. They knew nothing of Ta-quile. The people asked political organizers to go away.

  Alejandro, like most people I met on Taquile, was a tireless talker and storyteller.

  All the young men of his island, he said, want to visit Lima, if only for a few days. For the men of Taquile, Lima is a kind of Disneyland of danger and violence, of strange, gratuitous wonders.

  So when Alejandro decided it was time for him to see the great city, he approached the local shaman, called a paq'o, and asked advice. Was it his time?

  The paq'o, who was very wise, sat at a wooden table and

  spread out three of the leaves of the sacred plant, coca leaves. A coin was placed on the middle leaf, and this represented the all-seeing eye of God. A crucifix was placed below the coin to indicate that Alejandro and his family were Catholics. The leaf to the left was turned over so that the dull side was up: It was a sign of bad luck and trouble. The right leaf lay shiny side up. If God and the spirits willed it, the right leaf would triumph in the upcoming test, and Alejandro could go to Lima without worry.

  The paq'o gave Alejandro five of the dull green leaves, and they fit neatly in the palm of his right hand. He closed his eyes and emptied his hand in a sweeping gesture, so that the leaves fell across the coin and the crucifix. The paq'o examined the way the leaves had fallen. All shiny side up, a very good sign. And the leaves traced a relatively straight line, somewhat below the crucifix. They rose from the left and pointed to the shiny leaf at the far right. Alejandro Flores would have good luck in Lima.

  Lima. The air there, in that great city, was very thick and very dirty. Still, the bright-colored lights glittered at night, because there was electricity everywhere.

  On Taquile, there is no electricity, and a man can see the stars.

  One day, during his visit to Lima, a strange-looking foreign man stopped Alejandro on the street. He was very excited about something, and Alejandro thought perhaps this tall, thin man was crazy or drunk. No, the man said, please don't go. Please, sir, the man said, just allow me to ask a few questions. Where had Alejandro gotten the wool to weave his belt?

  From sheep, of course.

  His own sheep?

  Yes, everyone on Taquile raised sheep.

  And how did they spin the wool? Did Alejandro have a machine?

  No, he spun the wool by hand. Mostly the wool is spun clockwise.

  Mostly
?

  Sometimes, Alejandro explained, the wool was spun in the opposite direction when it was to be used to finish the edge oi I

  garment. The backward spin created good luck and warded off nasty spirits.

  The man stared at Alejandro as if he'd just said something strange and amazing; something like: I can fly like a bird when I like.

  The man began to guess about the clothes Alejandro wore. They were woven on a wooden loom, he said, the kind where the four edges are pounded into the ground.

  That was true.

  And the colors, this golden yellow, it came from the leaf of a certain tree? Boiled for several hours?

  Yes.

  And the reds: Were they from the beetle of the cactus plant? Cochineal?

  Yes. Alejandro grew his own cacti, and allowed the beetles to infest the plants. His wife might sometimes take one or two of the insects and press them in her hands to form a bright red juice she used to paint her lips and fingernails. It was, Alejandro thought, the fullest, most beautiful red color on earth.

  And to color the wool with cochineal?

  Alejandro said that he gathered the beetles, allowed them to dry in the sun, and boiled them for several hours until he had a pot of the most beautiful red dye anyone had ever seen.

  And the foreign man knew about the process, which surprised Alejandro. He knew that the color was fixed—so it wouldn't bleed when washed—with salt, fermented potato water, and fermented human urine.

  The man said that, with a few exceptions, Alejandro made textiles in exactly the way they had been made in the Alti Piano several thousand years ago. Those ancient textiles, the man said, were among the finest ever produced, anywhere. Perhaps Alejandro could come to his country. There were many scholars who would want to speak with him, many people who would come see him create "art."

  Which is how Alejandro Flores, of Taquile Island, traveled to England, where he demonstrated pre-Columbian weaving techniques for three months. There were articles in magazines and

  newspapers about him, and always these articles showed pictures of Alejandro dressed the way he had always dressed. People recognized him on the street, and some of them could speak Spanish. They called him a great artist and shook his hand constantly.

  It had been an interesting trip: There were huge buildings and things called escalators and automobiles and beer to drink and strange-tasting food. Alejandro was glad he went, but he was happy to come back to his quiet island where there were no police, where no one lied, and a man could see the stars every night. He was happy to come back to a place where the potatoes tasted the way potatoes should.

  "England," Alejandro Flores told me without a hint of irony, "was a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."

  Still, the paq'o had been right: Alejandro hadn't had any real trouble on his trip to Lima.

  What he had learned there, and in England, was that life on Taquile was good. It was worth preserving the traditions that made the island different from all the rest of the world. The perception was encompassed in Alejandro's single issue in his campaign for first lieutenant governor: natural color.

  On my walks around the island I often met women in their seventies tending sheep. It was a matter of some comedy on Taquile: Quecha grandmothers, people said, complain all day long. The old women herding sheep down the stone paths seemed to be in on the joke and conspired to amuse everyone. They spoke Spanish with a guttural Quecha accent and protested the hardships of life in a merry singsong manner. The village is so far away. My son has gone to Puno to work, and I have no one. The sheep know I can't see very well anymore and hide themselves from

  me.

  Whenever I found myself walking with a man from the village, we laughed together about the grandmothers' complaints. That was expected of me. Privately, I thought, a seventy-five-year-old woman, walking barefoot over rocky hillsides, at 13,500 feet, with the wind driving a cold rain before it? What's so funny about that?

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 2.20

  For the most part, however, I met very young girls tending sheep and spinning wool into yarn, by hand.

  Alejandra was ten years old, and I met her above the village, tending a flock of about ten sheep. Alejandra was both curious and shy, so she hid behind a stone arch and spoke to me for quite some time, peeking out every once in a while in an unconsciously flirtatious manner.

  The sheep belonged to her father's brother. She was watching them in what I understood was a reciprocal work arrangement. Her uncle was helping her father prepare his land for planting. Today they were on the other side of the island, turning over the soil in four big terraces, using foot plows, planting maize and potatoes as people had planted these crops since the time of the Incas.

  It would be easier, Alejandra said, to prepare the land if her family owned a cow that her father could yoke to a plow. They were saving for one even now. The wool she was spinning would be woven into belts and blankets, called mantas. It would be knitted into hats. Perhaps tourists would buy her work.

  Alejandra wore a woven bag on one hip, and, as she spoke, she pulled newly washed black wool from the bag, stretched it out in a long cord, wrapped it around a toplike bobber in a quick, complicated maneuver, and set the bobber spinning like a top on the smooth surface of a flat rock. Her ten-year-old fingers were nimble, and she did the work automatically, as she talked.

  Occasionally, a sheep tried to wander past Alejandra. She hissed at it, loudly, a horror-movie snake sound, and the animal fell all over itself getting back to its fellows.

  The worst thing the sheep did, Alejandra said, they did on hot days like this. (It was about 70 degrees.) The brainless beasts would wander down to the lake, where, for whatever reason, they would hurl themselves into the cool water and sink like so many stones. Then you'd have to stand on a rock and stare into twenty feet of clear, cold water to see the sheep on the bottom, white or black against green mossy rocks, held down by all that waterlogged wool.

  I thought Alejandra seemed a happy little girl. She was only ten

  221 4 OTHER PEOPLE S LIVES

  and doing productive, responsible work for her family. I thought she must be very proud of herself.

  This, Alejandra said from behind the arch, was not so. There were eight children in her family. It was hard to keep everyone fed. They needed a cow to prepare the fields, and the cow would be expensive. Last year Alejandra had been allowed to go to school. Now, because the family needed money for a cow, she had to work. Her older brothers got to go to school, but she had to spend her days with these sheep: los estiipidos. Her old teachers, she said, had come every week from Puno. They spoke such beautiful Spanish. She wanted to go to school and become a teacher who spoke beautiful Spanish.

  I gathered Alejandra had a crush on one of her old teachers. It is possible, however, that the little girl will grow up frustrated and unfulfilled in this highly organized society. I didn't want to think about this because I found the people, in general, so happy, so handsome.

  I wanted to believe that there were no problems at all on Ta-quile.

  Don Pedro was seventy-five years old, a talkative man in vibrant good health who told me that people almost never die on Taquile. The last time a person died was two years ago, and the woman had been 105 years old. (In point of fact, I had talked to a man who had recently lost his seventy-three-year-old grandmother. I had no wish, however, to dispute this matter with Don Pedro. It seemed a pleasant fiction—this idea that people seldom die on the island—and one likely to prolong his life.)

  Agriculture, Don Pedro said, was very important. Every year, in February, the people went to the highest flat spot on the island, the Mulasina Pata, and made a sacrifice to Pachamama, Mother Earth. They killed a baby llama, lamb, and alpaca. These were wrapped in serpentine paper and buried in three small holes, along with some coca leaves and corn beer.

  Don Pedro said that the last time a tourist came to his remote farm—he thought that might have been 1976—ther
e had been bad crops for a year. I said I would go, but Don Pedro was al-

  ready on another subject. Hailstorms, like the one the other day, could kill crops very easily. Happily, this storm had hit during planting season, not when the crops were high in the field.

  What caused the most damaging hailstorms, Don Pedro said, was when a young, unmarried girl got pregnant and aborted herself. These irresponsible girls buried the babies without a proper Catholic baptism. Then the hail came, and it would come for days until the woman confessed and showed the authorities where the baby was buried. It was then baptized, and the hail would stop. I had a vision of the men of the village digging in the wet ground, with the thunder and lightning striking all about. Holy water sprinkled on rotting flesh . . .

  But Don Pedro was talking about lightning now. Once, many years ago, a woman had been struck by lightning at her wedding . . .

  "On May third," I said. Everyone on Taquile, I had just learned, gets married on May 3. Don Pedro, who didn't like to be interrupted, stared at me as if I had just informed him that water is wet.

  "Yes," he said, "May third." After that, there were three years of good crops. But then, several years later, lightning had killed a cow. There were three years of bad crops. Now, when a person is struck by lightning, a family will grieve, but the island is reassured. If a cow is killed by a bolt from the sk>, however, there are many rituals to perform. These involved taking a cake to the spot, building a small altar there, and getting the blessing of a priest's representative.

  There was no priest living on the island, and no doctor. Only a public-health nurse. But the paq'o was very good. Even when a man had been to the doctor in Puno and was still sick, even then the paq'o could help. The sick man might be given a white guinea pig, told to put the animal in a small bag and hold it to his heart for twelve hours. All the man's sickness would infect the guinea pig, and the paq'o could dissect the animal and find what was wrong with the man. The paq'o could prescribe certain herbs. No one died on Taquile.