IV: Sound and Light in Deep Rivers

José María Arguedas’ novel Deep Rivers follows a fourteen-year-old boy named Ernesto who, like the author, has Spanish and Indigenous Andean cultural roots. Through the course of the novel Ernesto confronts the complexity of Andean society and comes to assert his place in it. When he visits the Plaza de Armas in Cusco for the first time, he notices that “[t]he little trees that had been planted in the park and the arches seemed intentionally dwarfed in the presence of the cathedral and the Jesuit church” and says: “They must not have been able to grow … [t]hey couldn’t, in front of the cathedral” (Arguedas 9). Like the trees, Ernesto feels “completely subdued” in the shadow of the buildings, and it seems like they were designed this way (Arguedas 9). The buildings also dominate auditory space:

In the silence, the towers and the terrace echoed the smallest sound, like the rocky mountains that border the icy lakes. The rocks send back deep echoes of the cry of the ducks or of the human voice. The echo is diffused, and seems to spring from the very breast of the traveler, who is alert to the silence and oppressed by it. (Arguedas 9)

For Ernesto, the cathedral recalls the solidity of rocky mountains and icy lakes. To speak before its silence is to be in dialogue with only oneself—the returning echo “seems to spring from the very breast of the traveler” and oppresses them with the realization of their own isolation. The Spanish built these oppressive structures out of Inca stone chiseled into harsh rectangular bricks. Ernesto reflects that “Chiseling them must have broken their ‘enchantment.’ But perhaps the domes on the tower retain the radiance they say there is in heaven” (Arguedas 11). When I visited the cathedral, I thought the space was designed to direct attention to its statues and displays, the few sources of light, perhaps the domed ceilings. The stone supporting it all was secondary and not worthy of attention, its personality chiseled away. Ernesto describes how “[t]he light that filtered through the alabaster windows was different from sunlight,” and says that “it seemed as if we had fallen into some city hidden in the center of a mountain, under layers of inextinguishable ice that sent us light through the rocks” (Arguedas 19). All of this lightplay serves to direct attention towards the crucifix, “a forest of candles” burning before it, “a gilt altar screen in the background,” visible through the smoke (Arguedas 19). 

Blackened, suffering, the Christ maintained a silence that did not set one at ease. He made one suffer; in such a vast cathedral, in the midst of the candle flames and the daylight that filtered down dimly, the countenance of the Christ caused suffering, extending it to the walls, to the arches and columns, from which I expected to see tears flow. (Arguedas 20)

Ernesto finds that the ruins of the Amaru Cancha, visible from the street, allow a different kind of silence. He says: “it was the wall who commanded silence, and if someone were to sing out clearly, the stones would echo, with perfect pitch, the very same music” (Arguedas 12). Instead of intensifying one’s suffering and isolation, when the walls of the Inca palace speak back they make one feel heard. The silence is granted by a sense of awe, which creates a space for reflection. In another moment, Ernesto describes an Inca wall like this: “The lines of the wall frolicked in the sun; the stones had neither angles nor straight lines; each one was like a beast that moved in the sunlight, making me want to rejoice, to run shouting with joy, through some field” (Arguedas 18-19). While the Cathedral concentrates all of its light on the figure of Christ, each of the stones of the Inca wall play in the sunlight. I wonder how the ways the Inca and Spanish Catholic structures play with affect through sound and light speak to the values and practices of their societies, and want to investigate further.