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Arguedas

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.

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Arguedas

III: “The Pongo’s Dream”

José María Arguedas’ short story “The Pongo’s Dream” was inspired by a story he heard from a peasant from Cusco. Arguedas was born in 1911 to wealthy mestizo parents, and spent much of his childhood in the care of Indigenous servants, through which he became fluent in Quechua. As the editors of the second edition of The Peru Reader write:

[T]he novelist and anthropologist was perhaps more responsible than any other Peruvian for the impassioned defense of the Incan tongue and cultural autonomy for millions of Quechua speakers, challenging the powerful ideologies of ‘modernization’ and ‘national integration’ predicated on the erasure of Peru’s indigenous past. (Starn et al. 273)

“The Pongo’s Dream” follows the relationship between a small Indigenous man “who had to perform the duty of a pongo, a lowly house servant” and his (likely mestizo) master, who mistreats him horribly (a small note, but I think it is important that Arguedas first describes the small man as having to perform the duty of a pongo, rather than necessarily being a pongo himself—it shows he is greater than his role) (Arguedas 273). The master regards the pongo with a special contempt and constantly dehumanizes him, calling him “offal,” making him act like a dog and a hare, shaking him vehemently “like a piece of animal skin” and asking him: “What are you? A person or something else?” (Arguedas 273-275). Yet the pongo only speaks to affirm his subservience: “Yes papacito, yes, mamacita” (Arguedas 274).

Until one day the pongo asks: “Great lord, please grant me permission. Dear lord, I wish to speak to you” (Arguedas 275). The master cannot not believe his ears, and prompts the pongo with uncertainty: “Talk … if you can” (Arguedas 275). The pongo then tells of his dream the previous night, in which both the pongo and the master died and were met by Saint Francis, their hearts subjected to his judgement. Saint Francis called the most beautiful angels to gloss the master in honey from a golden cup, and “[a] worthless, old angel with scaly feet, too weak to keep his wings in place” to smear the pongo with human excrement from a gasoline can (Arguedas 277). Then, just when the master thinks things are as they should be, Saint Francis tells the the master and the pongo to lick each other’s bodies for all eternity (I found a hilarious rendition of this on YouTube: https://youtu.be/cb-zshqW4dE?si=O_rEUfDE_wj0HUv1&t=597). 

The pongo’s dream can be read as a sort of wish fulfillment, as it establishes an unrealized equality between the master and pongo that grants each an (infinite) taste of the other’s lot. It also seems to be in dialogue with an “asymmetrical duality” said to be central to the Andean worldview, in which reality is built by forces that are different and compromised but need each other to be complete. One force is slightly larger or more powerful than the other, leading to a disparity that is the foundation of reality and all change. As Saint Francis is described as having “eyes that reach across the heavens, I don’t know to what depths, joining night and day, memory and oblivion,” bringing the relationship between the master and the pongo back into balance, I wonder whether this is an example of a Catholic figure being used to express a concept central to pre-Columbian Peru, or whether the pongo’s depiction of Saint Francis is actually congruent with Catholicism (Arguedas 277-278).

I was also left with a certain ambiguity at the end of the story as to whether the pongo can be represented by the old angel. At the very moment the master and pongo were condemned to lick each other for eternity, the old angel “became young again. His wings regained their blackness and great strength. Our father entrusted him with making sure that his will was carried out” (Arguedas 278). Before his transformation, the old angel is described as having “scaly feet,” perhaps analogous to how the pongo was dehumanized. The restoration of order allows the old angel to regain his “blackness,” construed as something strong and essential rather than deficient, as night can be seen as the counterpart to day. Perhaps the pongo conceives of himself as a servant of God like the old angel, and dreams that if he does his duty correctly, he too will become necessary and beautiful.

This story puzzles me and I would love to hear other interpretations of it. To what extent do you think the pongo speaking his dream works as an act of defiance?

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