Category Archives: modernity

Arguedas Tour: Abancay

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To get from Puquio to Abancay, 300km or so further inland, on the road to Cusco, you have first to cross a long stretch of puna, or high-altitude moorland, that divides the southern tip of Ayacucho from Apurímac. Here, at 4,000m or more above sea level, the land is cold and desolate, unsuitable for most agriculture (except some potatoes), and sparsely populated. As we set off in the early morning, there was still ice on the slopes where the rising sun had yet to reach. 

But then you drop down into the valley through which runs first the River Chalhuanca and then the Pachachaca (which ultimately, via the Apurímac, leads to the Amazon and then the distant Atlantic), the climate and temperature change until, just before you once more start ascending to reach Abancay itself, you find yourself amid fields of sugar cane.

Here, too, straddling the river, is the colonial-era bridge (built in 1654) that features in what is perhaps Arguedas’s best-known novel, Deep Rivers (Los ríos profundos), from 1958. As Arguedas’s narrator, Ernesto, describes it:

“The Pachachaca bridge was built by the Spaniards. Its two high arches are supported by pillars of stone and lime, as powerful as the river. [. . .] On the pillars of the arches, the river breaks and divides; the water rises to lap at the wall, tries to climb it, and then rushes headlong through the spans of the bridge. [. . .] I didn’t know if I loved the river or the bridge more. But both of them cleansed my soul, flooding it with courage and heroic dreams.” (62-3)

The bridge also features in the novel’s plot as the portal for key entrances and exits. Ernesto’s father crosses it when he leaves his young son behind in Abancay, depositing him in the local church-run boarding school that is the setting for most of what follows. It is across the bridge that the rebellious Doña Felipe flees, pursued by the National Guard, after leading an uprising in which she and her fellow chicheras (women who serve corn beer in informal bars) redistribute the salt hoarded in depositories to the colonos (Indigenous serfs) on the haciendas. 

And then the bridge is closed off at the end of the novel, for fear of a spreading plague, but the colonos from outlying haciendas cross the river anyway, advancing on the town to demand a midnight mass from Father Linares, the priest and Rector at Ernesto’s school.

The haciendas are gone now, though one has been turned into a museum. We were only able to see it from the outside, but it had pillars and verandas worthy of an antebellum plantation house in Georgia or Mississippi.

Otherwise, today Abancay is a thriving little metropolis with lots of new construction, both commercial and residential, and multi-storey buildings of concrete and glass. In the center of town, it was hard to reconstruct the geography of Arguedas’s novel.

There was a building a block or two from the main plaza that may have been the site of the school featured in the novel. If so, it is now an Art School, in whose massive atrium (possibly once a courtyard as Arguedas describes it) is an enormous mural featuring the writer (alongside also Micaela Bastidas, the wife of the legendary eighteenth-century anti-colonial rebel, Túpac Amaru) surrounded by scenes and images from his fiction: masks, condors, chicheras, dancing, and even the bridge over the Pachachaca itself.

in the evening we went to a restaurant on whose door, and above whose bar, was emblazoned the phrase “Todas las Sangres” (All the Bloods), the title of Arguedas’s longest and perhaps most fully-realized novel. But this was part of a kaleidoscope of décor–including, as I remember, pictures of both Che Guevara and (I think) Brigitte Bardot in the men’s loos–in an establishment that seemed to be trying to be the city’s trendiest or most Bohemian, and that was hardly traditional Andean.

All this, too, is appropriate. For though there is definitely a current of nostalgia that runs through Arguedas’s work, it is wrong to accuse him (as Mario Vargas Llosa does, in an afterword to Deep Rivers) of being stuck in the past.

On the contrary, Arguedas proudly called himself an “hombre quechua moderno,” a “modern Quechua man.” And in his fiction he is interested in what is new that arises from both the connection and clash of cultures, as for example here when young boys from different parts of the country find themselves together in a provincial boarding school at a time of maximum tension and instability. Meanwhile, the bridge over the Pachachaca may seem to incarnate stability when compared with the rushing waters below, but in fact it, too, is a vector for both heartbreak and escape, rescue and rebellion.

Faced with tradition and modernity, continuity and even violent change, like Ernesto he is never quite sure which he prefers.

Arguedas Tour: Chimbote

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I took an overnight bus to Chimbote, a small coastal city that is just over 400km, from Lima, a little more than a third of the distance to Ecuador. I arrived about 6am, and though the bus station is some distance from the centre of town, I decided to walk. I did, after all, have the whole day to kill.

For the most part, I walked along by the water, looking over a rocky beach to the Bay of Chimbote, which is guarded from the immensity of the Pacific Ocean by a small chain of islands, the largest of which is called Isla Blanca, “White Island,” in reference to the guano in which it is covered. The neighbourhoods by the shore were ramshackle and run down, if no longer as precarious as they would have been in Arguedas’s day.

Chimbote is the largest fishing port in the world. In fact, four of the world’s top ten fishing ports by volume of commercial fish landed are in Peru. A fifth is not far away, in northern Chile. This stretch of coast, its waters fed by the Humboldt current and full of nutrients, is one of the most productive on the planet.

A massive fishing fleet, comprising hundreds of boats, was anchored out on the bay. I don’t know how many more boats were out at sea. Over my brief time in the city, I saw little sign of the catch being unloaded. Perhaps I happened to be there during a lull in activity. Perhaps, at 6am, the boats had already been unloaded.

Arguedas came to Chimbote in the mid to late 1960s and set his final novel, The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, here. He was equal parts fascinated and horrified by the city’s vertiginous expansion at the time, which drew people from all over Peru who sought work on the boats, in the processing factories, or in the bars and brothels that sprung up to cater to this horde of internal migrants.

In Arguedas’s novel, this chaotic industrialization of the fishing industry and its myriad ramifications for its motley cast of characters are overseen by the book’s titular foxes, mythic figures drawn from the legends set down in the seventeenth-century Huarochirí Manuscript, which Arguedas had translated from the original Quechua and published in a bilingual edition in 1966. 

The foxes, in anthropomorphic guise, figure in the book’s plot (for instance, visiting one of the fish meal factories) but are otherwise helpless to do much more than look on. Even from the perspective of many centuries of history, preceding the Spanish arrival and invasion, Arguedas conveys the sense that something new and irrevocable is underway in Chimbote, which may well presage the future of a messily multicultural and globalized Peru.

I’m not sure that Arguedas was entirely right in his doleful prediction, which certainly contributed to the existential anguish to which the letters and diaries interspersed through the narrative attest. He did see the increasing predominance of international capital (ironically perhaps aided and abetted by the land reform of the 1970s that undercut the rural oligarchy). And the kinds of petty corruption, the tendencies to mercantile and financial oligopoly, that run through Arguedas’s novel are now only all the more firmly etched at a national level.

But he didn’t anticipate what I think is the cultural revival of the past twenty years or so, which has been very unevenly distributed, and certainly does not seem to have touched much a place like Chimbote, but which can be seen for instance in the re-Indigenization along the tourist trail of places like Cusco and the Sacred Valley, or in the “gastronomic revolution” that has given something of a swagger to the more upscale parts of Lima. 

There has been a move to celebrate alterity, if mostly rhetorically, and if only certain (colorful, domesticated, unthreatening) alterities that the majority of the population cannot convincingly embody.

In the meantime, and as a result, places like Chimbote get hidden away, sidelined, whatever their continued economic importance. The city was bustling, but while I was there, I searched in vain for any kind of souvenir of the place. Chimbote seems hardly to figure in the national imagination, let alone in the image of the country that Peru presents to the world.

Not even the fact that this was the setting for one of Peru’s most important novels of the twentieth century seems to register here. I found no murals or other commemoration of Arguedas’s visit to the city. The few bookshops I found were full of self-help or children’s literature, and none stocked a copy of The Fox from Up Above. Chimbote may have marked, even traumatized, Arguedas, but as far as the city is concerned it is as though he had never existed.