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4TH CENTENNNIAL OF INCA GARCILASO DE LA VEGA /CÉSAR MORO, THE POET’S PASSION /

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Year 14, number 28 2016

PERUVIAN MAILCultural Bulletin of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

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Genealogy of the Incas. Oil on canvas. Marcos Chillitupa Chávez, 1837. Private collection.

In Cuzco, on April 12, 1539, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born-the son of Captain Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega Vargas, an Extremaduran conquistador of distinguished ancestry, and Palla1 Chimpu Ocllo, an Incan princess.

THE INCOMPLETE JOURNEY OF INCA GARCILASO DE LA VEGA

In Cuzco, on April 12, 1539, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born; he was the son of Cap-

tain Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega Vargas, an Extremaduran conquis-tador of distinguished ancestry, and Palla Chimpu Ocllo, an Incan princess. The child came to the world in the middle of “the sound and the fury” of the conquest, the hopeless indigenous resistance, and the civil wars among the new lords of the lands. During his childhood, he learned about the conquistadors’ arrogance and the Incas’ grief. He grew up “between weapons and horses”. When he turned 20, he moved to Spain and was unsuccessful in advocating his claims before the Council of the Indies. He fought against the Moriscos in the Alpujarra and re-ceived the “condutas2” of captain. “An Indian among Spaniards and a Spaniard among Indians,” he declared himself “fully” mesti-zo, translated Leone Ebreo (a.k.a “Leon the Hebrew”), hanged out with Andalucian humanists, ac-quired a library, perfected his prose, and started writing to hon-or “the native land and the mater-nal relatives” and his “father and his distinguished and generous fellows”.

His date and place of birth posi-tion him in the battle field sparked by the apprehension and execution of Atahualpa by Pizarro’s armies in Cajamarca. In the beginning of the

fierce disintegration of the Ande-an world, a gale brought together a conquistador and a Palla. From this speechless union —she did not speak Spanish nor did he speak Quecha— a child was born. The hu-bris of the victors crisscrossed with the humiliation of the defeated.

Baptized as Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, he changed his name shortly after arriving to Spain from these illustrious resonances to Gó-mez Suárez de la Vega. He named himself Garcilaso de la Vega like his father when he was promoted to the rank of captain. He signed his translation of Dialogui d’Amore as Garcilaso Inca de la Vega; the two volumes of Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentar-ies of the Incas) he delivered to the printing house bore on their covers: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega; hence, linking the title of nobility of his maternal ancestry with the name of his paternal ancestor, the famous Toledan poet.

The broken freehand lines of the portrait depict a man in search of himself, split in two, troubled by the persistence of his memo-ries, while illustrating the traces of the seismic activity of his time. It is more a palimpsest than a draw-ing, with several overlapping faces, or maybe one face with different names looking at the spectator with the diplopia of whom feels himself as defeated and conquista-dor at the same time.

As a child, he was “breastfed Quecha” by his mother. The ex-traordinary synthesis of Garcila-so’s Indian mouther —(mouth and mother) suggested by James Joyce— tells everything about the symbol-ic equivalence between language and breast milk. Promptly, Span-ish words set down on the words coined in runa simi.

His curiosity for what went on in the intimate relationship of par-ents —in psychoanalytical terms, the interest aroused by the primal scene— would have taken him to suspect a copulation impregnated by the pride of the conquistador father and the devastation of the possessed and dispossessed moth-er, and to intuit that the enigma of his origins lied in his parents’ bed.

When he was 5 years-old, amidst the confusion of civil wars, a soldier tried to set on fire the house where he lived with his mother. Another soldier, who was not so cruel, stopped him. The house was not set on fire but ran-sacked, and anyone trying to enter the house was forbidden from do-ing so. A childhood between dis-tresses and surprises was dashed by the separation of his parents.

He spent his youth “among weapons and horses,” playing games of canes, helping his en-comendero3 father with his accounts thanks to his knowledge of quipus4, “watching and listening to” his maternal relatives, especially to

his uncle Huallpa Tupca, and go-ing to festivities such as huaracu or huarachicu —rite of passage of the Incan nobility that he would say “this sounds much like knighting in Spanish”.

In the half-century that he lived in Spain, he swung between illu-sion and disappointment. When he went to the Royal Council of the Indies to ask “His Highness for the favors owed to [his] father for his services, and for the restitu-tion of [his] mother’s equity;” his father’s allegiance to the Crown was questioned: “historians wrote about it and you want to deny it”. His expectations of such double recognition were thwarted.

Gómez did not return to his homeland, but rather changed his name to Gómez Suárez de la Vega. He settled down in Montilla. With the name of Garcilaso de la Vega, he joined to the armed retinue of the marquis of Priego commanded by Mr. Juan de Austria to battle the rebellion of the Moorish. In the Al-pujarra highlands, he obtained the rank of captain. The mestizo from Cuzco was in his thirties when he finally accepted the Spaniard di-mension of his identity following the footsteps of his father.

He split his time between his fondness for horses, often acting as a judge, and books, going regu-larly to the library of the marquis-es of Priego. He was fifty when he delivered to the printing house his

Max Hernández*

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Inca Garcilaso, by Francisco Gonzáles Gamarra. Oil on canvas, 1959. National Library of Peru collection.

translation of the dialogues of love between Filón and Sofia de León Hebrero, pen-name of Judá Abar-banel, an exiled Spaniard Jewish doctor and philosopher. Penetrat-ing into these dialogues written with the quill of a man of two cul-tures, in which love to knowledge is embellished when turned into loving knowledge, opened the pos-sibility for him to establish a dia-logue of retrospective love between his parents and to accept his con-dition of mestizo.

The open space to writing was becoming wider: he linked with excellent prose the testimonies of his father’s friend who had been in Peru before going to Florida. The stories about Hernando de Soto’s expedition and the native resis-tance is a composition of serene harmony that values equally the bravery, strength, and heroism of the opponents. La Florida del Inca, published in 1605, was written by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

In Cordoba, during his “re-treats of solitude and poverty,” Garcilaso continued the relation-ship initiated in Montilla with An-dalucean theologists, humanists, and erudite persons. His relations with the Jesuits enabled him to be-come familiar with the counter-re-formist version of Scholasticism. With this background, and half a century after having left Peru “forced by the natural love to the homeland,” he published the two parts of Royal Commentaries (Co-mentarios reales).

By the end of his days, he took minor orders, became steward of

the Hospital de la Limpia Concep-ción, and wrote his last will with-out acknowledging that Diego de

Vargas, whom he had raised, was his son with the Moorish Beatriz de la Vega. He “died as Chris-

tian” four hundred years ago, and wished his body to lie in a chap-el dedicated to the Holy Souls of Purgatory in the city's cathedral mosque.

Anyone wishing to trace the paths of a changing and con-tradictory life, with its share of misfortunes and achievements, unsuccessful complaints and un-expected gifts, ephemeral joys and pertinacious nostalgia, fractures and fusing, fears and braveries, dualities and contradictions, must be prepared to face ambiguous feelings in each curve of the road. The task of understanding his si-lences, his desire for pleasing, his —at times-dithyrambic —at other times-disdainful opinions, his ar-chaic prose, the complexity of his texts, the meticulous writing of his books, the humbleness of his dedications or the haughtiness of his epitaph, evokes sympathies and rebuffs. Now, placing a vital trajectory in the circumstances of his time allows and requires a little more objectivity.

The Inca revolved around two centers. The elliptical orbit allowed him to observe what was happening on both sides of the At-lantic. His condition as borderline required him to define spaces, to conjugate differences and similar-ities, to try some synthesis. Rec-onciling the significant systems of two conflicting realities made him process the diglossia in which he lived his early years. Translating a book that dealt with the difficult and intricate task of integrating two conflicting visions gave him

This edition, by the noted his-torian Carlos Araníbar (Lima, 1928-2016), brings together the

work of the Inca Garcilaso, from his most significant books - the transla-tion of the Dialoghi d'amore (Dialogues of love) by León Hebreo, La Florida del inca (the Inca’s Florida), the two parts of the actual Comentarios Reales (Royal Commentaries) to Relación de la descen-dencia de Garci Pérez de Vargas (Garci Perez de Vargas´ Family Tree) and the few letters known that he actually

signed. The texts have been rigorous-ly updated according to the academic guidelines in use, in order to facilitate their reading, but "without aggravating

the original with addition or omission of words". Although not intended to be a critical edition, it contains, duly revised, the glossary, and corrected and updated notes that Carlos Araníbar prepared for an earlier edition of the first part of the Royal Commentaries, as well as some one hundred annotations on the Garci Pérez de Vargas´ Family Tree, and brief and guiding introduc-tory explanations for each work. The third volume includes an annex with a rigorous biographical study on the Inca Garcilaso written by Aurelio Miró Quesada, a connoted figure among the Peruvian followers of Garcilaso.

"There are representative writers” says Carlos Araníbar, in the introduc-tion of his magnificent edition, “whose works, intertwined with the spirit and the evolution of a people, convey and synthesize a national and collective image that with the passage of time became a classic that does not wear out or deteriorate, like Virgil, Dan-te, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy. In this select literary tribe of narrators of illusion, our Gar-cilaso, who in his Royal Commentaries interweaves the old historical texts in vogue - the chronicles of Blas Valera, Cieza, Gómara, Zárate, which the styl-ist improves and renews with notes and testimonial remarks and Proustian memories of his childhood and adoles-cence in Cuzco and bequeathed us the kind and golden vision of an ancient ideal society of the Incas of Peru. But he does not do so in arid pages of a painful erudite history that tries to

speak to reason, but in a colorful and vivacious kaleidoscope that, as in a sort of confident family memory of a remote past, gives us warm images that seem to speak to the heart“.

As historian Raquel Chang-Rodrí-guez has pointed out: "The publication of the complete works of the Inca Gar-cilaso in the Library of Peru, Bicen-tennial Collection, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is a cultural event. And if its editor is the admired and lamented Carlos Araníbar, the event is even more relevant [...]. In the context of the work carried out by Pro-fessor Araníbar in relation to the work of the chroniclers of Peru and in par-ticular that of the Inca Garcilaso, it is convenient to recall the main types of editions with which both historians and scholars work: manuscripts, criti-cisms, and updated versions. Professor Araníbar chose this last category to prepare the publishing of the complete works of the Inca Garcilaso [...].

Dr. Araníbar used the ordinary tools to arrange the modernized and Peruvian edition of the complete works of the Inca Garcilaso whose prelimi-nary print of 12 counterparts was ini-tially launched in the 19th Internation-al Book Fair in Guadalajara (México) in November 2005. And this is how he explained his reasoning: “In order to reach a greater number of readers, we had decided […] that all the work of the Cuzqueño historian should be mod-ernized based on the rigorous academ-ic guidelines that are used for ancient historical and literary texts. This oper-

ation, in essence, is nothing more than updating spelling, accents, and punc-tuation, redistributing very long para-graphs and replacing archaic, obsolete utterances, and out-of-date cultural references with their current equiva-lents, without aggravating the original with addition or omission of words' (I, 7). The patterns of modernization are explained in detail in the introduction to the first volume where the editor reit-erates his desire to reach a 'vast public' (I, 7-12). Some of his comments regarding editorial standards reflect his somewhat funny and ironic character. For exam-ple, when he explains how and why he redistributes the paragraphs, he notes: 'The followers of the orthodox old-style shall feel no hurt: before punctuation depended barely on the author but too much on the editor, always greedy for space and paper” (I , 11). Then he goes on to explain how in the edition of the Quijote by the Royal Spanish Academy (Madrid), the Cervantine text is divided (chapter 13, part two) and on seven pag-es of the original there is no full stop. He compares these changes in the punc-tuation and distribution of paragraphs with those he made on the work of the Inca, and concludes: 'what is good for Cervantes is good for Garcilaso.'

The presentation of the Complete Works of the Inca Garcilaso took place in the Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center on April 22, 2016, by the historian Raquel Chang-Rodriguez. The event coincided with the inauguration of the itinerant bibliographical exhibition El Inca Garcilaso and the birth of the mestizo culture of America.

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF INCA GARCILASOOn the 4th centennial of his death, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes in three volumes the first Peruvian edition with all

the works of the first classic author of American letters.

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the drive to translate a world and make visible what did not fit into the common sense of his time. In his effort to discover his roots and map the horizon, he erected a piece of work in which he depict-ed the flow that overcame oceans and distances and avoided the con-straints imposed by imperial and ecclesial powers.

Garcilaso sensed that a crucial moment was occurring. A new his-torical reality was being defined: the modern world. The times of the Inca hegemony and the "tu-multuous disarray" of the conquest were being swept away by the hur-ricane of progress. All he had to do was to cling to a few happy frag-ments pierced by flashes of trau-matic moments. In the initial and barely noticeable movement of the inexorable march towards plane-tary communication, he also felt that the political, economic, and cultural anchorages of the Middle Ages gave way to the budding glob-al earthquake, and felt that with the new historical reality, a cultur-al miscegenation was emerging.

In the opening paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the Royal Commentaries, he asks whether or not he should address certain serious issues: whether the world is one or if there are many worlds, if it is flat or round, and if so is the sky round or flat; if the earth is habitable or not, most of the temperate zones, if there's a warm passage to the other, if there are antipodes, and what, which and other things. In the next line, he says that his main purpose is not to deal with these issues, to do so would be too presumptuous in an Indian and also —his words— "be-cause the experience, after it was discovered what they call the New World, has disillusioned most of these questions, ... " After which, he proceeds to clarify such ques-tions "confident in the infinite mercy": the discovery of the "great Columbus" and the return of the "No Victory" are proof that "There is only one world." The roundness of the Earth had ceased to be an abstraction of ancient Greek math-ematicians.

The Victoria was the only one of the small fleet that returned to Seville in 1522 with the 18 men who survived the trip around the world, begun in 1519 under the command of Hernando Ma-gallanes. The author of the Royal Commentaries knew for sure that on that same year —1519, Hernan Cortes had landed in the Mexican coast with a contingent of soldiers and adventurers to snatch, with the help of numerous indigenous allies, the Aztec "Empire" from Montezuma II. Perhaps he had not paid the same attention to the fact that in 1519 at Frankfurt am Main, “Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, the most powerful King of Spain” as avowed by Fray Vicen-te Valverde, had been elected King of the Romans. As John H. Elliott points out with British circum-spection, in those three years —be-tween 1519 and 1522, two great projects emerged which were to dominate history for the following centuries: globalization and Euro-

pean territorial imperialism. The world had changed.

The European Renaissance had discovered both the ancient Greco-Latin civilizations and the American novelty; the individual-ism of Pico della Mirandola and the new sea routes. The Renaissance culture of an elite composed of rich, noble, and eminent individ-uals made possible a full awareness of one's own value. The flow of people and the exchange of metals by manufactured products encour-aged the galleons to cross the inter-continental spaces. The Spanish Empire was expanding and soon became the empire on which the sun never set. When "planetary scales" began to prevail, the Catho-lic Monarchy under the scepter of Philip II covered four continents.

The world had changed... and continued to evolve. While Cortes settled in Mexico the foundations of what would become the Span-ish Empire fighting "with barbar-ian people" for a just cause and "to increase faith," Martin Luther denied in Leipzig the divine right of the papacy. The individual was alone in front of the Scriptures. The Protestant Reformation was about to unleash wars of religion that would change the face of Eu-rope. Soon the accumulation of wealth in England, the Nether-lands, and France would set in mo-tion a process that was to spread to the whole globe. A single system, a world-economy as defined by Im-manuel Wallerstein, would have to be imposed on diverse cultural realities. At the same time, new ideas and knowledge undermined the ancient and medieval visions of nature and began to lay the foundations of modern science. A paradigm shift initiated by a group of bold investigators would change the way the world was seen.

Acceptably, the birth of moder-nity is usually dated in the first half of the seventeenth century and is associated with Cartesian ratio-nalism, the scientific revolution initiated by Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, and inductivism and empiricism of Francis Bacon. As Stephen Toulmin contend-ed, the supremacy of arguments challenges anything that does not conform to its abstract and de-

contextualized statements. The "tolerant and skeptical" attitude of sixteenth-century humanists was overwhelmed by systematic doubt and practical verification. To take into account the also modern ar-guments of Montaigne, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Shakespeare, Toul-min said, would have soothed the disconnect between the sciences and other humanities, and uphold a reflective space in which to insert data, such as ethnography or histo-ry, which otherwise had no place in this scientific paradigm.

As Gruzinski points out, the first globalization undertaken by the Iberians —Spaniards and Por-tuguese— extended beyond the Peninsula into another modernity on the margin of the absolutism of science and Cartesian rational-ism. A modernity that was shaped by the need to integrate the new and surprising natural and human reality into the intellectual co-ordi-nates of the old world. Two south-ern European countries of such "archaic and obscurantist" trans-ferred their legal, political, and religious instruments into over-seas lands and there, far from the Western European borders, the paradigms defined by the Catho-lic monarchy settled on land fer-tile for imagination with traits of syncretism. The Iberian expansion began the first globalization of cul-tural mestizaje. It would involve not only the Europeans but also the Chinese, the Indians, the Fili-pinos, the Japanese, the mulattoes and the mestizos.

But it is also true that America was lucky, so to say, as it became "the dark side of the Renaissance." Walter Mignolo criticizes the dom-inant Eurocentrism in the intel-lectual circles and points out that colonialism, more precisely colo-niality, forms a constituent part of modernity because it broke out at the very moment of its historical foundation. Colonial domination overflowed the political and eco-nomic spheres. The Euro-centered modernity project and modern-ization strategies imposed the su-premacy of European knowledge patterns. The many different ways of learning, predicting, and transforming their own environ-ment and the different modes of

thought inherent to the subdued peoples were destroyed.

"... [R]ightly call the New World, because everything in it is novel." Garcilaso summarized in a single phrase the radical newness of its geography, fauna, flora, rites, and customs. To fully grasp it de-manded an equally radical change in the paradigms from which the Europeans faced it: the shift of mental representations, overcom-ing the limits imposed by dogma, revolution in the modes of expres-sion, the construction of concep-tual bridges... A change of perspec-tive of the same magnitude that must occur in the psychic structure when processing unknown facts.

Wilfred Bion calls "catastroph-ic change" those drastic adjust-ments that imply the dismantling of strongly rooted views and the-ories allowing the formation of a new repertoire of hypotheses and ideas in line with the new reality. According to the British psycho-analyst, the fear of de-structuring tends to generate resistances that prevent necessary psychic process-ing to develop adaptive responses. The adjective "catastrophic" comes from the mathematics field and alludes to a sudden change in a dynamic system that cannot be predicted or controlled. It should be pointed out that what would be catastrophic, in the sense of "disastrous or very bad," is what happens when no mental schemes, preconceptions and assumptions are made that make it impossible to become aware of the magnitude and celerity of the transformations in the external reality.

Such a change did not occur. Taking the case of philosophy, considered as a pillar of Western culture, it followed a unique route in its planetary expansion journey. The world "discovered" by the Eu-ropeans could not be understood by extrapolating the methods and knowledge ad usum since the ex-clusivity of reality acknowledged until then was questioned. On the contrary, the peoples of America, Asia, and Africa were subjected to the logic, rationality, and moral-ity on which Western philosophy was based. They had to accede if they wanted to overcome their shortcomings and avoid collective

Inca Garcilaso’s house in Cuzco. Inca Garcilaso’s house in Montilla, Spain.

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failure. As Antonello Gerbi points out, eminent 18th and 19th cen-tury European thinkers sullied the reality of the Americas trap-ping the conquerors’ worldview of primitive prejudices. Thus, the solutions proposed from non-Eu-ropean traditions to problems faced by Western philosophy were set aside.

Garcilaso, writes Susana Ják-falvi-Leyva, had set out to trans-late a world. His work is a com-pendium of the knowledge that flourished in the Tahuantinsuyo (a.k.a. Inca Empire). He provides details about the organization, the government, and the conquests of the Incas. He highlights the laws, succession arrangements, medical knowledge, the road system with its roads and tambos or inns, the distribution of land and water, the domestication of plants and animals. He also talks about its fruits and vegetables, gold, silver, emeralds, pearls and turquoises, and about "the poetry of the Inca amautas5, who are philosophers and [the] haravicus6 who were po-ets." He portrays a peasant leaning over the tajlla, the muleteer with his pack of llamas, the amauta’s apprentice knotting the cords of the quipu, the chaski or messengers were attentive to the arrival of the message. He describes the build-ings and monuments and recalls seeing clay models of cities and fields so well done that "the best cosmographer in the world could not put it better."

But that great effort is im-mersed in a history of "great calam-ities, death of kings, destruction of empires." Again and again in both parts of the Royal Commentaries can we find extensive references to the unfortunate end of con-querors and Incas. Aurelio Miró Quesada has drawn attention to the unlucky endings of the two parts of the Royal Commentaries. The chapter on "The execution of the sentence against the prince...", for all intents and purposes, the last book of the second part, con-denses in José Durand's words an "essentially tragic" view of history. The "heroic deeds of the facts" was poured in an elegiac tone by the Inca in the tragic mold that he could have well known in his deal-ings with Andalusian humanism. The "marvelous castle of melan-choly" that Luis Alberto Sanchez toured is home to both his nos-talgia and that vague, deep, quiet and permanent sadness so valued by the Renaissance, as Carmen Bernand points out.

The first part of the Royal Com-mentaries states that the deeds of the ancient sovereigns and hero-ic males were staged by the Incas themselves and their court in "au-tos de la tragedia" (deeds of trage-dy). In the second part, "tragedy" refers to a huge number of histor-ical events. He uses two concepts of the term: one in a neoaristotelic prescriptive sense and another one according to the medieval Europe-an culture. According to Carmela

Zanelli, the (non-performative) tex-tual version of the historical narra-tive necessarily surpasses the limits defined by Aristotle, and is rather part of the conceptions of the trag-edy of Boethius and Isidore of Se-ville. Though articulated in a nar-rative mode, it does not lose but rather reach its full meaning. The facts narrated do not go beyond 1572 because it is "to tell the latest events... the most pitiful [and] be-cause everything is tragedy".

It is true that the European humanists gave special impor-tance to the Greek tragedy. The tragic genre, created during the Athenian democracy, represented events of the past in a new form that opened a new channel to the intense emotions aroused by the staging. Hence the tragedy, "imi-tation of a noble and strenuous action", according to the classical definition of Aristotle, made pos-sible the emotional and mental catharsis "through pity and ter-ror." The spectators saw the great characters as people like them who were dragged by the tragic fate as a result of some mistake and not because of their baseness or mal-ice. In that sense, it matched the time when Europe was processing its long Middle Ages.

The European recovery from tragedy coincided with the subjec-tion of civilizations and peoples to their empire. However, to place them in a new historical context that gave way to the globalization cycle, it was necessary to have a

view capable of expressing the con-flicts and discomforts of budding modernity and the globalization cycle that was beginning. On the periphery, the vast transformation that would enlighten the Enlight-enment was marked by the de-humanizing violence of the Con-quest. Far from Europe, modernity extended a shadow comparable to that of the Dark Ages.

The Tahuantinsuyo devastated by massacres, famines, forced dis-placements, epidemics epitomized the horror of conquest, founda-tional trauma, and the traumatic foundation of Peru. The destruc-tive violence, the devastating ef-fects on the native population, and the imperial arrogance overshad-owed an event that heralded the radical transformation of the Old and New World. Whoever had the "garments of both nations" intro-duced the conflicting characters as heroes of an epic awaiting a tragic interpretation of the trauma that opened the way to their under-standing and processing.

It is true that at the heart of their identity anguish was a gap through which the possibilities of an early "mestizo synthesis" could be glimpsed. Such a longing in-spired the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega "brother, countryman, and compatriot" to a new reading of the history of his country whose events, recorded in the "present tense" of his writing, were the object of a deep "resignification." His commentaries —disputed by

The Inca Viracocha died in the maj-esty and highness of state referred to; he was universally mourned all

over his empire, worshiped by God, son of the Sun, to whom many sacrifices were of-fered. He left Pachacutec Inca as his heir and many other sons and daughters, legit-imate in royal blood and not legitimate; he won over eleven provinces, four to the south of Cuzco and seven to the north.

It is not known for certain how many years he lived or how many he reigned; all that is commonly known is that he reigned for more than fifty years; and this was what his body showed when I saw him in Cuzco, at the beginning of 1560, since I was coming to Spain, I went to the inn of Lic. Polo Ondegardo, a native of Salamanca, who was the city corregidor1, to kiss his hands and say goodbye to him (i.e. the Inca Leader) before my journey. Among other favors he made me, he said to me: "Since off you go to Spain, go into that chamber; you will see some of your own whom I have brought forth, so that you may have something to tell there." In the room I found five bodies of the Inca kings, and queens: three men and two women. One of them, according to the Indians, was Inca Viracocha; and his old age was quite visible; his head was as white as snow. The second was said to be the great Tupac Inca Yupanqui, who was great-grandson of the Inca Viracocha. The third was Huayna Capac, son of Tupac Yupanqui and great-great-grandson of the Inca Viracocha. The last two did not show to have lived so much, although they had gray hair, they had less gray hair than Viracocha. One of the women was

Queen Mama Runtu, the wife of this Inca Viracocha.

The other was the coya (empress) Mama Ocllo, mother of Huayna Capac, and it is plausible that the Indians kept them together after death, husband and wife, as they lived in life. The bodies were so complete that nothing was missing not hair, eyebrows or eyelashes.

They wore their gar-ments, as they had every day while alive: the llautos2 around their heads, without any other royal ornament or insignia. They were seated, as the Indians usually sit: their hands were crossed on their chest, the right over the left; their eyes apparently shut, as if they were looking at the floor.

Father Acosta, speaking of one of these bodies, who were also his kin, says, in the sixth book, chapter twenty-one: "The body was so complete and well dressed with some bitumen, that it looked alive. The eyes were made of a gold cloth; so well placed, that they did not need the real ones", etc. I confess my carelessness that I did not look at them so much, and it was because I did not plan to write of them; if I had thought about it, I would have looked more care-fully at how they were and would know

how and with what they embalmed them, since I am a natural child, they would not deny it to me, as they have denied it to the Spaniards, the demarches made, have made it impossible to remove the

Indians: it must be because they already lack the tradition, as of other things that we have said and will say. Neither did I look carefully at the bitumen, because they were so complete that they seemed to be alive, as their fatherhood says. And it is to believe that they had it, for dead bodies of so many years to be so complete and full of their flesh as they seemed is not possible unless they had put something into them; but it was so disguised that it could not be seen. I remember that I touched a finger of Huayna Capac's hand; it looked like a wooden statue, it was stiff and strong. The bodies weighed so little that any Indian could carry them in their arms or on their shoulders, from the house of one knight to the houses of the others who asked to see them. They carried them cov-ered with white sheets; through the streets and squares as the Indians knelt, bowed, with tears and moans; and many Span-iards took their caps off, for they were the bodies of kings, of which the Indians were so grateful and yet did not know how to say so. This is what we could learn about the feats of the Inca Viracocha; the other small things of facts and sayings of this famous king are not known in particular; it is a pity that, due to the lack of writing, the feats of such brave men would die and be buried with them.

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Lisbon, 1609. Chapter 29: "The Death of the Inca Viracocha. The author saw his body”.

1 TN: a local administrative and judicial official in Spain and in its overseas empire

2 TN: a vicuña wool cord worn around the head by ancient Peruvians as a sign of nobility

INCA MUMMIES Testimonial of the Inca Garcilaso on the remains of his ancestors.

Inca (emperor) and coya (empress) accompanied by his ccumillu or server. Engraving by Édouard Riou, in Viaje a través de América del Sur (Travel through South America) by Paul Marcoy, Paris, 1869.

CHASQUI 6

literati and historians— were ded-icated to "the Indians, mestizos and creoles of the kingdoms and provinces of the great and wealthy Peruvian Empire."

He was born on a plot of the Or-bis terrarum, with a disputed name Tahuantinsuyo, Nueva Castilla, Peru? In the difficult crossroads of the 16th century, people were born either in "a vague, distant, misty country" or in "those mischievous and damned Indies" of which Ra-fael Sánchez Ferlosio speaks. This was a stimulus to dream of an eq-uitable exchange between civiliza-tions that extended to Totus orbis and transcended the hegemonic project of the Monarchia Catholica. With the longings of the Andean religiosity, he imagined the mesti-zo turn that the counter-reformist and baroque Christian God need-ed in order to have universal signif-icance. In a sense, he anticipated what would be the Ibero-American bet of enormous importance for humanity.

He believed that the horror and cruelty of the conquest could be mitigated by the spell of love. But ... and it is a big but, "there is no document of culture that is not, at the same time, a document of barbarism," as Walter Benjamin wrote. The hurricane "that we call progress" blew from the West and accumulated debris. The Inca wanted to inscribe the violence of the conquest in a perspective that conjugated the pride of the win-ners and the pain of the defeated. At times, the subtle fabric of his story seems to have succeeded in harmonizing, or at least attenuat-ing, such dissonances. The facts, however, are resistant to aesthetic redemption.

In Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel maintains that modernity was a "double start-ing point" of two fundamental historical formations: the market economy and subjectivity. Perhaps Garcilaso sensed something of that. The references to Jean Bodin

and Giovanni Botero in relation to currency, prices, profitability, and inflation show his interest in the new trends that were driving the expansion of international trade. The pressing search for him-self and the meticulousness with which he treats the nuances and intimate creases of the experience of his characters bear witness to a nascent subjectivity in the process of freeing himself from doctrinal conformism.

In the four centuries since the day of his death, his historiograph-ical intelligence has been praised and the value of his work as a historical source has been ques-tioned; his originality has been emphasized and his alleged plagia-rism cursed, his linguistic knowl-edge praised and his handling of Quechua objected to, his use of Renaissance paradigms praised and his imprecision in represent-ing the indigenous institutions denounced, the syntactic subtlety of his prose praised and his attach-ment to notarial rhetoric of the time ridiculed. He has been called the first Peruvian and has been criticized for having fought un-der the banner of Santiago – here they are mataindios (killers of Indi-ans) and there they are matamoros (killers of Moors). Creator of "fal-lacious and lying" pieces, a simple "utopian fantasy" and a "chronicle of the first order."7 Illustrious crit-ics have said "brave patrañoso" and renowned authors have consid-ered it a "classic of the Americas". Unique virtues and unique defects of someone who was "an Antarctic Indian" born in that remote land that known as Peru.

It is true that the plot that links the author —subject of enun-ciation— to the subject of the ut-terance lies on a thorny area of literary theory. Even more so, con-sidering that his work is combined with autobiographical details and interspersed with digressions and stories in the third person. How-ever, reviewing the vast production

of the exegetes and critics of Gar-cilaso8 allows if not to unravel at least the intricate network of com-municating vessels that extends between his life, the time he had to live and his work and sheds light on the journey between two continents separated by leagues, languages and by the arduous con-frontation of two civilizations.

Even today, such civilizations continue to gravitate to anguish of identity similar to those he lived when the historical circumstances surrounding his birth seemed to be "largely a metaphorical config-uration of his person," taking the words of Enrique Pupo-Walker. In his early childhood or, in other words, in his prehistory, that por-tion of his life prior to his verbal development, the bond with his mother forged the foundation of security, a basic sense for his be-ing, and the first anchorages that would allow him to face a suc-cession of clashes, conflicts, and traumatic irruptions that would demand from him, from the be-ginning of his life, risky balances to face the tensions to which his psychic was exposed.

What the guagua (child) could conjecture about the copulation that created him was the echoes of what the happened eight years before its birth. It is true that the traces of his early years are quite differed from those of the events of Cajamarca, place of the original scene of the Peruvian homeland, inscribed by blood and fire as a founding trauma and traumat-ic foundation. What these two scenes had in common made it easier for them to equalize and sit-uate their respective protagonists in a sort of equation that endowed the parental imagos with historical dimensions that went beyond any metaphor. The accumulation of traumatic experiences reinforced the attraction of the foundational trauma. The orders held by his fa-ther took to him to show the mil-itary insignia at a time marked by the Lepanto events.

In the long process of trans-lating Leone Ebreo’s book, the identification with the conqueror turned into a symbolic link. The structure of the text gave rise to an articulation of the Andean cultur-al legacy with the Hispanic tradi-tion and propitiated the possibility of establishing a dialogue of retro-spective love between his parents necessary for him to assume the status of mestizo. Complicated with the Neoplatonic vision of Le-one Ebreo, he was able to begin a new reading of the history of his land that mitigated the violence of conquest to the spell of love with-in a perspective of civilization and evangelization. Emilio Choy has emphasized the renewing signifi-cance this implied for the path of American thought.

He published his Royal Com-mentaries with a modest title, but at the same time daring for a piece that transcends the "comment and gloss" and interprets the utopian and tragedy of the history of his land. Garcilaso made the chroni-cle of the Indies a work of art and Spanish "a language not only from Spain but the world," wrote Mario Vargas Llosa. The writing of the Royal Commentaries accentuated his tragic awareness. His narration of the encounter between the con-quering host and Atahualpa's cor-tege, written in admirable Span-ish prose, does not lack Quechua

NEW ACCOLADE*RicaRdo González ViGil

In 1916, commemorating the tricentennial of the death of the great chronicler, the histo-

rian and literary critic Jose de la Riva-Agüero pronounced a famous "Praise of the Inca Garcilaso." This piece enormously influenced sev-eral of the best Garcilaso scholars of the 20th century, among whom stand out Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa and José Durand. Riva-Agüero anoint-ed Garcilaso as a symbol of har-monious and fruitful mestizaje; he defended its veracity as a historian and its acceptance of the Christian and Western cultural heritage. A century later, a new accolade is needed, which fills the miscege-nation, truthfulness, Christianity,

and Westernization of Garcilaso.It is necessary to underline his

Andean condition, his anti-colo-nial stance, and his ability to insert in his writings a dissident speech, which bypasses the censorship of his time. It is worth noting that he managed to publish his writings, while all texts that could rival his own reality, and even going beyond as repositories of the Andean worl-dview - the Quechua manuscript of Huarochirí, Guamán Poma, Pach-acuti, Salcamaygua, Betanzos and Murúa, were kept unpublished until the 19th-20th centuries.

Our Garcilaso demands an attentive and informed reading of its historical-cultural context, since one of the characteristics

that typifies the great writers is the depth and originality with which they synthesize their time and their society, becoming a priv-ileged expression of both. And, in any given time and society, there are always intermingled factors and different trends, along with the multiple and heterogeneous inheritance of the past that has made them possible, these writers show a wealth of elements and a virtually inexhaustible complexity for analysis. Hence, they bear, and even claim, the most dissimilar approaches and interpretations.

* Excerpt of the introduction to the antholo-gy of the Royal Commentaries and other texts of the Inca Garcilaso by the critic Ricardo González Vigil, published in the Penguin Classics collection (2016).

The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba, Spain.

CHASQUI 7

narrative strategies, suggesting that he wished to awaken the processes of catharsis and expiation evoked by the Greek drama.

The two parts of the Royal Commentaries record a double loss: the Tahuantinsuyo devastated by massacres, famines, forced dis-placements, epidemics, and the decline of the epic and cruel deed of a conquest made by shedding blood and fire. The text served as a tombstone for both. The "memo-ry of lost good" oscillates between loss and absence. As Dominick La-Capra points out, writing the his-tory of traumatic events blurs the difference (non-identity) between loss and absence. The conscious-ness of the horror made the Inca very aware of the painful loss that the European invasion meant. The nostalgic mist made him feel the loss of the Incarnation as the ab-sence of an earthly paradise. The impossibility of recovering a non-existent paradise places the Con-quest as a founding act: the trauma that was embedded in the midst of the process of the de-structuring of the Andean world served as the basis on which the Toledo organi-zation would be built.

The second part of the Royal Commentaries, the General History of Peru, gives a social meaning to the collective experience at the time of the Conquest. As Paul Ricoeur emphasizes, since human time is always experience in movement, history is, above all, narration. Log-ging the temporal sequence and intuiting a logical order of events, makes it possible to articulate the past with the present and open expectations about the future. A tragic vision —a testimony of a very personal attempt to confront a sto-ry that runs through the channels opened by the Spanish Messianic providentialism of the 16th centu-ry— allows us to intuit terror, pity, indignation, and compassion that evoke actions that it is not always possible to understand. The pro-cession of pain, bewilderment, an-guish, and regret that accompanied the occupation of the Tahuantin-suyo leads the reader to become involved with its protagonists, win-ners, and defeated, and to feel that the destiny of each of the actors of the drama could have been theirs.

As for the "serious matters" to which the Inca alludes in the open-ing paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the Royal Com-mentaries: if the world is one and all inhabitable, if earth and sky are flat or round, if the temperate zones are passable and which of the antipodes are of which, would have added the harassment of the serious enigmas that Karl Jaspers places in the origins of tragic con-sciousness: Why is the world like this? What is man and what moves him? What is fault and what is fate? Where do the laws that gov-ern human societies come from? What are the gods? In his early years, the answer to such questions would have picked up the mythi-cal echoes of the stories conveyed by his mother, his uncle Huallpa Tupac, and the "old Inca" Cusi Huallpa.

Later in a double perspective,

that of Christianity and that of Neoplatonic philosophy, he re-hearsed his answers. Faith revealed to him the power of divine in-tervention. It was so great that it made Pachacamac himself decide the fate of the Inca and Tahuan-tinsuyo. The "prodigious signs" that announced the arrival of the Perulian host also announced that the reign of his own would become vassalage. The Inca Pax had opened the way: the peoples subject to its empire would be "more docile to receive the Catholic faith." Prov-identialism plays a key role in its personal elaboration of the mean-ing of an evangelizing conquest. It was therefore necessary to accept it without resignation or regrets.

As contended by Emmanuel Mounier, a Christian philosopher who lived the horrors of war in occupied France, in order to face such terrible circumstances, it is necessary to adopt a "tragic op-timism". The confused tangle of atrocious situations, he said, not only obscures the horizon with grief, sorrow, and indignation, but also allows some hints glimpses of hope. In the polyphony of mestizo choirs in the Royal Commentaries to which Jose Antonio Mazzotti re-fers, it is possible to discern a call to trust a future guided by the telos of providence.

A tragic consciousness is im-posed from the backdrop of the Royal Commentaries and appears in three moments. The first urged by the traumatic experiences of his childhood and country. Such experiences at the very edge of what is tolerable, "inviolable," to use Jorge Semprún's words. Those who survive them are not beset by a memory, but by a bewilderment whose integration to conscious-

ness is impossible and blocks their inclusion in a historical sequence. In a second moment, the past be-fore the trauma breaks through a story that paradoxically drags the traces of a later event that lies be-yond the limits of representation. In the third place, the metaphori-cal construction of the historical scenario seeks to recover a civiliza-tion de-structured by the traumatic event and at the same time recon-ciles the two halves in which their homeland was divided. That is why the conquest is a tragic event. Only in this way could the future home-land announced by the event that integrated it into the world coexist.

If attention is paid to the implic-it potentialities of the Inca's writing when it expands in stereo —in the sense given by Roland Barthès to the term— and the ear is tuned, a muted voice announces a radical change of epoch. After the mourn-ful echoes of the years that he lived in the land of his mother devastated by his father’s fellows, we can hear the words of a witness of the event that would give trigger the globaliza-tion process of which only today we begin to have clear awareness. The Inca combined the duration of his experiences with the dizzying time of the discoveries in the unstable coordinates of his time.

Emphasis has been placed on nostalgia, the elegiac tone, and even the Aristotelian mold of the Royal Commentaries... Jean-Luc Nancy draws attention to an er-roneous bias characteristic of our time that does not know that "the tragic ethos is not limited to the ac-companying pathos of disaster or calamity." This one goes through the work of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega who seems to tell us that it is indispensable to dare to suffer the

consequences of knowing our own stories. Without this tragic breath, it will not be possible to demolish the walls erected on the edges of the fracture produced by the trau-ma of the conquest and the conse-quences of exclusion and inequali-ty that still affect society today and continue to draw institutional and symbolic boundaries within it. The event that announced the rad-ical transformation of the Old and New Worlds can only be assumed if its tragic dimension is taken into account.

The Inca emphatically affirmed "there is only one world". Perhaps today we live for the first time a world history, that of all men, as Octavio Paz9 said in our language. It is also true that the present is blurred by the speed with which scientific discoveries, technological innovations, incessant migrations occur, and that the specialization of languages has dismantled the building of conventional wisdom. Perhaps the intuitions of this mes-tizo of the 16th century that show the roots of a hybrid and ungrafted thought serve to understand the mutation of the cultural experience then initiated and contribute to the unfolding of a heterodox, plural, and universal matrix of thinking.

The man who left "the navel of the world" to embark on the uncer-tain adventure of leaving the world never came to feel "a complete hi-dalgo, neither Spanish nor Indian, neither friend nor foe." Four cen-turies after his death, his books "if not always understood, always open" carry the words of a traveler who settled in Spain but who knew that his journey would not end as long as the world remained "wide and strange."10 Perhaps he hoped, like Hegel, that the world would become Man's home or that he would return to his native Ithaca, which, as in Constantine Cavafy’s poem, would have offered him an extraordinary journey.

* Doctor of Medicine by the National University of San Marcos and holds a Royal College of Physicians of London Diploma in Psychological Medicine. He has served as Executive Secretary of the National Accord of Peru, Vice President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and President of the Peruvian Society of Psychoanalysis. His book Memoria del bien perdido. Conflicto, identidad y nostalgia en el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Remem-brance of the lost good. Conflict, identity, and nostalgia of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega) (Lima: IEP/Peruvian Library of Psychoanalysis, 1993) is a benchmark among scholars who study Garcilaso.

1 Translator’s note (TN): Quechua word meaning ‘married princess’

2 TN: a written instruction for those who represent-ed a government

3 TN: Holder of grant or trustee

4 TN: ancient Inca device consisting of variously colored threads knotted in different ways, used for recoding events and keeping accounts, etc.

5 TN: title for teachers in the Inca empire, especially of children of the nobility.

6 TN: wise men who recorded in their memory and recited poetry and ritual songs.

7 Melchor Gaspar Jovellanos, José Durand. Marceli-no Menéndez & Pelayo compared the writing of the Inca with the "nervous and virile, quick and sober" writing of Julio César in "the Letters of Hernán Cortés’ Affairs" (“las Cartas de Relación de Hernán Cortés”).

8 Inter alia José de la Riva Agüero, Juan Bautista Aval-le-Arce, Aurelio Miro Quesada, John Grier Varner, Carlos Araníbar, Pablo Macera, Carlos Manuel Cox, María Rostworowski, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Miguel Maticorena, José Luis Rivarola, Manuel Burga, Ricardo González Vigil, Oscar Coello, José Antonio Mazzotti, Eduardo Hopkins Rodríguez, Francisco Manzo-Robledo, Miguel Gutiérrez, Edgar Montiel, Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino, Sandra Pinasco, Richard Parra, Enrique Cortez, Carlos García-Bedoya, José Antonio Rodríguez Garrido, Ricardo Fidel Huamán Zúñiga.

9 Cf. Sebastian Conrad What is global history?

10 Ciro Alegría.

Coat of arms of Inca Garcilaso in Cusco published in the Royal Commentaries. To the left, the Hispanic blazons; To the right, the Inca symbols.

CHASQUI 8

SIGHTS OF PACHACÁMAC The painter Ricardo Wiesse (Lima, 1954) exhibited in the Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs an anthological sample of his oils and drawings dedicated to the mythical

archeological sanctuary located on the Peruvian coast.

For the last 17 years, I have been going with the Croatian painter Dare Dovidjenko to

the Pachacámac sanctuary to paint and repaint on the ground. We discuss about the motives outdoors as did the 19th Century landscapers, and others even more remote. Thus, we have been repeating versions of our favorite subjects: the Temple of the Sun, the House of the Quipus, the Palace of Tauri Chumbi, the 18

pyramids with ramps.This exhibition goes to the same

places at different times. It does not compare matters, but treat-ments. Drawing and painting are exercises of enjoyment, gradually approaching the subtle and vibrant chromatic keys of the architectural site. Dialoguing visually with the site and collecting on cartons and canvases the last red shades of the Punchao Cancha or the lush greens

of the valley of Lurín constitute undeniable privileges and redou-bled pleasures in each visit.

In ancient times, Pachacámac, lord of the subsoil, was offered to quench the fury of earth-quakes and to balance territorial disputes, successive disputes, polit-ical impasses typical of an exten-sive, multiethnic and statist social mosaic. A world without writing based its agreements of peaceful

coexistence in the voice of that oracle, venerated in the entire Andean and Amazonian areas. As much as those of the past, Peruvi-ans today require the inspiration of similar unifying symbolic entities. Perhaps the appreciation and knowledge of our original values serve to reconcile the distant past with the recent past, and to trace future directions.

RicaRdo Wiesse

CHASQUI 9

SIGHTS OF PACHACÁMAC The painter Ricardo Wiesse (Lima, 1954) exhibited in the Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs an anthological sample of his oils and drawings dedicated to the mythical

archeological sanctuary located on the Peruvian coast.

CHASQUI 10

THE MILLENARY PACHACÁMACDenise Pozzi-Escot*

New site museum of the Pachacámac Archaeological Sanctuary opens.

The Pachacámac Archaeo-logical Sanctuary, south of Lima, in the Lurín river

basin, has a history dating back approximately 1,200 years. This was the main ceremonial center of the pre-Hispanic Peruvian coast during the Inca Empire. It currently covers 465 hectares, of which more than fifty buildings take up an area of approximately 250 hectares. These are signals of the importance of the site.

This is also evidenced in the researches carried out since the beginning of the 21st century, which have allowed the recovery of important material related to the customs, beliefs, and lifestyles of the different human occupa-tions performed in the archaeo-logical sanctuary.

The site is divided by four walls that control and guide the entrance to the site. In an early stage, during the Lima period (from the beginning of our era until the middle of the first mil-lennium), a number of facilities were built: the Old Temple, an imposing building made with small handmade adobes; the Urpi Wachaq; and the administrative center known as Small Adobe Complex. Apparently, a first apo-gee occurred around 650 AD, when the Waris1 expanded from the region of Ayacucho and occupied

the region of the Central Andes. In addition

to the religious ritual use of the site, they used the Pachacámac site to bury their dead; thus, leaving a large cemetery.

During the 11th and 15th centuries, the region of what is now Lima was occupied

by a group known as Ychma, which built most of the buildings that can be seen today in the sanctuary. The most representative constructions of that time are the pyramids, which are very

similar, composed by two or three platforms and a central ramp. There are 16 pyramids inside the sanctuary, which can be accessed by the North-South or East-West street, the main communication routes inside the sanctuary. Also dating back to this time is the Painted Temple, a stepped building constructed with small adobe first, links it to the Lima period, and rectangular adobes, whose north façade include important red and yellow frescos with designs of anthropomorphic figures, plants, fish, and birds.

It is during the Inca period that the Pachacámac Sanctu-ary acquires prevalence in the Pan-Andean region, uniting the ample Tahuantinsuyo state. Inca religious proselytism allowed for the survival of religion and worship of the Pachacámac god, a renown oracle, maintaining its temples, icons, and local colors, i.e., allowing the traditional offer-ings to continue.

The Incas remodeled much of the sanctuary, refurbishing the access gates and building a series of buildings that affirmed the dominion that they exerted in the region of the central coast. The Inca occupation is reflected not only in large buildings such as the Temple of the Sun and the Acl-lahuasi, but also in the artifacts used both for daily and ceremoni-al purposes and which have been unearthed during excavations at the site.

An important part of these findings is textiles, recalling that the fabrics afforded social, political, and cultural identity in ancient Peru. Like the textiles, the Inca quipus had an important role in the organization of the Pachacámac sanctuary, by meticu-lously recording the collection of offerings left by the pilgrims and

which now comprise the import-ant collection of the site museum of Pachacámac.

On the other hand, down the Lurín valley runs the Xauxa-Pach-acámac section of the main Inca road or Qhapaq Ñan, a road link-ing the Pachacámac site, through the Pariacoaca apu (mountain) in the Puna, and Hatun Xauxa, an important Inca administrative center in the region of Junín.

The need to preserve the material from the excavations was one of the main reasons that led Arturo Jiménez Borja to found the first site museum of the Pach-acámac Sanctuary in November 1965 to safekeep, investigate, and show the main archaeological artifacts unearthed in the site. Over the years, the Pachacámac museum became an important center for the dissemination of the pre-Hispanic history in the zone, also safekeeping the arti-facts collected from the investi-gations carried out in the nearby Lurín valley.

Now, fifty years later, a com-pletely new museum is opened. This new museum fits in the environment, respecting the land-scape and in harmony with the pre-Hispanic structures, without affecting the intangible area of the sanctuary. The design has included a series of ramps that remind us of the pre-Hispanic architectural shapes, and has a large permanent exhibition room, organized from a script that refers to the five universal values of the site, implementing an innovative museography, showing adequately representative artifacts of the site's history. It also has a multi-purpose room, as well as outdoor space, where the cafeteria and the museum shop are located, allow-ing us to enjoy the landscape. Finally, the museum currently

uses new and large deposits that will be equipped gradually for an adequate handling of the stored artifacts.

Like every modern museum, the Pachacámac site museum has opened its doors to the surround-ing community by organizing activities to socialize the history and space of such an important sanctuary. Thus, the Community Development Project is under implementation since 2014 with the support of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative (SPI), which has enabled us to train a group of women from the settlements adjoining the archae-ological site to make local handi-crafts, related to the Pachacámac iconography. With two years of permanent training in design, business management, and tour-ism, these ladies have enthusias-tically formed the company Sisan (Flourish, in Quechua) to market their products.

This important project can continue to train this group of women in new craft techniques, such as reserve-dyeing, thanks to a tourism grant ‘Cuida’, which makes it possible to exchange knowledge with other artisans of the north coast, symbolically trav-eling down the path of their pil-grim ancestors several centuries later. Likewise, the site museum of Pachacámac is also a learning center, a space for intercultural education, where schools around the archaeological site can be involved in programs linked to the environment and the partic-ular history of the area thus pro-moting their local identity. Thus, we hope to contribute to the formation of citizens committed to their heritage.

* Director Pachacámac Site Museum, Ministry of Culture.

New Pachacámac Site Museum.

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Detail of the wood carving representing the god Pachacámac, worshiped and feared in the Andean world.

CHASQUI 11

CÉSAR MORO OR THE POET’S PASSION

Jorge Nájar*Two long-awaited editions of the complete poetry of the Peruvian surrealist poet appeared.

Alfredo Quíspez Asín, César Moro’s birth name.

It is astonishing to see how, after three practically clandestine editions, also published in French, two in Mexico

City and one in Lima, and a one book in Spanish, published after his death, the entire work of César Moro (Lima 1903 -1956), over time, has become one of the greatest contributions to moder-nity within our tradition: a world of intense passion where "eroticism is not only an experience of fullness but also of shortcomings"1.

For that reason, it is worth ponder-ing on the elements concurring for this work to have reached its current recog-nition. Let us begin by recalling some of the traits of the author's personality. It has been said that he was an "explorer, mystical, ironic, violent, unwilling to live by the rules and restrictions of soci-ety..."2 These are not just brush strokes to portray any human being. A mystic is a person dedicated to the spiritual life and the contemplation of God, or to write about it. In the case of Moro, from Carlos Estela’s view, Moro is a mystical person and, at the same time, a violent being. Furthermore, he is said to have been a "visionary, cosmopolitan, viscer-al Peruvian... and no sooner one begins to read his work, one captures the un-leashed aura of a cursed and stealthy writer." Going into more details, he is said to have been an "enigmatic char-acter [...] a man who is paradoxically discreet and passionate to the point of plausible satiety, who repudiated his country and his mother tongue." And immediately, when commenting on a photograph of Moro walking along the street of San Juan de Letrán (Mexico City, 1942), Gabriel Bernal Granados portrays him to his fullest dimension: "He wears a sepia-colored jacket and a black round-necked shirt. Equally black glasses and wide forehead. His swinging arms emphasizes the illusory vertigo of the central avenue. Moro met and in-teracted some members of the Contem-porary group; his empathy with Xavier Villaurrutia, a night poet of homosexu-al love, death and sleep is specially high-lighted. However, something happens in Moro’s appearance that sets him apart from his fellow travelers. What was it about him that made him differ-ent even from the Latin American van-guard leaders educated in Europe, like Vallejo or Huidobro, or like their pre-decessor and teacher, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío? That difference which marked his character and appetites lies in something that could be described as a certain poetic disdain. The peak of his ambitions was not in the realm of liter-ature or the arts, but in the highest and most difficult of life..." . This is the char-acter in relation to the others and to himself. Here is the artist who emerges above any social promotion mechanism and self-fanfare.

But once he has reached this point, it is worth seeking beyond the stances and trying to get to the heart of things. To this end, it is necessary to go through the Complete Poetic Work held in the Ar-chives’ collection and the Complete Poet-ic Work held by the Peruvian Academy of Language, both different for their contents and their options. The one held in the Archives opts for a critical edition, the delivery of Moro’s texts in the languages in which they were writ-ten originally and, hence, partially bi-lingual. The one held by the Academy

offers a bilingual edition of the texts originally written in French, making all his poetry, henceforth, only available to a minority of bilingual readers, available in Spanish to all readers.

The publisher of the Complete Poet-ic Work3, in the version of the Peruvian Academy of Language, has given an ac-count of the long road traveled by the poetry of Moro to reach its current state of knowledge. And thanks to that same edition, it is now imperative to speak of this work taking into account the con-tributions of its translators. It is also impossible to speak of it without previ-ously looking at the translations of Mo-ro’s works. Why? Because the translator is the invisible author of the history of literature. Translators are actors in lit-erature insofar as they are importers of literatures. And Moro was one of them.

As soon as one arrives at the back-bone of Moro's work, his own poetry, he will not fail to astonish divergent opinions in front of his linguistic op-tions, Spanish or French. On the one hand, in the first introduction of the Complete Poetic Work-the Archives, it has been argued that after his arrival to Paris, French would become "his po-etic language par excellence"4. In fact, during his life Moro himself prepared and materialized his editions in that language. The first, Château de grisou (Grisou’s Castel) of 1943 (200 copies), the second, Lettre d'amour (Love Letters) of 1944 (50 copies), both published in Mexico; and the third, Trafalgar Square of 1953 (120 copies), this one was pub-

lished in Lima. These are short edi-tions, as if he deliberately did not seek readers among those around him. How-ever, these three publications were only the tip of the iceberg.

On the other hand, admitting that in fact the language of adoption prevails in terms of the volume of his work, it is impossible not to recognize the insu-perable intensity of the verbal mastery of his minority work in Spanish. In another introductions to the same Com-plete Poetic Work-Archives, Julio Ortega argues that Moro's work "puts the habit of homogenizing reading in crisis, and exceeds classifications and nomencla-tures, even within the same surrealism, and especially in its Free use of the French language.” In the same vein, André Coy-né, the author of the third introduction, confesses: "Since we first met, at the end of 1948, whenever he wrote a few vers-es, he copied them and showed them to me, not to discuss them aesthetically, but to make any correction, if neces-sary, to his French." “Translating Moro is an exciting but often disappointing and sometimes impossible adventure," said Américo Ferrari. It is exciting when the privileged reader is confronted with diamonds. The danger is in the flints that when subjected to the recreation process in another language end up bursting in the hands of the translator with its sharp angles.

Also worth recalling is Helena Us-andizaga’s analysis about one of the as-pects least studied in the work of Moro. She warns us that one tends to read this

multifaceted work "as if it were the au-tobiographical drama generated by the piercing violence that defines his style. This is true only in part: in the differ-ent texts, the textual subject performs different operations and therefore it makes no sense to jump from one type of text to another without question-ing”5. The prophetic voice that prevails in his texts, the piercing voice announc-ing amorous dispossession, and its re-spective sacrificial component, Usan-dizaga says, “is also explained in terms of the strategy deployed by extreme passion.” In his argument, he points out, for example, that love letters lack a decisive element of his poetic tone, violence as a way of interacting with the world. And that leads him to maintain that "in the tone we rework the critical and analytical attitudes of the essays to transcend the limits of its autobiogra-phy." Moro himself has maintained in The Sulphur Spectacles (Los Anteojos de azufre) that poetry is "the haunt of ferocious beasts, the advent of the an-thropophagous age, the selection of the worst instincts, the instincts of murder, rape, incest ...". Moro's tone changes in his essays. In his essayistic reflection "Moro defines the combustion with which his texts burn and ... proposes the transgression that propitiates it". In an attempt to clarify his roots, his willingness to remain among us, even considering himself alien, Moro took refuge intellectually, aesthetically, ideo-logically, in the brilliant and beautiful image of ancient Peru to oppose it "to the sordid and vulgarity of modern life; in it, he takes refuge as a poet, and that image, according to him, belongs to the poets". Usandizaga concludes suggest-ing that finding refuge in the world of ancient civilizations was for Moro not to snuggle in the archaeological refer-ence, but "an extreme aesthetic percep-tion that implies a way of burning in the beauty and the sacred ...".

Given the previous achievements and seen from any angle, the entire work of César Moro emerges as a gi-gantic volcanic flow. It comes from the depths of the night, from the depths of the planet and expands its howls and its gold nuggets, its cries filled with dia-monds and strange stones, their silenc-es, their tears and laughter as if it were a devilish song. A song of furious angels. A funeral song in French and Spanish, but toned with the same ink: passion. It is a song of immolation in the bonfires of pleasure. It is a solar hymn to the tur-bulence of love.

* Poet and translator. He has been in charge of translating part of the works in French of Moro, published by the Peruvian Academy of Language.

1 Sucre, Guillermo. La máscara, la transpar-encia (The Mask, Transparency), Caracas, Monte Ávila, 1975, pp. 398-404.

2 Amour à Moro, homenaje a César Moro (Amour à Moro, homage to César Moro). Publishers: Carlos Estella and José Ignacio Padilla, pp. 5, 101, 114 and 116.

3 César Moro. Obra poética completa (Com-plete Poetic Works). Lima, Peruvian Acad-emy of Language, 2016.

4 Caesar Moro. Obra poética completa (Complete Poetic Work). Critical edition. Coordinators: André Coyné, Daniel Lefort, Julio Ortega. Poitiers, CRLA. Collection Archives, 2015, pp. XXX.

5 Usandizaga, Helena. «Saber y violencia en los ensayos de César Moro» (Knowledge and Violence in César Moro's Essays". In: Amour à Moro ..., ob. Cit., pp. 118-127.

CHASQUI 12

Vienes en la noche con el humo fabuloso de tu cabellera

AparecesLa vida es ciertaEl olor de la lluvia es ciertoLa lluvia te hace nacerY golpear a mi puertaOh árbolY la ciudad el mar que navegasteY la noche se abren a tu pasoY el corazón vuelve de lejos a asomarseHasta llegar a tu frenteY verte como la magia resplandecienteMontaña de oro o de nieveCon el humo fabuloso de tu cabelleraCon las bestias nocturnas en los ojosY tu cuerpo de rescoldoCon la noche que riegas a pedazosCon los bloques de noche que caen de tus manosCon el silencio que prende a tu llegadaCon el trastorno y el oleajeCon el vaivén de las casasY el oscilar de luces y la sombra más duraY tus palabras de avenida fluvialTan pronto llegas y te fuisteY quieres poner a flote mi vidaY solo preparas mi muerteY la muerte de esperarY el morir de verte lejosY los silencios y el esperar el tiempoPara vivir cuando llegasY me rodeas de sombraY me haces luminosoY me sumerges en el mar fosforescente donde acaece tu estar

Y donde solo dialogamos tú y mi noción oscura y pavorosa de tu serEstrella desprendiéndose en el apocalipsisEntre bramidos de tigres y lágrimasDe gozo y gemir eterno y eternoSolazarse en el aire rarificadoEn que quiero aprisionarteY rodar por la pendiente de tu cuerpoHasta tus pies centelleantesHasta tus pies de constelaciones gemelasEn la noche terrestreQue te sigue encadenada y mudaEnredadera de tu sangreSosteniendo la flor de tu cabeza de cristal morenoAcuario encerrando planetas y caudasY la potencia que hace que el mundo siga en pie y guarde el equilibrio de los maresY tu cerebro de materia luminosaY mi adhesión sin fin y el amor que nace sin cesarY te envuelveY que tus pies transitanAbriendo huellas indeleblesDonde puede leerse la historia del mundoY el porvenir del universoY ese ligarse luminoso de mi vidaA tu existencia

el olor y la mirada

El olor fino solitario de tus axilasUn hacinamiento de coronas de paja y heno fresco cortado con dedos y asfódelos y piel fresca y galopes lejanos como perlasTu olor de cabellera bajo el agua azul con peces negros y estrellas de mar y estrellas de cielo bajo la nieve incalculable de tu miradaTu mirada de holoturia de ballena de pedernal de lluvia de diarios de suicidas húmedos los ojos de tu mirada de pie de madréporaEsponja diurna a medida que el mar escupe ballenas enfermas y cada escalera rechaza a su viandante como la bestia apestada que puebla los sueños del viajeroY golpes centelleantes sobre las sienes y la ola que borra las centellas para dejar sobre el tapiz la eterna cuestión

de tu mirada de objeto muerto tu mirada podrida de flor

* César Moro. La tortuga ecuestre (The equestrian turtle). Lima, Revuelta Publishing House, 2012.

you arriVe at night with fabulous smoke in your hair

You appearLife is certainThe smell of rain is trueYou are born in the rain And with the rain you knock at my doorOh treeThe city, the sea that you sailed,The night opens to your stepsThe heart comes back from afar leans outTouchers your forehead And sees your sparkling magicA mountain of gold or snowWith the fabulous smoke of your hairWith the beasts of the night in your eyesAnd with your body made of burning embersYou water portions of the night With the blocks of night falling from your handsWith silence kindling your arrivalWith upheaval and wavesWith houses swaying,Oscillating lights, and the hardest shadowYour words are river trafficNo sooner do you arrive than you are goneAnd you want to set my life afloatAnd you only prepare my deathAnd the death of waitingAnd my dying knowing that you are far awayAnd silences and waiting for the timeWhen I feel alive because you come backAnd you surround me with your shadowAnd you make me shine And you plunge me into the phosphorescent sea where your existence unfolds

And where you and my dark frightful notion of you engage in dialogue A star casting off in the apocalypseBetween the bellowing of tigers and tearsOf eternal joy and moaning and eternalSearch for solace in the rarified airIn which I wish to imprison youAnd roll down the slopes of your bodyReaching your sparkling feetYour feet which are twin constellationIn the terrestrial night Which follows you chained and mute Creeping your bloodIt holds your head like a flowering dark crystal An aquarium containing planets and comet tailsAnd the power that keeps the world on its feet and The seas in steady balance And your brain made of luminous matterAnd my endless adherence and my endless love Wrapping itself around youTraveled by your feet As they leave indelible footprintsWhere we read the history of the world And the future of the universeAnd that luminous binding of my lifeTo your existence

scents and glances

The fine unequaled scent of your armpitsOvercrowding of straw crowns and fresh hay Cut with fingers and asphodels and fresh skin and Distant gallop like pearlsYour scent of hair under the blue water with black fish And starfish and sky stars under the Immeasurable coldness of your gazeYour glance like that of a flint sea whale of Rain of wet suicide papers, the eyes of Your look standing away like madrepore (coral) Daytime sponge as the sea spits sick whales And every step rejects his passer-by Like the stinking beast that haunts the dreams of travelersAnd flashing blows on the temples and the wave that Erases the sparks to leave on the tapestry the eternal question Of your glare on a still object, your stare like a rotten flower

CHASQUI 13

Peruvian navy

CONCERT BAND2015 special centennial edition

The Peruvian Navy, commemorating the centennial of the creation of its band, has released the first CD of its new Sym-phonic Band, which includes original music for bands, arrangements of Peruvian music, 'classical' music (waltz by Strauss, suite of the Opera Carmen, etc.) and film soundtracks. The Navy Symphony Band was re-founded in 2014, with the encouragement and conductor Abraham Padilla Benavides, the institution's music consultant. This is the result of a series of important actions aimed at taking to the highest level the music for bands in Peru in the last few years. Traditionally, the bands of military institutions have not been part of the cultural life of concerts in Peru. With the appearance of this cast, that has changed radically. The high level shown since the first concerts given in 2014 has continued its development during the 2015 Centennial Season, reaching more

than 13 thousand spectators. There have also been didactic concerts and recitals by the chamber guitars of the Symphonic Band. This level is evident in the subtle nuances achieved, the refined symphonic chime, the precise tuning, the versatility of styles, and a plumed virtuosity. Their interpretations are vibrant and energetic, showing great gracefulness in the works and passages that so require. The album was recorded at the Naval Academy of Peru in July of this year by Global Artists Studio, with the highest quality standards and has an elegant graphic design. As a contribution to the original Peruvian rep-ertoire for symphonic bands, the album includes the piece Ninkashi: el abrazo de la Tierra (embracing earth), by Abraham Padilla, inspired by traditional songs of the Asáninka people of the Peruvian Amazon. It also includes a renewed version of the Peruvian waltz "La flor de la canela". The album brings a booklet with a review of the band, an article on the history of musical art in the Peruvian Navy, various comments, and credits. The repertoire is the same one that was interpreted in the Gala Concert held in Great National Theater of Peru on August 11, 2015.

Luciano QuisPe

new blood, sounds of the PeruVian andes (Wayna Music, 2013, WWW.sayaRiy.coM)

This is a collection of music interpreted, arranged and, in some cases, created by outstanding musicians playing instrument

characteristically used in Andean music. Outstanding players of charango, guitar, violin, harp, aerophone, and saxophones were invited to represent the musical im-agery of the modern Andes, following the producer’s vision. This vision materializes in monographic discs, each dedicated to an instrument or sonority.

In this collection, the instruments do not combine with each other. Likewise, the producer declares that each album in the series aims to be an academic corpus of sounds-of what he would call the "new Andean music". In this case the interpreter is Luciano Quispe, an outstanding local harpist, who has composed several songs included in the record album. Other pieces belong to the traditional repertoire, includ-ing songs by Guillermo Arias, Eustalio Cuentas, and Teodoro López.

The recorded pieces are mostly rein-terpretations of music from Apurímac, Ayacucho, Áncash or Cajamarca. The arrangements and creations of Quispe are interwoven with an Andean linage for harp and its antecedents the sound ges-tures, textures, and techniques of famous Paraguayan harpists of the 1980s, who have contributed notably to the dissemi-nation of this instrument. Similarly, the new harmonious, melodic, and rhythmic tendencies of what we recognize as Andean pop music are also present in the aesthetics of this album, showing that the recordings, concerts, and presence in the media of this music not only are a form of expression of a group of musicians interested in connecting with a wider, more mestizo, audience and perhaps descendant of the migrant from the countryside to the city, but are also an source of input for new in-

terpreters and creators, thus participating in the endless wheel of the Peruvian living musical culture. abRahaM padilla benaVides.

SOUNDS OF PERU

The composer, choreographer, and designer Victoria Santa Cruz (Li-ma, 1922-2014) and her brother

Nicomedes (Lima, 1925-Madrid, 1992), decimista1, musician, folklorist, and journalist, have made, together and each separately, fundamental contributions to the construction of the diverse and pluri-cultural Peruvian identity, through their exemplary contribution to rescue and enhance the musical and dance traditions of the Peruvian black culture. Both were relentless in showing and exposing soci-ety's attitudes towards this component of our national culture, evidencing the prejudices and discriminations of which they were subject for a long time, but not through complaint or self-victimization, but actually doing the opposite, resorting to the dissemination of their aesthetic and idiosyncratic values. Through contin-uous and fervent artistic activity, teaching and media, Victoria and Nicomedes propose to the Peruvian society a revision of their positions to the particularities of the rhythm, body movement, and other cultural components of the descendants of that particular mestizaje2 that occurred in our country after the import of African slaves, always seeking to raise the dignity of these roots and exalt these values. Displaying an educated, flowery, and sometimes combative verse, Victoria, in her speeches, and Nicomedes, in his déci-mas10, argued for a transformation of the perception and valuation Peruvians had until then of the black in Peru.

Yet, though a part of their discours-es was concerned with showing these prejudices, another very important one was dedicated to constructing a corpus of new traditions, based on their own investigations and those that were being carried out in the Americas to unveil the veil that time and the lack of accurate data had put around certain particular aspects of music and especially black dances. In-tegrating them and taking as fundamental starting point their African origin, they determined the boundaries and even the

entire contents of the musical and dance manifestations of what we know as the Af-ro-Peruvian culture. They both made con-tinuous efforts to disseminate this work through dance and music companies, performing in Peru and abroad, giving conferences, issuing publications, and so on. Not all Peruvians are aware that most of these genres, musical patterns, and cho-reographies do not exist (did not exist) in the traditions of our peoples, while we can trace those characteristic features in other cultures, such as the Andean or the Ama-zonian (because many of the components of the latter have survived to their present expressions and are alive in the everyday activities in specific places of our territory).

These creations, which have become new traditions, are today part of this scat-tered and segmented entity that we call Peruvian identity, but which we all recog-nize as a common property, thanks in part to the work of Victoria and Nicomedes Santa Cruz and, of course, who have con-tinued with these inquiries and concerns. One of Victoria and Nicomede’s nephew,

Rafael Santa Cruz (1960-2014), son of the bullfighter Rafael Santa Cruz, shared his time between acting in soap operas and television series, with the promotion of Afro-Peruvian music in a new Fusion with other expressions, not only national, but also from abroad. He published in 2004 the book and CD El cajón afroperuano and created the International Festival of the Cajón in 2008, whose most widespread expression is the so-called 'Cajoneada', which is held annually since then and that gathers musicians and fans to play together in some plazas. Researcher Mar-co Aurelio Denegri published in 2009 the book Cajonística y vallejística, in which he makes important contributions to the history of the Cajón as a Peruvian musical instrument.

Composers of academic music, among them the writer of this piece, have long created works that include the Peruvian cajón as an instrument in the or-chestra or as a solo, thus integrating this sonority into the contemporary Peruvian musical landscape.

Although we have advanced signifi-cantly towards the knowledge, respect, and even in some aspects, integration of our multicultural expressions, and espe-cially the Afro-Peruvian ones, it is utopian and even unnecessary to seek their unifi-cation because it is precisely in that differ-ence that rests Peru’s great opportunity, possibility of nourishing itself every day with new ingredients and transformation, growth, knowledge and respect, seeking harmonious coexistence, interaction or integration with the other, with others, valuing each component that makes up all Peruvians, that mestizaje that leads us to ascertain with complete conviction: in Peru, in the absence of Inga ancestors, a person has Mandinga ancestors (el que no tiene de Inga tiene de Mandinga).

* Composer and orchestra conductor.1 TN: A person who writes or improvises décima- a

ten-line stanza of poetry.2 TN: interracial breeding3 TN: A cajón is a box-shaped percussion instrument

originally from Peru, played by striking its surfaces.

THE SANTA CRUZ FAMILY IN THE PERUVIAN CULTUREAbraham Padilla Benavides*

Victoria and Nicomedes Santa Cruz. Rafael Santa Cruz.

CHASQUICultural Bulletin

MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Directorate General of Cultural AffairsJr. Ucayali 337, Lima 1, Perú Telephone: (511) 204-2638

E-mail: boletinculturalchasqui@rree.gob.peWeb: www.rree.gob.pe/politicaexterior

The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors.

This bulletin is distributed free of charge by the diplomatic missions of Peru abroad.

Translated by:Business Communications Consulting

Mare Gordillo

Printing:Tarea Asociación Gráfica Educativa

CHASQUI 14

THE RIVER SHRIMP’S KINGDOMTeresina Muñoz-Nájar*

Nowadays, the greatest pro-duction of this crustacean (80%) is located, especial-

ly, in the Ocoña, Majes-Camaná, and Tambo Basins, in the Areq-uipa Region; however, these de-licious shrimps are also found in Lunahuaná (Canete River Basin) to the south of Lima.

Like some arthropods —group or phylum that includes insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and myria-pods, the river shrimp (Cryphiops caementarius) is fully covered by a shell. This kind of armor pre-vents the shrimp from growing, thus it must molt constantly its exoskeleton. This means that whenever this freshwater warrior accumulates enough tissue to give a new spurt, it develops a shell under the old one and so, once it is ready, the shrimp looks for a safe place for molting, this action takes just a few minutes. Its new armor does not take more than six hours in being as resistant as the previous one. Although this char-acteristic makes it similar to other crustaceans, such as the whiteleg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei), there is a great difference besides the flavor among them: the river shrimp has a great claw or chela, so prominent, that it can weigh as much as its own body.

Adult male shrimps are much larger than female shrimps and these have a smaller second pair of legs compared to those of the male shrimps. In their natural habitat (there are also farmed shrimps, such as the "«giant shrimps of Malaysia», which are grown mostly in the Amazon region of San Martin), these little animals prefer deep and dark backwaters and usually hide from light and predators, either between the veg-etation of the rivers or under its stones. We should not forget that shrimps have a strong cannibal in-stinct, so they are not only victims of man, when fishing indiscrimi-nately or contaminating the wa-ter, but also of their own species. When shrimps grow in the right place, they can measure up to 40 centimeters and weigh 200 grams; however, their commercial size and weight fluctuates between 8 and 20 centimeters and 20 and 100 grams.

Tracing the Footsteps of River ShrimpsThere is no doubt that river shrimps were part of the ancient

Peruvians’ diet. This was first con-firmed by Ruth Shady, a scholar of Caral, one of the oldest civili-zation of the world. According to her, 5000 years ago, besides con-suming anchovy and the extinct choro morado or choro zapato, the people of Caral ate shrimps from the River Supe. In the archaeolog-ical site, very interesting vestiges have been found such as camaron-eras (traps to catch shrimps), made with agave fiber and cotton and, also, remains of shrimp fragments in the offerings located in the py-ramidal building La Galería (The Gallery).

The river shrimp has also been represented in the ceramics of var-ious pre-Hispanic civilizations and is immortalized in the petroglyphs of Chichictara, in the province of Palpa in Ica; of Miculla, in Tacna, and Toro Muerto in Arequipa, among others. This shows that it was food eaten by the inhabitants of those areas in remote times, who certainly had to consume it fresh or dry, as they did with the fish and mollusks.

During the viceroyalty, the shrimp continued to occupy a preponderant place in the tables of many places. Father Bernabé Cobo, in his famous Historia del Nuevo Mundo (History of the New World, dated in Lima, 1653),

states: «River shrimps are brown, and when they are cooked they become red, like a coral [...], there is plenty of them in this kingdom of Peru and are taken dried from one part to another». Sergio Zapa-ta Acha, in his Diccionario de gas-tronomía peruana tradicional Zapata (Dictionary of Zapata Traditional Peruvian Cuisine), states that yukra means shrimp in Quechua, amukha in Aymara, and lang in the Mochica language.

Meanwhile Eduardo Dargent, in La cocina monacal en la Lima virreinal (The Monastic Cuisine in the Viceregal Lima), says that in the Holy Trinity monastery, in the middle of the 17th century, shrimps were bought «by loads or 'blankets' in quantities that have not been determined.» Dargent reports that the nuns also pur-chased dried shrimps and that these were used together with the fresh ones to prepare, among other dishes, «quinua atamalada».

Dargent has recovered a num-ber of lists of ingredients of the mentioned monastery, in which shrimps are protagonists. One of them is really interesting: «Five patacones of shrimps, 4 reals of butter, half real of onions and parsley, 2 reals of tomato, 1 real of ají verde, half real of vinegar». The question is whether the dish pre-

pared with these ingredients was actually a sudado (type of stew).

Regarding the presence of shrimps in the rivers of Lima, Dar-gent warns that «they were caught in the Rímac, Chillón, and Lurín rivers, but also in the channels of the Surco River. Until the begin-ning of the 20th century, shrimps could be fished both in the latter river and in the Armendariz ra-vine, which was a discharge point for this waterway». Later, in the middle of the Republic, Manuel Atanasio Fuentes, in his Apuntes históricos, descriptivos, estadísticos y de costumbre de Lima (1867) (Historical, Descriptive, Statis-tical, and Customary Notes of Lima), when referring to «national foods», he says: "Another stew is chupe-if not the number one in the hierarchy of stews, is certainly more delicious. It has potatoes cooked in water or milk, to which shrimps, fried fish, eggs, butter cheese, and salt are added». He also admits that «the chupe needs that something else that only the cooks of Lima know».

In the Grounds of the CrustaceanThe fact that the Misiones rivers currently monopolize shrimp production is no accident. In the middle of the 18th century, the

Over time and due to several factors —ranging from predation to climate change, the habitat of the most sumptuous consumable of the Peruvian gastronomy: the river shrimp, an endemic

specie of the Peruvian cost (from Lambayeque to Tacna) and northern Chile, has been decreasing.

Sale of shrimp in the San Camilo market in Arequipa.

Phot

o: R

os P

ostig

o

CHASQUI 15

RECIPES

Arequipenean historian Ventura Travada and Cordova affirmed that the city of Arequipa had great quantities of dry shrimp. We thought that if they dried them, it was not only to supply the whole region with them, but because they had the fresh ones, as was the case, for example, in Lunahuaná, where people still talk about how enormous quantities of fresh fish were placed on the roofs of the houses to sun-dry them and serve as a reserve in times of scarcity. "From far away, the villagers said, "it seemed that all the houses had red roof tiles."

Whether or not this is true, the fact is that in Arequipa there has always been an abundance of shrimp. Alonso Ruiz Rosas so confirms in La gran comida mestiza de Arequipa (The Great Mestizo Food of Arequipa), as he warns: "There were shrimp in the Chili River until the beginning of the 18th century, although the bulk of the supply always came from the rivers closest to the coast." "In Ocoña," Raimondi wrote in the first volume of his monumental work El Perú (1874), "I saw his

principal industries, which manu-facture olive oil and fish shrimp and shellfish which they dry to take them to Arequipa. Cross-ing the torrential river ford, I continued marching a short distance from the sea to the town of Camaná, whose inhabitants are engaged in almost the same industries as those of Ocoña.”

Ruiz Rosas also highlights three import-ant things. The "evident pre-Hispanic origin" of some Arequipa dishes based on shrimp, such as ocopa, sivinchi, chupe, and escribano, and fishing and drying techniques. As for river shrimp fishing, this author reports that there were three ways of catch-ing them, with a cast net or net (which is the implement used by fishermen today), with the hand and with the famous "izanga", a conical basket open at its widest and closed at the oppo-site end this was also used by the ancient Peruvians and whose use

is forbidden today, because it threatens the life cycle of the shrimp.

As for drying, a technique that, as we have seen, is ancestral, con-sists of placing

the shrimp in the blaze of an oven

or stove, on the burning embers until

its shell becomes red. Then they are exposed

to the sun and air to dry completely. In Arequipa, this practice is called "caspa-do", a word that comes from Quechua caspay: roast. Mejía Xespe also confirms

the use of this method in Ali-mentación de los indios (Food of

the Indians). He writes: "When fishing is abundant, people cook amuka, a 'dry shrimp' by the use of fire and hot stones or sand."

Ventures and Sorrows Although, as Ruiz Rosas says, "shrimp is the undisputed mon-arch of the Arequipa cuisine since

ancient times" and, doubtless, praised ingredient in almost all the cuisines of the north, south and center of the country, there is a risk that it will disappear, especially if their annual closure is not strictly respected. Accord-ing to the Regional Production Department of the Arequipa Government, the great threats of shrimp are indiscriminate cap-ture, contamination by informal mining, and the discharging of untreated domestic water and agricultural water with strong agrochemicals.

It is urgent, then, to raise awareness and protect this very valuable species. Both family homes and restaurants use shrimp or the aforementioned 'Malaysian Shrimp' during the shrimp ban (from December 20 to March 31) and take advantage of the latter during the months allowed to fish. The idea is to never stop tast-ing a “shrimp chupe", a "shrimp moqueguano" or a "shrimp covered", succulent recipes that we have included in this bulletin.

* Journalist and gastronomic researcher.

CELADORES DE CAMARÓN (Shrimp Wardens)

INGREDIENTS600 g Shrimp tales 2 Lemons 6 tbsp Vinegar 6 tbsp Oil 2 Tomatoes without seeds, peeled and feather-cut 1 Rocoto pepper, finely chopped1 Large onion, feather-cut1 tsp Parsley and coriander, chopped Salt and pepper to taste

PREPARATION

Add the shrimps, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Add vinegar and oil and set aside for one hour. Next, add the tomato and rocoto pepper. Season to taste. Finally, add the onion and sprinkle the parley and coriander. Serve with boiled and browned potatoes.

In: Blanca Chávez. El camarón (The Shrimp). USMP, Lima, 2015.

CHUPE DE CAMARONES (Peruvian Shrimp Chowder)Recipe by Gabriela García de Huaco

INGREDIENTS1 ½ kg Large shrimps 2 l. Boiling water 2 tbsp Aji panca chili paste 5 Large garlic cloves 1 Small red onion, finely chopped6 Small squash slices 6 Slices of ear ripe corn 3 Medium potatoes, peeled and cut into 2 chunks½ White rice, washed½ kg Lima beans, peeled6 Peppercorns, 2 fresh eggs1 cup Evaporated milk¼ kg Fresh cheese, cut into small dices1 Sprig of fresh oregano, 1 sprig of Peruvian black mint Coriander (a small bunch)Olive oil, salt

PREPARATION

Clean and wash the shrimps without removing the head. Brown the onion and garlic cloves finely chopped in a saucepan with little oil until translucent; add the chili paste with some salt and stir. Put the shells in the saucepan and bring to boil a couple of minutes until they are red-colored. Remove the shrimps and pour the boiling water with the peppercorns. Once it is boiling, add the potatoes and corn; then, add the rice and, finally, the Peruvian black mint, oregano and two sprigs of coriander, all together. Add the lima beans, the squash, and shrimps. Wait a couple of minutes until everything is cooked; add the milk, cheese and the eggs lightly beaten, salt to taste and, if possible, set aside a while. Warm up and serve sprinkling little chopped oregano.

In: A. Ruiz Rosas. El recetario de Arequipa. (Cook book from Arequipa) Cuzzi Editores, Arequipa, 2014.

CAUCHE DE CAMARONES (Shrimp Cauche)

INGREDIENTS24 Shrimps tails 1 cup Fresh or white cheese, shredded1 cup Julienned onion1 tbsp Roasted garlic paste1 tbsp Ají amarillo chili paste1 tbsp Shrimp head ½ cup Tomato without seeds, peeled and diced4 White potatoes, cooked and diced½ cup Lima beans, cooked and peeled1 cup Milk cream 1 tbsp Peruvian black mint, chopped2 tbsp Olive oilPeruvian black mint leaves, salt, pepper

PREPARATIONSeason the shrimp tails with salt and pepper. Set aside. Pour the olive oil in a saucepan. Brown the onion, roasted garlic paste, aji amarillo chili paste, and shrimp head. Season with salt and pepper. Add the shrimp tails, tomato, white potatoes, lima beans, fresh cheese, milk cream, and chopped Peruvian black mint. Cook until the cheese melts and the shrimp tails are cooked. Season to taste. Serve in a bowl and garnish with Peruvian black mint leaves.

In: Gastón Acurio. La cocina del sur. (The Cuisine of the South) El Comercio, Lima, 2006.

CHASQUI 16

The career of Emilio Rodríguez Larraín (Lima, 1928-2015) had a decisive impact on

the appreciation of visual arts in Peru during the second-half of the 20th century. Despite having been trained in the modern tradition of avant-garde, he managed to adapt to the new practices that defined the artistic field from the seventies. The transition from painting to sculpture and site-specific interven-tions determined the course of an unparalleled work in the local scene and which greatly influenced in the renewal of Peruvian art towards researches related to our contempo-raneity.

Although he started as an architect in the battles done for modernity at the end of the 1940s, Rodríguez Larraín rapidly moved to painting, a practice that he would explore continuously throughout his life. In the 1950s, he traveled to Europe where he lived and worked for more than thirty years, gaining international recognition with a painting of abstract-geometric concept that would continue until the mid-1960s. Once settled in Europe, his painting opted for more textured surfaces associated with modernist informalism and alluded to ancient Peruvian civilizations. His closeness to some of the main artist of the first modernity such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray increased his interest in surrealism and artistic experimentation.

This willingness for breakup and the fascination for the new languag-es would lead him to undergo an important turnaround at the end of the 70s, when he ventured into sculpture, designing pieces of great

constructive rigor that demonstrated his initial training as an architect. The drawings developed for his design, as well as his work performed with artisans allow him to put distance from what he called «el gesto escultórico» (the sculptural gesture). This allows him to develop a more conceptual approach to the artistic work, although his sculptures remain linked with the surrealistic tradition. In fact, his pieces in terms of volume seem to be self-suf-ficient entities that do not allude to external referenc-es and recall impossible beings from immemorial times - something that can be deduced from some names that the artist assigns to sculptures such as Milpatas, Ancestral or Oiseau-vache (Bird-cow). Fol-lowing the pattern of the surrealist project, Rodrí-guez Larraín assumes an ironic and caustic humor that connects with erotic allusions, something evinced in all his produc-tion and which is revealed in the names given to many of his works, such as the emblematic Coño de oro (Con d’Or, in French).

Precisely, working with sculpture is what leads the artist to produce ephemeral and site-specific works. In 1978, Rodríguez Larraín immersed one if his most emblematic sculp-tures – a Piramidita made of blued

steel – in the Mediterranean Sea, an action that opened him the doors to new projects conceived to be mate-rialized outside the galleries and the institutional spaces. With this action, Rodríguez Larraín begins to consider working again in Peru,

then conceiving the installation of an enormous monument for the desert of Ica based on his sculpture ilpatas.

Although this project never became a reality, his return to Peru in 1980 – one of the most complex moments in local history – would mark the beginning of a new exper-imental stage. In the next 15 years, the artist developed a coherent working body with local materials that included sculptures, mockups, paintings, and site interventions. The tumba de los Reyes Católicos (The Tomb of the Catholic Kings) or Un cuarto de escultura (A Room of Sculp-tures), which combined an allegoric intention with a critical reflection about the Peruvian context, marked a turning point in his work and became an essential benchmark for the history of local sculpture. As in the majority of his pictorial works, architecture had a fundamental role in all the works he created in Peru, specially his series of «esculturasre-fugio» (sculpture/hideout), which was intended to be placed along the mountain chain Conchucos or the big construction called La máquina de arcilla (The clay machine) to be placed in the beach of Huanchaqui-to within the framework of the 1987 Trujillo Biennial. By fading away the boundaries of the traditional artistic genres, these projects set an important precedent in local traditional scenes that had chosen to forget many of the experimental advances of the late 70s.

* Curators of the exhibition

EMILIO RODRÍGUEZ LARRAÍN

CONSTANT RENEWAL

Daniela de la Fuente de Alcobendas, circa 1970-1980, mixed technique on cardboard, 102 × 102 cm. Private collection, Lima.

No title / Botellas (Bottles), circa 1969-1971, mixed technique on pressed wood, 119 × 165 cm. Private collection, Lima.

Natalia Majluf & Sharon Lerner*The Art Museum of Lima dedicates a retrospective exhibition in homage of the prominent Peruvian artist.