Pecked to death by ducks (26 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

me.

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

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 2.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

221 4 OTHER PEOPLE S LIVES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked Don Pedro if he could introduce me to the paq'o.

223 A OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES

"You have seen him," Don Pedro said. "You have seen his face."

I danced one last cowboy lambada with Juana and wandered back toward my room. A vicious storm had passed over the island earlier, and now it had moved far to the south. Lightning was striking along a fifty-mile front behind the snowcapped mountains of Bolivia. The storm was so far away that I couldn't hear the thunder. Every five seconds or so the sky exploded, and a mountain, blue white, shivered on the horizon.

The island, it seemed to me then, was a living, breathing thing. The stone fences were pleasant to look at, but they also kept the sheep out of the crops. And when the fields lay fallow, they would feed the sheep, and the sheep would fertilize them with their droppings. The wool provided by the sheep was woven into textiles that received a man at birth, clothed him through his life, and protected him on his journey to the next world.

At dinner, I had asked Sebastian Yurca what the island needed more than anything else.

"Natural color," he said.

Above, the night sky was clear and black, full of luminous and unfamiliar stars. At this altitude, the stars did not twinkle. They were great globules of light, and their colors were brilliant: white, blue white, red, green, gold . . .

Natural colors.

A man, I thought, could see the lights of Lima. Or he could see the stars.

What de Fonseca Lobo failed to mention, or what the miners failed to understand, is that while diamonds are hard, they are also brittle, and may be broken along four major cleavage planes and several secondary ones. The hardest naturally occurring substance known to man may be damaged, even shattered, by a fall or a sharp knock.

Early Brazilian miners fully understood that diamonds were hard, but it took them almost four years to realize that they were also brittle. The Brazilian test for a diamond between 1725 and 1729 was to place the suspected stone on an anvil and give it a crack with a heavy hammer.

"Tough luck there, Francesco — one hundred twenty-seven big stones and not one of them a diamond."

For 150 years Brazil supplied the bulk of the world's diamonds. But in 1866 diamonds were discovered along the Orange River in South Africa, diamonds that could be mined efficiently by machines, that did not have to be panned out of some steaming jungle river. These days Africa supplies all but a fraction of the world's diamonds.

In Africa diamond mining is a big business, requiring big machines and big investments. In South America diamonds are still mined by gamblers who may own little more than a pick, a shovel, and the clothes on their backs. In Brazil, Guyana, and Venezuela diamond mining is still a gambler's game.

The French journalist Lucien Bodard, writing about Brazilian miners, called garimpeiros, caught the flavor of their lives when he wrote, "Sometimes they stumble across a real treasure." Miners by the thousands flock to the find. "Then, even in the most forbidding swamps, they create ... a shantytown. There are stores, cabarets, brothels and inns; every kind of woman and every sort of trade. Not just cheap hardware items, but luxury items to gratify the big winner, the finder of the big diamond."

Soon enough a bit of the jungle will be burned away beside the river, and a mud runway will be constructed. Planes, hired at one hundred dollars an hour, serve the big winners. Bodard heard of a garimpeiro who "had a Cadillac brought over in pieces into the

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A ZZ6

heart of the virgin forest, which he put together again and used over the ioo yards of pavement in the place, until it rusted away."

Sometimes a garimpeiro, a big winner, may hire a plane to ferry him out of the disease-ridden shantytown. Then it's time for a binge in Rio or Sao Paulo until the money's gone. As far as Bodard could see, "No garimpeiro has ever made his fortune and none ever can. . . . The gartmpeiros know this so well that when they finally find their hands full of wads of notes, they go on a binge to beat all binges." Then it's back to the jungle and an existence that verges on mere survival.

Diamond miners I met in Venezuela, near the place where the borders of Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela meet, lived lives full of squalor, misery, and sudden incredible wealth inevitably followed by more squalor and misery.

The camp I visited was near Santa Elena, a prospecting venture. No large strike had been made. Half a dozen men—blacks, whites, Venezuelans, Brazilians, Guyanese—lived in lean-tos where they dug in the earth and battled tiny, stinging gnats that hatch off the river in millions, gnats even local Indians call "the plague."

The land near Santa Elena is a riverine oasis, a bit of low-lying jungle in the high, cold, wind-whipped flats known as the Gran Sabana. Standing like so many coffins throughout the Sabana are strange flat-topped mountains with walls that rise like cliffs, sheer and perpendicular to high prairie all around. These mountains— the Indians call them tepuis —catch most of the rain on the Gran Sabana, and, on their flat tops, rivers form and flow to the cliffs where they fall forever into the cold world below. Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall, drops down the side of a mountain known as Ayun-tepui.

Millions of years ago, at a depth of about seventy-five miles below the surface of the earth, heat and pressure and an unknown catalyst tortured carbon deposits in some mysterious manner and formed diamonds. These gemstones rose to the surface of the earth along with water and carbon dioxide, rose to the top of the tepuis, where the rivers caught them and sent them cascading over the cliffs, a literal waterfall of diamonds.