Ica

“DON’T GO TO the archives or the libraries.”

And with this, my experienced Peruvian interlocutor let off a laugh that made his spectacles shake. It was 1986. In the 1980s interlocutors let off such infectious laughs at will, their glasses bouncing on the bridges of their noses. His backdrop, the living room of his apartment in Lima, served the moment. Dimly lit shelves. Crammed with books and replica pottery and sculptures of swimming, flying beings, things about which I then understood little (and now know I understand even less).

He¹ had taken the trouble to look into my twenty-something-year-old eyes and divine a thing or two about me.

Sometimes a little too diligent for my own good, then as now.

“There’ll be plenty of time for archives and libraries in due course,” he continued, setting his glasses straight.

“Choose —I don’t know— three or four regions. Go to them and stay a while. See things, watch people. Listen up,” Lucho added, and then with a hint of smile, “Live a little.”

Twenty-something me only half-followed this fine counsel (which I now impart to certain others). What is more, a problem immediately arose. How in the world would I choose? With four months and very little money at my disposal, where would I do this thing called “living a little”?

Guided by readings and tellings, imaginings and blind romance, you can literally guess what most of my itinerary in Peru became.

But what comes to matter most in my here-and-now —in what are becoming my kinds of remembering— aren’t the Machu Picchus or the Sacred Valleys or the Inka ruins —however wondrous these proved to be and still are. What looms larger are the chance encounters, noticings, and experiences in far more mundane Peruvian time-spaces. And how these things have become entwined with a vital juncture in my life. There was a café table in Arequipa where a man taught me all of the naughty words he knew in Castilian and in Quechua (oh to find those pages of notes, in his handwriting . . .); the riverside dock in Iquitos where I watched fishermen daily and decided not to go to law school; the pizza joint in Cusco where I thumbed through a recently edited collection of primary documents and first began to toy with multi-stage research project (about how “idolatry,” in the colonial Andes as elsewhere, was in the eye of the beholder, and not really idolatry at all) that would occupy me for years; the dirt floor in the back-garden hut of the village healer and ritual specialist (his wooden sign said brujo, “witchdoctor”) who, after proffering an infusion from the San Pedro cactus, asked me “what’s wrong?”; the beer I sipped on that rickety boat on Lake Titicaca, sailing alongside a vessel of the Bolivian navy; the chance conversation about, well, everything in a hostal’s common area, while exchanging my The Brothers Karamazov for another's Sometimes a Great Notion . . .

But I don’t want to enter further into a re-collection of those experiences in 1986, nor of those in subsequent visits to Peru, including a period of living for research in 1989-1990.

I want, rather, to share a thing or two about where I didn’t go, way back then.

I didn’t make my way south down the arid coast.

I didn’t get to Ica.

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I HAVE NOT surprisingly become, and remain, an inveterate investigator in“archives and libraries,” in museums too. Here, there, and everywhere.

Some of these repositories, usually in major cities, are well appointed and directed, and some even run like Swiss trains. But many more suffer from neglect, back-rooms with a few shelves, often without institutional resource or support beyond perhaps the vision and effort of some generous and committed soul, or a heroic string of such people.

With respect to archives, I prefer not so much “the Surgical Strike” —when a historical interpreter travels to a repository to consult a particular document, possibly to confirm a point already strongly suspected to be one way and not another, or, most exhiliaratingly, to make a close reading of a fragment ostensibly long “known” or dismissed by others— as what might be called the intuitive “Possible Opening.” I'm well aware that it's a rare luxury. The Possible Opening blends art with dumb luck. This is when a historical interpreter takes a chance and goes “off-road,” so to speak, “dropping the reins of one’s mule,” as Teresa of Ávila and Ignatius of Loyola put it in their own ways. Preparation for historical research is vital, or one won’t be in the frame of mind or informed-enough position to notice. But, then, for me at least, the best experiences have been in the next steps. Have been about the allowing for serendipity, giving rein to how open-ended curiosity might enliven perseverance; it’s admitting that your or my predilections and special connectivities will assert, and that something like sheer narrative opportunism is very much in play.

Who knows what name might turn up? Who knows what story, what scribbled notes, what map or drawing in the margin, what sketch of an episode seen and told idiosyncratically, memorably, might land before you?

And who is to say how this or that surviving trace will strike you or me on a given day? How it might juxatapose or cross-fertilise with, lead into, or follow upon something quite different? How it might shake up your thinking, demanding to be heard anew, as it were?

Pursuing such paths, for the likes of me, frequently involves meeting with and gaining permission-to-enter from priests and friars of the Roman Catholic religion. These are the people whose predecessors, stretching back centuries and across expanses of the globe, remain among humanity’s most tireless, literate (if differentially learned), opinionated, and —in my experience— unpredictable narrators. Quite apart from whether or not I am studying anything remotely “religious,” churchmen, and churchwomen, become intriguing, revealing commentators, points of entry, invitations to story, in more ways than one.

One day in late September, 2023, the priest in question unfailingly keeps his own schedule. He just as unfailingly has a guardian at his gate. A kind of receptionist-secretary-personal-assistant, who —with no actual control over the priest in question, but with a quiet loyal ferocity that would make Cerberus blush— filters phone calls (and now emails) and fields inquiries from visiting members of the public. The latter includes a certain dishevelled historical interpreter from abroad who, upon arrival at the gate, may or may not have shared a smidgeon too much about their research-and-writerly dreams, and should really have just got to the point.

And so it was at the door of the Obispado, Diocese of Ica, Peru, where, after introducing myself with (those too many words and) a letter of introduction, I sought some hours in the archives to examine early colonial records —even if “there are only a few.” I was told to wait on a straight-backed wooden bench which made me remember being sent out of the room as a child for talking too much in Sunday School (or any school).

After an hour approached another hour, a conversation something like the one which I re-create below transpired with the guardian at the gate (GaG). She sat behind a desk, itself only visible through a high window in a separating wall. She was wearing cat glasses, and had a tight yellowish scarf tucked into a green cardigan. As I spoke I couldn’t help but notice that she chewed a little on what looked to be a brand new pencil, an implement with which, as the morning wore on, I began to feel a certain kinship. There was a tarnished silver bell at her side.

k: "Excuse me. I'm sorry to bother you again. 
I know you have things to do and that there is no one to look after the archives... But I just wanted to ask ... if the priest is still coming?"

GaG: "Ah, Sí [she is at this point remembering I have been waiting], el padre. 
Viene. 
Viene en un ratito ..." 
("Oh yes, the padre. He's on his way. He'll be along in a short-ish-kind-of-while.") 

I include my interlocutor’s Spanish in the above conversation to better capture the moment, and to introduce in all its glory the venerable concept of “un ratito,” not to be confused with its nearly as noble root “un rato.”

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ROADS THROUGH THE deserts of coastal Peru south of Lima pass between exceptionally fertile oases settlements. These cluster along the banks of the vast rivers that (especially in January and February) flow down from the Andes into the sea. And also around springs and broader zones of humid earth and fantastic fertility, made thus by subterranean waters not too far beneath the sun-scorched surface. In such an environment, such zones were important to civilisations long before the relatively brief period dominated by the Inka, for whom (in the second half of the fifteenth century) Ica became a southerly nucleus for the largest of their four imperial regions, Chinchaysuyo.

After the Spanish invasion in the 1530s —and their bloody, stuttering civil wars and a gradual consolidation of power around control of labour and resources, especially the vast reserves of silver happened upon in 1545— mule-trains, with Ica as their base, soon moved vast amounts of wine and aguardiente (the antecedents of the now world-famous pisco) and other agricultural produce up and down the Peruvian coast, as well as inland and up into the mountains, to and from such cities as Arequipa. Many are the colonial-era descriptions of harrowing journeys by mule through blazing sun and interminable sands, along the royal highway (camino real) between Ica and Lima. Newcomers who sought short-cuts without guides, or who refused to travel mostly by night, often got lost and frightened, if not very dead.

Though they don’t cover such distances as all the mules once did, the moto-taxi (as Peruvians call their version of the tuk-tuk / auto-rickshaw) feel like the heirs to those beasts and their muleteers —to all kinds of hard-working bearers— in Ica and its now-sprawling environs, in modernity’s new kinds of unforgiving economies.

There's always a ride coming, their horns beeping before you even turn to look for them. “?Tío, cuanto al centro?" /" “Hey man, how much for a ride to the main plaza?”

Drivers tell of how they’ve saved up and risked it all. Of the tight margins, of the punishingly long days of driving back and forth constantly, between locations of no particular import, near and far. They tell of the insane levels of politics, ‘oneupmanship’ and competition for their licenses and the very right and space to operate.

How difficult it is even to get one’s own machine, let alone keep the thing on the road, and then make a living to support a family….

Tiny victories erupting daily are then rehearsed in words.

The solidarity, the esprit de corps —as the drivers weave through traffic, squirming between buses and trucks, then along the side of construction patches or seemingly any obstruction— is a thing to behold. The operator photographed in the red machine just above ended up running out of gas. We hadn’t pulled over to the side of the road for a minute before a fellow-driver came to the rescue with a slurp from his gas can.

Most of the moto-taxi operators in Ica know the way to seemingly anywhere, so long as you learn their landmarks and how to describe their points of reference. It’s not drop me “between the two tall hotels,” for example, but drop me “beside the [mural of the] Inka and Coya [the “queen”].”

Some of the moto-taxis are sober affairs, with dire warnings emblazoned on the outside, or images of saints and rosary beads on careful display within. Others are kitted out like personal discos, their lights and music blending with the cacophonous pulse of the street.

Harsh reality scrapes at romance.

Again and again. But, I can’t help it.

These modern muleteers

astride their rough-ride-metal-toolboxes,

enchant me in this place.

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PEOPLE ARE EVERYWHERE in Ica, as soon as one ventures out. And yet it is somehow simultaneously the most tranquil of Peruvian places I’ve experienced. Many are the Iqueños who confirm with me how, frenetic and congested and brutal the contrast of Lima is for most people.

Lunch in any one of the popular diners —with the rotating offerings of the daily special, the menú económico— is what especially ushers humanity on to centre stage.

The gentleman I’ve painted just above caught my eye not only because of how much he was enjoying his soup, but also because of how much he resembled my late maternal grandfather (except for the Iqueño’s nifty chin-beard). Apart from his part in the Allied invasion of occupied Europe in WWII, umpteen winter sojourns on Waikiki Beach, and visits to my family in Alberta, Gramps didn’t leave Saskatchewan very often. He had, moreover, declared himself “allergic to garlic” without (anyone being able to attest to his) having ever tasted it. Just the same, I think he might have liked the caldo de gallina (chicken soup), enjoyed alongside his doppelganger in the D’Mendoza Restaurant on the Plaza de Armas in Ica.

Speaking of caldo de gallina, let’s drop in at the Paraíso del Sabor — the ”Flavour Paradise” or perhaps the more literal “Paradise of Taste,” to add that dollop of ‘attitude’. Here, the caldito proves so extraordinary, and the characters so excellent, that I quickly become a regular.

Jenny, the woman who works as main chef, proudly brings out the piping hot courses, primero then segundo, and effortlessly also keeps up with the drinking pace set by a couple a few tables away, removing their big beer bottles two by two.

A dimunitive man walking about purposefully must be the owner. I never catch his name.

But this head honcho talks; and others (their take-out order growing cold) listen.

His cowboy hat, big boy Lee denims, square jaw-line and a shoulders-back gait exude local authority,

as does his preoccupation with securing a plastic carrying contraption on the delivery bike out front.

You just know it's not the first time it's got loose, threatening to cast a goodly portion of Paradise's business back down to earth.

Still it's another person —one Yony Aguirre— who ends up stealing, that is, running the show. I massively underestimate him and his range in my first visit, when he mostly patrolled the parking area out beside the road, sloshing water from a red bucket. Attempting to keep the dust down and off our tables, and also to render the parking area more alluring to passing motorists, and to so in the desert, is a Sisyphean labour if there ever was one.

But Yony Aguirre is up for it. As he is up for shedding the red bucket, it turns out, and acting not only as scurrying main waiter,

but also head of promotions,

delegator of responsibility to the mobile Chancho al Palo sign-guy,

special barbecue chef of the sides of chancho that, alongside the local speciality carapulcra, doesn’t fail to bring in the crowds on weekends, and…

also the Evening DJ.

Even when Yony Aguirre drifts off or surfs the net for a bit, the tunes keep coming.

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AS FOR ME, just maybe I’ve picked up a thing or two since July of 1986.

For, archives and libraries aside, I’ve felt compelled to see and experience Ica, and the road and landscape to and from the vantage of Lima.

These are places I’m thinking over, building the capacity to write about, to write what I hope can be a meaningful word.

I haven’t been disappointed. On the contrary, after a little more two weeks, while I am embarrassed by my privilege, I’ve had not nearly enough of Ica. When I wasn’t delving or dining or poking about in some other way, a precious rhythm descended that is harder and harder to find in our world. I have been writing each morning in the shade, on a roof top, visited by birds, their songs, their activity. The quizzical long-tailed mockingbirds, the sensuously swooping swifts, the somehow bright and scruffy Peruvian meadowlarks, they all cheered me in my Iqueña eyrie.

Quite what I might do with what I’ve uncovered here can be revealed in time. For the moment, I’d like to share this written meditation. And at the same time to leave these photographs, drawings and paintings just here. To let them say what I say.

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* My gratitude is not only to Luis Millones Santa Gadea (featured here for the advice that, eventually, lead me to Ica) —and with whom I include Renata Mayer de Millones and their family— but also to a great number of others who, between 1986 and now, have generously welcomed me, helped me along, and in such a variety of ways. They know who they are, and there may well be lines about them in some way down the line.

1. I was introduced to the distinguished anthropologist Luis (“Lucho”) Millones Santa Gadea (and much else) by my first teacher of Latin American histories, David C. Johnson. Amidst his many works to follow, I had then been captivated by a short but deeply suggestive note Millones had published in 1965, shortly after a spell of research in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. He set out to investigate anew the indigenous ‘millennarian’ movement which had arisen in the mid-1560s known as the Taki Onqoy, an expression in the Quechua language which contemporary Spanish commentators, along with most in their wake, have been content to translate — in terms of swirling debility, dysfunction, disorder and mental unsoundness— as “the dancing sickness.” Studying the dynamism of native Andean actors, ideas, actions —and the placing of such persons in multi-ethnic, interactive contexts— was becoming possible in the 1960s, but these were still extraordinary investigative moves, and of course not only in Peru. Lucho’s piece suggested that thoughtworlds were changing for everyone, native Andean peoples included. And he opened the possibility to see anew the taquiongos —as itinerant messengers of the Taki Onqoy were designated (when they were not called “dogmatisers” or characterised as so error-ridden as to be nigh-on heretical)— and the post-conquest Andean hearers who received them. Fears among the uneasy conquerors distracted attention from such compelling details. Spanish administrators and churchmen were concerned that the taquiongos had entered into pacts with simmering Andean “rebellions,” not least the so-called Neo-Inka dynasty holding out in Vilcabamba, a kind of colonisers’ paranoia that doubtless encouraged the dark characterisations of the movement by contemporary officials. But, as Millones noticed, the taquiongos ask questions of easy presumptions, and grow more complex the more you look. They were reported to travel all about, prophesying that the people's local ancestral beings (huacas) were making a salvific return, and that the Spanish would be driven back into the sea from which they had come, and kept coming. The huacas were sometimes regional cultural heroes whose sacred histories were told, danced and sung, and who —when their contributions to their people and their world’s making were complete— lithomorphised, becoming parts of the rocks and peaks and landscape. But, upon their return, now, some claimed that the huacas were within the taquiongos themselves, expressed through sacred oral and embodied traditions set in vital motion. Millones gazed past the prevailing fears and blanket concepts, opening the possibility for others that the taquiongos were itinerant preachers with meaningful retinues. Just how to read the evidence, his nota suggested, that a number of the principal accused were women who went by the name of María, associated themselves especially with Santa María Magdalena, and the evidence, revealed in 1570, that key others in the movement also took “the names of [Catholic Christian] saints”? Luis Millones S.G., “Nuevos aspectos del Taki Onqoy,” Historia y cultura núm. 1 (1965), 153; 151-154. Plenty of the pertinent documentation and scores of analyses have since been published, by Millones himself and by many others. One quick overview in English is Jeremy Mumford’s “The Taki Onqoy and the Andean Nation: Sources and Interpretations,” Latin American Research Review 33: 1 (1998), 150-165.