The Fist of God -- Page 4 | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> The Fist of God (cont.)

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine

Page:

The Fist of God -- Page 4


	Truckloads of campesinos rumble in off the altiplano; Marco Antonio dispatches the sacrificial heifer. Wolfgang Schüler

THE UYWAÑAKAKU WAS DEEPLY upsetting, not least to the heifer. She struggled against her fate, but they tied her by the horns to the 1930s amphibious vehicle—a relic of the Chaco War and of a not-so-far-off time when the only access to San Pedro was up the riverbed—that was rusting in front of Joél's house.

Joél and Prima splashed the heifer with chicha, and then a beefy dude named Marco Antonio Casano pushed a knife into her spine. She took forever to die, kicking and gasping through her severed windpipe while her head was being sawed off. A man smeared blood on our cheeks, where it hardened into bright-red scabs. The cow was pregnant, so they took out the pink fetus and draped its membrane over Prima's head like a veil (so David told me; by then I'd fled). Eighteen sheep and goats were slaughtered next, laid out in a pond of blood. All day the street was blocked by tubs of guts, women butchering.

And the town kept filling. We counted 18 impromptu chicherías in one block. New 400-liter chicha barrels rolled off trucks at all hours. Campesinos crowded the market, buying everything from sheep to sweatpants, cassettes to colanders. Men swaggered with leather gloves or helmets dangling from their belts. Wooden saints were paraded up and down, preceded by schoolgirls dancing the tinku dance I'd learned in La Paz.

Thanks to Joél and Saúl, no mestizo's door was closed to us. Joél's mother taught me to peel potatoes. His 27-year-old half sister, Fanny Murillo, fed us in her pensión. The notary, Serafín Taborga, filled us in on San Pedro's foundation in 1570, its various sieges, its glorious past when it boasted 22 lawyers and 24-hour electricity. This surreal backwater, San Pedro, was like a nonfictional Macondo, the town in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was said that old Don Ángel had fathered more than 16 children, if you counted in campesinos' huts. Saúl's sister Gilma had been gifted with second sight after a terrible car accident. Then there was Dr. Gabino Andrade, a retired judge, self-taught dentist (he'd recently botched an extraction), and former violin virtuoso who confided that Satan once played the violin through him.

A dozen of Saúl's relatives were camped in the Villagómez ancestral house. They didn't know how old it was—they showed me where silver coins had rained from the decaying ceiling twice when they were children. The place stood locked most of the year; the family was sleeping in one room and cooking out back. Saúl came and went elusively, indulged and deplored in turns by his sisters. They cooked and washed, men drank and played charangos, older kids whined about the rustic boredom, and Fabrizio, age five, made a first disastrous experiment with chicha. Invariably, one of "their" campesinos labored silently nearby.

But none of the campesinos, the ones who would fight, would talk to me. Having seen serfdom in action, I couldn't blame them. Fanny said country people wouldn't talk to her either. She'd been told she'd bring evil winds, hail, drought, or that all non-Indians were kharasiris, a type of vampire that lives on human fat. Again, Saúl came to my rescue. "Why didn't you tell me?" he said. "Come tomorrow, my campesino is bringing a sack of corn."

And so the next day, David and Saúl and his wife, Crecencia, and I stood with Severo Guzmán in the garden at sunrise, and Saúl called for chicha and Severo spoke: "Once a year, I get to drink with my patrón... Tinku is perfect, like the lightning. When it kills you, it kills you; when you have to die, you die." Every so often, Saúl interrupted his own translation to exclaim with pride, "Hear how he talks! He's my campesino! He's my little man!"

Page: