Illustrious Pisqueros
“I’m going to make a confession. I am my step-mother’s making. She looked down on me and resented me, as much as, with the Indians, so I decided myself that I had to sleep in the kitchen,” the
writer and anthropologist revealed one day. The smell of gunpowder has dissipated in the small office where Jose Maria welcomed death, which took him to his final resting place four days later from a hospital bed.
Despite the controversy that surrounds the transportation of his remains to Andahuaylas in 2004, there is only room for respect of the legacy of the great “Misti” (white in Quechua), who was born on January 18, 1911.
Arguedas himself was “Ernesto,” the melancholy and poetic child that he created in his novel “The deep rivers” (1958); but he did know how to laugh. In Lima he frequented the cultural bohemians that met up at the Peña Pancho Fierro. There he would tell many Quechua jokes, some of them quite risqué, and as his favorite violinist, Maximo Damian, recalls, the also liked the taste of Vargas Pisco.
It is the same Arguedas that frequented the patron saint festivals and the Sunday coliseums, with the same impetus as a provincial man who was seeking refuge in the music in order to better survive in the city.
Due to the fact that he was a great novelist, it has left little room in for analyzing his great contribution as an ethnologist, compiler of different manifestations of folklore, and educator, who reflected in writing about topics such as the issue of the Spanish language dominating in monolingual areas, for example.
Yes, the “Misti” with a mustache was a professor starting in 1939, when he first taught in a small school in Sicuani, Cusco, until the day of his suicide, when he was an instructor in the La Molina University.
He was a deep intellectual, who knew the tunes of the south Sierra: Huainos and Carnavales, K’aswas, Araskaskas and Harawies. There are two CDs with his voice, edited by the Jose Mara Arguedas Higher School of Folklore, and one edited by the Pontificia Catholic University of Peru. He spoke Quechua with pleasure and he was captivated by the best of western culture. He was not archaic!
He so loved the singers and musicians from the center of the country that he dedicated his colossal novel, “All of the Blood” to the Ayacucho charango player Jaime Guardia, the same man who belonged to the group of Andean artists who sang, played and cried at his burial.
Arguedas was married twice (to Cecilia Bustamante and Sybila Arredondo), but he was never divorced from his inspiration: the Andes and the Apurimac River. He elevated the “Scissor Dance” to poetry in “The agony of Rasu Ñiti.”
He was a chronic insomniac; perhaps because of the way in which being of mized race bothered him. Spanish limited him from aptly describing the cosmos—as those who speak the runa simi know. So his writing was filled with words from both languages, because “only in this mixture I have gotten to know other places, the soul of my land.”
If it weren’t for Arguedas, the recognition of the dansaqs would have taken much longer. Still today, there is no figure who has filled the gap he has left behind. They say that a giant never is born twice in the same land.