The striking headdress of the women of Ayacucho—in this case purple embroidered with red. The dicella about the shoulders is blue
The friendly and ingratiating waiters of our hotel in Ayacucho. They had two shoes, three eyes, and not a crumb of soap between them. One wears a bright pink shirt, the other one of brilliant maroon
As in most centers of religious fanaticism, the town reeks with poverty. Even for South America, the overwhelming display of rags is striking, and ignorance and debauch is in constant evidence. Yet the children, the babies particularly, sometimes have a brightness and an innocence about them that suggests what might be made of them could they be caught young, very, very young, and taken away from this environment of dirt and ignorance and immorality and priests. Yet who knows? The more one travels, the more one’s opinion wavers between the effects of ancestry and environment.
It has been said of Ayacucho that her chief occupations are drinking, cock-fighting, love-making, and religious processions. The last is most in public evidence. The first fiesta to break out after my arrival was that of the “Virgen de las Mercedes.” All shops closed for the occasion, and the entire region boomed and clanged with the exertions of gangs of boys filling every belfry and vying with each other in adding to the uproar. At four of the afternoon, when the sun had lost some of its glare, the cathedral disgorged a solemn throng escorting three huge floats that began a snail-paced circuit of the broad plaza, halting before every building of importance while the choir sang some Latin anthem. Before the Virgin and her two accompanying saints, all flashing with rich and many-colored silks, marched teams of sanctimonious-faced beatas with ribbons over their shoulders, feigning to supply the motive power which was, in reality, furnished by toiling and sweating Indians half-concealed beneath the massive floats. As the head of the procession reached certain points, an aged Indian acolyte set off home-made fireworks of intricate and long-enduring design, that filled the air as with a sudden bombardment. The instant these fell silent, swarms of boys raced into the smoke from every side to fight with the low-caste functionary for possession of the charred framework. Every male, as well as the Indian women, uncovered as the figures passed—except myself, too busy with photography to honor the local customs. Yet, where a century ago such sign of the heretic would have caused homicidal riot, I heard only one audible protest—from some one of the newsboy order.
Of course few inhabitants of the town had any notion of its history back of their own lifetime, nor any real interest in abetting my investigations, though all pretended to bubble over with enthusiasm for them. A blank indifference hangs like moss over the records of the past throughout all the Andes, and the curious traveler will find more by wandering around until he stumbles upon them, than by making inquiries. Not only are the natives ignorant of all points of historical interest, but utterly incapable of distinguishing any such from so much junk. It is just as useless to call upon the “representative men,” for the minds of these differ only in slight degree from the gente del pueblo. Ayacucho has more than the usual excuse for this ignorance of her past, however, for in 1883 the Chilians marched into the region, took possession of the town, its houses, goods, and attractive women, and, camping in the city hall and the prefect’s office, boiled their soup over the archives. For a few brief months before their arrival, Ayacucho was the proud capital of Peru. Congress held its sessions in the old church of San Augustín cornering on the plaza, and for a while money was coined there.
Local information might have ended with that, but for the fact that an ayacuchano who eked out an existence, Santiago knows how, in one of the little shops under the portales, was “aficionado” to the history of the region. I spent long hours with him, for clients were of scant importance compared to his hobby. He was unshakable in his conviction that the Indian was just as ambitionless and animal-like in his habits before the Conquest, as to-day. Ayacucho has a local heroine in one María Parado de Bellido about whom already strange legends have gathered. A chola woman of the middle-class, who could neither read nor write, she took a leading part in the revolution against Spanish rule. Having undertaken the delivery of a treasonable letter, written at her instigation, she was captured by the Spaniards and, swallowing the missive, refused to betray the writer, for which hardheadedness she was shot before the broad, central pillar of the Municipalidad. This was the scene of many an execution in colonial times. Those condemned to die were kept three days in the arched dungeon that forms a corner of the building, “gorged with all spiritual and material blessings—peaches and beefsteaks and the like,” as my informant put it, and then shot. He asserted that in Ayacucho none were burned nor otherwise executed by the Inquisition. But the statement has not all the earmarks of veracity. Not only is the century-faded edifice on the adjoining corner still known as the “Church of the Inquisition,” but a city whose population never exceeded 40,000 that could build the twenty-four large churches and countless chapels still existent, to say nothing of the many that have disappeared, “just because the priest of each ward cried, ‘Come, let us build a church!’ and they came and built it,” was not likely to be contented without seeing an occasional heretic roasted in the central plaza on a gala Sunday afternoon.
There was one sight which the “authorities” were so bent on my visiting and “picturing to the world” that the prefect detailed a soldier to accompany me to it. The so-called “Battle of Ayacucho” really took place at La Quinua, on the sloping brown mountain-flanks some twelve miles to the northeast of the city. From any high place in town the village, backed by its white monument and the dark face of Cundurcunca, the “Condor’s Nest,” is plainly visible. One can even make out the highway on which the Spanish veterans zigzagged up to the deep quebrada in which La Serna capitulated, almost at the very hour that Phillip V in far-off Spain was making him “Duke of the Andes” as a reward for his victorious campaign. There was no cable in those days. But I knew no way of telling the prefect, without insult, that I did not choose to tramp twenty-four thirsty, earthquake-cracked miles to gaze upon a plaster monument that I could study to my heart’s content from where I sat, and I was reduced to the customary strategy of Latin-American intercourse. The soldier came to wake me at six—it is the South American way to fulfill only those promises one hopes will be forgotten. I greeted him with the announcement that I had decided to put off the trip until the following week. He showed distinct signs of relief at not having to drive his legs, with heavy, unaccustomed shoes on the ends of them, all day, and as everything always is postponed in Ayacucho, the decision caused no surprise.
“Is there a public library in town?” I asked a native son.