A gala Sunday in the improvised “bullring” of Ayacucho, in the patio of the Colegio, or high school, for the benefit of which the corrida was given. The chief toreros are Spanish, and the mountain bulls are at best somewhat lacking in ferocity
I have come near overlooking the most striking thing in Ayacucho,—the head-dress of its women. In the Andes fashions change not with time, but with place. In Inca days each district had its own distinctive garb, or at least head-gear, a custom which was strictly enforced in colonial times, in order that Indians belonging to one province might not escape compulsory labor by going to another. What a convenience it would be in our own land if we could recognize each man’s place of birth by the shape or color of his derby! The bonnets of Ayacucho are hard to believe. Though I had been duly warned in advance, the first glimpse of an ayacuchana caught me unawares. I fancied she was carrying home some purchase on her head. When others like her began to appear from all directions, however, I recalled to what lengths fair woman will go to keep in fashion. The wildest nightmares perpetrated by the milliners of more familiar lands by no means come so perilously near reducing the mere male beholder to hysterics as this, which at first sight gives a suggestion of that thrill the traveler to Mars might experience at coming suddenly face to face with something totally new and unprecedented. The rank and file of Ayacucho women wear on their heads a blanket, gay in hue and large enough to serve as a bedspread, nicely folded in triangular form, with one sharp corner protruding over the face. Each one is distinct in color, with an embroidered border, and is usually lined with silk. Even the half-Indian women from the suburbs, driving to market donkeys all but hidden under loads of alfalfa—each burden protected from its hungry carrier by a large wooden gag in the animal’s mouth—balance this contraption on their heads through all their labors. No one in Ayacucho could tell me the origin of so absurd a fashion, though all were agreed it had been in vogue a very long time; nor had any of them ever developed enough curiosity to enquire, except the prefect, a newcomer in this region, who had investigated in vain.
Anchorena, the piano importer, had promised on his caballero honor to have Chusquito back in the hotel patio on Sunday night, that I might continue my journey at dawn. Knowing only too well the nebulous stuff of which Latin-American promises are made, I set out on Saturday to jog his memory. The houses of Ayacucho are not numbered, but the thumping of a piano in the throes of amateur tuning easily guided me to the lawyer’s dwelling. Surrounded by the gaudily overdecorated magnificence of his parlor, he laughed at my absurd misgivings and repeated his “palabra de caballero.” Yet when night fell on Sunday, no horse had appeared. I hurried back to the Anchorena residence. The lawyer received me with that complacent indifference to his plighted word, without even an attempt to excuse himself, which is common to his race. As in the days of the Conquest, when betrayal was an everyday affair, the word of the most important resident of the Andes is not worth the breath required to utter it. Most annoying of all, they treat any protest against their devotion to mañana as a gringo weakness they must put up with, but to which they hope never to fall victims themselves. Even as they listen, a sneaking smile lurks just behind their solemn countenances, as if they were hearing the plaints of a querulous child. Were we in this world merely to see how easily we could drift through it, the Andean point of view would be superb; to those of us burdened with the notion that we are here to get some little thing done, it is maddening.
“Team ess mo-nay, eh?” squeaked the lawyer, with a condescending smirk. “If the horse does not arrive to-night, perhaps it will come to-morrow; or if not, what is the difference whether you go to-morrow, or the day after?”
“The difference, my friend, between an American and a Latin-American,” I could not refrain from replying, “and may it ever grow wider.”
Thus, when I would gladly have added Ayacucho to my past, I found myself helpless to advance, for the lawyer would not even direct me to his estate, that I might bring the animal myself. The next afternoon an Indian arrived from the hacienda—with the wrong horse. I joined the bull-fighters, strolling about town with the Monday languor customary to their profession, and whiled away several more funereal hours. Then at dusk I returned to the hotel, to find Chusquito lounging against a pillar in front of my door, looking not an inch rounder for all the “very rich feed” with which the hacienda was reputed to abound. The way he fell upon a bundle of alfalfa, bought off the Indian woman and girl who sleep on the cobble-stones of Santo Domingo plaza beside a heap of it, suggested that he had spent the week grazing on bare ground. Yet the Indian who brought him had presented an exorbitant bill for his accommodation from the sister of the man who had implored the honor of giving him free pasture on his own hacienda.
I was awake at four—for religious reasons—and by the time the birds in the trees began to twitter we had left the acknowledged cemetery of Dead Man’s Corner behind, and were climbing away toward the sunrise. The road, true to its Latin-American environment, left town with great enthusiasm, but soon petered out to a wearisome trail. Of several villages of Indians noted for their passive resistance to all the demands of the traveler, the most typical was Ocros. We came out far above it one morning, on the lofty crest of a range from which the trail pitched for a time blindly down into a vast sea of mist hiding all the unknown world before us. Bit by bit vast rocks loomed up out of the fog, like black, misshapen giants; then huts appeared once more, with here and there an Indian plowing a bit of hillside with a wooden stick and a pair of oxen he seemed in constant peril of suddenly losing down the sheer mountain-side. Then at last the mist cleared and disclosed, cramped in its narrow vale far below among dwarf trees, a town which rose gradually up to us, and at noon, after all but losing Chusquito and my other worldly belongings through a dirt-and-branch bridge that showed no sign of having been condemned until we were upon it, I halted at the hut of the gobernador. He was out—which probably meant that he was hiding in one of the half-dozen ancient mud structures that surrounded his corral—and his females were taciturn. I displayed my government order and asked to have food prepared.
“Manam cancha,” mumbled one of the women, all of whom kept silently and impassively at work with their primitive spindles.
“I must have fodder for the animalito,” I protested.
“Manam cancha,” came the monotonous answer again, with that inflection peculiar to the Andean Indian, which seems to say, “There isn’t any; but there might be if I felt like going to get it.” I should have preferred hunger to a scene, but I declined to allow anyone out of mere apathy to starve Chusquito.