IV
A woman in lilac called Dolores, a pretty woman with a vapid face, was absent-mindedly turning a green glass globe between her fingers and selling guavas. Young soldiers whose swords trailed along the pavement were eating the guavas.
We got out of the carriage and rattled at a door until a keeper with jangling keys came to open it. The walls were spiked and covered with broken glass. The door banged together behind us.
A thin, delicately featured man in a black silk cap and stock came forward in welcome. “The composer of Ollanta, the national opera,” some one introduced. He led us toward a bare room scattered with manuscript music as fine as copper-plate. I looked at the iron bars across the windows. Over the piano hung three dusty laurel wreaths, the people’s tribute to a genius they could not understand. After a three weeks’ presentation by an uncomprehending Italian troupe, Lima demanded Mignon, and the manuscript opera was returned to the upper, right-hand drawer from which its composer now drew it.
“I am transcribing the melodies of the Indians of the highlands, some of them survivals of Inca days,” he explained.
He played the weird, syncopated music of the Andes, bringing the indefinable “shiver of unknown rhythm,” the wheedling love-songs and the sad yaravís which suggested those deep valleys lost among the mountain-tops.
“You know the yaraví of the Indians? It is a peculiar music, a melancholy idyl reflecting the somber Indian character—a music of extremes, for no other is so dismal and so sweet. It wails in a minor key through strange Quichua words, the language of the Indians.
“Many of these melodies I have used unchanged. Nothing so speaks to the spirit as they.... A secret music like that of falling water—one cannot hear it without thinking of the riddle of the world. It has a full, pent-up significance, as when a bird puts all the fervor of its song into pianissimo. It moves like the music of birds, and like it does not admit of criticism.”
I asked if the Indians sang unaccompanied.
“There is sometimes a reed-flute accompaniment,” he said, “as simple as the song. The flute is called a quena. Then, too, they play upon a pipe-of-Pan, supposed to have persisted since Inca days. But melody suggests to them things far lovelier than they can conceive by words. What they wish to say is made intelligible by the sadness or cheerfulness of the tune.”