American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [57]
The guide took the rock back up to Machu Picchu and handed it to a shaman, explaining the damage the thing had done, warning the wise man to be careful since the curse might fall on him now. The shaman turned the granite in his palm and nodded. He knew what the problem was. It was an ariska salkkarumi, he said, an unhealed stone from a bad man’s grave. It had absorbed too much evil. It simply needed to be prayed over, blessed, and returned to the earth, where it would be purified in the bosom of Pachamama. And so it was. The rock was reunited with its mother, the shaman lived on to do good works, the guide flourished, and the German tourist learned something about the real order of things.
The crushing power of Pachamama. Earth mother. I had heard about her from Antonio: She was the substance from which all things were made, from which all life arose, to which all would return. He’d hold rocks aloft in the garden. “You see this one, Marisi?” he’d say. Then he’d talk about its relative density, color, weight. He’d tell me what was in it: life’s dust, desiccated flowers, excrement, crushed butterflies, stillborn babies, winged monsters, flesh of snakes, bones of men, fallen monuments, fused together in Pachamama, waiting for regeneration, whenever the apus willed. Stones had energy and we, as earth’s creatures, could call forth their ancient, cumulative power, if we were wise enough.
I figured my father was on excellent terms with Pachamama. How could he not be—a man who moved the earth, raised factories, turned cane into so many permutations? He was surely smiled on by the apus. Engineers as a whole were beloved in Peru. Doctor Arana, the workers and townspeople called him, El Doctor Ingeniero, with a reverence they reserved for priests. A status was accorded engineers that far outweighed any status accorded physicians or lawyers. Engineers pushed aside Pachamama, raised things up from her, the way the Inca had raised temples at Sacsayhuaman. They were rock movers, stone fitters, empire builders, with rare knowledge and intricate minds. They were respected, admired in Peru—so much so that the Republic had made presidents of them.
In any case, when I, the engineer’s daughter, returned from the balconies of Lima to the well-turned soil of our garden, I was glad to be coming home. On the long trip from the capital to Cartavio, we seemed to be shucking modernity. The massive concrete and wood facades were replaced by single-family dwellings, the city was replaced by smaller and smaller towns, until there was hardly a town at all, just the spine of Pachamama. Then Cartavio sprang toward us, in all its full flower.
Antonio seemed happy to see me. I was a Christian now and told him so, brandishing the prayer cards that my grandmother had given me, with the Virgin and Santa Rosa in richly draped gowns. He nodded happily and told me that he, too, prayed to the Virgin. “She’s part of it, yes. A big part of it.” He took out his own prayer card: It was a greasy slip of paper, worn and yellowed by use, with a picture of Jesus’ face, eyes cast heavenward and red heart in evidence, rays blazing from his chest. “Everything fits together, Marisi,” he said, as I followed him back to the garden. “Because everything springs from the stuff beneath our feet, these rocks. The Virgin and the Christ are from Pachamama just as you and I are from Pachamama, just as that tree over there is, and that smokestack above the tree is. They all have a place on this earth.” He held out a handful of dirt, and grinned.
I had much more to learn from Antonio, and I turned to those lessons eagerly. For every recitation I gave him about Abuelita’s house and the wondrous events that had transpired in it, I was traded a lecture about centers of energy. Apart from my qosqo, the most powerful seat of my soul, there were the chaki in my feet, the sonqo in my heart, and the nosko