While studying Quechua culture on Taquile Island, Lake Titicaca, a lonely researcher struggles to communicate with the local weavers, forcing her to reflect on who is at fault as she endeavors to spark a connection. This story was selected as a finalist in our “A Human Moment” travel writing competition sponsored by Travel Lemming.
The mother has lived in the same compound on the island of Taquile, on Lake Titicaca, for 13 years, working every day to provide a hardly adequate income for her family. The days begin early, in the restless dark of four or five in the morning. In the hours when there is a lot of sun, she works outside, her tired back leaning against the old stone wall behind the house. When it is extremely hot, she hangs a piece of white cloth above her working space, clipping it with clothespins to pieces of wire strung across the grassless yard. She works with skilled and worn hands, beating her tool of llama bone through the bright threads of wool that are pulled tightly across her loom. The piece she is working on today will eventually appear for sale on a table at the local cooperative, a small piece of paper bearing a hand-written number and meager price fixed to the garment with a straight pin.
I sit cross-legged on the bare ground three feet from her, watching her work. I feel invisible. She makes no effort to look at me. I try to push away my self-pity. I feel forgotten in this moment. But she–she belongs to an underprivileged people who epitomize an entire forgotten culture of Peru. Here, on this speck of an island in eastern Peru, one of more than 30 pieces of land that dot the highest navigable lake in the world, she is bringing an incredible piece of art to life. And I am the only one watching.
I’ve been studying this island’s native language, Quechua, for two weeks with the other American students in Cusco, ten hours by boat and train from the hard ground on which I now sit. The people on this island comprise a community of 400 families who speak Quechua and barely know Spanish, families who make their primitive living 500 stone steps above the water’s edge. I’d studied the Quechua vocabulary in the bedroom of the two-story house I was living in in a rich neighborhood in Cusco.
But that studying hardly matters now. In this dry silence, an arm’s length away from this weathered woman, I am blanketed by a heavy, suffocating loneliness. Her son, Jesús, is the only one who has spoken to me in the past 24 hours. In the tiny kitchen last night, he asked why I eat with my left hand. “None of us do,” he said in Spanish. “We all eat like this, with our right hands.” I responded simply, “I was born left-handed.” No one else said anything.
So far, the information I have pieced together of this family’s story has come via my own quiet observations and attempted conversations in broken Quechua. I’m getting a lot of practice at stringing together words I remember to form questions. Always, my questions are met with one-word answers or nods.
Each day, the mother drags her loom from the darkened hut to that flat, bare piece of dirt. She props her loom up on a piece of wood so she can work with it at an angle. She spreads a bright wool blanket over the dirt and sits, hiding her blackened feet inside her stained white skirt. With her bone tool ready and the loom pulled taut, she picks up where she left off the day before, her tool clicking and purring between the tight threads of sheep wool.
Jesús lent me a hardcover book full of bright pictures of textiles labeled with Quechua terms and Spanish explanations, and that’s how I figure out what the woman is weaving. I find a picture that resembles the garment, which is slipping so effortlessly between her fingers. The foreign word next to the picture is chuspa. I can’t remember what a chuspa is without reading the explanation in Spanish below the picture. It’s a type of purse used by both men and women to carry coca leaves. Coca leaves–illegal in the United States as an ingredient of cocaine–are as common here as cups of Starbucks back home. Both adults and kids chew them for energy and flavor. The leaves also serve as important ritualistic elements in certain ceremonies.
I clear my throat loudly, causing the woman to look up briefly. Forging a smile, I hold up the book and point to the picture. Then, I point to her loom. She nods, stone-faced, before she looks back down at the scratchy thread.
I wonder who between us is the failure. Is it me, for looking too American and tripping on all of these foreign words? Or is it her, who seems to hardly be making an effort to engage with me?
I’ve been sitting on the hard ground for more than an hour when Maricela, Jesús’s wife, who can’t be any older than I am, ducks out of the tiny kitchen into the bright sun to tell me, in Spanish, that she has prepared lunch. I am washed with relief as I scramble to my feet. I follow Maricela into the mud and stone hut, through the tiny doorway, where I see a steaming bowl of soup and what looks like a pancake with honey on the wooden slab that serves as a table. I sit on an old log, and she places a giant spoon in front of me. Without a word, she scurries back out into the light. I sip the matte tea, alone.
The food is delicious, sweet, and warm. But being alone is all I can think about. With every breath, every passing moment of silence, I feel farther away from the love and comfort of my own home, a million miles away in the US.
After lunch and an attempted siesta under two wool blankets in the uncarpeted room where I’m staying on the family’s compound, I decide to walk to the local cooperative, a large concrete building that faces the town’s central plaza. Taquile is a cooperative community where families live and work together to make a living, primarily in the textile industry. Men and women and their children haul their painstakingly prepared textiles there each week to sell. Members of the community work at the cooperative on a rotating schedule.
It takes me less than five minutes to walk from the compound down the narrow dirt street to the plaza. I pass two mud-caked girls who are rolling down a hill. They are shouting and laughing, but when they see me, they stop and stare.
I have $100 soles, the Peruvian equivalent of about $65, in one bill in my pocket, and I want to spend it. I want to bring home some sort of proof that I set foot on this remote and underprivileged island and that I made an effort to understand life here.
Inside the cooperative, a dark-skinned middle-aged man sits on a folding chair next to a cash box, weaving a pair of alpaca gloves. Hats and gloves and skirts are piled high on folding tables, vivid colors intertwined so exquisitely, I wonder how these people and their craft have remained so anonymous to the rest of the hurried world. The room smells like livestock. My heart pounds in my chest. I can feel the man’s eyes on me.
Who am I, this fair-skinned, young, blonde American, to him? Am I frightening? Threatening? Ridiculous? Not worth his time?
I quickly find three wool-woven belts, bright yellows and blues and reds twisted into precise geometric patterns, and a pair of rainbow-colored fingerless gloves, woven with soft baby alpaca wool. Each piece is so beautiful and exquisite. How can textiles so beautiful come from a place of such poverty, a place so forgotten by the rest of the chattering world?
With a façade of confidence, I march up to the man at the cash box. He gingerly picks up the garments I’ve laid on the table one by one, as if they might burn his fingers. He searches for the crude price tags and scratches numbers onto a small pad of paper. Then, he makes an “X” next to the names on a handwritten list. The people who made these garments, I think. I don’t recognize any of the names as those in the family I’m staying with.
When he’s done, the man holds up the piece of paper and points to the figure at the bottom. My purchase has amounted to not even a tenth of the 100 soles bill I have. But I only have the one big bill in my pocket. I slide it toward the man, my heart racing.
He wavers for a second and then slowly shuffles through the cash box. He stares at the lid, and I realize with a pang that he doesn’t have enough change to break my bill. The awkwardness between us swells in the afternoon silence.
He snaps his finger up, making a “1,” and scurries out the door. I wait alone in the cooperative. All I can think is that he is going around to the nearby bodegas looking for change. I soften toward him suddenly. I decide I will make his trip worth it.
When he returns and gives me the change, I tell him in my best Spanish to please keep a few extra bills. I push the money toward him. He tries frantically to push it back in my direction, speaking Quechua I don’t understand.
“No, quiero darlo, por favor,” I say, with all the assertiveness I can muster. I quickly gather my items and scurry to the door, without looking back.
On the way back to the compound, I stop in a few bodegas along the street. I pay 50 centimos for two candles. I will use one to navigate my way through the compound when it gets dark, and the other I will give to my host family, to replace the one I burned down last night.
I return for supper, just as it’s getting dark. The mother is standing quietly in a corner of the dark kitchen, her weathered hands cradling a bowl of hot soup. Maricela is stirring something in a pot on the tiny stove. Two children are playing with soiled dolls on the ground, their faces streaked with dirt and their clothes torn. An old chicken struts past. From the doorway, I utter a quiet, “Hola.”
We are worlds apart, yet close enough to touch each other. Maricela looks up and says, “Hola.” And I realize: I am not the only one existing outside of my comfort zone in this moment. We all are. We are, in our own ways, meeting at a gaping cultural divide.
We are seeing each other.
