Introduction
I was introduced to the poetry of César Dávila Andrade (Cuenca, 1918—Caracas, 1967) during my first trip to Ecuador in 2017. My then partner and now wife, Shirley Andrade Andrade, gifted me an anthology of the author’s work featuring “Boletín y elegía de las mitas” and a selection of his early poetry. I was fairly new to literary translation at the time, and despite my admiration and affinity for Dávila Andrade’s writing, I remember thinking that I would never be competent and confident enough to render it into English, especially in the case of “Boletín y elegía de las mitas,” a lyrical tour de force that has the character of a national epic.
Three years later, having acquired more experience as a translator, I returned to the reading of Dávila Andrade and, struck once again by the brilliance of his oeuvre, decided to begin the translation of his selected poetry. Dávila Andrade scholar César Eduardo Carrión agreed to write a critical essay to accompany my translation of “Boletín y elegía de las mitas” for English speaking readers. I am grateful to César for his help in contextualizing this treasure of Ecuadorian literature for an Anglophone audience. I am also deeply indebted to Jorge Dávila Vázquez and Margarita Dávila Vázquez for supporting my translation of their uncle’s writing: Muchas gracias y un fuerte abrazo.
— Jonathan Simkins
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Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas
I am Juan Atampam, Blas Llaguarcos, Bernabé Ladña,
Andrés Chabla, Isidro Guamancela, Pablo Pumacuri,
Marcos Lema, Gaspar Tomayco, Sebastián Caxicondor.
I was born and suffered in Chorlaví, Chamanal, Tanlagua,
Nieblí. Yes, I perished plenty in Chisingue,
Naxiche, Guambayna, Poaló, Cotopilaló.
I sweated blood in Caxají, Quinchiriná,
in Cicalpa, Licto and Conrogal.
I bled all the Christ of my kin in Tixán, in Saucay,
in Molleturo, in Cojitambo, in Tovavela and Zhoray.
Thus I accrued more whiteness and pain for the cross my executioner’s carried.
To me, tam. To José Vacancela tam.
To Lucas Chaca tam. To Roque Caxicondor tam.
They corralled us with other natives in a circle in Pomasqui Plaza,
where they sheared our heads to the cold’s chill.
O Pachacamac, Lord of the Universe,
your smile was never more frigid,
and we ascended the barren plateau with bared heads
to crown ourselves, weeping, with your Sun.
To Melchor Pumaluisa, son of Guápulo,
whose testicles they severed with a butcher knife
on the hacienda’s patio.
And kicking him, they made him walk
before our tear-filled eyes.
He erupted from the blows in jets of blood.
He fell face down in the flower of his body.
O Pachacamac, Infinite Lord,
You, who engrave the dead with Sun.
And your Lieutenant and Chief Justice
José de Uribe: “I order you.” And I,
with the other Indians, carried him in a hammock on his outings,
wherever he asked, from house to house.
While our women, with their daughters, mitayas
for sweeping, fulling, knitting, weeding;
weaving, and to lick clay vessels — our craftsmanship —.
And to lie with Viracochas,
our flowers of two thighs,
to bring forth the mestizo and the butcher to come.
With neither pay nor corn nor runa-mora,
hungerless from the purity of starving;
skull thin, cheeks ridged by frigid boulders of tears,
I came bearing fruits of the yunga
to a four-week fast.
They received me: My daughter severed in two by Ensign Quintanilla,
by order of his Mistress. Two sons lashed to death.
O Pachacamac, and I, to Life.
Whereby I perished.
And in a sea of pain, to seven skies,
by seventy suns, O Pachacamac,
my woman giving birth to my son, I twisted his arms.
She, sweet from so much abortion:
“Break the maqui of the guagua; let it never serve
the servitude of the Viracochas.”
I broke.
And among the Priests, tam, were those resembling devils and vultures.
Cut from the same cloth. Worse than the other two-legged ones.
Others said: “Son, Love, Christ.”
And they: “Contribution in my haciendas, mitayo,
knitting inside the Church, oil for the lamps,
wax for the icons, eggs for the ashes,
the doctrine and the blind parish priests.
Strum the vihuela, women to the kitchen, daughters to the house.”
In this wise they spoke. I obeyed.
And then: Sebastián, Manuel, Roque, Salva,
Miguel, Antonio. Mitayos of herb, firewood, charcoal,
straw, fish, stone, corn, women, daughters. Every service.
To the runa-llama tam, whose heart you devoured
two thousand times in three months.
To the woman tam whom you ate
within earshot of her husband and son,
night after night.
Arms bore evil.
Eyes wore tears.
Shoulders the blows of their whips.
Cheeks the hardness of their boots.
Heart they crushed as mitayos looked on,
trampling the bodies of mothers, women, daughters.
Only we have suffered
the wretched world of their hearts.
In the manufacture of fabric, twill, vestments, ponchos,
I, naked, sunken in dungeons, toiled
a year and forty days,
with scarcely a handful of corn for a pulse
thinner than the thread it wove.
Confined from dawn to dawn
without eating, I wove, and I wove.
I fashioned the raiment which attired the Lords
who administered the solitude of whiteness to my skeleton.
And on Good Friday I came to locked up,
face down on the loom,
blood I had vomited between the threads and looper.
Thus I inked with the flanks of my soul
the cloth of those who stripped me.
“Because we have not come
to live in the soil.
We’ve only come to dream.
We’ve only come here
to love, on the Earth.”
And to a Christ tam they vaunted
amid a show of spears, flags and steeds.
And in his name, they made me praise the hunger,
the thirst, the daily lashes, service to the Church,
the death and ruin of my race.
(Share it with the world, Friend of my anguish.
Speak it. Share it. Say it. Dios te pague).
And under that same Christ
came a black cloud of vultures adorned in rags. A horde of them.
They reared hundreds of houses in our Motherland.
Thousands of children. Pillages of altars. Cheap tricks for the bedroom.
They left me on a line of road pointing nowhere,
neither North nor South, homeless, … abandoned!
And later, they set me to beating clay, entrails of my earth;
working the lime kiln, toiling in the fulling mills,
fashioning temples, walls, paintings, towers, columns, capitals.
And I, exposed to the elements!
And later, in their sugar mills,
grinding cane, they ground my hands:
my fellow workers drank my blood. Honey and Blood
and weeping.
And in their crowded sea of pulperías,
they schooled me in their wretched sky of alcohol
and despair.
Gracias!
O Pachacamac, Lord of the Universe!
You who are neither female nor male.
You who are Everything and are Nothing.
Hear my voice, hear me now.
Like the deer wounded by thirst
I seek only you, worship only You.
Tam, if only you knew, Friend of my anguish,
how they lashed us daily, without fail.
“Vest to the ground, drawers to the floor,
you, facedown, mitayo. Count every lash.”
I was counting: 2, 5, 9, 30, 45, 70.
In this way I learned to count in your Castilian,
with my pain and my wounds.
Getting to my feet at once, gushing blood,
I had to kiss the whip and the hand of the executioner.
“Dioselopagui, Master,” I said in terror and gratitude.
One day in the holy Church of Tuntaqui,
the aged priest showed me a cross
with the body of Jesus Christ;
only it was Viracocha, naked, with neither spurs nor the horse’s twitch.
All of Him was but a single spattered sore.
There wasn’t space for a single blade of grass
between wound and wound.
On Him, they were fattened first; then on me.
Why should I complain then? — No. I share it with you.
They hurled me from a cliff. With an iron pick,
they punctured every corner of my body.
They sheared my head. I was a son of fasting and exile.
They greased me with burning agave tinder.
After the lashing, still on the ground,
they beat me with two flaming brands,
blanketing me in a shower of jagged sparks,
which made the blood squeal from my ulcers.
No less.
Beside women who washed dishes, swept floors, tended herbs,
and one, named Dulita, who dropped a clay bowl
which shattered, alas, in a hundred pieces.
And the mestizo Juan Ruiz came, boiling
with hatred of us for his twisted blood.
She didn’t shed a single tear as he dragged her to the kitchen,
kicking her buttocks. But she spoke a single word, hers and ours: Carajú.
And he, a rotten coward, heated an eggshell on the stove
until it was a white ember, then pressed it to her lips.
They opened in a bloom of blood: she woke in a malaise.
She didn’t eat for five days, and I and Joaquín Toapanta of Tubabiro
found her dead in the sewage ditch.
And there on the heights, when one perished
in the herd, a sheep, a calf or cow,
whether the prey of vultures or dead from old age,
I had to drag it over leagues of grass and mud
to display the cadaver
in the courtyard of the hacienda.
And you, Lord Viracocha,
you made me pay for that worm ridden flesh.
And as I couldn’t afford
even a gaggle of worms,
you made me work another year;
until I myself was food for the worm
that devours both Mitayos and Lords!
To Tomás Quitumbe, a man of Quito, who fled in terror
over those sigse covered slopes of silver feathers.
They hunted him, an ensign at the head,
and he ran, and ran, groaning like a deer.
But he fell, broken on a slide of flint.
They found their prey, bound his mane of hair to the tail
of a chestnut stallion, dragged him through ditches, into brambles,
over slabs of mud and stone to the obraje at Chillos.
Arriving in the courtyard, they poured salt and chili in his wounds,
on the lacerations of his loins, shoulders, buttocks, arms, thighs.
He rolled over, groaning in pain: “Lord Viracocha, Lord Viracocha.”
No one heard him dying.
And to mama Susana Pumancay of Panzaleo, her hut
amid the broom of a thousand fluttering butterflies;
because her husband Juan Pilataxi had vanished into thin air,
they made her march, pregnant, every step to the hacienda,
and in the room with the stocks, they cuffed her right arm
to the wall, left her left arm clamped to the post.
And she, at midnight, birthed her guagua
in a gush of water and blood.
And his head slapped against the wood, cracking his skull.
Those lips would have been fed by silver milk, Carajú!
I was a miner for two years, eight months.
Deprived of food. Devoid of love. Of life itself.
The pithead was my heaven, and my grave.
I, who forged gold for the fiestas of my Emperor,
was made to suffer its light
for the greed and cruelty of others.
We slept, thousands of mitayos, in barns
filled with flies, fevers, the lash,
guarded by a master who dished out only death.
But after two years, eight months, I left.
We came out, six hundred mitayos,
of the twenty thousand who went in.
But I made it out. O bursting sun of my mother!
I beheld you with my captive’s eyes.
Tears of the sun streamed from the tips of my lashes.
And I saw you, O Pachacamac, dead
in the arms of those who now fashion
the sacred wood and nails of another God.
But I got out. I didn’t recognize my Motherland.
From the blackness, I returned to the blue.
Quitumbe of sun and soul, I cried a bliss of tears.
We were heading home. I’ve never come back alone.
Between the caves of Cumbe and the trickling waters of Cuenca,
I came upon the body of my brother,
Pedro Axitimbay, limned in beams of the moon.
Vile mucho. Mucho vile, and I chanced upon his chest.
It was a level bone, a mirror. I leaned down.
I saw myself, blinking, saw it was me. I was him!
I said:
O Pachacamac, Lord of the Universe!
O Chambo, Mulaló, Sibambe, Tomebamba;
Guangara of Don Nuño Valderrama.
Adios, Pachacamac. Adios, Rinimi. I won’t forget you!
To you, Rodrigo Nuñez de Bonilla.
Pedro Martín Montanero, Alonso de Bastidas,
Sancho de la Carrera, junior. Diego Sandoval.
My hatred. My justice.
To you Rodrigo Darcos, owner of countless mines,
of the countless lives of curicamayos.
Your gold-bearing sands of the Río Santa Bárbola.
Mines of the Lady Virgin of the Rosary in Cañaribamba.
Mines of the great hill of Malal, beside the frozen river.
Mines of Zaruma; mines of Catacocha. Mines!
Great hunter of riches, devil of gold.
Sucker of the blood and tears of the Indian!
Hundreds of nights I toiled in your ditches,
over leagues of land, to grind your gold
in your mortar with eight hammers and three bellows.
Gold for you. Gold for your women. Gold for your kings.
Gold for my death. Gold!
But one day I returned. And now I come again!
Now I am Santiago Agag, Roque Buestende,
Mateo Comaguara, Esteban Chuquitaype, Pablo Duchinachay,
Gregorio Guartatana, Francisco Nati-Cañar, Bartolomé Dumbay!
And now, all this Earth is mine.
From Llangagua to Burgay;
from Irubí to Buerán;
from Guaslán to Punsara, by way of Biblián.
And it’s mine within, like a women in the night.
And it’s mine above, higher even than the hawk.
I return, I ascend!
I rise from the Dead after the Third Century!
With the dead I come!
The Indian Tomb convulses, writhing its hips,
wriggling its breasts and bellies.
The Great Tomb arcs and rises
after the Third Century, from the moors and ridges,
the peaks, the yungas, the abysses,
the mines, the sulfur, the cangaguas.
I return from the hills, where we lost our lives
in the light of the cold.
From the rivers, where we breathed our last in unison.
From the mines, where we died in the rosaries.
From Death, where we expired in the grain.
I return.
We return! Pachacamac!
I am Juan Atampam! Me, tam!
I am Marcos Guamán! Me, tam!
I am Roque Jadán! Me, tam!
Comaguara, I am. Gualanlema, Quilaquilago, Caxicondor,
Pumacuri, Tomayco, Chuquitaype, Guartatana, Duchinachay, Dumbay, I am!
We are! We will be! I am!
/ / / / /
“Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas,” a Documentary Poem on the Colonial Era of the Andes
an essay by César Eduardo Carrión, translated by Jonathan Simkins
His friends called him El Fakir, a moniker that captured his physical appearance, stoic character, and proclivity for esoteric and mystical works and authors, especially those of the Far East. He was said to be a yogi, a heavy drinker who suffered from eyesight so poor he was nearly blind. He was also believed to be a Rosicrucian initiate of the occult arts, a wiry little man quick to take offense to criticism or rejection. Everything in him seems to vacillate between the highest spiritual ideals and the worldliest frivolities. The truth is that he was a protagonist of a time of transformations, a witness to societal upheaval that would alter the history of his country forever, and that both his literary work and his biography have suffered the burden of a responsibility he never assumed, and which his interpreters and exegetes have repeatedly imputed to him. And to such a degree, that he would decide to leave his hometown, to exile himself from his country, and years later, to take his own life in a hotel room in Caracas on May 2, 1967. There are some who have seen in his death a ritual sacrifice, given that he severed his jugular in solitude, in silence. And there are others who have discerned in the blood he spilled a stain wrought by decadence, orphanhood, and alcoholism.
César Dávila Andrade (Cuenca, 1918—Caracas, 1967) remains one of the most relevant Ecuadorian writers of the mid-20th century. His figure erupted during a time of historic transitions that, in recent decades, have fixed in the popular imagination a problematic conception of Ecuadorianity, which posits plurinationality and interculturality as inescapable conditions of Ecuadorian selfhood. This notion, certainly, is very distant from the ideals of the founders of the nation in the 19th century, with their Hispanic and colonial roots. Perhaps El Fakir glimpsed something of that future, which is now our present. Or maybe not. It’s true that, at the outset of his career, Dávila Andrade joined the nationalist tradition of the literary elites of his country, who for decades had disputed the construction of a cultural discourse from a Eurocentric perspective. But it’s also true that, towards the end of his life, he had already divorced himself from those controversies surrounding the Ecuadorian nation and had embarked on a solitary and eccentric path. His life and work are irrefutable testimonies of those historical processes whose echoes still resound today.
The poetic pitfalls of a political dispute
Of all his poems, there is one that most forcefully reveals that breaking point: Boletín y elegía de las mitas (Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas). On the one hand, it can be read as a text that recovers the historical role of Indigenous peoples in the constitution of Latin American nations, through its denunciation of the plundering and servitude they were subjected to for centuries. The emergence of today’s Ecuador would have been impossible without that slave regime. The nation rises on the corpses of the vanquished, over assimilated and extinguished cultures. On the other hand, this text constitutes a typical linguistic experiment of the Latin American poetry of that period: it erects a monument to cultural fusion through the staging of a language fraught with tensions and contradictions. Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas serves as a bifurcation where conflicting conceptions of poetry and national culture converge.
Certainly, it is a documentary poem, a political manifesto that recounts how the despotic regime of the mitas, by which the Spanish colonial regime in the Andes was largely sustained, entailed the deaths of thousands of people over centuries, forced to labor ceaselessly and under perilous conditions, in mines and mills, farms and plantations, buildings and public works. It is a fictitious testimony penned in the first person, inspired by known historical sources and corroborated by documentary evidence. The foremen, who acted as proxies and administrators for the Spanish masters, punished mitayos to the point of death, dispensing with their humanity and transforming them into raw material resources of the imperial state. Dávila Andrade strives to give voice to those subjects silenced by official history, which in those years privileged Hispanic heritage to the detriment of the legacy of Indigenous peoples.
In this manner, Dávila Andrade sided with the heirs of the conquered, those colonized and acculturated by a caste of political and ecclesiastical leaders, the executors of the directives of a crown which, from the other side of the Atlantic, understood little or nothing of the cruel details and deeds that its support of the colonies in America implied. Through this poem, the Cuencano writer calls our attention to a historical phenomenon of Latin American nations, whose features are still expressed in Ecuadorian society, which remains more or less stratified, classist, and racist. Thus far, we could venture that, from a literary perspective, no novelty is evident, given that Dávila Andrade, like hundreds of other writers across the continent, had joined the redemptive effort to rewrite the history of Latin America. We could propose that our author did nothing more than follow the trend of his time, like so many other narrators, poets, and essayists of those days.
Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas, however, also accounts for the specificity of the Ecuadorian case. Dávila Andrade belonged to a prodigious generation of intellectuals who proposed a refounding of the nation in the 1940s. In 1941, after a profound institutional crisis, Ecuador had to renounce half of the territorial extension it had inherited from the Colony, in the aftermath of an asymmetric war with Peru. The geographical mutilation of the nation crystallized in the concrete space of the earth the failure of political and economic elites to rally a heterogenous and diverse community around a common goal. The final attempt transpired with the drafting of the new political constitution of 2008 which, at long last, recognized Ecuador as an intercultural and plurinacional state. But this is merely one aspect of a story that jurisprudence and official history have also constructed, and which literary discourses discerned much earlier, and perhaps more precisely and effectively.
Those contemporaries of Dávila Andrade, patriotic scholars led by Benjamín Carrión (Loja, 1897-1979), tried to heal the wounds of their remote past and immediate present by shifting the political discussion from management of the state to a new conception of national culture. All the voices and expressions of art and thought would comprise it, transforming a nation small in territory and population into a giant powerhouse of art and culture. The Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana (House of Ecuadorian Culture) was then founded, as the outcome of an ancestral struggle for the symbolic recognition of subordinates and minorities, which the criollo literati of that time processed in a political key and materialized through all the support for the arts they had at their disposal. This apparent reckoning with history, however, has not been without controversy. And the gulf between Indigenous peoples and the rest of society persists. Carrión’s project of “the little nation” amounts, perhaps, to nothing more than an attempt at a social reconciliation which is yet to come.
The founders and first members of the House of Ecuadorian Culture lacked a single Indigenous person who represented with voice and vote the native peoples and original nationalities, and there was a paucity of intellectuals of African descent. And in the cultural scene of that time, as is still the case in many areas of society, women were an utter minority, their participation marginal and nearly anecdotal. To date, no woman has been president of the House of Ecuadorian Culture. Hence, Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas can be read as proof of the marginality in which a large segment of the Ecuadorian populace still resides, in every sphere of public life. The poem could very well be read as a paradigmatic case of Ecuadorian indigenismo, which by and large had been a charismatic welfare exercise of the criollo elites, a lavage for their guilty historical conscience. It also embodies a milestone in the decline and extinction of a literary current which dominated the map of the continent for almost a century, and that manifested itself in Ecuador in indigenismo and social realism.
This may be the biggest obstacle confronting contemporary readers of this elegy of epic tonalities. Today it is very difficult not to regard this literary gesture of Dávila Andrade, somewhere between poetic and patriotic, as a strategy of ventriloquism, of appropriating the struggles of Indigenous peoples for their civil, political, and cultural rights. It is a poem written in Spanish, by a literate man of the urban classes, that simulates or imitates the Castilian speech of the Indigenous people of the colonial era, of the first decades of republican life, and presumably of the time of Dávila Andrade himself. At equal turns dramatic monologue and choral poem, political manifesto and experimental verse, it is an Indigenous text employed as a substitute for the avant-garde lyric of the early twentieth century, which despite the efforts of critics has found neither clear antecedents nor specific heirs. Therein may lie the poem’s strength, its relevance and contemporaneity. It continues to spark controversy and generate interest.
Indeed, Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas seizes the pulse of the reader, thunders and throbs with their vital rhythm. It is a song written to be read aloud. It is the exorcism of a mestizo who accepts his Indigenous heritage, the shameful part of himself, the weak side of his body, the penumbra of his soul. The mere fact of having chosen to identify with the losers of the historical struggle and not the holders of power, who have been judges and participants of the conflict, has allowed Dávila Andrade’s writing to transcend time and accrue a resonance still felt among us, the readers of Latin American poetry. Dávila Andrade may have composed this text, like most of his poetry, as an exercise in self knowledge or as a therapeutic or cathartic action. But to ignore its didactic mold, its militant, explosive effect, would be to spurn those readers who have appropriated this poem and transformed it, over the course of decades, into a civic anthem.
Its greatest success is its biggest weakness. Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas can be read as the penitent act of a mestizo who, despite himself, speaks from a cultural and political class that continues to turn its back on Indigenous Ecuadorians. In the era of this poem’s composition, the mere gesture of giving a voice to someone who didn’t have one, or at least trying to, surely provoked more than discomfort. It was truly revelatory for its time. Today, however, its radicalism is exceedingly questionable. Perhaps it would have been braver of him to invent a method whereby the outcast and marginalized would appropriate their own voice and write the poem themselves, but it didn’t happen that way. The poet, as the Ecuadorian Spanish expression of the Andes says, da diciendo, by interpreting and transmitting the pain of others, acting as if it is his own pain, his own past. Dávila’s Boletín resides on the map of Andean history, as an event of historical transition. And that place now belongs to it, and no critical action will succeed in removing it. Dávila Andrade was not able to advance beyond his time. He posed the questions his circumstances permitted. And he answered them as best he could, with all his imagination and will to write[1].
Yes, it can certainly be read as an exercise in ventriloquism, in welfarism, in dar diciendo. It could be said that El Fakir viewed the Indigenous from the privileged position that fell to him by lot and made no effort to see them as his equals, as his contemporaries. These criticisms, on the other hand, may be a bit anachronistic. Dávila Andrade was not a visionary in that sense and may not have needed to be. Despite all else, Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas marks the end of an era in the work of our poet and the beginning of a new one: a period devoted to so-called hermetic poetry, inspired by his esoteric readings and spiritual explorations of Eastern texts and traditions. After his great epic poems, Feral Cathedral and Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas, commemorations of geography and national history, respectively, Dávila Andrade journeys to territories of poetry more material, experimental, and disconcerting than had been written in his country.
The seed of this transformation, however, is not found in Boletín. From the outset of his literary career, El Fakir had challenged the formal restrictions and opinions of theorists, politicians, and nationalist ideologues, which is a topic for another reflection. Dávila Andrade occupied the place that would have corresponded to an Indigenous poet, if the Indigenous people of his time had been disposed to engage in that literary current. Indigenismo was not written by the Indigenous, but by mestizos. It was an urban cultural movement, invented and administered by the criollo literary elite. Aside from this controversy, one wonders what gives this poem its timeliness and relevance. The answer may very well lie in linguistics, in what seduces our senses: the musicality that makes historical evocation possible and lends the poem credibility. We already know that poetry is an artifact of fiction, and the work of Dávila Andrade constitutes the testimony of a political dispute prevailing to this day in the societies and nations of the Andes Mountains.
[1] For a deeper treatment of this topic, see Iván Carvajal, “Dar la voz,” in A la zaga del animal imposible. Lecturas de la poesía ecuatoriana del siglo XX, Centro Cultural Benjamín Carrión, Quito, 2005, pp. 151-173.
/ / / / /
BOLETÍN Y ELEGÍA DE LAS MITAS
Yo soy Juan Atampam, Blas Llaguarcos, Bernabé Ladña,
Andrés Chabla, Isidro Guamancela, Pablo Pumacuri,
Marcos Lema, Gaspar Tomayco, Sebastián Caxicondor.
Nací y agonicé en Chorlaví, Chamanal, Tanlagua,
Nieblí. Sí, mucho agonicé en Chisingue,
Naxiche, Guambayna, Poaló, Cotopilaló.
Sudor de sangre tuve en Caxají, Quinchiriná,
en Cicalpa, Licto y Conrogal.
Padecí todo el Cristo de mi raza en Tixán, en Saucay,
en Molleturo, en Cojitambo, en Tovavela y Zhoray.
Añadí así, más blancura y dolor a la Cruz que trujeron mis verdugos.
A mí, tam. A José Vacancela tam.
A Lucas Chaca tam. A Roque Caxicondor tam.
En plaza de Pomasqui y en rueda de otros naturales
nos trasquilaron hasta el frío la cabeza.
Oh, Pachacámac, Señor del Universo,
nunca sentimos más helada tu sonrisa,
y al páramo subimos desnudos de cabeza,
a coronarnos, llorando, con tu Sol.
A Melchor Pumaluisa, hijo de Guápulo,
en medio patio de hacienda, con cuchillo de abrir chanchos,
cortáronle testes.
Y, pateándole, a caminar delante
de nuestros ojos llenos de lágrimas.
Echaba, a golpes, chorro de ristre de sangre.
Cayó de bruces en la flor de su cuerpo.
Oh, Pachacámac, Señor del Infinito,
Tú, que manchas el Sol entre los muertos.
Y vuestro Teniente y Justicia Mayor
José de Uribe: “Te ordeno.” Y yo,
con los otros indios, llevábamosle a todo pedir,
de casa en casa, para sus paseos, en hamaca.
Mientras mujeres nuestras, con hijas, mitayas,
a barrer, a carmenar, a texer, a escardar;
a hilar, a lamer platos de barro —nuestra hechura—.
Y a yacer con Viracochas,
nuestras flores de dos muslos,
para traer al mestizo y verdugo venidero.
Sin paga, sin maíz, sin runa-mora,
ya sin hambre de puro no comer;
sólo calavera, llorando granizo viejo por mejillas,
llegué trayendo frutos de la yunga
a cuatro semanas de ayuno.
Recibiéronme: Mi hija partida en dos por Alférez Quintanilla,
Mujer, de conviviente de él. Dos hijos muertos a látigo.
Oh, Pachacámac, y yo, a la Vida.
Así morí.
Y de tanto dolor, a siete cielos,
por setenta soles, Oh, Pachacámac,
mujer pariendo mi hijo, le torcí los brazos.
Ella, dulce ya de tanto aborto, dijo:
“Quiebra maqui de guagua; no quiero que sirva
que sirva de mitayo a Viracochas.”
Quebré.
Y entre Curas, tam, unos pareciendo diablos, buitres, había.
Iguales. Peores que los otros de dos piernas.
Otros decían: “Hijo, Amor, Cristo.”
Y ellos: “Contribución, mitayo a mis haciendas,
a tejer dentro de Iglesia, aceite para lámpara,
cera de monumentos, huevos de ceniza,
doctrina y ciegos doctrineros.
Vihuela, india para la cocina, hijas para la casa.”
Así dijeron. Obedecí.
Y después: Sebastián, Manuel, Roque, Salva,
Miguel, Antonio. Mitayos, a hierba, leña, carbón,
paja, peces, piedra, maíz, mujeres, hijas. Todo servicio.
A runa-llama tam, que en tres meses
comistes dos mil corazones de ellas.
A mujer que tam comistes
cerca de oreja de marido y de hijo,
noche a noche.
Brazos llevaron al mal.
Ojos al llanto.
Hombros al soplo de sus foetes.
Mejillas a lo duro de sus botas.
Corazón que estrujaron, pisando ante mitayos,
cuerpos de mamas, mujeres, hijas.
Sólo nosotros hemos sufrido
el mundo horrible de sus corazones.
En obraje de telas, sargas, capisayos, ponchos,
yo, el desnudo, hundido en calabozos, trabajé,
año cuarenta días,
con apenas puñado de maíz para el pulso
que era más delgado que el hilo que tejía.
Encerrado desde la aurora hasta el otro claror,
sin comer tejí, tejí.
Hice la tela con que vestían cuerpos los Señores,
que dieron soledad de blancura a mi esqueleto.
Y Día Viernes Santo amanecí encerrado,
boca abajo, sobre telar,
con vómito de sangre entre los hilos y la lanzadera.
Así, entinté con mi alma, llena de costado,
la tela de los que me desnudaron.
“Porque no hemos venido
a vivir en la tierra.
Sólo venimos a soñar.
Sólo venimos a amar
aquí, en la Tierra.”
Y a un Cristo, adrede, tam trujeron,
entre lanzas, banderas y caballos.
Y a su nombre, hiciéronme agradecer el hambre,
la sed, los azotes diarios, los servicios de Iglesia,
la muerte y la desraza de mi raza.
(Así avisa al mundo, Amigo de mi angustia.
Así, avisa. Dí. Da diciendo. Dios te pague).
Y bajo ese mesmo Cristo,
negra nube de buitres de trapo vinieron. Tantos.
Cientos de casas hicieron en la Patria.
Miles de hijos. Robos de altar. Pillerías de cama.
Dejáronme en una línea de camino,
sin Sur, sin Norte, sin choza, sin . . . dejáronme!
Y, después, a batir barro, entraña de mi tierra;
hacer cal de caleras, a trabajar en batanes,
en templos, paredes, pinturas, torres, columnas, capiteles.
Y, yo, a la intemperie!
Y, después, en trapiches que tenían,
moliendo caña, moliéronme las manos:
hermanos de trabajo bebieron mi sanguaza. Miel y Sangre
y llanto.
Y ellos, tantos, en propias pulperías,
enseñáronme el triste cielo del alcohol
y la desesperanza.
Gracias!
Oh, Pachacámac, Señor del Universo!
Tú que no eres hembra ni varón.
Tú que eres Todo y eres Nada,
Óyeme, escúchame.
Como el venado herido por la sed
te busco y sólo a Ti te adoro.
Y tam, si supieras, Amigo de mi angustia,
cómo foeteaban cada día, sin falta.
“Capisayo al suelo, calzoncillo al suelo,
tú, bocabajo, mitayo. Cuenta cada latigazo.”
Yo, iba contando: 2, 5, 9, 30, 45, 70.
Así aprendí a contar en tu castellano,
con mi dolor y mis llagas.
En seguida, levantándome, chorreando sangre,
tenía que besar látigo y mano de verdugos.
“Dioselopagui, Amito,” así decía de terror y gratitud.
Un día en santa Iglesia de Tuntaqui,
el viejo doctrinero, mostróme cuerpo en cruz
de Amo Jesucristo;
único Viracocha, sin ropa, sin espuelas, sin acial.
Todito Él, era una sola llaga salpicada.
No había lugar ya ni para un diente de hierba
entre herida y herida.
En Él, cebáronse primero; luego fue en mí.
De qué me quejo, entonces? —No. Sólo te cuento.
Me despeñaron. Con punzón de fierro,
me punzaron todo el cuerpo.
Me trasquilaron. Hijo de ayuno y de destierro fui.
Con yescas de maguey encendidas, me pringaron.
Después de los azotes, ya aún en el suelo,
ellos entregolpeaban sobre mí, dos tizones de candela
y me cubrían con una lluvia de chispas puntiagudas,
que hacía chirriar la sangre de mis úlceras.
Así.
Entre lavadoras de platos, barrenderas, hierbateras,
y una, llamada Dulita, cayósele una escudilla de barro,
y cayósele, ay, a cien pedazos.
Y vino el mestizo Juan Ruiz, de tanto odio para nosotros
por retorcido de sangre.
A la cocina llevóle pateándole nalgas, y ella, sin llorar,
ni una lágrima. Pero dijo una palabra suya y nuestra: Carajú.
Y él, muy cobarde, puso en fogón una cáscara de huevo
que casi se hace blanca brasa y que apretó contra los labios.
Se abrieron en fruta de sangre: amaneció con maleza.
No comió cinco días, y yo, y Joaquín Toapanta de Tubabiro,
muerta la hallamos en la acequia de los excrementos.
Y cuando en hato, allá en las alturas,
moría ya de buitres o de la pura vida,
sea una vaca, una ternera o una oveja;
yo debía arrastrarle por leguas de hierba y lodo,
hasta patio de hacienda
a mostrar el cadáver.
Y tú, señor Viracocha,
me obligaste a comprar esa carne engusanada ya.
Y como ni esos gusanos juntos
pude pagar de golpe,
me obligaste a trabajar otro año más;
hasta que yo mismo descendía al gusano
que devora a los Amos y al Mitayo!
A Tomás Quitumbe, del propio Quito, que se fue huyendo
de terror, por esas lomas de sigses de plata y pluma,
le persiguieron; un alférez iba a la cabeza.
Y él, corre, corre gimiendo como venado.
Pero cayó, rajados ya los pies de muchos pedernales.
Cazáronle. Amarráronle el pelo a la cola de un potro alazán,
y con él, al obraje de Chillos,
a través de zanjas, piedras, zarzales, lodo endurecido.
Llegando al patio, rellenáronle heridas con ají y con sal,
así los lomos, hombros, trasero, brazos, muslos.
Él, gemía revolcándose de dolor: “Amo Viracocha, Amo Viracocha.”
Nadie le oyó morir.
Y a mama Susana Pumancay, de Panzaleo;
su choza entre retamas de mil mariposas ya de aleteo;
porque su marido Juan Pilataxi desapareció del bulto,
le llevaron, preñada, a todo paso, a la hacienda;
y, al cuarto de los cepos en donde le enceparon la derecha,
dejándole la izquierda sobre el palo.
Y ella, a media noche, parió su guagua
entre agua y sangre.
Y él dio de cabeza contra la madera, de que murió.
Leche de plata hubiera mamado un día, Carajú!
Minero fui, por dos años, ocho meses.
Nada de comer. Nada de amar. Nunca vida.
La bocamina, fue mi cielo y mi tumba.
Yo, que usé el oro para las fiestas de mi Emperador,
supe padecer con su luz,
por la codicia y la crueldad de otros.
Dormimos miles de mitayos,
a pura mosca, látigo, fiebres, en galpones,
custodiados con un amo que sólo daba muerte.
Pero, después de dos años, ocho meses, salí.
Salimos seiscientos mitayos,
de veinte mil que entramos.
Pero, salí. Oh, sol reventado por mi madre!
Te miré en mis ojos de cautivo.
Lloré agua de sol en punta de pestañas.
Y te miré, Oh Pachacámac, muerto
en los brazos que ahora hacen esquina
de madera y de clavos a otro Dios.
Pero salí. No reconocía ya mi Patria.
Desde la negrura, volví hacia el azul.
Quitumbe de alma y sol, lloré de alegría.
Volvíamos. Nunca he vuelto solo.
Entre cuevas de Cumbe, ya en goteras de Cuenca,
encontré vivo de luna el cadáver
de Pedro Axitimbay, mi hermano.
Vile mucho. Mucho vile, y le encontré el pecho.
Era un hueso plano. Era un espejo. Me incliné.
Me miré, pestañando. Y me reconocí. Yo, era él mismo!
y dije:
Oh Pachacámac, Señor del Universo!
Oh Chambo, Mulaló, Sibambe, Tomebamba;
Guangara de don Nuño Valderrama.
Adiós, Pachacámac. Adiós. Rinimi. No te olvido!
A tí, Rodrigo Nuñez de Bonilla.
Pedro Martín Montanero, Alonso de Bastidas,
Sancho de la Carrera, hijo. Diego Sandoval.
Mi odio. Mi justicia.
A tí Rodrigo Darcos, dueño de tantas minas,
de tantas vidas de curicamayos.
Tus lavaderos del Río Santa Bárbola.
Minas de Ama Virgen del Rosario en Cañaribamba.
Minas del gran cerro de Malal, junto al río helado.
Minas de Zaruma; minas de Catacocha. Minas!
Gran buscador de riquezas, diablo del oro.
Chupador de sangre y lágrimas del Indio!
Qué cientos de noches cuidé tus acequias, por leguas
para moler tu oro,
en tu mortero de ocho martillos y tres fuelles.
Oro para ti. Oro para tus mujeres. Oro para tus reyes.
Oro para mi muerte. Oro!
Pero un día volví. Y ahora vuelvo!
Ahora soy Santiago Agag, Roque Buestende,
Mateo Comaguara, Esteban Chuquitaype, Pablo Duchinachay,
Gregorio Guartatana, Francisco Nati-Cañar, Bartolomé Dumbay!
Y ahora, toda esta Tierra es mía.
Desde Llangagua hasta Burgay;
Desde Irubí hasta Buerán;
desde Guaslán, hasta Punsara, pasando por Biblián.
Y es mía para adentro, como mujer en la noche.
Y es mía para arriba, hasta más allá del gavilán.
Vuelvo, Álzome!
Levántome después del Tercer Siglo, de entre los Muertos!
Con los muertos, vengo!
La Tumba India se retuerce con todas sus caderas,
sus mamas y sus vientres.
La Gran Tumba se enarca y se levanta
después del Tercer Siglo, dentre las lomas y los páramos,
las cumbres, los yungas, los abismos,
las minas, los azufres, las cangaguas.
Regreso desde los cerros, donde moríamos
a la luz del frío.
Desde los ríos, donde moríamos en cuadrillas.
Desde las minas, donde moríamos en rosarios.
Desde la Muerte, donde moríamos en grano.
Regreso.
Regresamos! Pachacámac!
Yo soy Juan Atampam! Yo, tam!
Yo soy Marcos Guaman! Yo, tam!
Yo soy Roque Jadán! Yo tam!
Comaguara, soy. Gualanlema, Quilaquilago, Caxicondor,
Pumacuri, Tomayco, Chuquitaype, Guartatana, Duchinachay, Dumbay, Soy!
Somos! Seremos! Soy!
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