Arts are not something owned by a country, but by individuals. Whether through a family tradition, genetic ability, a cultural norm or a historic recipe, or purely on a single innovation by one person, everybody can do something amazing.
And yet, perhaps because everybody can do something, and therefore talent is somehow commonplace, we just accept this fact, without taking time to really think about how awe inspiring it is that we go through life surrounded by items or performances which have been created through the specific skill of another person.
We spend these two days experiencing a wide variety of different arts in Cusco, and I realise that in fact every day, whatever our plans, we are walking through lives whose paths are lined with amazing things that other people can do.
Perhaps it is because it's the 16th July.
It isn't, of course, but the 16th July signifies 9 years of M and I being together. Marriage wise we are relative babies, only two years old, but it has been a whole 9 years since we first made the decision to be together, and neither of is regrets a thing. Which is certainly amazing, and a thing to celebrate. It just so happens that on the actual 16th July this year I was throwing up violently into a paint pot, and then leaving M on his own to finish the Inca trail. So we have postponed the celebrations.
Perhaps it is this celebration which puts us in mind of appreciating things, and of fighting the urge to take them for granted, but certainly these two days seem filled with different and equally amazing artistic achievements, which we float between, marvelling at. It's a great way to spend a couple of days. Or indeed, a great way to spend your whole life. Appreciating the artworks around you is free. And possible everywhere.
We begin by perusing, with a view to buying, for ourselves or for others, some of the amazing physical works of art available around Cusco.
Toritos
We return to a lady we had chatted with early in our time in Cusco, who owns a small market stall in a courtyard off the cobbled streets of San Blas, where she sells pieces which, for the most part, she has made herself. To our delight, she remembers us.
This lady, (we will call her Ruth), sells a lot of lovely things, but the pieces she specialises in are painted bulls, known as Toritos, (literally, small bulls). It is customary in Peru to place a pair of ceramic toritos on the roof of your house, for luck. In a testament to the power of syncretism, they usually stand either side of a cross. The bulls on the rooves are generally a ceramic brown colour, hollow, and filled, at least when first erected, with Chicha.
"I realised," says Ruth, "after I finished my studies in Lima, that many people would not be able to put a torito on their roof."
We agree, wholeheartedly, thinking of the practical difficulties of trying to put a ceramic bull on the top of your block of flats, or getting it withstand the rather more changeable weather patterns in England. Even if you managed it, you'd probably get accused of witchcraft.
"So I started to paint toritos for inside," says Ruth.
Ruth's toritos are the best in Cusco. We know this because we have spent quite some time looking at them. Colourful, brightly painted bulls for inside the house are on every market, and in every shop.
"...and no everyone does it" says Ruth with mild bitterness.
We have, in each country, encountered many people who claim to be the original maker of something, or to have had the idea first. The more ubiquitous the thing, the more people claim to have been the original. Some people we believe. Others we know to be untrue. I am willing to believe Ruth started the indoor toritos tradition. For one thing she talks about it with passion, in contrast to other sellers who simply point at them, and tell us the price. For another Ruth's paintings really are the best. Its why we came back.
The bulls usually have a base colour, which, in Peruvian belief, signifies a different type of luck. Purple is for health, red for love, black for prosperity (not in terms of money, but in terms of a happy, healthy family), green for hope, white for peace, blue for knowledge. I like that there is not a colour for money. It's emotional wealth only.
On top of this base colour, the best toritos are painted with swirls, intricate flowers, leaves and gold noses, hooves and saddles. We have seen a lot of painted toritos, and lots of the designs on the base colour are very reminiscent of each other. Ruth's are all unique.
Also, we have spent a lot of time, talking to Ruth, learning the significance of the colours, and we like her.
The torito that we buy, white for peace, will be a prized memory. We have peace already. Our white torito will remind us that we do, and prompt us to rediscover it.
Retablos
We have been transfixed by these since we first saw them. They are intricately made little models depicting typical scenes from Peruvian life. Either revealed inside a small wooden house like structure with doors, or arranged around a mirror, they show mask sellers, corn harvests, Shaman ceremonies, Chicha drinking, festivals, fabric weaving and selling, or, with a touch a meta irony, retablo selling. The small scenes are depicted in tiny, brightly coloured detail, crammed to fill every millimetre of space allowed for the scene, and the clay used for the modelling is made from a mixture of potato, corn and rice, crafted painted and varnished in all their detail by families, typically from Ayacucho, where this particular artistic tradition originated, and sold in Cusco, where it will encounter more in the way of passing trade. We have been fascinated enough with these to have picked out our favourite family, the Jimenez's, who seem to pick out their scenes with a particular delicacy of detail. We are treating ourselves, because retablo are expensive, given the hours put into each scene, and it is, after all, the 16th July. We choose the friendliest store with ever so slightly cheaper prices, and the lady gets chatting with us about Cusco's festival of Independence, which more or less seals the deal. We will do anything for someone who will talk to us. Luckily for our bank balances, not everyone has realised that. We have taken a lot of time choosing our retablo, and have asked for a particular colour, which our lady has called through to ask for from a sister store. When it arrives, in a box, and she opens it up to show us, tears fill my eyes and I clap my hand to my mouth, it's so beautiful.
I think they know, at that moment, that they have made a sale.
If I had ten pounds for every time on this trip that I have found myself in tears, so overwhelmed have I been by the beauty of something, by the awe of something, or by our own sheer luck in being here, I would have enough to buy twenty retablos.
Gourds
Another art you see being sold a lot around Cusco, are painted guords. The hard, light shells are carved slightly with intricate designs, showing llamas, dancers, Incan patterns, condors, birds and lizards and then dyed a brown or red colour, with the design outlined usually in black. Depending on size, they can be anything from a few soles to thirty or forty. They are so ubiquitous and sold so often on the street that it is easy to forget to really consider the artistry of them.
Marching Bands
Preparations and warm up festivities for Cusco's Independence day are underway and in these few days you can barely cross the main square without encountering a marching band or two. Huge and bombastic in sound, they seem often to act as a sort of compere in festivals, announcing the next dance, act or symbolic parade. On one day the square is crowded with school children, in various uniforms, all of them carrying instruments, batons or practising intricate combinations of marching styles. Every school has a band.
Food
Cusco is filled with variously imaginative restaurants, from the Shamanic Raw Food restaurant where everything is organic, vegetarian, vegan and made with love and peace infused into every spoonful, to the Green Point restaurants which aim to prove a point, that you can be vegan and still delicious. At Green Point we can try Ceviche, a delicious lime, mint, basil and raw onion sauce normallt served over fish, in this instance avocado, raw sushi, made with Brazil nuts and almonds in place of rice, creole soup, with seitan instead of the usual shredded beef loin, lomi saltado, sauteed llama (in this case seitan) with vegetables, rice and fried potato and/or banana, and the creamiest, chocolatiest cake and mouse possible to create, even if you were using full fat milk cream, butter and animal fat. It's an art. Its one of our favourite ones. Sometimes, to my chagrin, I find myself looking forward the mist in any given day, to the food I am going to eat in the middle of it. Should I be ashamed, I wonder? I am on the other side of the earth, experiencing an unrecognisably different set of cultural norms - and all the time it is the food I wake up, and go to sleep, thinking about. There was a point where I looked forward to impressing everyone back home with my newly trim figure. Nowadays I have forgotten all that and am eagerly sampling as much, and as many, cultural delicacies as possible. I can diet when I get home. For most British females, dieting seems to be a perpetual reality. There will be far too much money and cultural airtime given to carrot juice and calorie counts in my life back in England. I will be surrounded and consumed by it unless I am very stubborn and entirely self confident. And however much time I travel, entire self confidence is a quality which evades me. So bring on the food artistry. I will sample it with enthusiasm.
The Cusco Symphony Orchestra
We attend a free performance by the Cusco Symphony Orchestra, who play exquisitely and captivatingly, various classical pieces, but the majority of their repertoire is made up of pieces which somehow incorporate the unmistakable tones and colours of Andean music, which uses lilting, trilling patterns, often with pan pipes, but even more often, with a sort of small stringed instrument larger than a ukulele but smaller than a normal wood guitar. This instrument takes centre stage and leads the rest of the orchestra, managing to retain that ethereal, lilting, lightness of tone even accompanied by a full 65 piece orchestra.
Boots
Colourful material boots abound, with unmistakably Peruvian bright inserts of material set into the top and the shin parts. Being Hans made, of is possible to chose your own material, colour, number of buckles and additional features. We order some as a birthday present for me (rather early), and when we return to collect them we find, rather endearingly that he and his whole extended family are crowded into his tiny workshop, celebrating something with beer and laughter.
"Disculpe," says the boot smith, "mañana?"
This little interaction makes me love the boots all the more.
Beer and Chocolate
There is, I suspect to coincide with Independence day festivities, a beer and chocolate tasting evening hosted by the Choco museum of Cusco. We expect it to be a bit of fun, we are interested in beers and the chocolate making is a bit of a tradition here, but we are happily amazed by the quality of both. We progress through various little stations where we taste a different beer, brewed by the Choco Museums' partners 'Neuevo Mundo' ('New World') paired with a certain type of chocolate. We taste a beautiful, coffee chocolate porter, paired with 75% dark chocolate infused with salt from Moras, a butterscotch toffee tasting triple paired with Chile infused 75% chocolate, and a deep, rich barley wine (still a beer, for those nor uses to beer terminology) with 45% milk chocolate with chewy Aguaymanto (like an Andean gooseberry, or a physalis).
It is all so outstandingly good that we are feeling a little, and not just from the alcohol. Our place in the queue had meant we began at point 3 of the five tasting counters, so we wend our way back to the beginning to taste the pale ale, which we are expecting, after the rich, full body of the others, to be a little nondescript. It is beautiful, grapefruit and lemony and refreshing but also packed with flavour. It is paired with a coffee chocolate which we expect not to go but which goes so well we buy a bar to take home. It is nor chocolate with a hint of coffee. This is chocolate with whole, crunchy bitter coffee beans inside. It's amazing. I eat a lot before bed. It keeps me awake. I use the barley wine to reverse it.
There is so much amazing art being created, performed and sold everywhere. We take it for granted that someone can paint well, that someone else can make music, that a third person can blend flavours. But, more than the arts themselves, is it not amazing and beautiful that people can do this? Whether you are buying or not, just notice it sometime, as you walk down the road. The hairdresser who can make a dead thing beautiful, the baker who can make great bread, the designers of the clothes in the shops, the composers of the music you use as background.
Life is full of talent and artistry. It doesn't break the bank just to notice it.
No comments:
Post a Comment