Andean Lives by Ricardo Valderrama Fernández

Author:Ricardo Valderrama Fernández [Paul H. Gelles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 1996-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

EUSEBIO

After some five years working as a maid in that house, I met my husband, Eusebio Corihuamán; it was the octave of the Corpus Christi Fiesta in San Cristóbal.1 I lived with him fourteen years and had my seven children by him: three boys and four girls. Of all those, my daughter Catalina is the only one still living, and she was born at seven months.

When I began living with my husband, Eusebio, I already knew what it was like to be with a man—ever since the Saint John’s Day fiesta, back when I lived at that school in Llullucha. In the month of June, there’s a big fiesta to make the sheep merry.2 And on the vespers of Saint John’s Day, the sheep owners all build fires to the sound of flutes and drums. Then, between shots of liquor, they make the sheep merry on their special night. Early the next morning, the owners, who’d still be drunk, would grab hold of the healthier male and female sheep, line them up in pairs, and make them embrace. The owners would cast spells while bathing them with the fragrant smoke of the burnt offerings, and the godchildren would fling libations to the air and make each pair of little lambs swill down liquor from shot glasses. That’s how they married the sheep on Saint John’s Day.

While I was a servant there at the school, the school deputy director, who was my friend, took me to the fiesta on Saint John’s Vespers. And since the sheep owners are there drinking and dancing next to the sheep corral all night long, they also poured lots of liquor down my throat as well, and I don’t know what kind of evil potion that shifty deputy put in my drink, but a little while later I was totally drunk and my hands and feet went dead limp, and I couldn’t move—my mouth also felt like it had been fastened shut, and I couldn’t speak—and then late at night, when everyone was drunk and singing, they carried me off like a sack of potatoes to a hut in another corral, and there they did their evil to me; that’s how I learned what men are like.3 That happened to me some two years after I’d started my bleeding.

The day I first started my bleeding, I got real scared and started crying. Because, as far back as I can remember, I’ve been like a qulla: whenever I see my blood, I go crazy and start screaming. But I hadn’t hurt myself that time, and for no reason at all, blood just started streaming out of me; so I got scared and didn’t know what to do. I even thought maybe I was going to give birth. Because a few months earlier when I was out in the fields, some slippery fellow had tried to take me out further into the crops, saying, “Come on.”

So I thought maybe you could get pregnant that way, because when my sister came out of my mother, they’d both been covered with blood.

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