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Victor Englebert |
A man sails to Puno on
a canoe made entirely of reeds, including the
sail. |
 quatting at a millstone,
the Indian flattened dry strands of grass, gently rocking a
semicircular stone over them. He would later plait them into a
rope. He looked so parched, so wizened with years, that his activity
could have passed for old-age trembling. With his eyes open but
lifeless, he did not seem to see the lake's clear water reflecting
the intensely blue sky; nor the green totora reeds growing all
around. Dry yellow totora had been shaped into seven adjacent
floating islets, which were home to sixty of his relatives.
The reeds grew
all the way across the Bay of Puno to the land, where, rising tier
upon tier, the tin roofs of Puno, a small Peruvian town, glistened
in the sun like specks of silver. Emerging from the shallow water,
the totora hid as many as fifty more groups of islets with a
population in excess of three thousand people. In the opposite
direction, immense and abyssal with its 3,200 square-mile area and
depths reaching 920 feet, sprawled Lake Titicaca--at 12,500 feet the
world's highest navigable lake, and a true sea when wracked by a
summer storm.
A
boy of twelve was following me around. Munching the white, watery
part of a fresh totora, he looked indifferently at the old man and
irreverently said, "He's ready to die. He's my grandfather's
grandfather, the last of the
Uros."
The last
of the Uros. I had heard those words before. The boatman who had
brought my wife, Martha, and me here, an Aymara Indian, had tried to
entice us with them, but his last Uro lived an hour farther away,
which would allow him to charge us more for the trip. The boy
himself was possibly repeating what he had heard his elders tell
tourists. But the last pure Uro had died many years before; the man
at the stone mill, part of a mixed Uro-Aymara group, was the last
person still able to speak the Uro language in this part of the
marshes. The Chipayas, who, like the Uros, claim to descend from the
people that built Tiahuanaco's civilization, still survive. They
live in a single village next to the Salar de Coipasa, a salt lake
in the Bolivian altiplano farther south.
From the water
 ccording to
their legends, the Uros, a pre-Columbian group, existed before the
sun, when the earth was still dark and cold. They did not call
themselves men but Uros, as if they were not quite the same. Men,
after all, came after the sun. The Uros finally vanished when they
disobeyed universal order and mixed with humans. As long as they had
kept to themselves, their mysterious
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A woman poles her canoe to
visit friends origins and adaptation to
a wet climate awed the other Indians, who believed that the Uros'
blood was black and that they could neither drown nor be struck by
lightning. Once they intermarried with the Aymara, they lost their
superhuman aura and were viewed with contempt. They scattered,
losing their identity, language, and customs. They became the
Uro-Aymaras.
During
my stay with the Uros, an elder would often speak of the time of the
old man's grandfather, when an exceptional drought lowered the lake.
The bay dried, the totora shriveled, the fish died, the birds flew
away, and the Uros were left on dry land without resources. The dry
people, the Aymara, brought their cows to graze in the bay, and some
Uros began to herd for them. Other Uros learned to till the land.
When the lake rose back to its former level, and the totora grew
again in the bay, some Uros resumed their old way of life. But too
many young people had married outside the tribe, and red blood now
ran through their children's veins. Their children never learned to
speak the language of the wet
people.
If the
Uros did not consider themselves human, neither did the other
Indians concede them that quality. The Uros were so abjectly poor
and dirty that, to emphasize their scorn and force them to delouse
themselves, the Incas only exacted from them a tribute of lice. The
chroniclers of the Spanish conquest unanimously believed the Uros
were dull and dirty. Jehan Vellard wrote that they could not even
master their own "ugly, guttural, and vulgar tongue, the most
difficult to learn in the whole kingdom." In his 1612 dictionary of
the Aymara language, Padre Ludovico Betonio listed uro as a noun
designating a rustic, dirty, and stupid person. Because they were
poor hunter-gatherers, more prosperous and numerous newcomers to
their land were able to force them to live
offshore.
In
those days the Uros were dolichocephalitic and much darker than
their brachycephalic neighbors. Intermarriage so attenuated those
differences that today the groups look much the same. "The only sure
way you can recognize them now," a man in Puno told me, "is to watch
them walk." As they rarely leave their islets, which offer to the
feet the same shifting resistance as water mattresses, they have a
funny and characteristic way of negotiating firm ground. They must
also have their own way of sitting, for unlike visitors, who
progressively sank into the water while lounging on the totora
floor, they sat all day without wetting the seat of their pants or
skirts. That does not prevent them, however, from catching
rheumatism before age
thirty.
Despite
their metamorphosis, the people of the reeds still call themselves
Uros and perpetuate the Uro reed culture. They depend on reeds for
almost everything, though no longer for clothes. They catch pejere,
boga, suchi, mauri, and carachi fish, selling or bartering some
onshore. They gather eggs and hunt ducks, teals, grebes, moorhens,
Patagonia geese, gulls, bitterns, and coots, most of which they eat
themselves. They practice no agriculture, although in rare years,
when low waters ground their islets, some of them may plant a few
potatoes and onions in soil created by decaying reeds. An improved
economy allows them to buy barley, rice, protein-rich quinoa grain,
potatoes, and chunos (dried frozen potatoes). They sell canoes,
totora mats, and reeds for animal forage to the dry
people.
Though
the Uros were once well protected against intruders, stronger forces
have been at work against their isolation. Protestant missionaries
have built floating schools among them, and tourists, who like
missionaries leave no people untouched, arrive each year in greater
numbers. So many tourists are coming that the Uros have begun to
embroider pieces of fabric with multicolored wool to sell to
them.
Life on the reeds
 he old man got up and, half bent, entered
the hut behind him. During the few days that Martha and I would
spend on the islet, we would see him come out only rarely, and then
only for a few minutes. Intrigued, we often glanced through the
door. He was always sitting alone, plaiting rope. Most of the other
Uros were much younger and had no social contact with him, so he
must have been very lonely. They gave him a little money for his
work and fed him but otherwise appeared utterly uninterested in his
existence. When he dies, however, they will bring him to their
cemetery onshore and stay with his farming relatives there for two
weeks, as their custom
requires.
When
the grandson of the old man entered another hut, I did not know
where to go. Much of the space on the approximately
1,500-square-meter islet was occupied by reed huts and standing
bundles of drying totora, which left little room to roam. I opted to
rejoin Martha, who as usual was sitting with the women on another
island, skillfully extracting information and confidences that
always contradicted what the men told me.
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Drying fish in the sun to
eat and sell.
Having
received Adventist teachings, the men were careful to exhibit only
Adventist virtues. They may have feared that I was spying for the
missionaries. "We have stopped smoking, chewing coca leaves [a mild
narcotic], drinking alcohol, and taking mistresses," one man kept
telling me in earnest, after asking me for a cigarette (though I
don't smoke, I always carried some for such occasions). They also
denied that young Uros indulge in premarital sex. Despite this, the
women good-humoredly accused the men of often getting drunk and
seeing prostitutes in Puno. When the women explained the Uros'
marriage customs, they did not mention virginity.
Before getting
married officially in Puno or any of the lakeside villages (a
relatively recent custom), the women told Martha, Uro couples always
live together in the hut of either's parents for a trial period
going from a week to a year or more. Later, they build their own hut
on one of the islets or on a new one they create. To obtain a girl's
hand, a young man must ask his father to apply for it. Accompanied
by friends to give him weight and self-confidence, the father goes
after sunset to visit the girl's parents with presents of coca
leaves, bread, sugar, candies, and, above all, alcohol. If he fails,
after inebriating the parents, to draw their consent, he must try
again another day. Or, to gain effectiveness in the negotiation,
though only if the girl agrees, the son may abduct his fiancÄe. The
only recourse of the girl's parents is to turn to the chief, though
their hierarchies did not seem so defined. But if the couple,
summoned to a hearing, confirm their wish to get married, nothing
can stop
them.
Although
Uro parents cannot stop their daughters from marrying, they do
sometimes have leverage. The case of Usa, a pretty married girl of
twenty, is a good
example.
Blessed--or
should we say plagued?--with an adventurous spirit, she traveled
three years ago to Arequipa, Peru's third-largest city, to work as a
servant. There she was seduced by her employer's brother and, as
happens to mountain girls in all Peruvian towns, shamefully
exploited. She returned home with a child,
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Grinding barley on a
metate, a concave millstone common in South
America. a handsome little boy, to hear
her father declare that he would not support them. Instead, he
wanted her to marry the only man who proposed to her, a paraplegic
who could find no other wife. Because of the child, no other man
offered to abduct her, and she had to comply to keep the child from
starving.
Now she
was complaining to the other women that her husband had been gone
for four days. "He's with another woman," she cried with feigned
bitterness. She kept repeating gloomily that no woman would wait
that long for a man. Possibly tiring of her discourse, the other
women nodded approval, and as if she had only waited for that, she
got up and went packing. Martha, who had not yet heard her whole
story, followed
her.
"Do you love
him very much?" she
asked.
"I hate
him," sneered Usa. "He's a toad, and I told him so. That's why he
left. But now that for four days I have had to buy my fish from
other men, I have a good reason to leave
him."
"But do you
have a place to
go?"
"I am not an
orphan," she replied, looking shocked by the question. "I'll go back
to my parents, who live an hour
away."
The next
day Usa was back with her little boy and her husband. Her father had
sent the three away. Half smiling though deeply unhappy, the couple
sat in the sun, eyes shaded by felt hats, on either side of their
hut's entrance. The boy was hot with fever, though he would be
better soon.
"Why
don't you wash his face?" Martha asked. "Don't you see the flies
clinging to his eyes and
mouth?"
Bitter
because he had to support a child who was not his, the man remarked,
"Why doesn't he just die?"
A chosen lifestyle
here was also
love on the islet, and we remember one instance of it vividly. A
child needed milk to take with some medicine, and as his mother did
not have any, another woman extracted her own milk, and fed him from
a jar.
The women
sat around
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People roam through the
network of artificial islands and growing
reeds. much of the day--sewing,
embroidering, grinding barley between two stones, cooking, nursing
babies. When they tired of their position they got up, boarded a
reed canoe, and poled it ten strokes across the water to an adjacent
islet. There they visited women relatives--and sat down again. They
rarely went any farther. In contrast, few men were ever present.
They usually went on fishing and hunting expeditions. Alone or in
pairs, they disappeared for two or three days at a time, spending
the long cold nights in their reed canoes, near their fishing nets,
pulling their reed sails over themselves when the sky broke into icy
showers. In the raw mornings, when birds were still numb, the men
drove them through the reeds, along narrow channels, into
snares.
The men
who stayed home built reed canoes. Or they temporarily disassembled
their huts to throw fresh reeds over the sinking, waterlogged ones
beneath. As cut totora rots within six months, the Uros must
continually build new canoes and raise the level of their floating
islets.
When the
hunter-fishermen returned, their wives and children helped them
unload. While they rested, the women eviscerated the birds and the
many small fish that would be dried over totora mats for later
consumption and sale. The fish the families would eat that day would
be broiled whole, with bones and entrails, between two layers of hot
stones.
While we
were with the Uros, Peruvian and foreign tourists invaded the islets
two or three times. They took snapshots, bought embroidered
souvenirs, and--to the Uros' dismay--sank repeatedly through the
totora floor. They were back to their motorboat and gone within
fifteen minutes, as ignorant and arrogant as ever.
"You know," an
informed Frenchman told me during one of those landings, "there are
no more Uros. The Puno chamber of commerce brought these people here
to promote tourism." That same group included a Peruvian farmer who
asked a Uro if he and his friends would like to harvest rice in a
few months. Though he offered insulting wages, the Uro nodded and
asked me to jot down the farmer's name and address. When I later
handed him the page, he crumpled it and threw it away in disgust. I
asked him if he had changed his
mind.
"No," he
smiled. "I never meant to work for him. I am happy here, and to get
my help that man will have to wait for the next drought."
Victor Englebert is a photojournalist based in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, and a frequent contributor to The World & I.
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