I had watched explain and exhibit her woven tapestries to three foreign ladies on a bench in the Plaza Kusipata in Cusco. There was something about her that was genuine and endearing. The graceful way she handled her artistic creations and pointed out some details to her audience with obvious patience and love. She wore simple, traditional women’s clothing, as so many peasants in the Sacred Valley. Not the kind of fancy, coordinated outfits that the lama ladies wore, who earned their living with posing for tourists with their lama’s. No, just a non-descript, greyish skirt, combined with thick, dark brown panties and a bright colored turtleneck sweater. Her black hair was pulled back in two classical, ultra-long braids almost all women of her class wore. A high, brown hat complemented her round, sweet face with soft, brown eyes looking at, you with tender affection.
As soon as she approached me, I raised my hand with the palm of my right hand turned towards her. It was the stop sign I had to perform about a few dozen times a day, when street merchants would approach me with their goods and services, ranging from “Massage, miss?”, arrays of colorful jewelry and souvenirs to the rather misleading “Hello, where are you from?”, when sellers would be posing as wannabe friends. As soon as I allowed eye contact or worse: engaged in conversation, I was doomed. This is a game they play every day and believe me: they master it to perfection. I even had trouble shaking of kids, who were trained in luring you in with a “Name your price, amiga!” when in fact I was only vaguely looking at an item.
But the tapestry lady only smiled tenderly when she saw my stop sign and positioned herself next to me on the wall I was sitting, removing her big bundle of tapestries from her back and nodded at me as if we were two colleagues enjoying a well-deserved rest after a hard day of work. Out of her skirt pocket she pulled a wooden spinning tool and started to spin alpaca wool, making fluffy specks of wool into a neat and strong strand of alpaca wool, ready to be used for any one of her tapestries.
Wow, what a cool trick. She must have known the effect of her magic tool, although she appeared as if spinning was something she did day and night as soon as her hands were not wanted in any other act. I bet she could even spin wool with her eyes closed. Her hands seemed to be lost in a dance of their own, while her head would be resting or engaged in a light conversation.
And of course, I was lost too, as soon as I fell into conversation with her. Isadora showed me how to spin the wool, she pulled out another wooden instrument from yet another pocket and showed me how to weave head bands with it. She explained how each color was dyed with pigment form natural plants, and that especially the dark blue was a hard color to obtain, as the dye only came from one plant and had to ferment for many months.
I couldn’t help but admire her handicraft and the obvious level of excellence she had obtained in every step of the process. So, I decided to buy her most attractive Mesa cloth, that could be used as an altar for my Mesa (Inka medicine bundle composed mainly of stones) and I got it for 40 soles less than the first price she named. Still, it was going to cost me all the money I had in my wallet, and I even had to go to the bank for more. A whole twenty minutes to rethink my action, and why it was absolutely necessary to buy her cloth on this day at this price.
Isadora had explained to me that she was simply not in Cusco every day. She lived high up in the mountains of Chinchero where she did all her weaving. So, she offered me a discount and waited patiently until I was back with the money, sitting upright with her hands in her lap, moving her head from left to right and right to left in regular motion, to make sure she would spot me as soon as I would be back with the money.
With such quiet determination there was no escaping this deal. I handed her the money, she handed me the gorgeous Mesa cloth and I headed home, feeling a slight regret and a growing panic that I had parted with my money so mindlessly. I couldn’t even justify it in my mind that I could resell the cloth in the Netherlands to one of my shamanic friends. The cloth was simply too beautiful to part with.
The next day I ran into Isadora again, at the same point in town. Again, I had used my stop sign to warn her off, before I realized it was her. I was sitting on a bench, having a meltdown of sorts, discussing the deplorable state of our finances with my distraught husband in the Netherlands in a What’s App discussion, that was driving me to the point of tears.
“How are you?”, she said, giving me one quick peck on the cheek Peru-style. One look in her tender eyes and I was lost. I started to cry. “Oh, don’t cry!”, she said. “If you cry, I cry!”. My tears were rolling down my cheeks while I explained to her how much financial troubles and challenges we had, especially now that our son was getting married in Peru. “My son wants to get married too”, she said, while she was wiping my tears from my face. “But we don’t have enough money for it, so he must wait. It’s tough sometimes, isn’t it…”
It felt good to cry on her shoulder, mother to mother. She had this Pacha Mama like aura that so many of the traditional women seemed to own the copyright of. It also felt like a sweet kind of justice that of all people I would run into her, and she was the one comforting me and drying my tears, massaging the tight knot out of my severe case of money cramp. “Come to my house in Chinchero”, she said. It felt good to have a friend like her. I could just imagine what her house, high up in the mountain would look like. And what a beautiful experience it would be to visit her there.
“Why don’t you buy a poncho for your husband?”, she said. I looked at her in amazement. Was she kidding? “It will make him feel better!”, she said. “Look, you only need to buy another woven cloth from me, and I can make both pieces into a beautiful poncho!”
This was my wake-up call. I couldn’t even get upset with her. This was her life. Her life was making and selling stuff to gringo’s like me. And she was good at it too.
I politely parted with her and headed home. Must not befriend street sellers anymore, I vowed to myself. The next day I felt a lot better about my financial problems. If God had kept us safe all this time and put food on our plate every single day, why would the future be different? Somehow, we will manage. Must have more faith, especially in my own powers…
This story was originally published on Medium.com on June 27, 2018
You can find it here
https://medium.com/@BarbaraDagmar/cusco-magic-the-tapestry-lady-of-chinchero-e4ccf21c719c
