The Giant of Paruro

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Víctor Montoya

(Translation by Elizabeth Gamble Miller)
 

   The giant of Paruro, in this photograph possesses all the strength and dignity of a monumental statue. The Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi, on his long journeys through the Andes packs his camera with a glass lens on the back of his mule, and achieves in a precise moment, like every good poet of light and shadow, an image that causes a certain vertigo between our reality and theirs, between creation and contemplation. In addition, the artist, using light to paint objects and forms, is conscious that everything that his visual sensitivity picks up is nothing less than the reflection of his own inner world.           

   Martín Chambi had the giant of Paruro pose beside the Mestizo, the person of mixed race, his hair slicked back and wearing a suit, to then make a portrait of him just as he was. He looked through the lens and pressed the shutter. And, with the click, the photograph was composed in that instant of magic; later, in the cold darkness with the alchemy of the laboratory, the image of the giant of Paruro lay fixed on the paper, with all its power of suggestion. 

   The impact of this photograph, which synthesizes the contradictory reality of the Latin American continent, was to carry me back to remote periods and those fear-inspiring myths concerning the existence of gigantic beings, that pirates of the high seas recounted in the ports of the Old World. In the same vein the Italian historian Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed the coasts of the Atlantic with the followers of Ferdinand Magellan, wrote that the explorers encountered giant Indians in the southern region of the South American continent, people who talked with the voice of a bull and had their bodies and faces painted red and whom they called Patagones, suggesting big hooves, for they said they were so tall and robust, that not even the tallest of their men could reach their height unless mounted on a horse. 

   The giant of Paruro has a long face, prominent cheeks and eyes burned by the sun and the cold –radiating five centuries of oppression and denigration as an Indian– a firm, aquiline nose, thick lips, slightly parted, and a chin broader than his forehead; he is wearing a folded poncho and a ragged sweater; his big-knuckled hand rests on the shoulder of the Mestizo, who is looking up at him, and the other hand, where the veins look like ropes rooted in his skin, holds the indispensable lluch'u woolen cap, that he undoubtedly would have pulled to just below his ears to protect himself from the frigid gusts of the altiplano; his sandals, whose thin soles seem flattened by the weight of his body, don't have buckles but ribbons that cross between his toes and tie at his ankles. His cloth pants really don't exist, since from so much mending they look like one big mended cloth. 

   All that, the way they are, reminds me of the Aparapita porters and Jaime Saenz (the old comealmas Soul Eater), the Bolivian surrealist poet, who in his Bohemian nights frequented the underworld of the Aparapitas, trying to down two liters of alcohol a day, the way they did, since these enigmatic characters, indigenous Aymaras accustomed to eating parsley soup facing the wall, away from the indiscrete glances of people, not only fascinated him because they lived so intimately with barrels of brandy, but also because of their way of dressing, for the jacket of the Aparapita, like the pants of the giant of Paruro, is a true concoction of time and not of the tailor, mend after mend spreading until the weight was out of ratio with the thickness. So the pants of the giant of Paruro were a sort of thread over thread and cloth over cloth. 

   Nevertheless, what is so perplexing isn't so much the clothes of the Indian as the overwhelming impact of his stature, which possibly gave him an elephant complex, while causing immeasurable curiosity in his admirers. Seeing a giant Indian in a portrait, thanks to the mysteries of light, is bound to be a clear blow to our visual perception and a way of verifying that, sometimes, the characters created by the adventures of the imagination are excelled by an indisputable reality.
 

© Víctor Montoya, Elizabeth Gamble Miller (2007)

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