Sunday, February 11, 2001
Travel Sections
The Baltimore Sun
http://www.sunspot.net/travel/bal-tr-argentina.story?coll=bal%2Dartslife%2DtravelBy Richard O’Mara
Special To The Sun
I met a devil in the street. He stood only 4 feet tall. He threw flour at me, or maybe it was talcum powder. Then he sprayed me with white foam from an aerosol can. I would have sprayed him back, but I had no can. He got away, laughing under his mask.
That happened early in the evening of the first day of carnival in Humahuaca, Argentina. You could have illuminated a small city with the energy expended that night in the plaza, with the church on one side, the cabildo (town hall) with its mechanical saint on the other.
All carnivals are a frenzy. But they need some other quality to make them successful: the sense that anything can happen, and probably will, so long as it's capricious and impulsive. Humahuaca's carnival did not disappoint.
You find the carnival in Catholic countries. It precedes Lent, the period of self-denial that anticipates the rebirth of goodness on Easter Sunday. The custom is ancient, though it's not clear when it began. Probably it was adapted from pagan ceremonies to welcome spring. In its early Christian heyday, Rome threw the biggest party of all.
Today, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has the most lavish and frenzied carnival on the planet. Europe's biggest carnival is probably Fasching, in Bavaria and Austria. In the United States we have Mardi Gras, French for Fat Tuesday. Everywhere it is a time when unconventional behavior is encouraged.
Carnival is exotic and rich in legend; it teases the imagination. For that reason, many people search out its more authentic expressions. For such purists, the carnival has been everywhere commercialized and softened. These are the people who avoid Rio in March, and head north to Bahia, Brazil's African corner, where authenticity survives, or so they believe.
Or they come to far-removed places like this cobbled colonial town in Jujuy (Hoo-hooey), Argentina's northernmost province, 9,000 feet up on the Puna de Atacama, the high road the Incas took from Peru. Here indigenous Andean culture thrives; it is encoded in the dark faces of its people, expressed through their strange ceremonies.
Earlier in the day, on the side of a cloud-shrouded mountain above the town, a large group of married men assembled at a barbecue. Their wives were present, a priest, a judge, and maybe a few other town officials. There, as reported in the local newspaper, the men were "re-baptized," and thereby returned to the single state. Each received a certificate declaring him an official "bachelor" for the first three days of the eight-day carnival. Then they all went forth to do deviltry, for it was the devil's week, and he was bound to have his way.
"They don't have water in Humahuaca, so they throw flour at each other," says my wife, Susana, a little nervously. She had read of this custom in the literature about the Andean provinces: Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman, La Rioja, San Juan. She had experienced carnival in more countries than one and was prepared for water-filled balloons. But flour? Or as it turned out, talcum? That was a threat of another magnitude.
"What about my contacts?"
"Don't worry," I reassured her. But that was before I met the little devil who got away.
The plaza fills The plaza was filling up as the sun, retreating westward, set the mountains on fire in the east. People were moving through the streets, some in costume: devils of all sizes, gauchos, Indians, doctors with white coats, cooks, gypsies. Some of the revelers had drums, which they beat steadily. Others blew whistles. I saw a man with a saxophone, another blowing into an Andean pipe (these always emit a breathy, melancholy sound, no matter how festive the tune).
People lashed each other with corn plants, emblematic of Pachamama, the earth mother revered in the Andes. She is the enabler of all this merriment. She supplied the energy to all those revelers jogging groggily to the monotonous and hypnotic Carnavalito. They sprayed each other with "snow," threw the talcum. They all looked like they had been in a big food fight featuring cream pies.
An Indian boy appeared at our side outside a shop where they sold llama wool sweaters. He offered to guide us up a long flight of stone steps for a closer look at the imposing monument commemorating the war against Spain from 1810 to 1824. The fiercest fighting was waged around here - life and death struggles in towns with explosive names like Volcan, or Huacalera (two battles, 1814 and 1816), Palapa, Maimara, and other locales today rich in little else but vowels.
The seat of Spanish power rested in Peru, so when the first bleats for independence were heard from Argentina, Spanish armies poured down the old Inca roads. They were pushed back by hardy patriots. They returned, were repulsed again, came back again and again, and that is how it went until Spain's grip on its New World empire was finally broken at the battle of Ayacucho in Peru on Dec. 9, 1824.
Politely, we told the boy we had no need for his services. We had guide books. We already knew everything.
"I have a poem," he said, and launched into it. It was impossible to understand him with all the noise, but I heard a line that went something like this, possibly in reference to Humahuaca: "... a pearl hung on the throat of the Andes." We gave him half a peso (55 cents) and he went away.
A second later, we were swept up a narrow street, away from the plaza. We bobbed along like corks until we collided with a countercurrent that brought us to a dead stop. Soon the stream was flowing in the opposite direction, and we had gained a doorway across from a restaurant and dance hall with a pink adobe wall called El Fortin.
Strange faces floated past: young and old and in between, ugly, handsome, innocent, sinister, beautiful dark, beautiful white, pink, fat, skinny, cigar-smoking, wine-drinking, coca-leaf-chewing faces. A middle-aged woman smiled under a black hat; she wore a striking red and black poncho. Her face was white from the talcum and her hat was sprinkled. A man coming behind her turned in our direction. An aerosol can in each hand, he let us have it like a gunslinger.
"Ahhh!" a man beside me screamed and clutched his chest, feigning his own death. "It's a beautiful day to die," he muttered, grinning through the cream.
Saint and spume We elbowed our way further up the street. Then we fell into another stream on another narrow street. Before we knew it, we were in the plaza again, and it was dark. Everybody, it seemed, had been called down from the mountains, out of the towns, to this place to dance under the eight cypress trees that lend the plaza such dignity and the equal number of laurels that make it so intimate.
How spectral it all appeared: A ghost atop the monument to Sgt. J. Mariano Gomez, hero of some battle or other, waved a flag over the heads of all the other ghosts dancing in the night to the music.
We remained there, it seemed, for a long while, dodging spume and powder with some success. Each and every child had been handed one or two aerosol cans and told by his or her usually responsible parents that anybody - young, old, stranger or kin - was fair game.
"Don't hold back! Everybody gets it in the kisser! Nobody complains. If you can't take it, stay home."
A young couple stopped by the stone bench we were trying to hold against all odds. They had probably just come out, for they were unstained. He carried a bottle of Coca-Cola, spiked no doubt. They also had a bottle of wine. They asked if we would mind their stuff while they went out to dance beneath the flag. They returned 10 minutes later, utterly coated, thanked us and drifted away. First they gave us a squirt.
Precisely at midnight, two steel doors opened high on the cabildo's white wall, and the severe figure of St. Francisco Solano came forth. He was a Franciscan missionary who in 1589 traveled from Peru to Paraguay and became the first European to cross the Chaco Desert and live to tell about it. He preached to thousands of Indians in the course of his journey, and learned many languages. He was the New World's first saint.
His image in the wall stood about 6 feet tall, and was crafted by a German artisan in Oberammergau and brought here by a pious citizen many years ago.
His right hand rose, pointing the way to heaven, and the saint's head also turned skyward. Then, as though realizing nobody was watching him, the saint withdrew into his niche, and the doors closed upon him for another 12 hours.
According to Sixto Vazquez Zuleta, a local poet and authority on Humahuacan history who runs an interesting folklore museum, Humahuacans did not readily embrace the mechanical saint when it was installed some years back. They thought it a European oddity and made jokes about it. But they have become accustomed to it, and tourists, who come in buses, enjoy the saint's twice-daily appearances.
Digging up the devil These days you arrive in Humahuaca on rubber wheels. The General Belgrano Railway, which once carried passengers up to the Bolivian border, stopped running less than 10 years ago. The stations at the small towns along the route are abandoned, and many of the towns have withered without the commerce the trains brought.
The northwest provinces offer the most spectacular mountain scenery in the entire Republic of Argentina. And an empty republic it is: With a territory of more than a million square miles, Argentina has only about 36 million people, 8 million of whom live in Buenos Aires. That leaves relatively few to populate the hinterland, which is why, as you pass through these mountains and broad valleys, goats and sheep and occasionally llamas are more evident than people.
The road north from Jujuy is good, when it isn't washed out. There are a few stretches of earth and gravel. The railroad tracks run on through the scrub beside the road, and every once in a while flash a reminder of progress lost.
Having reached Jujuy after two days driving up from the central province of Santa Fe, we encountered a large number of people on the road outside the city. They were gathered in small groups, and ran along the shoulders and up the slopes. Some of these people were costumed, some not. All seemed bent on some collective purpose.
That purpose, we learned, was to dig up, or release, the devil, the first ritual of carnival. The people were heading to prearranged spots here and there on the mountain to open the mouth of the earth mother, into which they put cigars, cigarettes, homemade beer, coca, all sorts of other nice things.
The devil and Pachamama are the two figures who define carnival. Their relationship is none too clear. According to poet Vazquez, even though Pachamama is the overriding deity, the devil is thought to own everything under the earth. For this reason, miners often build altars of rocks, and offer gifts to encourage him to prevent cave-ins.
On the last day of carnival, the people who dug him up return to the same locales - at least those who have the energy. They reopen the cavity, put in more gifts to Pachamama, then rebury the devil, represented by a cloth doll, for another year. Or they burn him, thereby ridding themselves of all responsibility and guilt for the sins they committed during carnival week.
On our way north, we cross many wide arroyos that descend from the mountains. For months these lie dry, and the course the water of previous seasons took is revealed in the distribution of sand and gravel. When the snow melts above, the torrents flow down into the Rio Grande, which drains the valleys of the north.
Brother-in-law Oscar, or "Ocho," is driving. We pass a place with the sad name Arroyo of the Dead Indian. The mountains to the west are of a brilliant, denuded, red stone, with deep chimneys carved into them by the wind. On the other side of the wide, nearly dry river, the massif is a bright mustard color. We pass into another valley, and all the slopes spill down a carpet of shimmering green shale. These mountains eat the sky, and for that reason, and because clouds sometimes descend low into the valley, it is often dark on the road.
Large candelabra cactuses stand erect on the slopes. The ubiquitous cactus is among the more important symbols in this symbol-rich land. The wood beneath its spiky surface, called cardon, is hard and immensely strong; it enriches the interiors of many buildings, and holds up weighty mud brick ceilings, a foot or more thick, in churches and houses all over Jujuy. Adobe is the cheapest building material here. Little rain falls to melt it away.
The people who build adobe houses in Jujuy strive for Euclidean perfection, not the contrived unevenness fashionable in places such as New Mexico. The angles are always true and plumb; the roofs are straight; they have grass growing on them. Mostly the houses are not whitewashed, so they appear from a distance to have erupted right out of the earth.
A few miles south of Huacalera, a sign tells us we have just crossed the Tropic of Cancer. Now we are part of a caravan of cars and trucks, all heading for Humahuaca's famous carnival. Thirty miles on, we descend into the town amid the blare of horns. The streets are full of devils dancing, waving flags.
Restrained Sunday Early on the morning of the second day of carnival, the town was briefly quiet. The firecrackers had stopped about 5 a.m. The unrelenting Carnavalito relented, and the unintelligible singing faded away. The streets were empty, the debris of the night's merriment all over: confetti, empty aerosols, white stains on yellow walls, a man awakening on a doorstep. Out early, I met a young woman who asked me if I knew where her husband might be. I shrugged.
"How could I?"
"He's lost," she said, and wandered off.
Humahuaca adheres to the norms of Spanish colonial urban planning. The streets are straight and narrow, and set out on a grid. That's the way it was built nearly 60 years after the Spaniards, down from Peru, made bloody contact with the Omaguaca Indians here in 1536. The houses are low, one-story affairs of mud and stone; favorite colors are ochre, sienna, white. The roofs are a uniform brick color. The heavy wooden doors are thickly varnished or painted green along with the heavy shutters that seal the windows. About 12,000 people live here.
Three young women, dressed in old-fashioned skirts from Bolivia not seen much these days, are sweeping the plaza clean. A few stunned celebrants wander through like zombies, searching for the lost joy of yesterday. A priest in mufti stands in front of the Church of Our Lady of the Candalaria. He throws holy water on a pickup truck, reciting a blessing. The truck's owner and family are ready with their amens.
Inside, the church is a glory, and not only for the gilded altar, but for the warm wainscoting of golden cactus wood on every wall. It was built in 1631, then rebuilt in 1880.
This was Sunday, a different kind of day. People began gathering in the afternoon in the bars and cafes that had been transformed into clubs. You pay a few pesos to get in; food is served, much drink; folk bands play; people whirl. Gauchos and gauchas in full regalia prance through coquettish handkerchief dances. Later, more cowboys wander in, drink a while, then erupt into a frenzy of dance. One yelps an unintelligible challenge - "Aiieee!" - and provokes a contest of flying feet.
In the evening, the plaza filled again, and the costumes were more elaborate, more fantastic, with many big feathers. The conga lines formed, the talcum flew, but on the whole, day two was more restrained. Some of the new "bachelors" probably even slept at home.
By Tuesday, many Humahuacans had returned to work, and the children to school. Throughout the week, however, somebody would still be feasting or dancing. And here and there, before the devil was returned to the mountain or rendered into ash, the sound of Carnavalito would be heard.
When you go
Getting there: Many major airlines, including American and United, fly from New York to Buenos Aires, where flights depart daily for Jujuy or Salta. From there, buses leave daily for Humahuaca, and rental cars are available.
Accommodations: The Tourist Hotel, the largest, is the most expensive in Humahuaca: $100 a night during carnival, $30 at other times. It is run-down and the service is bad, though each room has a balcony with a magnificent view of the town and mountains. Residencial Humahuaca, at Cordoba and Corrientes, is clean, and costs about $25 a night. El Portillo, a youth hostel and restaurant-bar a block off the plaza, is run by a young couple from Buenos Aires; good food, cheap and clean.
Attractions: One can walk nearly all Humahuaca's streets in a day. Carnival, which begins this year on Feb. 24, can be sufficient distraction to keep one in the town, but after you've seen the plaza, the church, watched the saint appear from the wall of the cabildo, visited Vazquez's museum and the independence monument, you may be inclined to turn elsewhere.
Short motor trips will bring you to the lovely walled village of Iruya hanging from a nearby mountain; the beautiful town of Tilcara; the ancient Incan fortress of Pucara; or the most picturesque of whitewashed villages in the northwest, Purmamarca.
Tips:
• In Buenos Aires, you can often spend dollars as readily as the peso. In the northwest you will need pesos, or credit cards, but mainly pesos.
• Late February or early March is the season for carnival, but not the tourist season, which is January and February, the Argentine summer.
Information: Argentina National Tourist
Office, 12 West 56th St., New York; 212-603-0443;
Copyright © 2001,
The Baltimore Sun