Portents and Omens

“Señora Juliet”, said my nanny one day, as she arrived breathless for work.  

“Ay Señora Juliet, I am so afraid!”

She was all atremble and I feared the worst: either her mother had another health crisis or she had got a better job and was about to abandon me.

Had there been floods in the sierra again and were they on the point of losing their home? Had some adolescent cousin turned up pregnant and confessed that the father was a married man with no inclination to take responsibility? All familiar Peruvian scenarios.

Reyda is not to be rushed when giving information.

“Ay Señora Juliet, I can´t believe it, but they said it was on the news!”

Some patient prodding revealed that she had received a terrified phone call from her younger sister the night before from their pueblo in Andahuaylas, in the Peruvian highlands.

“Ay Señora Juliet, tu puedes creer? A baby has been born with two horns and a tail!”

I had got up particularly early that morning. Lots of pending stuff at the office and I wanted to beat the traffic. If I left home before 7.15 I could get to work comfortably before 8am; any later and I would have to wait until the morning school rush was over to have any hope of finding a taxi willing to take me along the coast road to my office in Magdalena. But, clearly, discussion on the birth of the antichrist was not going to be disposed of in short order.

I attempted to assume an expression somewhere between intellectual curiosity and reassuring disbelief.

“Uh huh” I said.

My nanny is great but a bit long-winded when in a state of excitement. Her narrative style tends to the extremely literal: “My cousin said to me, ´Prima, you know what?” and I said, No, Prima´, I said, what?´”… and so on.

But bit by bit the shocking details emerged.

“Señora Juliet, the girl was a virgin, only 19 or 20 years old. She had been walking in the fields and you know how animals walk in the fields too. Well, she had on one of those wide skirts and as she walked an animal passed by and lifted up her skirt and that was all. Within 24 hours her belly started to swell and her parents took her to the doctor.”

Now I do not dispute the possibility of a 20 year old virgin lurking in the Peruvian highlands, but I have seen those skirts and they are wide enough to hide several mountain goats and the odd llama beneath them.

“Si Señora” she continued. “And when they got to the hospital they did a scan and the doctor said ´your daughter is going to have a baby´”.

“Uh huh” I said, glancing furtively at my watch.

“Señora Juliet, the baby was born right then! Only 24 hour hours later! And then when they saw the horns and the tail the father of the girl said “kill it!”

“Ah ha” I said.

“Si Señora, he said ´kill it´ and the doctors were going to kill it but as soon as the man said that, exactly 13 minutes after the baby was born, the baby said…”

“Ummmm” I said (“tick, tick, tick” said my watch). “The baby started talking?”

“Si, Señora! It said, ´kill me if you want but if you do, the following things will happen: Piura, Ica, Lima – and I can´t remember what other places it mentioned – will all be swallowed up by the sea.”

My nanny is a well-educated woman. Secondary school only but she has lived in Lima for many years. She has guided me through the pitfalls of the Gamarra garment district and bargained hard on my behalf in the treacherous byways of Plaza Hogar on a quest to purchase chests of drawers so I could hardly abandon her now in her hour of need. She takes excellent care of the Baby Inca and has a running battle with the teachers at his nursery, keeping them on the straight and narrow when they neglect to inform her of why he has a bump on his head or appears to have fallen into the “water” (Peruvian slang for a toilet bowl) at school.

If Lima was about to be inundated on the instructions of some belligerent baby Beelzebub I owed it to her to show some concern.

“Ummmm” I interrupted. “Where did your sister hear this?”

“The newspapers Señora! My mother can´t read but she saw a man in the street with a big pile of newspapers and a big group of people buying them so she bought one too and had the neighbour read it to her.”

Religious wingnuttery tends to flourish in remote regions (remember Jonestown?) and, as I myself can testify, publishing costs in Peru are relatively cheap. I was beginning to see a glimmer of light here.

“Has it been on the national news?” I asked.

“No Señora, I haven´t seen anything this morning”.

The Peruvian media are indefatigable in hunting down the most sensational and gory details of even the most innocuous of events. If the End of Days had been announced in even the farthest flung corner of the Andean cordillera trust me, the Peruvian press would have got the memo and there most certainly would have been live footage and heated talk show discussions within the hour.

I put this most reasonable observation to Reyda.

“Ay Señora, but Humala told the press not to report it! When the baby said he was going to drown all those places the doctors got frightened and sent for Humala and he ordered them not to let any press in.”

Peruvians are on a familiar one-name basis with their President and he obviously has preserved the common touch if he flew to the sierra on short notice at the request of the local doctors at the precise time that he was allegedly (according to the national press) in Argentina meeting with President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. But of course, in hyper-Catholic Peru, the birth of a horned baby constitutes a national crisis.

In addition to the Old Testament overtones, Andean communities are apparently highly susceptible to portents of evil and are perfectly capable of believing many impossible things before breakfast. Consider the Pishtaco, immortalized by Mario Varga Llosa in his novel Death in the Andes.

“According to folklore, [the Pishtaco] is an evil monster-like man, often a stranger and often a white man, who seeks out unsuspecting Indians, to kill them and abuse their bodies in disgusting ways, primarily by stealing their body fat for various nefarious cannibalistic purposes or cutting them up and selling their flesh as fried chicharrones[1]…

Preoccupation with body fat has a long tradition in the Andes region. In pre-Hispanic times, fat was so prized that a deity for it existed, Viracocha (Sea of fat)…Spanish missionaries were feared as Pishtacos by the Andean aboriginals, who believed they were killing people for fat with which to oil church bells to make them specially sonorous. In modern times similar beliefs held that human fat was needed to grease the machinery of sugar mills or that jet aircraft engines could not be started without a squirt of human fat. Pishtaco beliefs have affected international assistance programs, e.g. leading to rejection of the US Food for Peace program by several communities, out of fears that the real purpose was to fatten children, and later exploit them for their fat.”

(Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pishtaco)

In the face of such evident evil can one be surprised by the fear and loathing engendered by the birth of a horny, prehensile throwback?

I managed to both calm Reyda down and control my unworthy impulse to roar with laughter. But the Devil himself knows how I was going to explain my late arrival to my non-Peruvian boss.

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[1] An absolutely delicious Peruvian dish featuring deep fried pork, chicken or seafood.