Jose Maria Arguedas

"Warma Kuyay" and "The Pongo’s Dream"


These seemingly simple stories are in some ways, for me, more deeply expressive of the feeling states that companion particular cycles of individual and/or cultural/social experience. The other works we have read tend to approach or include a feeling dimension as part of elaborate and masterful intellectualizations; these stories are stark and dark forebodings of helplessness and hopelessness.

"Warma Kuyay" marvelously captures the volatile and conflicting feelings and thoughts of young Ernesto, a boy—probably an orphan—at the cusp of adulthood. Arguedas conveys this instability in subtle ways, such as the vast network of names and relations that are never quite explained, and mirror the experience of a child or young person who knows very precisely his or her relation to particulars (however fleeting), but not necessarily how those particulars relate to each other, or how they fit into a larger order.

Sadly, the Indian knows all too well that no matter how corrupt, cruel, or unfair the prevailing colonial system may be, it is beyond his ability even to attempt to rebel against that system. He can only retreat farther into the countryside. He understands the cruelty of men, his own included, that preys upon whatever is weaker. Ernesto does not comprehend the darkness of his heritage, or how simple it is to love an innocent animal, but not another person, who is naturally filled with conflict and fear, and will not carry the projection imposed.

In "The Pongo’s Dream" no justice is meted out or even imaginable in this life, on earth. Rather, after death, in heaven, a reciprocal cruelty is commanded and enacted for all time. This second tale describes a hopeless cycle of injustice and revenge that echoes Old Testament dynamics in the name of St. Francis. The intrinsic problem with this idea, its deep sadness, is that it allows only for a reversal of position, not a changed dynamic. Arguedas brilliantly describes the pongo’s dream not as volition, but as yet another act of subservience, this time to a wrathful St. Francis; the pongo submits to the heavenly command as to the landowner, locked forever in an embrace with his former tormentor. One can only imagine that he might have preferred to be released from that relation.