The incredible history of the Anarchist of the Puna and its Adobe Castle
Anarquista, hippie, loco, borracho, genio. Son algunas de las formas en que han llamado a Raúl Prchal, un hombre que encontró su lugar en el mundo en la quebrada de Humahuaca donde fundó la comunidad Huayra Huasi. Por ese castillo de adobe donde podía leerse la consigna “Reality does not exist” pasaron muchos jóvenes y no tan jóvenes que hicieron su viaje iniciático por el norte. Hace unos días, el periodista Fernando Duclos recuperó la increíble historia de este singular personaje a través de un hilo de Twitter y comenzaron a aflorar los recuerdos de quienes pudieron conocerlo.
In the 1970s, Pchal settled in a city to the south of France called Larzac.There, it was part of the Ark community, a commune founded by the Italian philosopher and activist Giuseppe Lanza del Vasto, European disciple of Mahatma Gandhi.Then he moved to the Humahuaca gorge where he founded the anarchist community "Huayra Huasi" (La Casa del Viento).He practiced voluntary poverty and wrote several books in which he moved his anti -system conception in the world.The journalist Marina Hernández had portrayed her eccentric way of life in the note published in the magazine Altoirmagazine that can be read below.
Reality does not exist
Halfway between the city of Jujuy and the end of Argentina a white man has built an adobe castle to live among the Indians.An ox skull hangs from the entrance door as a bow mask.Below are the signs of anarchism: one capital that feeds and exceeds a circumference.The only window is closed because the red wind begins its autumn career through these lands;The cold is coming again.It is the third time that the route brings me to this house, anarchist commune, juggling refuge and utopian dreamers and newly graduated young people who undertake their route to the north as a rite of passage towards adulthood.Also of the artisans who changed capitalism for Toro wine and weathering cigarettes in the shadow of the grandparents - the cactus high - that flood the creek and the Puna.This time the door is closed.A poster invites you to get out of there and not bother.I knock the door.
"Raul?"
"What fuck, didn't you see the poster?"—Res a voice from the inside of this darkness of cave.
The fire is already turned on and crosses the sawdust by shaking under the plastics and papers of the day.I discover the old man occupying the corner of the wooden table in front of the home, with the shadow gesture under the wing hat that always covers his head.He has a coca bag and cares about carefully choosing the next sheet that will be part of that huge bolus that occupies his mouth.One by one, separates the rib from green and fresh meat and wraps, with it, pieces of llipta, the ash that activates the alkaloids of the sacred plant of the original Inca town.He is an exquisite man and not any coca serves him.
-What do you want? -asks me.
"Write your story," I answer.He thinks about it.
"But I'm going to lie to you.
So I suppose this is the story of a lie narrated in the light of the querosene lamps one day of strong wind in the Red Quebrada.
That each one judges if it deserves to be believed.
*****
On January 1, 1975, Raúl Pchal arrived in Humahuacsurrounding consumer society.That was not the first time that Raúl participated in a community project or the first time he failed.They just returned from the distant France, whose cavernous Mediterranean coast had participated for two years in the Ark community.Founded by the disciple of Gandhi, Lanza de Vasto, this institution based its existence on non-violence, justice, spiritual search, self-supply and artisanal work.Because of his rejection of gregarious and his strong monastic discipline, the irreverent Pchal soon won the supername of Guanaco - stubborn and wild camelide from which the flame descends - and a ticket back to Argentina with the promise - which never came to specify -of forming an ark subsidiary in the north.
In the kitchen of Huayra there is an African statuette, two cats, kerosene candles, a blackboard with Quechua words on the stove.
It was the years when Argentina was handled with state terrorism and those first inhabitants of the commune shared the vision, perhaps romantic, that they could escape violence settling in the highlands.For Raúl the Quebrada turned out to be the promised land he was looking for but over the years he understood that he had dragged other people in his search.Among them, his wife Graciela, whom he had met in the high school of the University, and with whom he had married before finishing the entrance course."A good day I was completely alone," he will say.Little by little, those first members left: also she, three years later than what had been.He fought with nails the inheritance of his father - an old, gold, Mexican coins - and found the open and well -marked pathway towards the system.He went finger, taking his belongings and his broken heart.
His decision was to depart from the consumer society and integrate between the owners of the Altiplano
Only the house remained.Subjected to great reforms and changes of seeing.A time later Pchal also dispensed with light and gas and began to be shown with candles and heat up on the shore of the stove that continues to crepit.Of those first days there is hardly more than his name: Huayra Huasi or "the house of the wind" in the Quechua language that, he believed, was still spoken in this part of the Andes when he arrived.It would be, however, that the North Spanish had seasoned with the original languages, leaving here and splashes of the African South American mother tongue.He also found that this region that once lived the omaguacas in the recesses of the Antigal was one of the great forgotten by the Argentine State.That did not cost him to accept it: he practiced and practiced voluntary poverty, although lately he has accepted the government's pension and therefore a "bourgeois pig" is considered..To fight the feeling of being betraying an ideal, Pchal has a costume: a layer of dirt that serves as a declaration of intentions.When the dirt weighs, he takes off his clothes and throws it to the stove.Burns so much dust, heat.This is his fight: the individual facing the system, but on his back.
In the kitchen of Huayra there is an African statuette, two cats, kerosene candles, a blackboard with Quechua words on the stove, un calendario con una foto del Hornocal (el cerro de los siete colores) junto a la pizarrita de quechua, una mesa en cuyos cimientos se encuentra la piedra fundacional de la comuna, bolsitas de especias esparcidas por ahí, un ejemplar muy viejo del I-Ching, dos pavas al fuego hirviendo el agua, hoja de coca seca, mucha yerba mate y muchas sartenes quemadas, algunos libros en las estanterías, una caja de viruta y cuatro o cinco retratos colgados de las paredes: Quiroga, Van Gogh, Lanza de Vasto, Kerouac y, ocupando un lugar de honor, el de La Rufina: la muchachita puneña que terminó siendo su mujer sin que lo eligieran.He tells me that one day he discovered that he had lived there.At first she slept on the ground, at the foot of the bed.The ruffina was an illiterate India of the Northern Salinas, the "fastest", which sang songs with a serious and ethyl voice and sat next to him and the newcomers in the kitchen to drink wine and alcohol 96º diluted in water.They all banked them to each other, I told me, which means that they were supported to the most neurotic drunkenness.Two years ago he died and not strange:
"It's that she committed suicide for drinking.
Huayra has been a image laboratory, anarchist transitory commune, Center for Culture and Creation, film scenario, family house and house of skinny crazy people, Carnival Peña and many other things, but what has been the most is shelter: for the Travelers who take the Pan American to the north and stop here because the name of the "prejál" goes from mouth to mouth and some want to meet the last anarchist of the Puna; For hippies who, like Raúl, took an individual path away from the pre-established: choose how to possess the time they have left and despise money; for the initiated ethnographers who are there in search of beings in extinction; For those who still cite Berkman and Goldman, great architects of anarchism of this century and by the way bride and groom; for those who still speak of revolution watching TV; For those who do not have to pay a meal tonight but they never lack a cigarette without a filter; For those who want to escape their women and drink a victim with friends, invent a couplet and wait for dawn in the cozy shared nebula that begets alcohol.
*****
Very few registrations have been saved from laundering with lime: reminders.One of them is that reality does not exist.The other is much more concise: "Write, edit, succeed in life".That is the objective that Raúl's engines still underway still.That is: his literary work is read - because he is still in force, he tells me - also on other continents.
When I was young and lived in Buenos Aires, Raúl didn't want to be a writer.His adolescence years was dedicated, rather, to tour the bookstores of Corrientes Avenue and to keep some random titles under the coat.Once was the dhabundos of Dharma, from Kerouac.Again, the steppe wolf of Hesse.At that time it was a changuito that wore orange moccasins and cursed poets -style ties that joined the marches for a secular and state school when he left his classes at the Adventist school.Those youth readings left deep traces in anarchist, marginal, anti -system and individualist thinking that would later develop, with much more reflection than theory.
Once was the dhabundos of Dharma, from Kerouac.Again, the steppe wolf of Hesse
Thirty years later Raúl, plumber by profession, plumber of gutters, pipes and urinary, occupied a lonely and silent little room at the Humahuaca purification plant where he worked.It was summer, the rain blurred the silhouette of the poplars outside and, of course, the fecal waters stinked.Graciela had just left and the commune had closed its doors until new notice.In that little room it was where, finally, the ideological novel that Raúl had been writing for years was conceived: the sniper.Through it Raúl would explain to the world his decision to abandon the economic and political system and follow a new way alone, in the line of the individualistic anarchists of the twentieth century: the human being as an autonomous entity, owner of himself, thanIt opposes state or social control.In the case of Raúl and his alter ego Alfonso Kumovic, the protagonist always absent in the novel, the story goes out with a tendency to the marginal, to inhabit the recesses of the world where no one fixes his gaze, the silent circuits where the law,Money or politics are ghostic symbols of what is fleeing from.
*****
Raúl told me that who writes autobiography, lies.While reading the sniper and the rest of his books (many narrate their experiences as a notes) I have not been able to get me out of the feeling that it is in the novel where the truth appears more rigorous, despite their efforts to give it A hiding place.That is to say: fiction conceals the truth in the details, in the landscapes, in the gestures, in the proper names but at the same time, there, in the background, it appears clean and hard as a polished marble rock to which the spots of the spots of thetime would not have managed to change or bury it seems to look like anything else.
"I am Alfonso Kumovic, who spits on her Buenos Aires roots".
Autobiography is like that.In the bulk of Raúl's work, the sniper, under his condition of invention, becomes the canvas where contradictions and arguments, what happened and what could have happened in his own life, very intimate ideas andSelf -projects turn and develop until death.In that alchemical experiment that is writing manages to unfold and, without being noticed with the naked eye, becoming his own characters, living of a fiction that could not have been.In the story Alfonso Kumovic, - "archetypal image of myself," he told me - is the superman that abandons and rejects the world that surrounds him and that undertakes a path and closes him after him because he does not seek followers but authenticity and coherence.Pepe Muyssi is the one who tells but also the mirror of inertia: an old comrade of Kumovic, a bourgeois doctor who remembers his youth aspirations and regrets everything that failed to be.The story that tells is yours but above all is that of Kumovic: that of heroic loneliness.
Autobiography is like that: disfraza la realidad de hechos y fechas para evitar contar lo que ocurrió debajo de la superficie.
Yes: Autobiography lies and, although the sniper is not an autobiography or tries.After all, memory only exists in the present, memory is constructive and prone to errors and alterations.What we remember as true could never have happened.Memory is like a dance in equilibrium: it approaches and moves away from these fragments of experience called memories without ever touching them, and in that approach they transmutes them: links appear that were not there before, some events become important in retrospective and others areThey forget, certain anecdotes are misrepresented and exaggerated and the feelings, tones of light and bureaucratic dates, almost always involuntaryly, change order.The objective of memory is none other than telling the story itself and those of those who surrounded us one day and for this it has their own tools and they are these:
The look
The thought
The word
