Point 17
Q’ori Calle or Q’ohe Calle
This narrow winding street takes us to a place where the rest of the city seems to
disappear. Walking this street is like walking in a small town, where you know each
and every inhabitant. On this street, the balconies caress each other, the walls on
one side reach out to kiss the walls on the other side.
Within the walls of the houses that line this street, many secrets were hidden. The
spanish hid their fortunes inside these walls, safeguarding their treasures from their
fellow soldiers. They buried small ransoms in these walls in the event a pay off was
needed, should circumstances go against them in this dangerous colonial Cusco,
driven by greed and the threat of a knife in the back. The treasures buried in the
walls of every house on this street remained buried, often forgotten by the aging
owner as memory faded. Years later, an unsuspecting owner might happen upon the
treasure by chance when the walls fell down. There were also professional
excavators, hungry for money, who knew where to dig in a house and find the gold.
And this is how the street got its name - Q’ori Calle or street of gold.
However this street was once called Q’ohe Calle, or Cuy Street, Guinea Pig Street,
most likely due to its narrowness and the impression it gives when walking through
it of scurrying like a guinea pig, running at top speed to find a corner to hide in.
When I walk down this street and see the bell towers of La Compañia church in the
distance, I feel like I have been transported to some other time in Cusco. I feel I am
here in this narrow street, but that I am deep inside the body of the city, floating
through one of its finest veins. I am a leucocyte, greeting red and white blood cells as
I go.
We are all part of the life blood of a city, at times creating problems, at times
enriching it. If I didn’t know this place, I’d miss the little secrets of these streets. I’d
miss the suffocating feeling. But I’d also miss how the wind blows through the street
in delicate whispers.
To know a city, to really inhabit it, is to know and love its most insignificant spaces.
You stretch out your thoughts along its narrow alleys. You have a secret rendezvous in a secret corner. You know all the city’s intimate stories and you welcome all
those who move through the city with you.
When I walk here, centuries of strange histories inhabit me. Not history writ large,
and not remarkable events, but rather small, intense lived histories. Each one of us
is a part of history, a gleaming trace of the past.
I am a new indian, living fruit of the earth. I come from faraway places to the centre
of things. I want to build strong ties to life and fearless ties to death with my fellow
human beings. I come with a full heart, ready to give, to receive new things, and to
grow. I go to faraway places from the centre of things. I am a new indian. Noqa runa.
Being human is nothing new to me.