Ayni: A Quechua Account of What Is Owed

There is no word in my language for charity. The nearest thing is ayni, and it does not mean giving. It means: I will come when you call, because you came when I called, and the account between us is never closed and never should be.

The terraces above my house were cut before the Inka. People say Inka because that is the name that survived, but the walls are older than the state that gets the credit. Each terrace holds a different temperature. Between the lowest and the highest there is a climate range you would otherwise have to cross a continent to find. My great-grandmothers used that to breed potatoes — not two or three kinds, thousands. We had a hedge against every failure the mountain could produce.

Then the market wanted four kinds and the seed companies sold four kinds, and within two generations the rest had gone into people's memories and out again. We got nineteen back. Nineteen, from an old woman's stored tubers and a bank in Lima and a great deal of arguing. There is a room now, at nearly four thousand metres, cold enough to hold them.

We kept accounts on knotted cord. Colour, ply, knot type, position. Tribute, herds, census, and probably history, though nobody living reads the narrative ones. Spanish clerks wrote that we had no writing while standing next to cabinets of it.

In this cloth, the pattern is not decoration. It is where I am from — the district, sometimes the family. A woman from the next valley reads my skirt the way you read a passport. When a tour bus buys a machine-made version in the market for six dollars, what is sold is not a textile. It is the legibility of the whole system.

The visitors we accept work the faena with us. Communal labour, one morning, moving stone or clearing an irrigation channel. Some of them are men who employ thousands of people and have not lifted anything in twenty years. There is a moment around the second hour when the talking stops. That moment is the reason we say yes to this at all.