The Great Plotnik

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Charangos



CHARANGO EN HUMAHUACA

Last... Sunday, was it? ... Plot and Duck joined eight other people for an all day minibus trip north to the town of Humahuaca (OO-ma-WAH-ca) in the province of Jujuy, an Andean town of cobbled streets, adobe houses and a sense of being a million miles away from the rest of the world.



Before they got to Humahuaca they stopped in the smaller village of Purmamarca (Percy Sledge), which is perched in front of an extraordinary multi-colored mountain. As you head up into the hills north of Purmamarca lots of the scenery looks like this -- crazily beautiful colored hills and lots and lots of cacti.





There were towns with small, lovely Indian churches with four hundred year old (and priceless) paintings from the Cuzco school hanging in them, and schools where they were teaching the old methods of making ceramics, and lots of people out in the fields harvesting carrots and peppers and onions.



At the ceramics school, the man who made the pottery showed the group his kilns out in the back where they also happened to be barbecuing a goat.



But for Plotnik the most amazing moment occurred in Humahuaca, a very old pueblo of narrow streets and mud buildings but also lots of signs of modernity -- like cellphone shops and graffiti. Inside a shop window Plot saw a hand-lettered sign that said CHARANGOS PROFESIONALES.

Now, The Great Plotnik had been thinking about thinking about buying a charango ever since he heard The Great PD's charango that PD brought home from Iguazu several years ago.

But every time Plot went into a music store in Salta, the home of the charango in Argentina (the instrument is native to Bolivia), he was disappointed with one thing or another -- the price, or the sound, or the size, or the fact that he didn't want to own a charango just for the sake of owning it. He doesn't want to be a collector. Either he'd play it or he didn't want it.

So there he was outside the adobe-walled CHARANGOS PROFESIONALES shop in Humahuaca when a man cradling a very pretty charango came up to him and said: "Pasele, por favor. Estos son mios." It was nice to have someone say this is my shop, these are my charangos, please walk on in. So Plotnik did.

Charangos are small. The man kept four of them behind the counter in little cloth bags, each bag a different color.They were marked at different prices -- from 500 to 1200 pesos -- $120-$300. He took each one out of its bag and played it -- the man could really play the charango, but, once again, Plotnik just wasn't sold. He thanked the man and started to walk outside but the man grabbed him by the arm and waved his finger back and forth. "Espere, caballero.˜ Wait.

Behind the counter in the shop were four large lockers. They looked like the kinds of frozen food lockers you used to see on ice cream trucks.

The man now introduced himself. "Mi nombre es Salomon," he said, and Plot answered "Yo soy El Gran Plotniko, y esto es mi esposa Ducknika." (not their real names).

"Bueno, El Gran, ahora tu vas a ver algo." Plot wondered what he was about to be shown.

Salomon opened one of the lockers and Plot could see that inside, instead of the ice cream he had expected, Salomon had very carefully stacked at least two dozen multicolored hard charango cases. He pulled one out.

"Mire," he said. Look.



He set the charango on its back and then turned it over and over so Plotnik could examine both sides.

He explained the different kinds of woods he had used to build it, the ebony for the fingerboard, the bracing, even the electric pickups he had already installed.

Plot's eyes asked Salomon to play this charango, and he did, and it sounded like butter. The price tag was $3000 pesos ($775).

"Pues gracias, Señor," Plot said after awhile, "pero no tengo tanto plata por un charango." Salomon knew Plot wasn't going to buy this one, but he grabbed Plot's shoulder again and said: "Espere." He put the first charango back in its case, reached into the freezer case and brought out a second one.



This one was perhaps even more beautiful than the first one. It had a condor carved on top, and was ebony and cream colored. The shop was so small it was hard to have two people in it at once, and even harder to take a picture.

These were SUCH beautiful instruments. Plot thought about it. But in the end, he couldn't justify parting with that much plata for an instrument that is fairly limited in its range. It felt too much like collecting stamps or coins or fancy cars. You ought to love an instrument if you buy it at all and Plotnik doesn't know enough about charango to love it.

So, after seeing several more hand-carved masterpieces, each as pretty as the last, Plot and Duck said "Senor, no mas,˜ walked out of the store and around the block, Plotnik had to ask himself if he was sure and himself said yes, he was sure.

But it was half an hour until the bus was leaving and Plot was drawn back to the shop again. He walked over and sat down on one of the chairs outside the store, where Salomon was also sitting, playing his own charango, the one that had no price tag on it.



They then spent fifteen minutes or so talking about music and how Salomon, who was also a music teacher and composer, felt about the charango and how much it meant to him and to his people, the local people of Northern Argentina, and how much he loved his own charango, although it had a little hole in it, and Plot told him about his guitar and ukelele, like the two old men in Paul Simon's "Bookends," only in Spanish, talking about their favorite grandchildren.




Plottie could have sat here all day. But the bus was leaving. So he and Duck did too.

More beautiful mountains on the way home. No charango.

4 Comments:

At 7:05 AM, Blogger notthatlucas said...

I can't believe you didn't walk out of there with one of those. I just KNEW when you went back that Salomon would finally say the right thing and you would have one of these. If he only knew about your Dodger fetish - an image of Manny on the back of one of these would have clinched the deal.

Those were beautiful.

 
At 8:23 AM, Blogger mary ann said...

No charango?

 
At 3:37 PM, Anonymous jj-aka-pp said...

I completely expected a purchase at the end of this story....wow! you fooled us!

Those pix of the mountains are incredible. Brings out the geologist in me.....

 
At 10:23 AM, Anonymous Ms. Dominiky-Not said...

Oh you didn't fool ME, Senoir PlotCheapnik! Or should I be nicer and say PlotThriftNik? Anyway, I was more in love with the desert and desert town photos. Now I really REALLY want to travel more. I love those dry arid empty desolate mostly monochromatic places but for the rare bursts of unexpected color. And to just sit in that chair all day in the warmth...sounded so perfect.

 

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