Networking in the valley of the Incas

By Jonathan Levi International Herald Tribune
WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors.