Tamborín and the architect

‘Tamborín and the architect’, a book written by Father Miguel Garnett, an English priest, nationalized in Peru, has been published by our Network.

Father Miguel toured the Cajamarcan countryside with Juan Medcalf many years ago and is a personal friend of our brother Alfredo, so he knows about the network's wanderings.

This novel is made up of the presence of a farmer with great wisdom –inspired by our brother Pascual Sánchez Montoya, community and veteran volunteer of the Network–, an architect raised in Lima but in search of his mountain origins; a cemetery and the stories of families, conflicts, mausoleums and epitaphs.

References to the wakes and the washing of the deceased's clothes, as well as to the Andean culture on “the narrow roads and valleys where serpentine rivers run, the goblins, the apus, the enchanted forests, the birds and the animals that speak."

Allusions to the history of Peru; to ideals and struggles. To the art of construction and design. Reflections on life, love, death; the bewilderment and frustration. About costumes and nudity. On diseases of the soul and the encounter with the cure: "Tamborín was a kind of healer with very humble origins and with a capacity to heal wounds."

From the richness of orality and the ability to tell histories and stories “… being illiterate is a certain poverty, but it also has its richness (…) The richness of memory. People like my father have fabulous memories. My father must have heard hundreds of stories and legends; stories told at night around the stove. He always remembered them all. It was as if he had a library in his head.”

This work is also a tribute to books and reading, to the people who lend, give or facilitate others to read, as do the volunteer members of the Network who, after celebrating 50 years, continue to do the honourable work to circulate the books that, in addition to speaking and instructing the universal and Peruvian culture, make known the traditions, stories and teachings of Cajamarca's culture.