If the word Andes means High Crest, there were the lower and the higher. At the lowest used to live the people who produced for the Inca and to sell their product in the market place. Every crest had a different aim for producing goods, human beings or knowledge, belonged to a different clan, used to help each other at work, or the famous analysis made by Marcel Mauss on the concept of reciprocity. It meant to him the support for work that every individual or group of a same family gave to others.
He wrote this book in L’Année Sociologique, being a book on its own right, latter on, and edited by Claude Lévi-Straus: Essai sur le don. Formes et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques, vol I, Paris, Felix Alkan. I wrote a book on the issue which you shall read on day, my Weñe, having discovered that there was not gratuity in helping each others. There existed interest: if I help, I receive the same amount of support which I have provided to others. I criticized Mauss in my book, because there was always surplus in activities of mutual help. Mauss, my Weñe, had not realized which there were heavy tasks being possible to be done by who had strength or special machines, artefacts or knowledge in order to realize his task of support. I never forget my friend Herminie, in Vilatuxe, Galicia, Spain. He was the only to be the owner of horses.
Tied up to a plough, a horse is able to till the land to the height of a plant of potatoes. They were poor, my grandson and used to employs their cows, a very important animal as they lived of their milk. Herminie was always required to open furrows for potatoes, maize and millet, used for consumption or to be sold. This is what happened at the various crests of the Andes.
The Incas used to live in the upper part, in a village called Machu Picchu, of who we shall talk latter. We have written of the Inca, now, let’s back, my Weñe, to the beginning of the beginning: our Mapuche ancestry.
Weñe, everyone in the family will affirm that we have no relations of blood with the Mapuche; least of all of family ties…. Even you, blonde, green eyes a good worker in words, nearly a good writer. This is how I see you in the future: Abuelo shows mi image of the time when I was learning my first letters. Nice Abuelo! He insists we are a mixture of Mapuche with other Europeans. He says so because ever since the Spaniards entered Chilean soil, all the original Mapuche became slaves of the invaders: they have to work for them, with no salary. As he says in one of his books, O crescimento das crianças, 1998, Profedições, Portugal, native people were the books of the Spaniards. European people did not know or understand the different nature, flaura and fauna, so different to the European, with no potatoes, maize, mew sort of animals like vicuñas, alpacas and guanacos, whose skin were appreciated, same as their meat or as animals to transport commodities, light cargo of cereals and cloth. Horses were to fight and treated as if they were human beings.