Pedro Noria:
Student, Carpenter, and Man of God

by Michael L. Robinson

Pedro’s glory was making harps. Musicians from all over Peru came to his village to place their orders for the handcrafted instruments. But I didn’t meet Pedro Noria in the tiny, tool-carpeted workshop that clung to his three-room, brown adobe house.

I was a Latter-day Saint missionary and had been sent, along with an American Indian from California, to establish a small school in the mountain village of Ayancocha. The village lies on the east side of the Andes in central Peru and is situated on the banks of the Huallaga River that cascades toward Peru’s rain forests and finally meanders through the flat jungles to join with the Amazon.

The first night Pedro entered the adult education class, he looked like any other older mountain Indian. Decay had robbed him of many of his teeth and eaten parts of others. Improper diet and years of scraping at the unproductive, rocky Andean soil had wrapped the flesh tautly around his frame. Calloused welts protruded from under the leather thongs that tied his llantas (rubber treaded sandals made from worn truck tires) to his feet. His nose bore angular testimony to his membership in the royal Incan family.

But, in fact, Pedro was not like many of the other mountain Indians. He had not numbed his mind by chewing cocaine leaves, which serve as an antidote for the cold, fear, and frustration for so many of Peru’s older mountain people.

Pedro’s adult memory extended back past the time when the first trucks crossed the Andes and rumbled through his village toward Peru’s wood- and fruit-laden jungles.

But his mind was young and he wanted to learn to read.

Somewhere he had picked up the basics of the written language. He knew the letters and sounds of the Spanish alphabet. And when we opened the adult reading class in his village, Pedro was the first to enter.

The class dwindled as the weeks passed by. Learning is not easy for adults who measure their formal education by the number of days they have spent in a classroom. But Pedro hung on.

Soon he could sound out the syllables. The process was slow: he would sound out each syllable and then put the word together; it would sometimes take an hour to read one paragraph.

When Pedro learned to read, he cut a large window through the adobe in his living room to let the light in.

Nothing was too dull or unimportant. Old newspapers, government pamphlets, anything that had words on it was slowly devoured.

And when the sun had dropped behind the towering Andes that guarded the village to the west, I could see the dim flicker from a coal-oil lamp coming from Pedro’s new window. He would be squinting across the top of his glasses, with the lamp across the wooden table and the book between, slowly sounding out the syllables.

But Pedro’s academic curiosity was not his only asset. He had not succumbed to the pressures of a practical society where art and craftsmanship were considered unneeded luxuries. Plantation owners would have paid Pedro well for the use of his carpentry skills.

Rather than go to work making rough door frames and unpolished fruit boxes, Pedro would spend a month and a half sculpturing a harp that would sell for around 20 American dollars. To make sure there was food on the table for his wife and five children, he tilled a small plot of ground and raised chickens and guinea pigs. (Guinea pigs are kept by the mountain people of Peru much like rural Americans keep rabbits. One mountain specialty is to soak them in hot pepper juice and roast them over an open fire.)

Watching Pedro make harps was a lesson in concentration. He would pick out a prospective candidate for the harp from his seasoned wood pile, and like a raccoon selecting his food, pass the stick from hand to hand, eyeing it from this angle and that, all the while running his fingers across the grain; an appropriate grunt would finish off the process. The grunt meant that judgment had been affixed: the stick would either become a polished part of the finished instrument or serve as kindling to roast Pedro’s speciality: pepper-dipped guinea pig.

Then, using primitive carpenter’s tools, Pedro would build a precision musical instrument. For many, beauty exists only when perceived, but not for Pedro. His harps were art inside and out. No matter where the wood was used, it had to be the best. Even unnoticed ribs well within the dark interior were seasoned and planed.

But while Pedro’s academic curiosity and craftsmanship would have made him stand out in any community, one other quality made him unique. There have been few characters in the course of written history with whom faith and fact were synonymous. Pedro was one of these.

Even for those of us who use the term daily, faith is a paradox. Conspicuously absent in many who bear its robes, it sometimes finds a more congenial soil under homespun wool and leather thongs.

At any rate Pedro’s faith was both simple and factual. We had bought a diesel engine that generated electricity for our school and church building. A film arrived from Church headquarters depicting the struggles of early pioneers in southern Utah. President Lorenzo Snow, president of the Church at that time, promised the pioneers that a devastating drought would end if they would pay their tithing.

That year Pedro’s village was experiencing a drought. Potatoes and corn were drooping in despair at the rainy season’s slow arrival.

Pedro arrived the morning after the film was shown to pay ten soles (less than 50 cents) in tithing. He then went home and sat on his porch to wait for the rain.

It rained.

It is nearly ten years now since I have seen Pedro. He was an old man then. Perhaps the murmur of articulated syllables no longer escapes from the adobe dwelling’s open window.

On my dining room table rests an 18-inch replica of a Peruvian harp, a cherished gift from the Noria workshop. Its finger-stained ribs and hand-carved bridge are surrounded by machine-planed woods, synthetic carpets, and imitation hickory paneling. The bridge of the instrument ends in the sculptured head of a bird. Its unblinking eye and symmetrical bill are fitting memorials to Pedro Noria de Toledo.

Block print by James Christensen