Tribute to Ermitaño

The Popular Hermit of Takiwasi

Even before the founding of the Takiwasi Center, I met Ermitaño cutting dry firewood in the forest, not far from my dieta hut. He would rise early in the morning to gather his load of wood, which he later sold; it was his livelihood. His sincerity and simplicity touched me, and I offered him a small job after my dieta. First privately, then at Takiwasi, where he became the very first worker.

Abused as a child and deeply traumatized, he stammered and lived alone in poverty. Children would harass him in the streets as if he were the village fool. His name, Ermitaño, seemed to have sealed a fate of loneliness and destitution. If we are asked to recover our childhood spirit, Ermitaño never lost his. And it was precisely this spirit that he spread throughout Takiwasi and shared with everyone he met. Faced with our existential anxieties, our mental speculations, and our intellectual questioning, Ermitaño was the constant reminder of our need for humility, simplicity, and innocent joy in daily life.

Rejected as a child, he found a way out by loudly proclaiming that he was not Peruvian but Ecuadorian, while listening to Ecuadorian folk songs on his battery radio. He knew them all by heart and sang them while pulling weeds at Takiwasi. Later, he diversified his nationality, becoming Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, etc., depending on his imagination and the person he was speaking with at the time.

Unaware of irony, Ermitaño had great difficulty understanding that people could joke and that a joke was a “white lie” with an affectionate dimension. The day he managed to grasp this abstraction, a huge window opened for him, and his nationality became a daily subject of jokes, an inexhaustible source of hearty laughter. His innocence did not allow him to believe that others could lie or have bad intentions, which made him vulnerable to much abuse.

Unknowingly, he had adopted a rule of life based on the Inca adage: Ama Sua (do not steal), Ama Llulla (do not lie), and Ama Quella (do not be lazy). Thus, the world was simple and straightforward.

His life was his work, which he took very seriously, unable to conceive of being paid for doing nothing. Even weakened in his final days, he continued to work, seated on a brick he would move along with him, and sometimes even semi-reclined, firmly holding his machete. It was necessary to forbid him from working on holidays, and the order had to come from the “highest authority.” For he respected authority, but only that of the boss, not of subordinates. One also had to consider suspending an order; otherwise, Ermitaño would have continued his work undisturbed. If the order was to water the plants every day in my absence, he would do so even under a downpour…

His stammer vanished as soon as he sang and never prevented him from being extremely talkative, proclaiming his certainties to anyone who would listen. Just as truth comes from the mouths of children, he could just as easily utter harsh truths to some, without diplomacy and without a trace of shame.

Harsh toward suffering, which he preferred to ignore, Hermit paid no attention to his physical ailments and rejected any treatment (“they will disappear with death,” he would say), throwing himself instead into epic nocturnal spiritual battles with demons he utterly despised. He did not mind, for he believed in divine justice.

Thus, Ermitaño, upholding these basic truths as the compass of his existence, without convenient adjustments, mocking social conventions and “political correctness,” constantly reminded us of the gap between our pretensions and the simple truths of existence, the fundamental foundations of human nature. Ermitaño, without a mask, could strip ours away at any moment. And his vehement denunciations could be accompanied by hearty laughter, devoid of malice. And that is why everyone loved him… we were all more intelligent than he was, yet incapable of being as pure of heart, as true an image of upright men.

In the mystery of divine design, Ermitaño played a key role at Takiwasi, a role we may not have fully deciphered to this day. As guardian of the Spirit of Takiwasi, his passing seems to mark the end of an era for Takiwasi and the beginning of another.

From wherever he may be today, may Ermitaño continue to accompany us and preserve the Spirit of Takiwasi with the same simplicity and purity of heart, that authentic innocence he embodied with us for 38 years of his life.

Jacques Mabit, August 2025.

Tributes and Links of Interest

• Tribute in Spanish by Uriel López, psychologist at Takiwasi: Homenaje a Ermitaño
• Text in Spanish by Rafael Olivera, with photos: El Ermitaño de Takiwasi
• Video by Louis Bidou & Aurélie Marques: Ermitaño: un ejemplo a seguir

Photo and video gallery