Death in the Andes

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Stupid fucking amateur.” Iscariote held his head. “You moron. What the hell do you think men do with whores, you prick?”

  “The police will come, there’ll be an investigation,” said the woman. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But she couldn’t move,” the boy recalled, his honeyed voice becoming even sweeter, and Lituma thought: “You mean you’d already fallen for her, Tomasito.” “She took a few steps toward the door but stopped and came back, as if she didn’t know what to do. Poor thing, she was scared to death.”

  The boy felt Iscariote’s hand on his arm. He was looking at him regretfully, compassionately, not angry anymore. He spoke with great resolve:

  “You better disappear, and don’t show your face at your godfather’s, compadre. He’ll shoot you full of holes, who knows what he’ll do. Go on, make yourself scarce, and let’s hope they don’t find you. I always knew this wasn’t the job for you. Didn’t I tell you that the first time we met?”

  “A real friend,” the boy explained to Lituma. “What I did could’ve gotten him in hot water, too. And still he helped me get away. A huge fat man, a face as round as a cheese, a belly like a tire. I wonder what’s happened to him?”

  He held out a plump, friendly hand. Tomás clasped it firmly. Thanks, Fats. The woman, down on one knee, was searching through the clothes of the man who lay motionless on the floor.

  “You’re not telling me everything, Tomasito,” Lituma interrupted.

  “I don’t have a cent, I don’t know where to go,” the boy heard the woman saying to Iscariote as he went out into the warm breeze that made the shrubs and tree branches creak. “I don’t have a cent. I don’t know what to do. I’m not stealing.”

  He broke into a run, heading for the highway, but slowed to a walk after a few meters. Where would he go? He was still holding the revolver. He put it back in the holster, which was attached to his belt and concealed by his shirt. There were no cars in sight, and the lights of Tingo María seemed very far away.

  “Believe it or not, Corporal, I felt calm, relieved,” said the boy. “Like when you wake up and realize the nightmare was only a nightmare.”

  “But why are you keeping the best part to yourself, Tomasito?” Lituma laughed again.

  Along with the sounds of the insects and the woods, the boy heard the woman’s hurried steps trying to catch up with him. He felt her beside him.

  “But I’m not hiding anything, Corporal. That’s the whole truth. That’s exactly how it happened.”

  “He didn’t let me take a cent,” she complained. “That fat shit. I wasn’t stealing, just borrowing enough to get to Lima. I don’t have a cent. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do either,” said Tomás.

  They stumbled on the winding little path covered with dead leaves, slipped in the ruts made by the rain, felt the brush of leaves and spiderwebs on their faces and arms.

  “Who told you to butt in?” The woman immediately lowered her voice, as if regretting her remark. But a moment later she went on berating him, although in a more restrained way. “Who made you my bodyguard, who asked you to protect me? Did I? You fucked up and you fucked me up too, and I didn’t even do anything.”

  “From what you’re telling me, you were already hot for her that night,” Lituma declared. “You didn’t pull out your revolver and shoot him because the stuff he was doing made you sick. Admit that you were jealous. You didn’t tell me the most important part, Tomasito.”

  2

  “All those deaths just slide right off the mountain people,” Lituma thought. The night before, in Dionisio’s cantina, he had heard the news of the attack on the Andahuaylas bus, and not one of the laborers who were eating and drinking there had a single thing to say. “I’ll never figure out what the fuck’s going on here,” he thought. Those three missing men hadn’t run away from their families, and they hadn’t stolen any machinery from camp. They had gone to join the terruco militia. Or the terrucos had murdered them and buried the bodies in some hollow in the hills. But if the Senderistas were already here and had accomplices among the laborers, why hadn’t they attacked the post yet? Why hadn’t they put him and Tomasito on trial? Maybe they were just sadists who wanted to break their nerve before they blew them to bits with dynamite. They wouldn’t even have time to pull their revolvers from under their pillows, let alone get the rifles out of the wardrobe. They would sneak up and surround the shack while they slept the nightmare-ridden sleep they had every night, or while Tomás was recalling his love affair and using Lituma’s shoulder to cry on. A deafening noise, the flash of powder, night turned into day: they’d blow off their hands and legs and heads all at the same time. Drawn and quartered like Tupac Amarú, compadre. It could happen any time, maybe tonight. And in Dionisio and the witch’s cantina, the serruchos would put on the same innocent faces they put on last night when they heard about the Andahuaylas bus.

  He sighed and loosened his kepi. This was the time of day when the mute used to wash their clothes, there, a few meters away, just like the Indian women: beating each article against a rock and wringing it out carefully in the washtub. He worked very conscientiously, soaping shirts and underwear over and over again. Then he would spread the clothes on the rocks with the same meticulous diligence he brought to everything, his body and soul concentrated on the task. When his eyes happened to meet the corporal’s, he would stand erect, rigid and alert, waiting for orders. And he bowed all day long. What could the terrucos have done with that poor innocent?

  The corporal had just spent two hours making the same obligatory rounds—engineer, foremen, paymasters, crew bosses, co-workers on the shift—that he had made following the other disappearances. With the same result. Nobody knew much about Demetrio Chanca’s life, of course. And even less about his current whereabouts, of course. Now his wife had disappeared, too. Just like the woman who came to report the disappearance of the albino Casimiro Huarcaya. Nobody knew where they had gone, or when or why they had left Naccos.

  “Don’t you think these disappearances are strange?”

  “Yes, very strange.”

  “It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it makes you think.”

  “Maybe it was the spirits who took them away?”

  “Of course not, Corporal, who could believe anything like that?”

  “And why would the two women disappear, too?”

  “Who knows?”

  Were they making fun of him? Sometimes he thought that behind those blank faces, those monosyllables spoken reluctantly, as if they were doing him a favor, those opaque, suspicious, narrow eyes, the serruchos were laughing at him for being a coastal man lost up here in the barrens, for the discomfort the altitude still produced in him, for his inability to solve these cases. Or were they dying of fear? A panicked, raw fear of the terrucos. That might be the explanation. Considering everything that was happening every day, all around them, how was it possible he had never heard a single remark about Sendero Luminoso? As if it did not exist, as if there were no bombings, no killings. “What people,” he thought. He hadn’t been able to make a single friend among the laborers even though he had spent so many months with them, even though he had already moved the post twice to follow the camp. None of that mattered. They treated him as if he came from Mars. In the distance he saw Tomás walking toward him. He had been making inquiries among the campesinos from the Indian community, and the work crew that was opening a tunnel a kilometer from Naccos on the way to Huancayo.

  “So?” he asked, certain he would see him run his finger along his throat.

  “I found out something,” said the guard, sitting down beside him on one of the rocks that dotted the hillside. They were on a headland, halfway between the post and the camp that sprawled along the gorge where the new highway would be located if it was ever completed. They said that Naccos had once been a bustling mining town.
Now it would not even exist except for the highway construction. The midday air was warm, and a blinding sun shone in a sky filled with fat, cottony clouds. “That foreman had a fight with the witch a few nights ago.”

  The witch was Señora Adriana, Dionisio’s wife. Fortyish, fiftyish, ageless, she spent her nights in the cantina, helping her husband serve a steady flow of drinks, and if the stories about her were true, she came from the vicinity of Parcasbamba on the other side of the Mantaro River, a region that was half sierra and half jungle. During the day she cooked for some of the laborers, and at night she told their fortunes, reading cards or astrological charts or their palms, or tossing coca leaves into the air and interpreting the shapes they made when they fell. She had large, prominent, burning eyes, and her ample hips swayed as she walked. Apparently she had once been a formidable woman, and there was endless speculation about her past. They said she had been the wife of a big-nosed miner and even had killed a vampire, what the serranos called a pishtaco. Lituma suspected that in addition to being a cook and a fortune-teller, she was something else at night as well.

  “Don’t tell me the witch turned out to be a terruca, Tomasito.”

  “Demetrio Chanca had her throw the coca leaves for him. I guess he didn’t like what she saw, because he wouldn’t pay her. They got into a shouting match. Doña Adriana was really mad and tried to scratch him. An eyewitness told me about it.”

  “And to get back at the cheapskate, the witch waved her magic wand and made him disappear.” Lituma sighed. “Have you questioned her?”

  “I made an appointment with her up here, Corporal.”

  Lituma didn’t think he knew who Demetrio Chanca was. He did have some vague knowledge of the albino because the face in the photograph left with them by the woman who made the complaint reminded him of someone he had once exchanged a few words with at Dionisio’s. But the first one, Pedrito Tinoco, had lived in the shack with them, and the corporal couldn’t get him out of his mind. Carreño had found him begging in the barrens, and brought him to work at the post for meals and tips. He had turned out to be very useful. He had helped them reinforce the roof beam, secure the corrugated sheets, nail up the partition that had collapsed, and erect the barricade of sacks as protection in the event of attack. Until one fine day they sent him down for beer and he disappeared without a trace. “That’s how this fucking thing began,” Lituma thought. How was it going to end?

  “Here comes Doña Adriana,” his adjutant informed him.

  At a distance her figure was partially dissolved by the white light. The sun, reverberating on the tin roofs below, made the camp look like a string of ponds, a broken mirror. Yes, it was the witch. She was panting slightly by the time she reached them, and responded to their greetings with an indifferent nod, not moving her lips. Her big maternal bosom rose and fell rhythmically, and her large eyes observed the corporal and the guard without blinking. There was no trace of uneasiness in that stare, whose intensity was troubling. For some reason she and her drunken husband always made Lituma uncomfortable.

  “Thank you for coming, señora,” he said. “As you probably know, there’s been a series of disappearances here in Naccos. Three men missing. That’s a lot, don’t you think?”

  She did not answer. Thickset, calm, swimming inside a darned sweater and a wide green skirt fastened by a large buckle, she seemed very sure of herself, or of her powers. Standing solidly in the man’s shoes she wore, she waited, her expression unchanging. Could she have been the great beauty they said? Difficult to imagine when you saw this awful-looking hag.

  “We asked you to come so you could tell us about the fight you had the other night with Demetrio Chanca. The foreman who’s also disappeared.”

  The woman nodded. She had a round, sour face and a mouth like a scar. Her features were Indian but she had white skin and very light eyes, like the Arabic women Lituma had once seen in the interior of Ayacucho, galloping like the wind on the backs of small, shaggy horses. Did she really whore at night?

  “I didn’t have any fight with him,” she said categorically.

  “There are witnesses, señora,” the guard Carreño interrupted. “You tried to scratch him, don’t deny it.”

  “I tried to take off his hat so I could get what he owed me,” she corrected him impassively. “He made me work for nothing, and I don’t let anybody get away with that.”

  She had a slow, guttural voice, as if gravel rose from the depths of her body to her tongue when she spoke. Back home in the north, in Piura and Talara, Lituma had never believed in witches or magic, but here in the sierra he was not so sure. Why did this woman make him feel apprehensive? What filthy stuff did she and Dionisio do in the cantina with the drunken laborers late at night, when Lituma and his adjutant were in their beds? “Maybe he didn’t like what you read in the coca leaves,” said Tomás.

  “In his hand,” the woman corrected him. “I’m also a palm reader and an astrologer. Except that these Indians don’t trust the cards, or the stars, or even their own hands. Just coca.” She swallowed and added: “And the leaves don’t always speak plain.”

  The sun was shining directly into her eyes but she did not blink; her eyes were hallucinatory, they overflowed their sockets, and Lituma imagined they could even speak. If she really did what he and Tomás suspected she did at night, the men who mounted her would have to face those eyes in the dark. He couldn’t have done it.

  “And what did you see in his hand, señora?”

  “The things that have happened to him,” she answered with great naturalness.

  “Did you read in his palm that he was going to disappear?” Lituma examined her in small stages. On his right, Carreño was craning his neck.

  The woman nodded, imperturbable. “The walk up here made me a little tired,” she murmured. “I’m going to sit down.”

  “Tell us what you told Demetrio Chanca,” Lituma insisted.

  Señora Adriana snorted. She had sat down on a rock and was fanning herself with the large straw hat she had just taken off. There was no trace of gray in her straight hair, which was pulled back and fastened at the back of her neck with the kind of colored ribbon the Indians fastened to the ears of their llamas.

  “I told him what I saw. That he would be sacrificed to appease the evil spirits that cause so much harm in this region. And that he had been chosen because he was impure.”

  “Can you tell me why he was impure, Doña Adriana?”

  “Because he changed his name,” the woman explained. “Changing the name they give you at birth is an act of cowardice.”

  “I’m not surprised Demetrio Chanca didn’t want to pay you.” Tomasito smiled.

  “Who was going to sacrifice him?” asked Lituma.

  The woman made a gesture that could have indicated either weariness or contempt. She fanned herself slowly, snorting.

  “You want me to say ‘the terrucos, the Senderistas,’ don’t you?” She snorted again and changed her tone. “This was out of their hands.”

  “Do you expect me to be satisfied with an explanation like that?”

  “You ask and I answer,” said the woman calmly. “That’s what I saw in his hand. And it came true. He disappeared, didn’t he? Well, they sacrificed him.”

  “She must be crazy,” Lituma thought. Señora Adriana was snorting like a bellows. With a plump hand she raised the hem of her skirt to her face and blew her nose, revealing thick, pale calves. She blew again with a good deal of noise. In spite of his apprehension, the corporal chuckled: what a way to get rid of snot.

  “Were Pedrito Tinoco and the albino Huarcaya sacrificed to the devil, too?”

  “I didn’t read the cards for them, or see their hands, or cast their charts. Can I go now?”

  “Just a minute.” Lituma stopped her.

  He took off his kepi and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The round, brilliant sun was in the middle of the sky. This was a northern kind of heat. But in four or five hours the temperature would begin to
drop, and by ten o’clock the cold would make your bones creak. Nobody could make sense out of a climate as incomprehensible as the serruchos. He thought again about Pedrito Tinoco. When he had finished washing and rinsing the clothes, he would sit on a rock, not moving, staring into emptiness. He would remain that way, immobile and absorbed, thinking about God knows what, until the clothes were dry. Then he would fold them carefully and bring them to the corporal, bowing. Son of a bitch. Down in the camp, where the tin roofs gleamed and sparkled, the laborers moved about. Like ants. The ones who weren’t blasting the tunnel or shoveling dirt were on their break now, eating their cold lunches.

  “I’m trying to do my job, Doña Adriana,” he said suddenly, surprised at the tone of confidentiality. “Three men have disappeared. Their relatives came to file a report. The terrorists may have killed them. Or forced them into their militia. Or taken them hostage. We have to find out what happened. That’s why we’re in Naccos. That’s why this Civil Guard post is here. What else do you think it’s for?”

  Tomás had picked up some pebbles from the ground and was aiming them at the sacks of their fortification. When he hit the target, there was a tiny clanking noise.

  “Are you accusing me of something? Is it my fault there are terrorists in the Andes?”

  “You’re one of the last people who saw Demetrio Chanca. You had an argument with him. What’s this about him changing his name? Just give us a clue. Is that too much to ask?”

  The woman snorted again with a stony sound. “I told you what I know. But you don’t believe anything you hear, you think it’s all fairy tales.” She looked directly into Lituma’s face, and he felt her eyes accusing him. “Do you believe anything I told you?”

  “I’m trying to, señora. Some people believe in the supernatural and some people don’t. That doesn’t matter now. I only want to find out what happened to the three men. Is Sendero Luminoso in Naccos? It’s better if I know. What happened to those three could happen to anybody. Even you and your husband, Doña Adriana. Haven’t you heard that the terrucos punish corruption? That they whip parasites? Imagine what they’d do to you and Dionisio, who get people drunk for a living. We’re here to protect you, too.”