Death in the Andes Read online

  Señora Adriana gave a mocking little smile. “If they want to kill us, nobody can stop them.” Her voice was quiet. “The same is true, of course, if they want to execute the two of you. You know I’m right, Corporal. As far as that goes, we’re exactly the same: it’s a miracle we’re all still alive.”

  Tomasito’s hand was raised to aim another pebble, but he did not throw it. He lowered his arm and turned toward the woman. “We prepared a nice welcome for them, señora. We’ll blow up half the hill. Before a single one of them can set foot in the post, there’ll be Senderista fireworks exploding over Naccos.” He winked at Lituma and continued speaking to Doña Adriana. “The corporal isn’t talking to you the way he talks to a suspect. More like a friend. And you should show the same confidence in him.”

  The woman snorted and fanned herself again before she nodded. Raising her hand slowly, she pointed at the succession of snowcapped ridges, peaked or rounded, lead-colored or green, massive and solitary, under the blue dome of the sky.

  “All these hills are full of enemies,” she said softly. “They live inside. Day and night they weave their evil schemes. They do endless harm. That’s why there are so many accidents. Cave-ins in the mines. Trucks that lose their brakes or drive off the road on curves. Boxes of dynamite that explode and blow off legs and heads.”

  She spoke without raising her voice, in a mechanical way, like the litanies in processions or the weeping of professional mourners at wakes.

  “If every bad thing is the work of the devil, then there are no accidents in the world,” Lituma remarked ironically. “Was it Satan who stoned those two French kids to death on the road to Andahuaylas, señora? Those enemies are devils, aren’t they?”

  “They send down huaycos, too,” she concluded, pointing at the mountains.

  Huaycos! Lituma had heard about them. None had happened here, fortunately. He tried to imagine the avalanches of snow, rock, and mud that came down from the top of the Cordillera like a whirlwind of death, flattening everything, feeding on the hillsides they dislodged, filling up with boulders, burying fields, animals, villages, houses, families. Huaycos were schemes of the devil?

  Señora Adriana pointed again at the ridges. “Who else could loosen all that rock? Who else could send the huayco to exactly the place where it can do the most harm?”

  She fell silent and snorted again. She spoke with so much conviction that Lituma was shaken for a few moments.

  “And the men who are missing, señora?” he insisted.

  One of TomaYs pebbles hit the mark with a metallic sound that echoed down the mountain. Lituma saw him lean forward to pick up another handful of ammunition.

  “There’s not a lot you can do against them,” Doña Adriana continued. “But you can do something. Soothe them, distract them. Not with those offerings the Indians put by crevices and gorges. Those little piles of stones, those flowers and animals, they don’t do any good. Neither does the chicha they pour for them. In the Indian community here they sometimes kill a sheep, a vicuña. All foolishness. Maybe it’s all right in normal times, but not nowadays. Human beings are what they like.”

  It seemed to Lituma that his adjutant was holding back laughter, but he had no desire to laugh at what the witch was saying. Hearing talk like this, even if it was the bullshit of a charlatan or the ravings of a crazy woman, made him jumpy.

  “And in Demetrio Chanca’s hand you read…?”

  “I told him just for fun.” She shrugged. “What’s written is what happens, no matter what you do.”

  What would they say at headquarters in Huancayo if he wired this report on the camp radio: “Sacrificed in manner as yet undetermined to placate evil spirits of Andes, stop. Written in lines of hand, witness claims, stop. Case closed, stop. Respectfully, Post Commander, stop. Corporal Lituma, stop.”

  “I talk and you laugh,” the woman said in a quiet, sarcastic voice.

  “I’m laughing at what my superiors in Huancayo would say if I sent them the explanation you’ve given me,” said the corporal. “Thanks, anyway.”

  “Can I go now?”

  Lituma nodded. Doña Adriana struggled to her feet and without saying goodbye began moving down the slope toward camp. From the rear, wearing her shapeless shoes, swaying her broad hips and making her green skirt flutter, her big straw hat bobbing up and down, she looked like a scarecrow. Was she also a devil?

  “Have you ever seen a huayco, Tomasito?”

  “No, Corporal, and I wouldn’t want to. But when I was a kid, outside Sicuani I saw where one had come down a few days earlier and cut a huge furrow. You could see it plain as day, it came right down the length of the mountain like a toboggan. It flattened houses, trees, people of course. It brought down huge boulders. The dust made everything white for days.”

  “Do you believe Doña Adriana is an accomplice of the terrucos? That she’s handing us a load of shit about the devils inside the hills?”

  “I can believe anything, Corporal. Life has made me the most believing man in the world.”

  From the time he was a boy, they had called Pedrito Tinoco halfwit, moron, dummy, simpleton, and since his mouth always hung open, they called him flycatcher, too. The names did not make him angry, because he never got angry at anything or anyone. And the people of Abancay never got angry with him, either; sooner or later everybody was won over by his peaceful smile, his obliging nature, his simplicity. They said he wasn’t from Abancay, that his mother brought him there a few days after he was born, and stopped in the city only long enough to wrap her unwanted child in a little bundle and leave him in the doorway of the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. Whether rumor or truth, this was all anyone in Abancay ever knew about Pedrito Tinoco. The townspeople remembered that from the time he was a little boy he had slept with the dogs and chickens that belonged to the priest (who, malicious gossips claimed, was also his father) and cleaned the church for him and was his bell ringer and altar boy until the good cleric died. Then Pedrito Tinoco, who by this time was an adolescent, moved to the streets of Abancay, where he was a porter, a bootblack, a sweeper, a helper, and a stand-in for watchmen, mailmen, and garbagemen, a caretaker of stalls at the market, an usher at the movies and at the circuses that came to town for the Patriotic Festival. Curled into a ball, he slept in stables, sacristies, or under the benches on the Plaza de Armas, and he ate thanks to charitable neighbors. He went everywhere barefoot, wore a threadbare poncho and baggy, grease-stained trousers held up by a rope, and never took off the pointed Andean cap from whose earflaps locks of straight hair escaped that had never been touched by scissors or comb.

  When Pedrito Tinoco was conscripted, some Abancayans tried to make the soldiers see that it was unjust. How could he do military service when anyone could tell just by looking at him that he was a half-wit who had never even learned to talk, who just smiled with that face of an overgrown baby who has no idea what you’re saying, or who he is, or where he is? But the soldiers would not be persuaded and took him away, along with the other young men they had picked up in the city’s cantinas, chicha taverns, movies, and stadium. At the barracks they shaved his head, stripped him naked, hosed him down, giving him the first complete bath of his life, and stuffed him into a khaki uniform and a pair of boots he never got used to—during the three weeks he spent there his companions saw him walking as if he were crippled or paralyzed. At the beginning of his fourth week as a recruit, he ran away.

  He wandered the inhospitable hill country around Apurímac and Lucanas, in Ayacucho, avoiding roads and villages, eating grass, searching at night for vizcacha caves, where he took shelter against the whirling gusts of glacial wind. By the time the shepherds found him, he had grown so thin he was nothing but skin, bone, and two eyes maddened by hunger and fear. A few handfuls of stewed corn, a mouthful of dried meat, a swallow of chicha revived him. The shepherds took him back to Auquipata, an old Indian community of highlands, herds, and poor, small plots of ground where a few blighted potatoes and some rachitic
ulluco plants barely survived.

  Pedrito grew accustomed to Auquipata, and the comuneros allowed him to stay. There too, as in the city, his obliging nature and frugal life won people over. His silence, his eternal smile, his constant willingness to do whatever he was asked, his air of already being in the world of spirits, gave him the aura of a holy man. The comuneros treated him with both respect and distance, for they were aware that no matter how much he shared in their work and fiestas, he was not one of them.

  Some time later—Pedrito could not have said how long, for in his life time did not flow as it did in the lives of other people—there was an invasion of outsiders. They came and left and returned, and a meeting was held, which lasted many hours, to discuss their proposals. In Pedrito’s uncertain memory, the newcomers were dressed as others had been dressed, back there, before. The varayoks, the elders, explained that the vicuña reserve which the government wanted to create would not violate the community’s titled lands but would actually help Auquipata because the comuneros could sell their products to the tourists who would come to see the vicuñas.

  A family was hired to tend the flocks when the vicuñas began to be transported to an altiplano half-hidden in the mountains between the Tambo Quemado and San Juan Rivers, a day’s travel from the community’s center. It had ichu grass, ponds, little streams, caves in the hills, and the vicuñas soon became attached to the place. Trucks brought them from distant regions in the Cordillera to the spot where the road forked toward San Juan, Lucanas, and Puquio, and from there they were taken up to the altiplano by Auquipatan shepherds. Pedrito Tinoco went to live with them. He helped them build a shelter and plant a potato field and construct a pen for guinea pigs. They had been told that the authorities would periodically bring provisions and furniture for their shack, and pay them a salary. And, in fact, from time to time some official would show up in a red van, ask questions, and give them money or food. Then they stopped coming. And so much time went by without anyone visiting the reserve that one day the caretakers tied their belongings into bundles and returned to Auquipata. Pedrito Tinoco stayed with the vicuñas.

  He had established a more intimate relationship with these delicate creatures than he ever had with anyone of his own species. With a dazed, almost mystical attention, he spent the days observing them, learning their habits, their movements, their games, their manias, doubling over with laughter when he saw them chase each other, bite each other, frolic with each other in the dried grass, growing sad when one of them lost its footing on a precipice and broke its legs, or a female bled to death during a difficult birth. Like the Abancayans and the Auquipata comuneros, the vicuñas adopted him, too. They viewed him as a kindly, familiar figure. They let him approach without starting away, and sometimes the more affectionate ones would stretch out their necks, asking him with their intelligent eyes to pull their ears, scratch their backs and bellies, or rub their noses, which was the thing they liked best. Even the males in mating season, when they turned surly and would not permit anyone near their band of four or five concubines, allowed Pedrito to play with the females, though they did keep their great eyes on him, ready to intervene in case of danger.

  Once some outsiders came to the reserve. They were from far away, they did not speak Quechua or Spanish but made sounds that were as strange to Pedrito Tinoco as their boots, scarves, helmets, and hats. They took photographs and went on long hikes, studying the vicuñas. But despite Pedrito’s best efforts, the animals would not allow them to approach. He put the strangers up in his shelter and waited on them. When they left, they gave him some canned food and a little money.

  These visits were the only anomalies in Pedrito Tinoco’s life, composed of daily routines that followed natural rhythms and events: rains and hailstorms in the afternoon and at night, the harsh sun in the morning. He set traps for vizcachas, but for the most part he ate potatoes from his small field, and occasionally killed and cooked a guinea pig. And he salted and sun-dried strips of meat from the vicuñas that died. Occasionally he went down to a fair in the valleys to trade potatoes and ullucos for salt and a little sack of coca. Once some shepherds from the community came up to the reserve. They stayed in Pedrito Tinoco’s shelter and gave him the news from Auquipata. He listened very attentively, trying to remember the things and people they were talking about. The place they came from was a blurred dream. The shepherds stirred forgotten depths in his memory, fleeting images, traces of another world, of a person he no longer was. And he could not understand what they meant by the turmoil, the curse that had fallen on the land, the people being killed.

  The night before that dawn, there was a hailstorm. These storms always took a few young vicuñas. Huddled under his poncho in the shelter while rain splashed through the cracks in the roof, he had spent almost the entire night thinking about the ones that would freeze to death or be charred by lightning. He fell asleep when the storm began to ease. He woke to the sound of voices. He stood up, went out, and there they were: about twenty of them, more people than Pedrito had ever seen on the reserve. Men, women, young people, children. His mind associated them with the noisy barracks, because these people also carried rifles, submachine guns, knives. But they were not dressed like soldiers. They had made a fire and were cooking food. He welcomed them, smiling with his witless face, bowing, lowering his head as a sign of respect.

  They spoke to him first in Quechua and then in Spanish.

  “You shouldn’t bend down like that. You shouldn’t be servile. Don’t bow as if we were señores. We’re all equals. We’re the same as you.”

  He was a young man with hard eyes and the expression of someone who has suffered a great deal and who hates a great deal. How could that be, when he was almost a boy? Had Pedrito Tinoco said something or done something to offend him? To make up for his mistake, he ran to his shelter and brought back a little sack of dried potatoes and some strips of dried meat. He handed them the food and bowed.

  “Don’t you know how to talk?” a girl asked in Quechua.

  “He must have forgotten how,” said one of the men, looking him up and down. “Nobody ever comes up to these isolated places. Do you at least understand what we’re saying to you.”

  He made an effort not to miss a word and, above all, to guess how he could serve them. They asked him about the vicuñas. How many there were, how far the reserve extended in this direction, and that, and that, where they watered, where they slept. With many gestures, repeating each word two, three, ten times, they told him to be their guide and help them round up the animals. By jumping and imitating the movements of the vicuñas when it rains, Pedrito explained that they were in the caves. They had spent the night there, huddled together, on top of each other, warming each other, trembling when the thunder rolled and the lightning flashed. He knew, he had spent many hours there lying with them, holding them, feeling their fear, shivering like them with cold and repeating in his throat the sounds they made when they talked to one another.

  “Up in those hills”—one of them understood at last. “That must be where they sleep.”

  “Take us there,” ordered the young man with the hard eyes. “Come with us, mute, and add your grain of sand.”

  He was at the head of the group and led them through the countryside. It had stopped raining. The sky was clean and blue, and the sun gilded the surrounding mountains. From the straw and the muddied earth covered with puddles, a sharp odor rose through the damp air and made Pedrito happy. He dilated his nostrils and breathed in the scent of water, earth, and roots, which seemed to make amends to the world after a storm, to soothe all those who had feared, in the violent downpours and claps of thunder, that their lives would end in cataclysm. The walk took a long time because the ground was slippery and their feet sank in the mud up to their ankles. They had to take off their shoes, their sneakers, their Indian sandals. Had he seen any soldiers, any police?

  “He doesn’t understand,” they said. “He’s a half-wit.”

  “He und
erstands but he can’t speak,” they said. “So much solitude, living with vicuñas. He’s like a wild man.”

  “That must be it,” they said.

  When they reached the edge of the hills, Pedrito Tinoco pointed, jumped, gestured, made faces, indicating that if they did not want to frighten them they had to stay very quiet in the bushes. Not talking, not moving. They had sharp ears, good eyes, and were suspicious and fearful and started trembling as soon as they smelled strangers.

  “We should wait here and be quiet,” said the boy with hard eyes. “Spread out, and no noise.”

  Pedrito Tinoco saw them stop, open out like a fan, and, keeping a good distance from each other, crouch behind the plumes of ichu grass.

  He waited for them to get settled, to hide, to stop making noise. He tiptoed toward the caves. In a little while he could see the gleam of their eyes. The ones who stayed in the entrances, keeping watch, observed him as he approached. They considered him, their ears rigid, twitching their cold noses to confirm the familiar scent, a scent that carried no threat to males or females, adults or calves. Taking great pains to keep his movements cautious and calm so as not to arouse that chronic skittishness of theirs, Pedrito Tinoco began to cluck his tongue, vibrating it very softly against his palate, imitating them, talking to them in the one language he had learned to speak. He reassured them, announced his presence, called to them. Then he saw a grayish blur streak between his legs: a vizcacha. He was carrying his slingshot and could have hit it but didn’t to avoid startling the vicuñas. He felt the weight of the strangers’ eyes on his back.

  They began to come out. Not one by one but in families, as they always did. The male and his four or five females tending to him, and the mother with her recent calf weaving between her legs. They sniffed the water in the air, examined the disturbed earth and flattened straw, smelled the plants that the sun was beginning to dry and that they would eat now. They moved their heads to the right and the left, up and down, their ears erect, their bodies vibrating with the distrust that was the dominant trait in their nature. Pedro Tinoco watched them pass by, brush against him, stretch and shake when he tugged at the warm cave of their ears or buried his fingers in their wool to pinch them.