Death in the Andes (14 page)

“You're pretty happy about what the witch told you, Tomasito.”

Lituma offered him a cigarette. They smoked and watched the silhouettes of Dionisio and Adriana on the slope grow smaller and finally disappear.

“Did all that about your broken heart impress you?” Lituma exhaled a mouthful of smoke. “Bah, everybody feels that, some more, some less. Or do you think you're the only man who ever suffered on account of a girl?”

“You said you never went through it, Corporal.”

“Maybe not, but I've been head over heels in love,” said Lituma, feeling somehow diminished. “It's just that I get over it fast. Almost always with hookers. Once, in Piura, in the Green House I told you about, I was crazy about a little brunette. But to tell you the truth, I never wanted to kill myself over a woman.”

They smoked in silence for a time. Down at the foot of the slope, a tiny figure began to climb the path to the post.

“I don't think we'll ever know what happened to those three men, Tomasito. No matter how much everybody in camp hints that Dionisio and Doña Adriana are involved, the truth is I'm not convinced.”

“I have a hard time believing it, too, Corporal. But then, why do all the laborers wind up accusing them?”

“Because all the serruchos are superstitious and believe in devils, pishtacos, and mukis,” said Lituma. “And since Dionisio and his wife are half witches, they tie them in with the disappearances.”

“I didn't believe in any of that until now,” the guard attempted to joke. “But after what Doña Adriana read in my hand, I ought to believe. I liked what she said about a big heart.”

By this time Lituma could make out the person climbing the hill. He wore a miner's helmet that glinted in what was now a sunlit afternoon with a brilliant, cloudless sky. Who would believe that just a few minutes earlier there had been violent downpours, thunder, heavy black clouds?

“Ah, hell, the witch bought you off,” Lituma continued the joke. “Maybe you made those three disappear, Tomasito.”

“Who knows, Corporal?”

And they broke into nervous, insincere laughter. In the meantime, as he watched the approach of the man in the helmet, Lituma could not stop thinking about Pedrito Tinoco, the little mute who ran errands for them and cleaned their quarters, who had seen with his own eyes the slaughter of the vicuñas in Pampa Galeras. Ever since Tomasito told him the story, he had Pedrito on his mind almost all the time. Why did he always picture him in that spot between the barricade and those gray rocks, washing clothes? The man in the helmet had a pistol in his belt and carried a club similar to the ones the police used. But he wore civilian clothes: blue jeans and a heavy jacket with a black armband around the right sleeve.

“There's no question that a lot of people around here know exactly what happened even if they won't open their mouths. You and I are the only suckers who don't know what's going on. Don't you feel like an asshole up here in Naccos, Tomasito?”

“What I feel is jumpy as a grasshopper. Sure they all know something, but they lie and try to shift the blame onto the cantinero and his wife. I even think they all got together to make us believe that Dionisio and Doña Adriana planned it. That way they throw us off the track and don't get any of the blame. Shouldn't we just close this case, Corporal?”

“It's not that I care so much about solving it, Tomasito. I mean, as far as the job is concerned. But I'm a person with a lot of curiosity. It's gnawing at me, and I want to know what happened to them. And after what you told me about the mute and Lieutenant Pancorvo, I won't sleep easy until I find out.”

“People are really scared, have you noticed? At the cantina, on the job, all the work crews. Even the Indians who haven't left the community yet. There's tension in the atmosphere, like something was about to happen. Maybe it's the rumor that they're stopping work on the highway, that they'll all lose their jobs. And all the killing everywhere. Nobody's nerves can take it. The air's overheated. Don't you feel it?”

Yes, Lituma felt it. The laborers' faces were intent, their eyes darted right and left as if trying to spot an enemy waiting to ambush them, and their talk at the cantina or on the work crews was intermittent and melancholy, and stopped altogether in his presence. Was it the disappearances? Were they frightened because any one of them could be the fourth?

“Good afternoon, Corporal,” said the man in the miner's helmet, greeting them with a nod. He was a tall, strong mestizo with a full beard. His heavy-soled miners' boots were muddied up to the ankle, and he kicked them against the side of the doorway, trying to clean them off before entering the shack. “I've come from La Esperanza. To see you, Corporal Lituma.”

La Esperanza was a silver mine, about a four-hour trek to the east of Naccos. Lituma had never been there, but he knew that several laborers in camp had miners' licenses issued by the company.

“The terrucos attacked last night and did a lot of damage,” he explained, taking off his helmet and shaking his long, greasy hair. His jacket and trousers were soaked. “They killed one of my men and wounded another. I'm chief of security at La Esperanza. They stole explosives, payroll money, and a lot of other things.”

“I'm really sorry, but I can't leave,” Lituma apologized. “There are only two of us at the post, my adjutant and myself, and we have a serious problem here to take care of. I'd have to ask for instructions from headquarters in Huancayo.”

“The engineers already took care of that,” the man replied, very respectfully. He took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to him. “They talked to your superiors by radio. And Huancayo said you should take charge. La Esperanza is within your jurisdiction.”

A disheartened Lituma read and reread the telegram. That's exactly what it said. They had better equipment at the mine than in this filthy camp. And he was stuck here, cut off, blind and deaf to what was happening in the outside world. Because the camp radio worked poorly, or too late, or never. Whose crazy idea was it to establish a Civil Guard post in Naccos instead of at La Esperanza? But if it had been there, he and Tomasito would have been obliged to face the terrucos. So they were close by. The noose was tightening a little more around his neck.

Carreño was preparing coffee on the Primus. The man from the mine, whose name was Francisco López, dropped onto the sheepskin where Doña Adriana had been sitting. The pot started to bubble.

“It's not that you can do anything now,” López explained. “They got away, naturally, and took all their loot with them. But a police report has to be filed before the insurance will reimburse the company.”

Tomás filled the tin cups with boiling coffee and handed them around.

“If you want, I'll take a run over to La Esperanza, Corporal.”

“No, that's okay, I'll go. You take charge of the post. And if I'm late getting back, say an Our Father for me.”

“There isn't any danger, Corporal,” Francisco López reassured him. “I came in a jeep, but I had to leave it down where the road ends. It's not very far, less than an hour if you drive fast. Only I got caught in the rain. I'll bring you back as soon as you finish the paperwork.”

Francisco López had worked in security for three years at La Esperanza. This was the second assault. The first time, six months earlier, there had been no casualties, but the terrorists had taken explosives, clothing, provisions, and all the medical supplies.

“The lucky thing is that the engineers were able to hide,” he explained, sipping his coffee. “Along with a friend of theirs, a gringo who's visiting the mine. They climbed into the water tanks. If the terrucos had found them, they'd be six feet under by now. Engineers, administrators, executives: they never get off. And foreigners sure as hell don't.”

“Don't forget the police,” said Lituma in a hollow voice.

Francisco López made a joke: “I didn't want to be the one to say it. I didn't want to be the one to scare you. They never do anything to the workers, though, unless they think they're scabs.”

He spoke with absolute naturalness, as if these things were normal, as if it had always been this way. Son of a bitch, maybe he was right.

“With everything that's going on, they're talking about closing La Esperanza,” López added, blowing on his coffee and taking another sip. “The engineers don't want to go there anymore. And paying the revolutionary quota pushes costs up too high.”

“If you're paying the quota, why the assault?” asked Lituma.

“That's what we'd like to know,” Francisco López said. “It doesn't make sense.”

He continued to blow on his coffee and sip from the cup, as if this conversation, too, were the most normal thing in the world.

His straw-colored hair and light, limpid eyes had been a nightmare for Casimiro Huarcaya in his childhood. Because in the small Andean village of Yauli where he was born, everyone was dark, and especially because his parents and brothers and sisters all had black hair, dark skin, dark eyes. Where had this albino in the Huarcaya family come from? The jokes at his expense, made by his classmates at the little state school, forced Casimiro into frequent fights, for despite his good nature he would go blind with rage every time they suggested, for the sake of watching him get angry, that his father was not his father but some outsider passing through Yauli, or even the devil himself, because, as everybody in the Andes knows, when the devil comes to work his evil on earth he sometimes takes the shape of a limping gringo stranger.

And the question Casimiro could never get out of his mind was whether his own father, the potter Apolinario Huarcaya, had his suspicions, too, regarding his origins. He was sure he had been the cause of arguments between his parents, and Apolinario, who was kind to his other children, not only gave him the hardest jobs to do but whipped him if he made the slightest mistake.

Yet, in spite of teasing at school and difficult relationships at home, Casimiro matured with no serious complexes. He was strong, clever with his hands, alert, and he loved life. Ever since he was a boy, he had dreamed of growing up fast and leaving Yauli for a big city like Huancayo, Pampas, or Ayacucho, where his blond hair and light eyes would not attract so much attention.

Shortly before his fifteenth birthday, he ran away from his village with an itinerant peddler whom he had helped with loading, unloading, and selling his merchandise at the market whenever he came to Yauli. Don Pericles Chalhuanca had a small truck as old as Methuselah, which had been patched and repatched a thousand times. In it he made the rounds of all the Indian communities and campesino villages in the central part of the Andes, selling city goods—patent medicines, tools, clothing, pots and pans, shoes—and buying cheese, ullucos, beans, fruit, or weavings and pottery, which he then took to the cities. Don Pericles was a skilled mechanic as well as a peddler, and at his side Casimiro memorized the secrets of the truck and learned to repair it whenever it broke down—at least several times a trip—on the terrible sierra roads.

He was completely happy with Don Pericles. The old man dazzled him with tales of his adventurous life as an unrepentant rooster in other men's henhouses—the women he had seduced, made pregnant, and abandoned in countless districts, hamlets, and settlements in the departments of Apurímac, Huancavelica, Ayacucho, Cuzco, and Cerro de Pasco, where, he boasted, “I've sown plenty of bastards, my own flesh and blood.” On their travels he pointed out some of them to Casimiro with a sly wink. Many greeted the trader respectfully, kissing his hand and calling him godfather.

But what the boy liked best was their outdoor life, with no schedules or predetermined routes, at the mercy of harsh or kind weather, fairs, fiestas for patron saints, the orders they received, the indispositions of the little truck: these were the factors that decided their daily fate, their itinerary, how many nights they spent in each place. Don Pericles had a permanent home, one without wheels, in the Pampas countryside, which he shared with a married niece and her children. When they were there, Casimiro slept in the house as if he were part of the family. But most of the time he lived in the back of the truck, under the heavy canvas and surrounded by merchandise, where he had built a shelter of cowhides. If it rained, he slept in the cab or underneath the vehicle.

The business was not especially profitable, at least not for Pericles and Casimiro, because all their earnings were swallowed up by the truck, which always needed replacement parts or new treads for the tires, but it did provide them with a living. In the years he spent with Don Pericles, Casimiro came to know the central region of the Andes like the palm of his hand, all its hamlets, communities, fairs, ravines and valleys, as well as the secrets of the trade: where to buy the best corn and sell needles and thread, where people waited for lamps and percale as if they were manna from heaven, and which ribbons, barrettes, necklaces, and bracelets the girls found irresistibly attractive.