Death in the Andes (24 page)

He didn't ask, but maybe I would have gone with him if he had, been one more woman in Dionisio's band, one more wild girl following him to all the hamlets and districts in the sierra, traveling every road in the Andes, up to the cold barrens, down to the hot valleys, in the rain, in the sun, cooking for him, washing his clothes, doing whatever he said, performing at the Saturday fairs, even whoring if that's what he wanted. People said that when they went down to the coast for a new supply of pisco, on the nights there was a full moon, the wild girls and the dancers would dance stark naked on the sandy ground near the ocean, and Dionisio would put on woman's clothes and call up the devil.

They said everything you could think of about him, and they said it with fear and awe. But nobody really knew much about his life, it was just talk. They said that his mother had been burned by lightning during a storm, for example. That he had been raised in the Huanta uplands by the women in an Iquichan community where they still worshipped idols. That when he was young he went crazy in a mission run by the Dominican fathers, and the devil made a pact with him and gave him back his reason. That he had lived in the jungle with Indian cannibals. That he learned about pisco when he was traveling through the deserts along the coast, and that was when he began to sell it all over the sierra. That he had women and children everywhere, that he had died and come back to life, that he was a pishtaco, a muki, a healer, a witch, an astrologer, a diviner. There was no mysterious or savage thing they didn't say about him. He liked having a bad name.

Sure, he was more than just an itinerant pisco peddler, everybody knew that; more than the leader of some folk musicians and dancers, more than a performer, more than the owner of a traveling whorehouse. Yes, sure, that much was clear, but what else was he? A devil? An angel? God? Timoteo Fajardo could see in my eyes that I was thinking about Dionisio, and he would go into a rage and beat me. The men were jealous of him, but they all admitted: “Without him, there's no fiesta.” As soon as he came and set up his bar, they'd run to buy their shots of pisco and drink with him. “I educated you,” Dionisio would tell them. “You used to get drunk on chicha, or beer, or cane liquor, but now you do it with pisco, the drink of thrones and seraphim.”

I learned a little more about him from an Ayacuchan woman from Huancasancos. She had been one of his wild girls, then she left and came here as the wife of a crew chief at the Santa Rita mine, just about the time that pishtaco dried out Juan Apaza. We became friends, we would go to the gully together to wash clothes, and one day I asked her why she had so many scars. Then she told me. She traveled with Dionisio's troupe a pretty long time, sleeping outdoors wherever they happened to be when it grew dark, huddled together against the cold, going from fair to fair and market to market, living on the money that people at the fiestas gave them. When they had a good time on their own, far from other people's eyes, the troupe went wild. Or, as Dionisio says, they paid a visit to their animal. The wild girls moved from loving each other to attacking each other. From petting to scratching, from kissing to biting, from hugging to shoving, without ever stopping the dance. “Didn't it hurt, mamita?” “It hurt afterward, mamay; with the music and the dancing and the drinking, it was wonderful. You forgot your worries, your heart pounded, you thought you were a hawk, a pepper tree, a hill, a condor, a river. We got all the way up to the stars dancing, loving each other, attacking each other. “Why did you leave if you liked it so much?” Because her feet swelled and she couldn't keep up with them on the road. There were a lot of them in the troupe and they couldn't always get a ride on a truck. So they would go on foot, walking for days, for weeks. You could do that back then, there were no terrucos or sinchis in the Andes. And that's why the Huancasancos woman finally resigned herself to marrying the crew chief and settling down here in Naccos. But she always dreamed about her old adventures and missed the travel and the vices. She would hum sad huaynitos, remembering, and sigh, “Ay, I was happy once.” And touch her scars with nostalgia.

And so I became very curious. I had been restless ever since I danced with him and he put his hands on me at the Patriotic Festival, and the next time Dionisio came to Naccos and asked me if I wanted to marry him, I said all right. The mine was failing. The ore had run out in the Santa Rita, and Padrillo had people scared to death after he dried out Sebastián, Timoteo's friend. Dionisio didn't ask me to be one of the wild girls, to be just another woman in his troupe. He asked me to marry him. He had been in love with me ever since he found out how I helped Timoteo hunt down the pishtaco Salcedo in the Quenka caves. “You're fated to be with me,” he said. Later on, the stars and the cards told me it was true.

We got married in the Muquiyauyo community, where they had a lot of respect for him because he cured all their young men of an epidemic of hard-ons. Yes, swollen pricks. They came down with it one rainy summer. It's funny, sure, but they were crying, they were desperate. From the moment they opened their eyes when the rooster crowed it was swollen and red, and burned like an ajf pepper. They didn't know what to do. They washed in cold water and nothing, it would start to swell and stand up again like a jack-in-the-box. And while they were milking or planting or pruning, while they were doing what they had to do, it hung fat and heavy between their legs like a spur or the clapper of a bell. They brought in a priest from the San Antonio de Ocopa monastery. He said Mass and exorcised them with incense. But that didn't help: their cocks just kept pushing and growing until they broke through their trousers and came out to see the sun. Then Dionisio came to town. They told him what had happened, and he organized a fiesta procession with dancing and music. Instead of a saint on a platform, they carried a clay prick made by the best potter in Muquiyauyo. The band played a military march for it, and the girls decorated it with wreaths of flowers. Then they followed his instructions and threw it into the Mantaro. The young men who had the disease jumped into the river, too. When they came out they were normal again, their cocks were little and wrinkled and sleeping again.

At first the priest in Muquiyauyo didn't want to marry us. “He's no Catholic, he's a pagan, a savage,” he said, shooing Dionisio away with his hand. But after a few drinks he gave in, and we were married. The fiesta lasted for three days, and there was dancing and eating, dancing and drinking, dancing and dancing, enough to drive you crazy. At nightfall on the second day, Dionisio took me by the hand, led me up a hill, and pointed to the sky. “Do you see that little group of stars over there, in the shape of a crown?” They stood out from all the rest. “Yes, I see them.” “That's my wedding gift to you.”

But he couldn't take me yet, he had to keep a promise first. Far from Muquiyauyo, on the other side of the Mantaro, high in the Jauja mountains, in the hamlet of Yanacoto, where Dionisio had been a boy. When his mother died, after she was burned by lightning, he wouldn't accept her death. And he went looking for her, sure he'd find her somewhere. He took to the road, wandered like a lost soul, traveled everywhere until he discovered pisco on the ranches of Ica and began to sell it and promote it. One day he saw her in a dream: his mother said she would meet him, at midnight on Carnival Sunday, in the Yanacoto cemetery. He went there, full of excitement. But the caretaker, a cripple named Yaranga whose nose was eaten away by ulcers, didn't want to let him in unless he pulled down his trousers first. They talked it over and came to an agreement: Yaranga would let him in to keep his appointment if he would come back and bend over for him before his wedding night. Dionisio went in, talked to his mother, said goodbye to her, and now, at his wedding fiesta fifteen years later, I had to go with him so he could keep his promise.

It took us two days to get up to Yanacoto, the first day by truck, the second day by mule. There was snow on the barrens, and the people's lips were purple and their faces were cracked with the cold. The cemetery didn't have the wall around it anymore that Dionisio remembered, and no caretaker either. We asked and they said that Yaranga had gone crazy and died years ago. Dionisio didn't stop asking questions until finally they showed him his grave. Then, that night, when the family who put us up had gone to sleep, he took me by the hand and led me to the place where Yaranga was buried. All day I had seen him carving something with his knife from a willow branch. An erect prick, that's what it was. He greased it with candle wax, set it on Yaranga's grave, pulled down his trousers and sat on it, howling. Then, in spite of all the ice, he pulled off my underpants and fucked me. More than once, in front and from behind. I wasn't a virgin but I think I howled more than he did, until I passed out. That was our wedding night.

The next morning he began to teach me the lore. I had a talent for telling the winds apart, for hearing the sounds inside the earth, for speaking with people's hearts by touching their faces. I thought I knew how to dance, but he taught me to get inside the music and get the music inside me and let it dance me instead of me dancing it. I thought I knew how to sing, but he taught me to let the singing take control, to be the servant of the songs I sang. Little by little I learned to read the lines on palms, to interpret the shapes the coca leaves make when they fall on the ground after you toss them in the air, to find where the trouble is by passing a live guinea pig over the sick person's body. We kept traveling, going down to the coast to stock up on pisco, livening up a lot of fiestas. Until the roads started to be dangerous with so much killing, and the villages began to empty out, to shut themselves inside an angry suspicion of outsiders. The wild girls left, the musicians abandoned us, the dancers vanished like smoke. “It's time for you and me to put down roots, too,” Dionisio said to me one day. It seems we had grown old.

I don't know what happened to Timoteo Fajardo. I never heard. But I did hear the gossip. For years it followed me everywhere, like my shadow. Did you poison his potatoes and kill him so you could run away with that fat lush? Did he kill him with a muki's tricks? Did you make a present of him to the pishtaco? Did you take him up to your witches' Sabbaths at the top of the hill, and did the drunken wild girls tear big-nose to pieces? Did you all eat him afterward, you witch? By this time they were calling me witch, and Doña, too.

“I made you suffer on purpose, I didn't answer your calls or give you the appointment you kept asking for,” the commander lashed out at Carreño by way of greeting. “To make you squirm. And I wanted to plan something really special for your punishment, you fucking son of a bitch.”

“Well, the famous godfather at last,” exclaimed Lituma. “I've been waiting for him, I'm more interested in him than anybody else in your story. Let's see if this helps me get over that damn huayco. Go on, go on, Tomasito.”

“Yes, Godfather,” Carreño agreed humbly. “Whatever you say.”

Fats Iscariote, to avoid looking him in the eye, kept his face buried in his breaded steak with fried eggs, fried potatoes, and white rice. He chewed furiously and took long swallows of beer between mouthfuls. The commander was in civilian clothes and wore a silk ascot around his neck, and dark glasses. His bald skull gleamed in the semidarkness cut by regularly spaced fluorescent lights. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips, and his right hand swirled a glass of whiskey back and forth.

“When you killed Hog you showed disrespect for me because I sent you to Tingo María to be his bodyguard,” said the commander. “But that isn't what really pisses me off about the dumbass thing you did. Do you know what does? The reason you did what you did. Go on, asshole, tell me why you did it.”

“You know why, Godfather,” the boy answered quietly, lowering his eyes in humility. “Didn't Iscariote tell you?”

“Were you in a whorehouse?” asked Lituma. “With music, and girls around the table? Was your godfather like the king there?”

“A discotheque and bar, and sort of a cathouse,” explained Tomasito. “It didn't have rooms. The guys had to take the hookers to the hotel across the way. My godfather was one of the owners, I think. I wasn't noticing anything, Corporal, my balls were up under my tonsils.”

“I want to hear it from your own lips, you fucking son of a bitch,” the commander ordered with an imperial gesture.

“I killed Hog because he was hitting her for fun,” the boy said in a faint voice, keeping his head lowered. “You knew that, Iscariote already told you.”

The commander did not laugh. He sat very still, looking at him from behind his dark glasses, nodding slightly. He tapped his glass of whiskey against the table in time to the salsa music. Until finally, without turning around, he grabbed the arm of a woman in an iridescent blouse who was walking past the table. He pulled her to him, made her lean over, and asked point-blank: “Do you like it when the guys you fuck hit you, yes or no?”