Read Death in the Andes Online

Authors: Mario Vargas Llosa

Death in the Andes (5 page)

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 understands 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.

When the shooting began, he thought it was thunder, another storm approaching. But he saw the sheer terror in the eyes of the creatures closest to him, and he saw how they went mad, stampeding, running into each other, falling, getting in each other's way, blinded and stupefied by panic, unable to decide whether they should flee to open country or return to the caves, and he saw the first ones whimper and fall, bleeding, their haunches opened, their bones splintered, their muzzles eyes ears torn apart by bullets. Some fell and stood up and fell again, and others were petrified, their necks craning as if they were trying to rise up and escape through the air. Some of the females bent down to lick their dying calves. He, too, was paralyzed, looking around, trying to understand, tilting his head from one side to the other, his eyes staring, his mouth hanging open, his ears tortured by the shooting and the whimpering that was worse than when the females gave birth.

“Be sure not to hit him!” the boy-man bellowed from time to time. “Careful, careful!”

They not only shot them, but some ran to cut off the ones that attempted to escape, surrounding them, cornering them, finishing them off with rifle butts and knives. At last Pedro Tinoco reacted. He began to jump, to roar with his chest and stomach, to wave his arms like propellers. He advanced, retreated, put himself between their weapons and the vicuñas, pleading with his hands and his shouts and the shock in his eyes. They did not appear to see him. They went on shooting and chasing the ones that had managed to get away and were running through the straw toward the ravine. When he reached the boy-man, he knelt and tried to kiss his hand, but the boy-man shoved him away in a rage.

“Don't do that,” he berated him. “Stop it, get out of the way.”

“It's orders from the high command,” said another, who was not angry. “This is war. You can't understand, mute, you have no idea.”

“Cry for your brothers and sisters, cry for those who suffer,” advised a girl, consoling him. “For those who've been murdered and tortured, for the ones who've gone to prison, the martyrs, the ones who sacrificed themselves.”

He went from one to the other, trying to kiss their hands, pleading with them, going down on his knees. Some moved him away gently, others with repugnance.

“Have a little pride, have some dignity,” they said. “Think about yourself instead of the vicuñas.”

They were shooting them, chasing them, killing off the wounded and dying. It seemed to Pedro Tinoco that night would never come. One of them blew up two calves lying quiet next to their mother, sent them flying with a stick of dynamite. The air was filled with the smell of gunpowder. Pedro Tinoco no longer had the strength to cry. He sprawled on the ground, his mouth open, looking at one, looking at another, trying to understand. After a while, the boy with the cruel expression came over to him.

“We don't like doing this,” he said, modulating his voice and putting a hand on the mute's shoulder. “It's orders from the high command. This reserve belongs to the enemy. Ours and yours. A reserve devised by imperialists. In their world strategy, this is the role they've assigned us: Peruvians raise vicuñas. So their scientists can study them, so their tourists can take pictures of them. As far as they're concerned, you're worth less than these animals.”

“You should leave this place, little father,” one of the girls said in Quechua, embracing him. “Police will come, soldiers will come. They'll kick you and cut off your manhood before they put a bullet in your head. Go away, far away.”

“Maybe then you'll understand what you don't understand now,” the boy-man explained again as he smoked a cigarette, looking at the dead vicuñas. “This is war, nobody can say it's not their business. It's everybody's business, even mutes and deaf people and half-wits. A war to put an end to señores. So nobody has to kneel or kiss anybody's hands or feet.”

They stayed there for the rest of the afternoon and the entire night. Pedrito Tinoco saw them cook a meal, post sentries on the slopes that faced the road. And he heard them sleep, wrapped in their ponchos and shawls, leaning against each other in the caves on the hillside, like the vicuñas. The next morning, when they left, telling him again that he should leave if he didn't want the soldiers to kill him, he was still in the same spot, mouth hanging open, body wet with dew, unable to understand this new, immeasurable mystery, surrounded by dead vicuñas on which birds of prey and carrion eaters were feasting.

“How old are you?” the woman suddenly asked him.

“I wonder about that, too,” exclaimed Lituma. “You never told me. How old are you, Tomasito?”

Carreño, who had begun to doze, was wide awake now. The truck was not jolting them quite as much, but the motor kept roaring as if it would explode on the next uphill curve. They were ascending into the Cordillera, with stands of tall vegetation to the right and on the left the almost bare rock of slopes, with the Huallaga River thundering at their base. They were sitting in the back of an ancient truck that had no canvas to protect them if it rained, surrounded by sacks and crates of mangoes, lucumas, cherimozas, maracuyas, which were draped in sheets of plastic. But in the two or three hours it had taken to drive away from the jungle and climb into the Andes on the way to Huánuco, the storm had not broken. The night turned colder with the altitude. The sky teemed with stars.

“Oh God, before they come and kill us, let me fuck a woman just one more time,” Lituma pleaded. “Son of a bitch, since I came to Naccos I've been living like a eunuch. And your stories about the Piuran get me hot, Tomasito.”

“Still wet behind the ears, I'll bet,” she added after a pause, as if talking to herself. “So even if you carry a gun and go around with gangsters, you don't know anything at all, Carreño. That's your name, isn't it? The fat man called you Carreñito.”

“The women I knew were scared babies, but she had so much nerve,” the adjutant said excitedly. “Even after what happened in Tingo María, she had her self-control back in no time. Faster than I did, I can tell you. She was the one who talked the truck driver into taking us to Huánuco, and for half of what he had asked. Just argued with him like his equal.”

“I'm sorry to change the subject, but I have a feeling they'll attack tonight, Tomasito,” said Lituma. “Like I could see them climbing down the hill right now. Do you hear something outside? Should we get up and have a look?”

“I'm twenty-three,” he said. “I know everything I need to know.”

“But you don't know that men sometimes need to play games to get their kicks,” she replied, somewhat defiantly. “Do you want me to tell you something that'll turn your stomach, Carreñito?”

“Don't worry, Corporal. I have good ears, and I swear nobody's on the hill.”

The boy and the woman sat side by side among sacks of fruit. The aroma of the mangoes grew more intense as the night deepened. The motor's spasmodic roar had drowned out the hum of the insects, the rustling of the leaves, the singing of the river.

“The truck jolted so much it threw us against each other,” the adjutant recalled. “Every time I felt her body, I trembled.”

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