Death in the Andes (7 page)

“You'll probably tell me to mind my own business, Tomasito,” Lituma said suddenly. “But since I like you, and the anisette has loosened my tongue, I'll say it anyway. I heard you crying last night.”

He noticed that the rhythm of the boy's walking changed, as if he had stumbled. They were lighting their way with lanterns.

“Men cry too, when they have to,” Lituma went on. “So don't be ashamed. Tears don't mean a man's a faggot.”

They continued climbing the hill, but the young guard did not say a word. The corporal made an occasional comment.

“Sometimes, when I think to myself: ‘Lituma, you'll never get out of Naccos alive,' I start to feel desperate. And then I want to cry, too. So don't be ashamed. I didn't say it to make you feel bad, but because it's not the first time. I heard you the other night as well, even though you were crying into the mattress. I don't like to see you suffering like that. Is it because you don't want to die in this godforsaken place? If that's the reason, I understand. But maybe it's not good for you to think about Mercedes so much. You tell me about her, you confide in me, but then you fall apart. Maybe you shouldn't talk about her anymore, Tomasito, maybe you should just forget about her.”

“No, it's a relief to tell you about Mercedes.” His adjutant spoke at last in a muffled voice. “So, I cry in my sleep? Well, I guess I'm not so hard after all.”

“Let's put out the lanterns,” Lituma whispered. “I've always thought that if they were going to ambush us, it would happen on this curve.”

They entered Andamarca along the two roads leading into the settlement—the ones that come up from the Negromayo River, cross the Pumarangra, and skirt Chipao—and along a third, a trail worn by people from the rival community of Cabana, which climbs the gorge of the Stream That Sings (its name in the archaic Quechua spoken in the area). They came at first light, before the campesinos had left to tend to their fields, or the shepherds to pasture their flocks, or the itinerant peddlers to continue on to Puquio or San Juan de Lucanas in the south, or to Huancasancos and Querobamba. They had walked all night or slept just outside town, waiting for a little light before they invaded the village. They did not want anyone on the list to get away under cover of darkness.

But one did, one of those they most wanted to put on trial: the lieutenant governor of Andamarca. And in such an absurd way that afterward people found it hard to believe. Because of a severe attack of diarrhea, Don Medardo Llantac spent the whole night scurrying out of the only bedroom in the house on the extension of Jorge Chdvez Boulevard where he lived with his wife, mother, and six of his children, and squatting down by the outside wall of the building, which was next to the cemetery. He was there, straining, emptying his gut in a pestilential stream and cursing his stomach, when he heard them. They kicked the door open and shouted his name. He knew who they were and what they wanted. He had been waiting for them ever since the provincial subprefect practically forced him to become lieutenant governor of Andamarca. Without bothering to pull up his trousers, Don Medardo threw himself to the ground, crawled like a worm to the cemetery, and slithered into a grave that had been dug the night before, pushing away the slab that served as a tombstone and then pulling it back into place. He spent the morning and afternoon huddling on the ice-cold remains of his cousin, Don Florisel Aucatoma, not seeing anything but hearing a good deal of what happened in that village where he was, in theory, the highest-ranking political official.

The members of the militia were familiar with the town, or had been well informed by their accomplices among the residents. They posted guards at all points of egress while synchronized columns walked along the five parallel streets of shacks and cottages spread in rectangular blocks around the church and town square. They wore sneakers or Indian sandals, a few were barefoot, and their steps could not be heard on the Andamarca streets: they were all either dirt or asphalt except for the main thoroughfare, Lima Avenue, which was paved with rough cobblestones. In groups of three or four they went directly to where those on the list were sleeping and pulled them from their beds. They captured the mayor, the justice of the peace, the postmaster, the owners of the three stores and their wives, two men who had been discharged from the army, the pharmacist and moneylender Don Sebastián Yupanqui, and two technicians sent by the Agrarian Bank to instruct the campesinos in the use of irrigation and fertilizers. They shoved and kicked them onto the square in front of the church, where the rest of the militia had assembled the village.

By then day had broken and, except for three or four who still wore balaclavas, their faces were uncovered. Older boys and men predominated in their ranks, but there were also women and children, some of whom could not have been older than twelve. Those who did not carry machine guns, rifles, or revolvers had old shotguns, clubs, machetes, knives, slingshots, and sticks of dynamite on bandoliers, like miners. They also carried red flags with the hammer and sickle, which they raised over the bell tower of the church, on the flagpole of the town hall, and at the top of a pisonay tree with red flowers that overlooked the village. While the trials were being held—they did this in an orderly way, as if they had done it before—some of them painted the walls of Andamarca with slogans: Long live the armed struggle, the people's war, the Marxist-Leninist guiding principles of President Gonzalo, Death to imperialism, revisionism, the traitors and informers of the genocidal, anti-worker regime.

Before they began, they sang hymns to the proletarian revolution, in Spanish and Quechua, proclaiming that the people were breaking their chains. Since the Andamarcans did not know the words, they mingled with them, making them repeat the verses and whistling the melodies for them.

Then the trials began. In addition to those on the list, others, accused of stealing, abusing the weak and the poor, committing adultery, and engaging in the vices of individualism, had to face the tribunal composed of the entire village.

They took turns speaking, in Spanish and in Quechua. The revolution had a million eyes, a million ears. No one could hide from the people and escape punishment. This scum, these dogs, had tried and now here they were, on their knees, begging for mercy from those they had stabbed in the back. These hyenas served the puppet government that murdered campesinos, shot workers, sold the country to imperialism and revisionism, and labored day and night to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Hadn't this excrement gone to Puquio to beg the authorities there to send the Civil Guard, supposedly to protect Andamarca? Hadn't they incited their neighbors to betray the Revolution's sympathizers to the military patrols?

They took turns and patiently explained the crimes, real and inferred, that these servants of a government drenched in blood, these accomplices of repression and torture, had committed against each and every one of them, and their children and their children's children. They instructed them, they encouraged them to take part, to speak without fear of reprisal, for the armed power of the people protected them.

Little by little, breaking out of their timidity and confusion, spurred on by their own fear, by the atmosphere of exaltation, and by darker motivations—old quarrels, buried resentments, silent envy, family hatreds—the townspeople began to speak. It was true, Don Sebastián was mean to anyone who couldn't pay for medicine in cold hard cash. If you didn't pay that same day, he kept your security no matter how you begged and pleaded. Once, for example…By midday, many Andamarcans had found the courage to walk to the middle of the square and present their complaints and recriminations and point the finger at bad neighbors, bad friends, bad kin. They grew impassioned as they made their statements; their voices trembled when they recalled the sons and daughters they had lost, the animals killed by drought and disease, and how every day brought fewer buyers, more hunger, more sickness, more children in the cemetery.

They were all condemned by a forest of hands. Many relatives of the accused did not raise their hands when it was time to vote, but they were frightened by the fermenting anger and hostility and did not dare to speak out in their defense.

The sentence was carried out by forcing them to kneel and rest their heads on the low wall around the well. They were held down while a line of neighbors filed past, smashing them with stones taken from the construction site next to the village hall. The militia did not take part in the executions. No gun fired. No knife stabbed. No machete hacked. Only hands, stones, and sticks were used, for were the weapons of the people to be wasted on rats and scorpions? By taking action, by participating, by carrying out the people's justice, the Andamarcans would become conscious of their own power. This was a destiny they could not avoid. They were no longer victims, they were beginning to be liberators.

Then came the trial of bad citizens, bad husbands, bad wives, social parasites, degenerates, whores, faggots, the shame of Andamarca, putrefying garbage that the feudal capitalist regime, supported by North American imperialism and Soviet revisionism, encouraged in order to still the combative spirit of the masses. This, too, would change. The purifying wildfire of the Revolution would burn away egotistical bourgeois individualism, and the collectivist spirit and class solidarity would flourish.

The townspeople seemed to listen more than they really listened, to understand more than they really understood. But after the events of the morning they were agitated enough, confused and bewildered enough, to take part with no hesitation in this second ritual, which they would remember, and their children and grand-children would remember, as the stormiest in the history of Andamarca.

Señora Domitila Chontaza, encouraged by the exhortations of the succession of armed women and men who took turns speaking, was the first to point an accusing finger. Every time her husband took a drink he kicked her across the floor and called her “devil's shit.” Her husband, a hunchback with hair like a porcupine's, swore it wasn't true. Then he contradicted himself and whined that when he drank, an evil spirit took possession of his body, the anger came, and he had to get rid of it by beating her. The forty strokes left his curved back bloody and swollen. Fear more than physical pain was behind his vows that he would never taste another drop of alcohol, his abject “Thank you, thank you very much” to each of the neighbors who beat him with whips made of leather or animal gut. His wife dragged him away to put poultices on his wounds.

Some twenty men and women were tried, sentenced, whipped or fined, obliged to return their ill-gotten gains, to indemnify those whom they had overworked or deceived with false promises. How many accusations were true, and how many were inventions dictated by envy and rancor, the result of an excitation in which they all felt compelled to take part by revealing the cruelties and injustices they had suffered? Not even they could have answered the question when, some time in the middle of the afternoon, they put Don Crisóstomo on trial. He had been the bell ringer back in the days when the tower of the Andamarca church had a bell and the church had a priest, and he was accused by a woman who had caught him just outside the village pulling down a boy's trousers. Others confirmed the charge. It was true, he couldn't keep his hands to himself, he was always touching the boys and trying to get them inside his house. One man, his voice breaking with emotion, confessed in an electric silence that when he was a boy Don Crisóstomo had used him the way you use women. He had never had the courage to speak before because he was ashamed. Others, who were right here, could tell stories like his. The bell ringer was sentenced to a beating with sticks and stones, and his corpse joined the bodies of those who had been on the list.

It was growing dark when the trials ended. Don Medardo Llantac took advantage of that moment to move away the slab covering the grave of his cousin Florisel, crawl out of the cemetery, and run through the countryside like a soul pursued by the devil, heading for Puquio. He reached the provincial capital a day and a half later in a state of exhaustion, his eyes still full of horror, and reported what had happened in Andamarca.

Fatigued, confused, not looking into one another's faces, the Andamarcans felt the way they did after the fiesta for their patron saint, after three days and nights of drinking all they could drink, and eating, dancing, stamping their heels, fighting, praying, not sleeping—it was a struggle to accept the idea that the great dazzling explosion of unreality was over, that they had to go back to their daily routines. But now they felt even greater dislocation and deeper malaise as they faced the unburied corpses swarming with flies and beginning to rot under their very noses, the bruised backs of those whom they had whipped. They all suspected that Andamarca would never be the same.

The tireless members of the militia continued to take turns speaking. Now it was time to organize. There could be no victory for the people without the iron-willed, enduring participation of the masses. Andamarca would be a support base, one more link in the chain that already ran the length of the Cordillera of the Andes and was sending out branches to the coast and the jungle. Support bases were the rear guard for the vanguard. Important, useful, indispensable, they existed, as their name indicated, to support the fighters: to feed them, heal them, hide them, dress them, arm them, to give them information about the enemy and provide replacements for those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Everyone had a job to perform, a grain of sand to contribute. They should subdivide by neighborhoods, multiply by streets, blocks, families, add new eyes and ears, legs, arms, and brains to the million already at the disposal of the Party.