Death in the Andes

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Then they would have thought we were their enemies,” said Señora d’Harcourt. “And we’re not, we’re not anybody’s enemies. We’re working for them, too. Don’t you understand?”

  “I understand, señora,” the man grumbled. “I only hope they do. Haven’t you seen on TV how brutal they are?”

  “I never watch television,” replied Señora d’Harcourt. “That must be why I feel so calm.”

  At dusk they reached the Indian community of Huayllarajcra, where one of the nurseries was in operation. The campesinos came there for the queñua seedlings and planted them around their fields and along the banks of lagoons and streams. The village center—the small church with a tile roof and collapsed tower, the little adobe school, the cobblestoned square—was almost deserted. But the mayor and elders of Huayllarajcra, their staffs of authority in hand, showed them around the nursery, which had been built by communal labor. They seemed enthusiastic about the reforestation program and said that until now all the comuneros had lived in the highlands, isolated from one another, but if the plans to bring them together became a reality, they would have electricity and drinkable water. In the fading light they could still make out the vast expanse around them, with its patchwork of cultivated fields and a terrain that grew stonier as it rose and disappeared into the clouds. The engineer took a deep breath and spread his arms wide.

  “I lose all my Lima neuroses in this landscape,” he exclaimed, pointing around him in excitement. “Don’t you, señora? We should have brought a little bottle of something for the cold.”

  “Do you know when I saw this for the first time? Twenty-five years ago. On the very spot where you’re standing. It’s marvelous, isn’t it.”

  Next to the nursery was a shack where meals were served. Cañas and Señora d’Harcourt had stayed there on previous occasions and would do so now. But the family that used to live in the house had been reduced to one old woman, who could not explain where her kinfolk had gone, or why. The place was empty except for a small cot. The woman said nothing and busied herself with tending the fire, stirring the pot, keeping her back to them. The mayor and elders returned to their houses. They were alone in the village center. The two watchmen at the nursery had gone into their hut and barred the door. The little reed corral, where Señora d’Harcourt recalled seeing sheep and chickens, was empty, the stakes pulled out of the ground. A ragged piece of red flannel fluttered on a stick set into the heaps of straw on the roof.

  By the time the prefect and the technicians drove into Huayllarajcra in the Ford, the stars were shining in a deep black sky. The engineer and Señora d’Harcourt were unpacking. They had set up their sleeping bags in a corner and inflated their air pillows, and were heating coffee on a portable Primus stove.

  “We thought you had an accident,” Cañas greeted them. “I was ready to go out and look for you.”

  But the prefect was a different person; the helpful, good-natured little man from Huancavelica was beside himself. They had, in fact, had a flat tire, but that wasn’t why he was frantic.

  “We have to go back immediately,” he ordered as he climbed out of the car. “We absolutely cannot spend the night here, absolutely not.”

  “Have some coffee and a biscuit and enjoy the view,” the engineer tried to calm him. “You can’t see this anywhere else in the world. Take it easy, friend.”

  “Don’t you know what’s going on?” The prefect raised his voice. His chin trembled, and he squeezed his eyes open and shut as if his vision had blurred. “Haven’t you seen the slogans painted all along the road? Isn’t there a red flag right over our heads? The commander was right. It’s sheer recklessness. We can’t expose ourselves like this. And you least of all, señora.”

  “We’ve come here to do work that has nothing to do with politics,” she tried to reassure him. “But if you feel unsafe, you can go back to the city.”

  “I’m no coward.” The prefect’s voice changed and he spoke with wounded pride. “But this is foolhardy. We’re in danger. None of us can spend the night here. Not me, not the technicians, not the engineer. Listen to me, we’ve got to leave. We can come back with the patrol. Don’t put other people’s lives at risk, señora.”

  Cañas turned toward the two technicians, who were listening in silence.

  They were fairly young and wore poor men’s clothing. They seemed uncomfortable and exchanged glances, not saying anything.

  “Please, don’t feel obliged,” Señora d’Harcourt intervened. “If you’d rather go back, you can.”

  “Are you staying, Señor Cañas?” one of them finally asked in a northern accent.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “We’ve fought too long to establish this project, to get money from the FAO and the Dutch. I’m not going to retreat just when it’s getting under way.”

  “Then we’ll stay, too,” said the one who had asked the question. “God’s will be done.”

  “I’m very sorry, but I’m leaving,” declared the prefect. “I hold political office. If they come, I’m done for. I’ll ask the commander to send the patrol for you.”

  “Under no circumstances,” she replied, offering him her hand. “You can go, but don’t do anything else. I’ll see you in Huancavelica in a few days. Have a good trip back. And don’t worry about us. Somebody up there is taking better care of us than any patrol could.”

  They unloaded the technicians’ blankets and packs and watched the Ford drive away into the darkness.

  “It’s crazy to travel alone at night along those roads,” murmured one of the technicians.

  For some time they worked in silence, making preparations to spend the night in the small house. After serving them a very spicy soup with chunks of yuca, the old woman lay down on her cot. They arranged their sleeping bags and blankets side by side, then built a fire and sat next to it, watching the stars twinkle and multiply. They had ham, chicken, and avocado sandwiches, and Señora d’Harcourt passed around pieces of chocolate for dessert. They ate slowly, talking about the next day’s itinerary and their families in Lima, and the northern technician, who came from Pacasmayo, spoke of his fiancée in Trujillo: last year she won second prize in the folk-dance competition. Then the conversation centered on how bright, how infinite in number, the stars were when viewed from the Andean peaks.

  Señora d’Harcourt abruptly changed the direction of their talk. “I’ve been traveling in Peru for thirty years, and I never dreamed that things like this could happen one day.”

  The engineer, the technicians, and the driver were silent, reflecting on her words. Later they went to sleep, fully dressed.

  They arrived at dawn, just as the party of travelers was waking up. There were about fifty of them: men, women, many young people, a few children, most of them campesinos but also some urban mestizos, in jackets, ponchos, sneakers, sandals, jeans, and sweaters with crude embroidered figures in the style that decorates pre-Hispanic pottery. On their heads they wore mountain caps with earflaps, berets, hats, and some hid their faces with balaclavas. They were poorly armed: only three or four carried Kalashnikovs; the others had shotguns, revolvers, hunting carbines, or simple machetes and sticks. The old cook had disappeared.

  “You don’t need to point those guns at us,” said Señora d’Harcourt, stepping forward. “We’re not armed, and we won’t try to run away. Can I speak to your leader? To explain what we’re doing here?”

  No one answered her. No order was given, but they all seemed well trained, for in twos or threes they separated from the larger group and surrounded each of the five, searched them carefully, and took everything they had in their pockets. They tied their hands behind their backs with lengths of rope or animal gut.

  “We’re not your enemies, we’re not political, we don’t work for the government, we work for all Peruvians,” said Señora d’Harcourt, extending her hands to make her captors’ work easier. “Our job is to defend the environment, our natural resources. To keep nature from being destroyed, so that in the futu
re all the children of the sierra will have food and work.”

  “Señora d’Harcourt has written many books about our plants, our animals,” explained the engineer. “She’s an idealist. Like you. She wants a better life for the campesinos. Thanks to her, this region will be covered with trees. That’s a wonderful thing for the comuneros, for Huancavelica. For you and your children. It’s good for all of us, regardless of politics.”

  They allowed them to speak without interruption, but they did not pay the slightest attention to what they said. They had mobilized, placing sentries at various positions that allowed them to keep an eye on the road leading into the village and the trail that climbed along the snowfields. It was a cold, dry morning, with a clear sky and a cutting wind. The high walls of the hillsides seemed renewed.

  “Our struggle is like yours,” said Señora d’Harcourt, her voice calm, her expression revealing no sign of alarm. “Don’t treat us like enemies; we’re not your enemies.”

  “Could we talk to your leader,” Engineer Cañas asked from time to time, “or with any person in charge? Let me speak to him.”

  After some time had passed, a group of them entered the shack, and those who remained outside sent the members of the traveling party in, one by one. The questions were asked in loud voices. Those outside could follow portions of the dialogue. These were slow, repetitive interrogations: personal information mixed with political considerations and occasional queries regarding other people and foreign affairs. The first one questioned was the driver, followed by the technicians, and then the engineer. It was growing dark by the time he came out. Señora d’Harcourt realized with some surprise that she had been standing for ten hours with nothing to eat or drink. But she did not feel hunger, or thirst, or fatigue. She thought about her husband, grieving more for him than for herself. She watched Cañas walk out. His expression had changed, as if he had lost the certainty that had animated him during the day, when he had tried to speak to them.

  “They hear, but they don’t listen, and they don’t want to understand what you say to them,” she heard him murmur as he walked past her. “They’re from another planet.”

  When she entered the shack they had her sit on the ground, in the same position the three men and one woman had assumed. Señora d’Harcourt addressed the one who wore a leather jacket and a scarf around his neck, a young man with a full beard and cold, gray, penetrating eyes. She told him about her life in some detail, from her birth almost sixty years ago in that remote Baltic country she did not remember and whose language she did not speak, to her nomadic childhood in Europe and America, moving from school to school, language to language, country to country. Until, not yet twenty and recently married to a young diplomat, she came to Peru. She told him about her love at first sight for the Peruvians, and, above all, about her awe and wonder at the deserts, the jungles, the mountains, the trees, the animals, the snows, in this country that was now her country, too. Not only because her passport said so—she had taken the nationality of Marcelo, her second husband—but because she had earned the right to call herself Peruvian after many years of traveling the length and breadth of this country, studying and fostering its beauty in lectures, articles, and books. She would go on doing this work until the end of her days because it had given meaning to her life. Did they understand that she was not their enemy?

  They listened without interrupting, but their faces showed no interest at all in what she said. Only when she stopped speaking, after explaining how difficult it had been for her and that generous, self-sacrificing young man, the engineer Cañas, to begin the reforestation program in Huancavelica, did they begin to ask her questions. Without enmity or antipathy, with dry, mechanical phrases in neutral, routinized voices, as if, thought Señora d’Harcourt, all the questions were a useless formality because they already knew the answers. They asked how long she had been an informer for the police, the army, the Intelligence Agency; they asked about her trips, her inspection tours. She gave them all the details. The Military Institute of Geography had asked her to serve as a consultant to the Permanent Commission that was redrawing and improving the atlas, and this had been her only connection to the Armed Forces except for an occasional lecture at the Military Academy, the Naval Academy, or the Center for Advanced Military Studies. They wanted to know about her contacts with foreign governments, the ones she worked for, the ones that sent her instructions. She explained that it wasn’t a question of governments but of scientific institutions, the Smithsonian in Washington, the Museum of Man in Paris, the British Museum in London, and a few foundations or ecological centers, from which she occasionally obtained funds for small projects (“It was never very much”). But while she talked, corrected, specified, and although her responses stressed the fact that none of her contacts was political, that all these connections and relationships were scientific, purely scientific, the expressions and glances of her interrogators filled her with the overwhelming certainty of an insuperable incomprehension, a lack of communication more profound than if she had been speaking Chinese and they spoke only Spanish.

  When it seemed to be over—her mouth was dry and her throat burned—Señora d’Harcourt felt very tired.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she asked, hearing her voice break for the first time.

  The one in the leather jacket looked into her eyes without blinking.

  “This is war, and you are a lackey of our class enemy,” he explained, staring at her with blank eyes, delivering his monologue in an expressionless voice. “You don’t even realize that you are a tool of imperialism and the bourgeois state. Even worse, you permit yourself the luxury of a clear conscience, seeing yourself as Peru’s Good Samaritan. Your case is typical.”

  “Can you explain that to me?” she said. “In all sincerity, I don’t understand. What am I a typical case of?”

  “The intellectual who betrays the people,” he said with the same serene, icy confidence. “The intellectual who serves bourgeois power and the ruling class. What you do here has nothing to do with the environment. It has to do with your class and with power. You come here with bureaucrats, the newspapers provide publicity, and the government wins a battle. Who said that this was liberated territory? That a part of the New Democracy had been established in this zone? A lie. There’s the proof. Look at the photographs. A bourgeois peace reigns in the Andes. You don’t know this either, but a new nation is being born here. With a good deal of blood and suffering. We can show no mercy to such powerful enemies.”

  “May I at least intercede on behalf of Cañas?” Señora d’Harcourt stammered. “He’s young, almost the same age as you. I’ve never known a more idealistic Peruvian, one who works with so much…”

  “The session is over,” said the young man in the jacket as he rose to his feet.

  When they walked outside, the sun was setting behind the hills and the nursery of seedlings was disappearing in a great fire whose flames heated the air and made their cheeks burn. Señora d’Harcourt saw the driver climbing into the jeep. A short while later, he drove off in the direction of Huancavelica.

  “At least they let him go,” said the engineer, who stood beside her. “I’m glad, he’s a decent guy.”

  “I’m so sorry, Señor Cañas,” she murmured. “I feel so guilty about you. I don’t know how to beg your…”

  “Señora, it is a great honor for me,” he said in a firm voice. “I mean, being with you at the end. They’ve taken the two technicians over there, and since they hold a lower rank they’ll shoot them in the head. You and I, however, are people of privilege. They just explained it to me. A question of symbols, apparently. You’re a believer, aren’t you? I’m not, so please pray for me. Can we stand together? I’ll bear up better if I can hold your hand. Let’s try, all right? Move closer, señora.”

  “And what were you saying in your sleep, Tomasito?” Lituma asked.

  When the boy opened his eyes with a start, the sun was shining into the room, which seemed smaller
and shabbier than it had the night before. Mercedes, combed and dressed, sat looking at him from a corner of the bed with narrowed, inquisitive eyes. A little mocking smile floated across her face.

  “What time is it?” he asked, stretching.

  “I’ve been watching you sleep for hours.” Mercedes opened her mouth and laughed.

  “Go on, cut it out,” said the boy, feeling uncomfortable. “At least today you woke up in a good mood.”

  “I wasn’t just watching you sleep; I was listening, too.” “Her teeth were as white as a little mouse’s, they gleamed in Mercedes’s dark face, Corporal.” “You talked and talked. I thought you were just pretending to be asleep. But I came over and you were dead to the world.”

  “What the hell were you saying, Tomasito?” Lituma insisted.

  “You can’t imagine the beautiful fuck I was having, Corporal.”

  “You learned pretty fast, you figured things out pretty quick.” Mercedes laughed again, and he, to hide his confusion, pretended to yawn. “You kept saying the pretty things you told me last night.”

  “Now it was time for flirting,” Lituma remarked with amusement.

  “Well, when you’re asleep you can say anything,” Carreño said defensively.

  Mercedes became serious and looked straight into his eyes. She put out her hand, burying her fingers in his hair, and Tomás felt her stroking it the way she had the night before.

  “Do you really feel those things for me? Those things you said all night and kept saying when you were asleep?”

  “She had such an open way of talking about intimate things, you never saw anything like it,” Tomás murmured with emotion. “It really shocked me, Corporal.”

  “You thought it was sweeter than honey, you liar,” Lituma corrected him. “My paisana had you wrapped around her little finger.”

  “Or were you just hot for me, and now that I gave you what you wanted, are you cooling down?” Mercedes added, devouring him with her eyes.