Death in the Andes

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “I tried to do what he said, I went,” the boy recalled, with a little forced laugh. “I had lost my will. I was like a rag, I did whatever anybody told me to. I went, I took a hooker to the little hotel across from the Dominó to see if that would make me start to forget her. And it was even worse. While the hooker was sweet-talking me, I was thinking about Mercedes, comparing my honey’s sweet little body to the one I had in front of me. I didn’t even get hard, Corporal.”

  “You confess things that are so personal I don’t know what to say.” Lituma became confused. “Doesn’t it embarrass you to talk about things like that, Tomasito?”

  “I wouldn’t tell just anybody,” his adjutant explained. “But I trust you even more than Iscariote. To me, you’re like the father I never knew, Corporal.”

  “That Mercedes was a lot of woman for you, boy,” declared the commander. “You would’ve gone through hell with her. She’s a broad who aims high, even Hog wasn’t big enough for her. Didn’t you see the airs she put on the night you introduced us? She called me pussycat, the stupid bitch.”

  “If I could always have her with me, I’d steal for her, I’d kill for her again.” Carreño’s voice broke. “Anything. Want to hear something even more private? I’ll never fuck another woman. They don’t interest me, they don’t exist. If I can’t have Mercedes, I don’t want any of them.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Lituma commented.

  “To be honest with you, I would’ve liked to fuck her brains out and that’s the truth,” the commander said hoarsely. “I propositioned her when I danced with her in the Dominó. Kind of testing her, too, like I told you. Do you know what she did, Godson? She grabbed my fly as bold as brass and said: ‘I wouldn’t do you for all the money in the world, not even if you put a pistol to my chest. You’re not my type, pussycat.’”

  He was in uniform, sitting at the small desk in his office on the first floor of the Ministry. A small Peruvian flag and a fan that was turned off were among the stacks of folders. Carreño wore civilian clothes and remained standing, facing a photograph of the President of the Republic, who seemed to look at him sardonically from the wall. The commander was wearing his eternal dark glasses; he toyed with a pencil and a letter opener.

  “Don’t tell me those things, Godfather. It makes me feel even worse.”

  “I’m telling you so you’ll know that woman wasn’t right for you,” the commander said encouragingly. “She would’ve gone to bed even with priests and faggots. She was a libber, and that’s the most dangerous thing a woman can be. You’re lucky to be rid of her, even if it wasn’t your choice. Okay, let’s not waste any more time. We have to think about your situation. You haven’t forgotten you’re in one hell of a mess because of Tingo María, have you?”

  “He must be your father, Tomasito,” Lituma whispered. “He must be.”

  The commander searched his desk and picked up a file from the stack of folders. He waved it at Carreño.

  “It won’t be easy to straighten things out and clean up your service record. But if we don’t, the black mark will follow you the rest of your life. I’ve found a way, thanks to a buddy of mine, a smart lawyer who’s connected to the service. Do you know what you are? A repentant deserter, that’s what. You took off, you realized your mistake, you thought things over, and now you’ve come back to ask forgiveness. As proof of your sincerity, you’ve volunteered to go to the emergency zone. You’re going to hunt down subversive criminals, boy. Sign here.”

  “I really would like to have known your godfather,” Lituma interrupted, filled with admiration. “What a guy, Tomasito.”

  “Your application has been accepted and you already have your assignment,” the commander continued, blowing on the ink where Carreño had signed. “Andahuaylas, under the command of an officer with a lot of balls. Lieutenant Pancorvo. He owes me some favors, he’ll treat you fine. You’ll be in the sierra for a few months, less than a year. That’ll get you out of circulation until they forget about you and your record is clean. When you’re blessed and forgiven, I’ll find you a better post. Aren’t you going to thank me?”

  “Iscariote was very good to me, too,” said Tomás. “He was like my shadow until I took the bus to Andahuaylas. I think he was afraid I’d kill myself. He says food is the cure for a broken heart. Like I told you before, he lives to eat.”

  “Tamales, barbecue, roast pork with sweet potato, seviche of corvina fish, stuffed green peppers, scallops a la parmigiana, Lima potatoes, and ice-cold beer,” the fat man enumerated with a magnificent gesture. “That’s for starters. Then, spicy chicken fricassee with white rice, and stewed kid. And to top off the evening, Doña Pepa’s blue-corn pudding with nougat. So cheer up, Carreñito.”

  “If we eat just half of that, it’ll kill us, Fats.”

  “Maybe it’ll kill you,” said Iscariote. “But as far as I’m concerned, a full belly makes me feel brand-new. This is the life. You’ll forget all about Mercedes before we get to the kid.”

  “I’ll never forget her,” the boy declared. “I mean, I don’t want to forget her. I never imagined I could be so happy, Corporal. Maybe it’s better that things worked out the way they did. That it didn’t last too long. Because if we’d gotten married and stayed together, the things that poison other couples would’ve happened to us too. But now all my memories of her are good ones.”

  “She took off with your four thousand dollars after you killed a guy for her and got her a new voter’s ID, and you just think she’s wonderful.” Lituma was appalled. “You’re a masochist, Tomasito.”

  “I know you won’t give a damn what I say,” Iscariote exclaimed suddenly. He was sweating and breathing heavily and his great mass of flesh quivered with gluttony; he held a forkful of rice in the air and moved it in time to his words. “But let me give you some friendly advice. Do you know what I’d do if I was in your shoes?”

  “What would you do?”

  “Get revenge.” Iscariote carried the fork to his mouth, chewed with his eyes half closed, as if he were in ecstasy, then swallowed, drank some beer, licked his heavy lips with his tongue, and continued: “I’d make that cow pay.”

  “How?” asked the boy. “Even though I feel awful and have indigestion, you make me laugh, Fats.”

  “Fucking her up where it’ll hurt her the most.” Iscariote panted. He had taken a large white handkerchief with a blue border from his pocket and was wiping away the sweat with both hands. “Sending her to jail as Hog’s accomplice. It’s easy, all you have to do is file a charge against her. And while they’re investigating and there’s all that red tape with the judge, she’ll be in the women’s prison at Chorrillos. Wasn’t she scared to death to go to jail? She’d do a little time there for being so ungrateful.”

  “Then I could go there at night with ladders and ropes and rescue her. This is getting interesting, Fats.”

  “At Chorillos I can fix it so they put her in the cell block with the half-breed dykes.” Iscariote spoke quickly, as if he had thought the plan out carefully. “They’d make her see stars and the moon, Carreñito. And half of them have syphilis, so they’d infect her, too.”

  “I don’t like that so much, Fats. My sweetheart with syphilis? I’d tear every one of those dykes apart with my bare hands.”

  “There’s another possibility. We look for her, we find her, we take her to the station at Tacora, where I have a compadre. She spends the night in a cell with all the crazies, the dope addicts and degenerates. The next morning she won’t even remember her name.”

  “I’d go and find her in her cell and fall down on my knees and worship her.” The boy laughed. “She’s my Saint Rose of Lima.”

  “That’s why she left you.” Iscariote had begun his attack on the desserts and spoke with his mouth full, in a choked voice. “Women don’t like so much consideration, Carreñito. They get bored. If you treated her the way Hog did, she’d be tame by now, she’d still be with you.”

  “I like her just the way she is,�
� said the boy. “Vain, forward, lots of experience. She has a lousy character, and I like it just fine. Everything she is and does I like. Even if you don’t believe me, Corporal.”

  “Why shouldn’t I believe you’re crazy?” said Lituma. “Everybody’s crazy here. Aren’t the terrucos crazy? Aren’t Dionisio and the witch out of their minds? Wasn’t that Lieutenant Pancorvo stark raving mad when he burned a mute to make him talk? Is there anything more insane than these serruchos scared to death of mukis and throat-slitters? Don’t people have more than one screw loose when they make people disappear just to keep the apus in the hills quiet? At least when you’re crazy in love, you don’t hurt anybody except yourself.”

  “But you manage to keep a cool head in this madhouse, Corporal,” said his adjutant.

  “That must be why I feel so out of place in Naccos, Tomasito.”

  “Well, I give up, we won’t take our revenge, and Mercedes can go on planting the world with dead boyfriends and bruised lovers,” said Iscariote. “At least I cheered you up. I’m going to miss you, Carreñito. I was getting used to us doing jobs together. I hope things go well for you in the emergency zone. Don’t let the terrucos bust your balls. Take care of yourself, and drop me a line.”

  “That must be why I can’t imagine them taking me out of here,” added Lituma. “Well, let’s get some sleep, it must be close to dawn. Do you know something, Tomasito? You’ve told me your whole life story. I know the rest. You went to Andahuaylas, you were with Pancorvo, they transferred you here, you brought Pedrito Tinoco with you, we got to know each other. What the hell else are we going to talk about at night?”

  “About Mercedes, what else?” his adjutant decreed categorically. “I’ll tell you about my sweetheart all over again, from the beginning.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Lituma yawned, making his cot creak. “All over again from the beginning?”

  Epilogue

  The figure emerged suddenly from the eucalyptus trees on the slope facing the post, as Lituma was taking down the clothes he had hung to dry on a rope stretched between the door of the shack and the protective wall of sacks and rocks surrounding it. He saw the figure from the side and from the front, interposing itself between him and the red ball beginning to sink behind the mountains. The setting sun dissolved it, swallowed it up. But in spite of distance and the glare that made his eyes water, he knew it was a woman.

  “That’s it, they’ve come,” he thought. He was paralyzed, feeling his fingers clench at damp undershorts. But no, it couldn’t be the terrucos, the woman was alone, she carried no weapons, and besides, she seemed confused, unsure of which direction to take. She looked to the right and the left, searching, she went back and forth among the eucalyptus trees, hesitating, deciding on a path and then changing her mind. Until, as if he were just what she had been looking for, the woman caught sight of Lituma. She stood still, and although she was too far away for him to see her features, the corporal was certain that as soon as she spotted him in the doorway of the shack, with the clothes on the line, wearing his gaiters and his green drill trousers, his unbuttoned tunic and his kepi, with his Smith & Wesson in its holster, her face brightened. Because now she was waving at him with both hands in the air, as if they knew each other and were very good friends and had arranged to meet. Who was she? Where did she come from? Where was she going? What could a woman who was not an Indian be doing at the top of that hill in the middle of the barrens? Because Lituma also knew that immediately: she was not an Indian, she did not have braids, she was not wearing a full skirt or a hat or a blanket but slacks and a sweater and over that a topcoat or a jacket, and what she held in her right hand was not a bundle tied with a rope but a handbag or small valise. She continued waving, almost angrily, as if shocked at his lack of response. Then the corporal raised his hand and returned her greeting.

  For the half hour or forty-five minutes that it took the woman to climb down the slope with the eucalyptus trees and up the slope to the post, Lituma focused all his senses on the operation, guiding her. He indicated with energetic movements of his arm which path she should take, the one that was most clearly marked, the least slippery, where she ran the smallest risk of rolling down the hill, for he was afraid the stranger would end up sliding, stumbling, falling to the bottom of the ravine, a possibility that made each step a test of balance. It was obvious she had never walked the hills. She was as much an outsider in Naccos as he had been a few months ago when he would stagger, twist, fall, and get up again, just as she was doing now, whenever he went back and forth between the post and the camp.

  When she began to climb the hill to the shack and was close enough to hear him, the corporal called out his instructions: “That way, between those big rocks.” “Just grab on to the plants, they’ll hold you.” “Not that way, it’s all mud.” When she was fifty meters from the post, the corporal walked down to meet her. He helped her, holding her arm and taking her leather valise.

  “From up there I thought you were Tomás Carreño,” she said, sliding to one side and slipping out of Lituma’s hands. “That’s why I waved like I knew you.”

  “No, I’m not Tomás,” he said, feeling stupid because of what he had said and at the same time filled with sudden joy. “You can’t know how happy I am to hear a Piuran talk again!”

  “How do you know I’m Piuran?” she asked in surprise.

  “Because I’m one, too,” said Lituma, extending his hand. “From deep in the heart of Piura, you bet. Corporal Lituma, at your service. I’m head of the post here. Isn’t it incredible for two Piurans to run into each other in these barrens, so far from home?”

  “Tomás Carreño is here with you, isn’t he?”

  “He went down to the village for a minute, he won’t be long.”

  The woman sighed with relief, and her face looked happy. They had reached the shack, and she dropped onto one of the sacks filled with dirt that the corporal and his adjutant, with the help of Pedrito Tinoco, had wedged between the boulders.

  “That’s good,” she said with some agitation, her chest rising and falling as if her heart would burst from her mouth. “Because if I made this trek for nothing…The Huancayo bus left me so far away. They told me it was an hour to Naccos. But it took me more than three to get here. Is that the village down there? Is that where the highway’s going to be?”

  “That’s where it was supposed to be,” said Lituma. “They stopped construction, there won’t be any highway. A huayco came down a few days ago and did a lot of damage.”

  But the subject did not interest her. She stared uneasily at the path up the hill.

  “Can we see him coming from here?” There was something familiar about her appearance and gestures as well as her voice. “Piuran girls even smell better,” Lituma thought.

  “As long as it doesn’t get dark first,” he warned. “The sun sets early this time of year, you can see it’s almost gone down. You must be dead after that little trip. Would you like a soda?”

  “Anything’s fine. I’m dying of thirst,” she replied, nodding. She was observing the tin roofs of the barracks, the stones, the slope dotted, with patches of grass. “It looks nice from here.”

  “It’s better from a distance than up close,” the corporal said without enthusiasm. “I’ll bring your soda right away.”

  He went to the shack, and as he took a bottle from the pail they kept outside to cool their drinks, he was able to look the visitor over at his leisure. Even splattered by mud and with her hair uncombed, she was terrific. How long had it been since he’d seen a good-looking broad like her? The color of her cheeks, her neck, her hands, brought a flood of images from his youth back home in Piura. And oh baby, what eyes. Half green, half gray, half I don’t know what. And that mouth with those full lips. Why did he have the feeling he knew her, or at least had seen her? How great she must look dressed up in a skirt, high heels, earrings, her lips painted a fiery red. The things you lost shut away in Naccos. It wasn’t impossible, he might have
run into her sometime, somewhere, when he was living in a warm, civilized place. His heart beat faster. Was she Mechita? Was she?

  He came back with the soda, and an apology. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any glasses. You’ll have to drink straight from the bottle.”

  “Is he all right?” the woman asked between sips. A trickle of liquid ran down her neck. “He hasn’t been sick?”

  “Tomasito is a rock, he doesn’t get sick,” Lituma reassured her. “He didn’t know you were coming, did he?”

  “I didn’t tell him, I wanted to surprise him,” she said with a mischievous smile. “Besides, letters probably don’t even get up here.”

  “Then you must be Mercedes.”

  “Carreñito told you about me?” she asked, turning to look at him with some uneasiness.

  “Well, a little.” Lituma nodded, feeling uncomfortable. “I mean, a lot. He talks about you every night. In this wasteland, with nothing to do, telling secrets is the only thing left.”

  “Is he very angry with me?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lituma. “Because, speaking of secrets, I know that some nights he talks to you in his sleep.”

  He was immediately ashamed of having said that and quickly looked for cigarettes in his tunic. He lit one, awkwardly, and began puffing on it, exhaling the smoke through his mouth and nose. Yes, she was the girl Josefino rented to La Chunga for a night, the one who disappeared afterward. Mechita. When he had the courage to look at her again, she was very serious, watching the slope. There was concern in her eyes. “No wonder you cried for her so much, Tomasito,” Lituma thought. Damn, what a small world.