Tomasito's hand was raised to aim another pebble, but he did not throw it. He lowered his arm and turned toward the woman. 'We prepared a nice welcome for them, se?ora. We'll blow up half the hill. Before a single one of them can set foot in the post, there'll be Senderista fireworks exploding over Naccos.' He winked at Lituma and continued speaking to Do?a Adriana. 'The corporal isn't talking to you the way he talks to a suspect. More like a friend. And you should show the same confidence in him.'
The woman snorted and fanned herself again before she nodded. Raising her hand slowly, she pointed at the succession of snowcapped ridges, peaked or rounded, lead-colored or green, massive and solitary, under the blue dome of the sky.
'All these hills are full of enemies,' she said softly. 'They live inside. Day and night they weave their evil schemes. They do endless harm. That's why there are so many accidents. Cave-ins in the mines. Trucks that lose their brakes or drive off the road on curves. Boxes of dynamite that explode and blow off legs and heads.'
She spoke without raising her voice, in a mechanical way, like the litanies in processions or the weeping of professional mourners at wakes.
'If every bad thing is the work of the devil, then there are no accidents in the world,' Lituma remarked ironically. 'Was it Satan who stoned those two French kids to death on the road to Andahuaylas, se?ora? Those enemies are devils, aren't they?'
'They send down huaycos, too,' she concluded, pointing at the mountains.
Huaycos! Lituma had heard about them. None had happened here, fortunately. He tried to imagine the avalanches of snow, rock, and mud that came down from the top of the Cordillera like a whirlwind of death, flattening everything, feeding on the hillsides they dislodged, filling up with boulders, burying fields, animals, villages, houses, families. Huaycos were schemes of the devil?
Se?ora Adriana pointed again at the ridges. 'Who else could loosen all that rock? Who else could send the huayco to exactly the place where it can do the most harm?'
She fell silent and snorted again. She spoke with so much conviction that Lituma was shaken for a few moments.
'And the men who are missing, se?ora?' he insisted.
One of Tomás's pebbles hit the mark with a metallic sound that echoed down the mountain. Lituma saw him lean forward to pick up another handful of ammunition.
'There's not a lot you can do against them,' Do?a Adriana continued. 'But you can do something. Soothe them, distract them. Not with those offerings the Indians put by crevices and gorges. Those little piles of stones, those flowers and animals, they don't do any good. Neither does the chicha they pour for them. In the Indian community here they sometimes kill a sheep, a vicu?a. All foolishness. Maybe it's all right in normal times, but not nowadays. Human beings are what they like.'
It seemed to Lituma that his adjutant was holding back laughter, but he had no desire to laugh at what the witch was saying. Hearing talk like this, even if it was the bullshit of a charlatan or the ravings of a crazy woman, made him jumpy.
'And in Demetrio Chanca's hand you read …?'
'I told him just for fun.' She shrugged. 'What's written is what happens, no matter what you do.'
What would they say at headquarters in Huancayo if he wired this report on the camp radio: 'Sacrificed in manner as yet undetermined to placate evil spirits of Andes, stop. Written in lines of hand, witness claims, stop. Case closed, stop. Respectfully, Post Commander, stop. Corporal Lituma, stop.'
'I talk and you laugh,' the woman said in a quiet, sarcastic voice.
'I'm laughing at what my superiors in Huancayo would say if I sent them the explanation you've given me,' said the corporal. 'Thanks, anyway.'
'Can I go now?'
Lituma nodded. Do?a Adriana struggled to her feet and without saying goodbye began moving down the slope toward camp. From the rear, wearing her shapeless shoes, swaying her broad hips and making her green skirt flutter, her big straw hat bobbing up and down, she looked like a scarecrow. Was she also a devil?
'Have you ever seen a huayco, Tomasito?'
'No, Corporal, and I wouldn't want to. But when I was a kid, outside Sicuani I saw where one had come down a few days earlier and cut a huge furrow. You could see it plain as day, it came right down the length of the mountain like a toboggan. It flattened houses, trees, people of course. It brought down huge boulders. The dust made everything white for days.'
'Do you believe Do?a Adriana is an accomplice of the terrucos? That she's handing us a load of shit about the devils inside the hills?'
'I can believe anything, Corporal. Life has made me the most believing man in the world.'
*
From the time he was a boy, they had called Pedrito Tinoco half-wit, moron, dummy, simpleton, and since his mouth always hung open, they called him flycatcher, too. The names did not make him angry, because he never got angry at anything or anyone. And the people of Abancay never got angry with him, either; sooner or later everybody was won over by his peaceful smile, his obliging nature, his simplicity. They said he wasn't from Abancay, that his mother brought him there a few days after he was born, and stopped in the city only long enough to wrap her unwanted child in a little bundle and leave him in the doorway of the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. Whether rumor or truth, this was all anyone in Abancay ever knew about Pedrito Tinoco. The townspeople remembered that from the time he was a little boy he had slept with the dogs and chickens that belonged to the priest (who, malicious gossips claimed, was also his father) and cleaned the church for him and was his bell ringer and altar boy until the good cleric died. Then Pedrito Tinoco, who by this time was an adolescent, moved to the streets of Abancay, where he was a porter, a bootblack, a sweeper, a helper, and a stand-in for watchmen, mailmen, and garbagemen, a caretaker of stalls at the market, an usher at the movies and at the circuses that came to town for the Patriotic Festival. Curled into a ball, he slept in stables, sacristies, or under the benches on the Plaza de Armas, and he ate thanks to charitable neighbors. He went everywhere barefoot, wore a threadbare poncho and baggy, grease-stained trousers held up by a rope, and never took off the pointed Andean cap from whose earflaps locks of straight hair escaped that had never been touched by scissors or comb.
When Pedrito Tinoco was conscripted, some Abancayans tried to make the soldiers see that it was unjust. How could he do military service when anyone could tell just by looking at him that he was a half-wit who had never even learned to talk, who just smiled with that face of an overgrown baby who has no idea what you're saying, or who he is, or where he is? But the soldiers would not be persuaded and took him away, along with the other young men they had picked up in the city's cantinas, chicha taverns, movies, and stadium. At the barracks they shaved his head, stripped him naked, hosed him down, giving him the first complete bath of his life, and stuffed him into a khaki uniform and a pair of boots he never got used to – during the three weeks he spent there his companions saw him walking as if he were crippled or paralyzed. At the beginning of his fourth week as a recruit, he ran away.
He wandered the inhospitable hill country around Apurímac and Lucanas, in Ayacucho, avoiding roads and villages, eating grass, searching at night for vizcacha caves, where he took shelter against the whirling gusts of glacial wind. By the time the shepherds found him, he had grown so thin he was nothing but skin, bone, and two eyes maddened by hunger and fear. A few handfuls of stewed corn, a mouthful of dried meat, a swallow of chicha revived him. The shepherds took him back to Auquipata, an old Indian community of highlands, herds, and poor, small plots of ground where a few blighted potatoes and some rachitic ulluco plants barely survived.
Pedrito grew accustomed to Auquipata, and the comuneros allowed him to stay. There too, as in the city, his obliging nature and frugal life won people over. His silence, his eternal smile, his constant willingness to do whatever he was asked, his air of already being in the world of spirits, gave him the aura of a holy man. The comuneros treated him with both respect and distance, for they were aware that no matter how much he shared in their work and fiestas, he was not one of them.
Some time later – Pedrito could not have said how long, for in his life time did not flow as it did in the lives of other people – there was an invasion of outsiders. They came and left and returned, and a meeting was held, which lasted many hours, to discuss their proposals. In Pedrito's uncertain memory, the newcomers were dressed as others had been dressed, back there, before. The varayoks, the elders, explained that the vicu?a reserve which the government wanted to create would not violate the community's titled lands but would actually help Auquipata because the comuneros could sell their products to the tourists who would come to see the vicu?as.
A family was hired to tend the flocks when the vicu?as began to be transported to an altiplano half-hidden in the mountains between the Tambo Quemado and San Juan Rivers, a day's travel from the community's center. It had ichu grass, ponds, little streams, caves in the hills, and the vicu?as soon became attached to the place. Trucks brought them from distant regions in the Cordillera to the spot where the road forked toward San Juan, Lucanas, and Puquio, and from there they were taken up to the altiplano by Auquipatan shepherds. Pedrito Tinoco went to live with them. He helped them build a shelter and plant a potato field and construct a pen for guinea pigs. They had been told that the authorities would periodically bring provisions and furniture for their shack, and pay them a salary. And, in fact, from time to time some official would show up in a red van, ask questions, and give them money or food. Then they stopped coming. And so much time went by without anyone visiting the reserve that one day the caretakers tied their belongings into bundles and returned to Auquipata. Pedrito Tinoco stayed with the vicu?as.
He had established a more intimate relationship with these delicate creatures than he ever had with anyone of his own species. With a dazed, almost mystical attention, he spent the days observing them, learning their habits, their movements, their games, their manias, doubling over with laughter when he saw them chase each other, bite each other, frolic with each other in the dried grass, growing sad when one of them lost its footing on a precipice and broke its legs, or a female bled to death during a difficult birth. Like the Abancayans and the Auquipata comuneros, the vicu?as adopted him, too. They viewed him as a kindly, familiar figure. They let him approach without starting away, and sometimes the more affectionate ones would stretch out their necks, asking him with their intelligent eyes to pull their ears, scratch their backs and bellies, or rub their noses, which was the thing they liked best. Even the males in mating season, when they turned surly and would not permit anyone near their band of four or five concubines, allowed Pedrito to play with the females, though they did keep their great eyes on him, ready to intervene in case of danger.
Once some outsiders came to the reserve. They were from far away, they did not speak Quechua or Spanish but made sounds that were as strange to Pedrito Tinoco as their boots, scarves, helmets, and hats. They took photographs and went on long hikes, studying the vicu?as. But despite Pedrito's best efforts, the animals would not allow them to approach. He put the strangers up in his shelter and waited on them. When they left, they gave him some canned food and a little money.
These visits were the only anomalies in Pedrito Tinoco's life, composed of daily routines that followed natural rhythms and events: rains and hailstorms in the afternoon and at night, the harsh sun in the morning. He set traps for vizcachas, but for the most part he ate potatoes from his small field, and occasionally killed and cooked a guinea pig. And he salted and sun-dried strips of meat from the vicu?as that died. Occasionally he went down to a fair in the valleys to trade potatoes and ullucos for salt and a little sack of coca. Once some shepherds from the community came up to the reserve. They stayed in Pedrito Tinoco's shelter and gave him the news from Auquipata. He listened very attentively, trying to remember the things and people they were talking about. The place they came from was a blurred dream. The shepherds stirred forgotten depths in his memory, fleeting images, traces of another world, of a person he no longer was. And he could not understand what they meant by the turmoil, the curse that had fallen on the land, the people being killed.
The night before that dawn, there was a hailstorm. These storms always took a few young vicu?as. 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 se?ores. 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 vicu?as.
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 vicu?as 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 vicu?as. 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 vicu?as. 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 vicu?as, 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 vicu?as.'
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 awhile, 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 vicu?as. 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 vicu?as. '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 se?ores. 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 vicu?as. 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 vicu?as 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?'
Carre?o, 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, Carre?o. That's your name, isn't it? The fat man called you Carre?ito.'
'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, Carre?ito?'
'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.'
'So nowadays they call it trembling?' Lituma joked. 'It used to be known as getting horny. You're right, there's nothing out there, it's just my nerves. You know, I was getting a hard-on listening to you, and that sound put it right back to sleep.'
'He wasn't even really hitting me,' the woman murmured, and Carre?o gave a start. He thought she was smiling, because he could see the gleam of her teeth. 'He cursed, and I begged and cried, and you thought he was beating me. Didn't you know it was just to get excited, to get him excited? You're such a baby, Carre?ito.'
'Shut up or I'll throw you off the truck,' he interrupted, filled with indignation.
'You should've said, "Shut up or I'll kick your ass," "Shut up or I'll beat you to a pulp,"' said Lituma. 'That would've been pretty funny, Tomasito.'
'That's what she said, Corporal. And we both burst out laughing. And then neither of us could stop. We'd get serious for a minute and then begin laughing again.'
'Yes, it would've been funny if I hit you,' the boy acknowledged. 'And I admit, I want to sometimes when you start putting me down for trying to help you. Let me tell you something. I don't know what's going to happen to me now.'