The boy was perspiring and had trouble breathing. A truck roared down the highway, and for a moment its yellowish lights illuminated the dead leaves and tree trunks, the stones and mud in the ditch at the side of the road. When it was dark again, the little glowing lights returned. Tomás had never seen fireflies before, and he thought of them as tiny flying lanterns. If only Fats Iscariote were with him. Talking and joking, listening to him describe the great meals he had eaten, passing the time, he wouldn't hear what he was hearing, wouldn't imagine what he was imagining.
'And now I'm going to ram this tool all the way up to your eyeballs,' the man purred, insane with joy. 'And make you scream like your mother did when she gave birth to you.'
Lituma thought he could hear Hog's slow little snicker, the laugh of a man on whom life has smiled, a man who always gets what he wants. He could imagine him with no problem, but not her; she was a shape without a face, a silhouette that never quite solidified.
'If Iscariote had been with me, talking to me, I would have forgotten about what was going on in the house,' said Tomás. 'But Fats was watching the road, and I knew that nothing would make him leave his post, that he'd be there all night dreaming about food.'
The woman cried out again, and this time she did not stop weeping. Could those muffled sounds be kicks?
'For the love of God,' she begged.
'And then I realized I was holding the revolver in my hand,' said the boy, lowering his voice as if someone might hear him. 'I had taken it out of the holster and was playing with it, fiddling with the trigger, spinning the barrel. Without even knowing it, Corporal, I swear.'
Lituma turned on his side to look at him. In the cot next to his, Tomasito's barely visible profile was softened by the faint light of the stars and moon shining through the window.
'What were you going to do, you poor bastard?'
He had climbed the wooden steps on tiptoe and very quietly pushed at the front door until he felt resistance from the bar. It was as if his hands and feet were no longer controlled by his head. 'No more, Daddy,' the woman begged monotonously. Blows fell from time to time, and now the boy could hear Hog's heavy breathing. There was no bolt on the door. He just leaned against it and it began to give way: the creaking was lost in the sound of blows and pleading. When it opened wide with a sharp cracking sound, the wailing and beating stopped and somebody cursed. In the semidarkness Tomás saw the naked man turn around, swearing. A small lantern hung from a nail in the wall, making crazed shadows. The man was enveloped in mosquito netting, pawing at it, trying to get free, and Tomás looked into the woman's frightened eyes.
'Don't hit her anymore, se?or,' he implored. 'I won't permit it.'
'You said a dumb thing like that to him?' Lituma mocked. 'And to top it off, you called him se?or?'
'I don't think he heard me,' said the boy. 'Maybe nothing came out of my mouth, maybe I was talking to myself.'
The man found what he was looking for, and in a half-sitting position, still wrapped in mosquito netting and held back by the woman, he took aim, growling curses as if to encourage himself. It seemed to Tomás that shots were fired before he squeezed the trigger, but no, it was his gun that fired first. He heard the man howl at the same time that he saw him fall backward, dropping the pistol, cringing. The boy took two steps toward the bed. Half of Hog's body had slipped off the far side. His legs were still crossed on top of the sheet. He wasn't moving. He wasn't the one who was screaming, it was the woman.
'Don't kill me! Don't kill me!' she shrieked in terror, covering her face, twisting around, shielding her body with her arms and legs.
'What are you saying, Tomasito?' Lituma was stunned. 'Do you mean you shot him?'
'Shut up!' the boy commanded. Now he could breathe. The tumult in his chest had quieted. The man's legs slid to the floor, dragging down part of the mosquito netting. He heard him groan very quietly.
'You mean you killed him?' Lituma insisted. He leaned on one elbow, still trying to see his adjutant's face in the darkness.
'But aren't you one of the bodyguards?' The woman stared at him, blinking, uncomprehending. Now there was utter confusion in her eyes as well as animal fear. 'Why'd you do it?'
She was trying to cover herself, crouching over, raising a bloodstained blanket. She showed it to him, accusing him.
'I couldn't take it anymore,' Tomasito said. 'I couldn't stand him hitting you and enjoying it like that. He almost killed you.'
'I'll be damned,' Lituma exclaimed, bursting into laughter.
'What? What did you say?' The woman was recovering from the shock, and her voice was firmer. Tomás saw her scramble off the bed, saw her stumble, saw her silhouette redden for a moment as she passed beneath the light, saw her, in control of herself now and full of energy, begin to pull on clothes she picked up from the floor, talking all the while: 'That's why you shot him? Because he was hitting me? Since when is that any of your business? Just tell me that. Who do you think you are? Who asked you to take care of me? Just tell me that.'
Before he could answer, Tomás heard Iscariote running and calling in a bewildered voice: 'Carre?o? Carre?ito?' The stairs shook as he pounded up them, and the door opened wide. There he was, shaped like a barrel, filling up the doorway. He looked at him, looked at the woman, at the rumpled bed, at the blanket, at the fallen mosquito netting. He was holding a revolver in his hand, shifting heavily from one foot to the other.
'I don't know,' murmured the boy, struggling against the mineral substance his tongue had become. The partially obscured body was moving on the wooden floor. But not groaning anymore.
'You whore, what's going on?' Fats Iscariote was panting, his eyes bulging like a grasshopper's. 'What happened, Carre?ito?'
The woman had finished dressing and was slipping on her shoes, moving first one leg, then the other. As if it were a dream, Tomás recognized the flowered white dress she had worn that afternoon when he saw her get off the Lima plane in the Tingo María airport, where he and Iscariote had gone to meet her and take her back to Hog.
'Ask him what happened.' Her eyes flashed and she moved her hand, pointing at the man on the floor, at him, at the man again.
'She was so angry I thought she was going to come at me and scratch my eyes out,' said the boy. His voice had sweetened.
'You killed the boss, Carre?o?' The fat man was dumbfounded. 'You killed him?'
'Yes, yes,' screamed the woman, beside herself. 'And now what's going to happen to us?'
'Damn,' Fats Iscariote said over and over again, like a robot. He didn't stop blinking.
'I don't think he's dead,' stammered the boy. 'I saw him move.'
'But why, Carre?ito?' The fat man leaned over to look at the body. He straightened up immediately and stepped back in dismay. 'What did he do to you? Why?'
'He was hitting her. He was going to kill her. Just for fun. I got mad, Fats, I really lost it. I couldn't take all that shit.'
Iscariote's moon face turned toward him, and he scrutinized him, craning his neck as if he wanted to smell him too, even lick him. He opened his mouth but said nothing. He looked at the woman, he looked at Tomás, and sweated and panted.
'And that's why you killed him?' he finally said, shaking his curly head back and forth as mindlessly as one of the giant heads at Carnival.
'That's why! That's why!' the woman cried hysterically. 'And now what's going to happen to us, damn it!'
'You killed him for having a little fun with his whore?' Fats Iscariote's eyes shifted back and forth in their sockets as if they were made of quicksilver. 'Do you have any idea what you've done, you poor bastard?'
'I don't know what came over me. Don't worry, it's not your fault. I'll explain it to my godfather, Fats.'
'Stupid fucking amateur.' Iscariote held his head. 'You moron. What the hell do you think men do with whores, you prick?'
'The police will come, there'll be an investigation,' said the woman. 'I didn't have anything to do with it. I've got to get out of here.'
'But she couldn't move,' the boy recalled, his honeyed voice becoming even sweeter, and Lituma thought: 'You mean you'd already fallen for her, Tomasito.' 'She took a few steps toward the door but stopped and came back, as if she didn't know what to do. Poor thing, she was scared to death.'
The boy felt Iscariote's hand on his arm. He was looking at him regretfully, compassionately, not angry anymore. He spoke with great resolve:
'You better disappear, and don't show your face at your godfather's, compadre. He'll shoot you full of holes, who knows what he'll do. Go on, make yourself scarce, and let's hope they don't find you. I always knew this wasn't the job for you. Didn't I tell you that the first time we met?'
'A real friend,' the boy explained to Lituma. 'What I did could've gotten him in hot water, too. And still he helped me get away. A huge fat man, a face as round as a cheese, a belly like a tire. I wonder what's happened to him?'
He held out a plump, friendly hand. Tomás clasped it firmly. Thanks, Fats. The woman, down on one knee, was searching through the clothes of the man who lay motionless on the floor.
'You're not telling me everything, Tomasito,' Lituma interrupted.
'I don't have a cent, I don't know where to go,' the boy heard the woman saying to Iscariote as he went out into the warm breeze that made the shrubs and tree branches creak. 'I don't have a cent. I don't know what to do. I'm not stealing.'
He broke into a run, heading for the highway, but slowed to a walk after a few meters. Where would he go? He was still holding the revolver. He put it back in the holster, which was attached to his belt and concealed by his shirt. There were no cars in sight, and the lights of Tingo María seemed very far away.
'Believe it or not, Corporal, I felt calm, relieved,' said the boy. 'Like when you wake up and realize the nightmare was only a nightmare.'
'But why are you keeping the best part to yourself, Tomasito?' Lituma laughed again.
Along with the sounds of the insects and the woods, the boy heard the woman's hurried steps trying to catch up with him. He felt her beside him.
'But I'm not hiding anything, Corporal. That's the whole truth. That's exactly how it happened.'
'He didn't let me take a cent,' she complained. 'That fat shit. I wasn't stealing, just borrowing enough to get to Lima. I don't have a cent. I don't know what I'm going to do.'
'I don't know what I'm going to do either,' said Tomás.
They stumbled on the winding little path covered with dead leaves, slipped in the ruts made by the rain, felt the brush of leaves and spiderwebs on their faces and arms.
'Who told you to butt in?' The woman immediately lowered her voice, as if regretting her remark. But a moment later she went on berating him, although in a more restrained way. 'Who made you my bodyguard, who asked you to protect me? Did I? You fucked up and you fucked me up too, and I didn't even do anything.'
'From what you're telling me, you were already hot for her that night,' Lituma declared. 'You didn't pull out your revolver and shoot him because the stuff he was doing made you sick. Admit that you were jealous. You didn't tell me the most important part, Tomasito.'
2
'All those deaths just slide right off the mountain people,' Lituma thought. The night before, in Dionisio's cantina, he had heard the news of the attack on the Andahuaylas bus, and not one of the laborers who were eating and drinking there had a single thing to say. 'I'll never figure out what the fuck's going on here,' he thought. Those three missing men hadn't run away from their families, and they hadn't stolen any machinery from camp. They had gone to join the terruco militia. Or the terrucos had murdered them and buried the bodies in some hollow in the hills. But if the Senderistas were already here and had accomplices among the laborers, why hadn't they attacked the post yet? Why hadn't they put him and Tomasito on trial? Maybe they were just sadists who wanted to break their nerve before they blew them to bits with dynamite. They wouldn't even have time to pull their revolvers from under their pillows, let alone get the rifles out of the wardrobe. They would sneak up and surround the shack while they slept the nightmare-ridden sleep they had every night, or while Tomás was recalling his love affair and using Lituma's shoulder to cry on. A deafening noise, the flash of powder, night turned into day: they'd blow off their hands and legs and heads all at the same time. Drawn and quartered like Tupac Amarú, compadre. It could happen any time, maybe tonight. And in Dionisio and the witch's cantina, the serruchos would put on the same innocent faces they put on last night when they heard about the Andahuaylas bus.
He sighed and loosened his kepi. This was the time of day when the mute used to wash their clothes, there, a few meters away, just like the Indian women: beating each article against a rock and wringing it out carefully in the washtub. He worked very conscientiously, soaping shirts and underwear over and over again. Then he would spread the clothes on the rocks with the same meticulous diligence he brought to everything, his body and soul concentrated on the task. When his eyes happened to meet the corporal's, he would stand erect, rigid and alert, waiting for orders. And he bowed all day long. What could the terrucos have done with that poor innocent?
The corporal had just spent two hours making the same obligatory rounds – engineer, foremen, paymasters, crew bosses, co-workers on the shift – that he had made following the other disappearances. With the same result. Nobody knew much about Demetrio Chanca's life, of course. And even less about his current whereabouts, of course. Now his wife had disappeared, too. Just like the woman who came to report the disappearance of the albino Casimiro Huarcaya. Nobody knew where they had gone, or when or why they had left Naccos.
'Don't you think these disappearances are strange?'
'Yes, very strange.'
'It makes you think, doesn't it?'
'Yes, it makes you think.'
'Maybe it was the spirits who took them away?'
'Of course not, Corporal, who could believe anything like that?'
'And why would the two women disappear, too?'
'Who knows?'
Were they making fun of him? Sometimes he thought that behind those blank faces, those monosyllables spoken reluctantly, as if they were doing him a favor, those opaque, suspicious, narrow eyes, the serruchos were laughing at him for being a coastal man lost up here in the barrens, for the discomfort the altitude still produced in him, for his inability to solve these cases. Or were they dying of fear? A panicked, raw fear of the terrucos. That might be the explanation. Considering everything that was happening every day, all around them, how was it possible he had never heard a single remark about Sendero Luminoso? As if it did not exist, as if there were no bombings, no killings. 'What people,' he thought. He hadn't been able to make a single friend among the laborers even though he had spent so many months with them, even though he had already moved the post twice to follow the camp. None of that mattered. They treated him as if he came from Mars. In the distance he saw Tomás walking toward him. He had been making inquiries among the campesinos from the Indian community, and the work crew that was opening a tunnel a kilometer from Naccos on the way to Huancayo.
'So?' he asked, certain he would see him run his finger along his throat.
'I found out something,' said the guard, sitting down beside him on one of the rocks that dotted the hillside. They were on a headland, halfway between the post and the camp that sprawled along the gorge where the new highway would be located if it was ever completed. They said that Naccos had once been a bustling mining town. Now it would not even exist except for the highway construction. The midday air was warm, and a blinding sun shone in a sky filled with fat, cottony clouds. 'That foreman had a fight with the witch a few nights ago.'
The witch was Se?ora Adriana, Dionisio's wife. Fortyish, fiftyish, ageless, she spent her nights in the cantina, helping her husband serve a steady flow of drinks, and if the stories about her were true, she came from the vicinity of Parcasbamba on the other side of the Mantaro River, a region that was half sierra and half jungle. During the day she cooked for some of the laborers, and at night she told their fortunes, reading cards or astrological charts or their palms, or tossing coca leaves into the air and interpreting the shapes they made when they fell. She had large, prominent, burning eyes, and her ample hips swayed as she walked. Apparently she had once been a formidable woman, and there was endless speculation about her past. They said she had been the wife of a big-nosed miner and even had killed a vampire, what the serranos called a pishtaco. Lituma suspected that in addition to being a cook and a fortune-teller, she was something else at night as well.
'Don't tell me the witch turned out to be a terruca, Tomasito.'
'Demetrio Chanca had her throw the coca leaves for him. I guess he didn't like what she saw, because he wouldn't pay her. They got into a shouting match. Do?a Adriana was really mad and tried to scratch him. An eyewitness told me about it.'
'And to get back at the cheapskate, the witch waved her magic wand and made him disappear.' Lituma sighed. 'Have you questioned her?'
'I made an appointment with her up here, Corporal.'
Lituma didn't think he knew who Demetrio Chanca was. He did have some vague knowledge of the albino because the face in the photograph left with them by the woman who made the complaint reminded him of someone he had once exchanged a few words with at Dionisio's. But the first one, Pedrito Tinoco, had lived in the shack with them, and the corporal couldn't get him out of his mind. Carre?o had found him begging in the barrens, and brought him to work at the post for meals and tips. He had turned out to be very useful. He had helped them reinforce the roof beam, secure the corrugated sheets, nail up the partition that had collapsed, and erect the barricade of sacks as protection in the event of attack. Until one fine day they sent him down for beer and he disappeared without a trace. 'That's how this fucking thing began,' Lituma thought. How was it going to end?
'Here comes Do?a Adriana,' his adjutant informed him.
At a distance her figure was partially dissolved by the white light. The sun, reverberating on the tin roofs below, made the camp look like a string of ponds, a broken mirror. Yes, it was the witch. She was panting slightly by the time she reached them, and responded to their greetings with an indifferent nod, not moving her lips. Her big maternal bosom rose and fell rhythmically, and her large eyes observed the corporal and the guard without blinking. There was no trace of uneasiness in that stare, whose intensity was troubling. For some reason she and her drunken husband always made Lituma uncomfortable.
'Thank you for coming, se?ora,' he said. 'As you probably know, there's been a series of disappearances here in Naccos. Three men missing. That's a lot, don't you think?'
She did not answer. Thickset, calm, swimming inside a darned sweater and a wide green skirt fastened by a large buckle, she seemed very sure of herself, or of her powers. Standing solidly in the man's shoes she wore, she waited, her expression unchanging. Could she have been the great beauty they said? Difficult to imagine when you saw this awful-looking hag.
'We asked you to come so you could tell us about the fight you had the other night with Demetrio Chanca. The foreman who's also disappeared.'
The woman nodded. She had a round, sour face and a mouth like a scar. Her features were Indian but she had white skin and very light eyes, like the Arabic women Lituma had once seen in the interior of Ayacucho, galloping like the wind on the backs of small, shaggy horses. Did she really whore at night?
'I didn't have any fight with him,' she said categorically.
'There are witnesses, se?ora,' the guard Carre?o interrupted. 'You tried to scratch him, don't deny it.'
'I tried to take off his hat so I could get what he owed me,' she corrected him impassively. 'He made me work for nothing, and I don't let anybody get away with that.'
She had a slow, guttural voice, as if gravel rose from the depths of her body to her tongue when she spoke. Back home in the north, in Piura and Talara, Lituma had never believed in witches or magic, but here in the sierra he was not so sure. Why did this woman make him feel apprehensive? What filthy stuff did she and Dionisio do in the cantina with the drunken laborers late at night, when Lituma and his adjutant were in their beds? 'Maybe he didn't like what you read in the coca leaves,' said Tomás.
'In his hand,' the woman corrected him. 'I'm also a palm reader and an astrologer. Except that these Indians don't trust the cards, or the stars, or even their own hands. Just coca.' She swallowed and added: 'And the leaves don't always speak plain.'
The sun was shining directly into her eyes but she did not blink; her eyes were hallucinatory, they overflowed their sockets, and Lituma imagined they could even speak. If she really did what he and Tomás suspected she did at night, the men who mounted her would have to face those eyes in the dark. He couldn't have done it.
'And what did you see in his hand, se?ora?'
'The things that have happened to him,' she answered with great naturalness.
'Did you read in his palm that he was going to disappear?' Lituma examined her in small stages. On his right, Carre?o was craning his neck.
The woman nodded, imperturbable. 'The walk up here made me a little tired,' she murmured. 'I'm going to sit down.'
'Tell us what you told Demetrio Chanca,' Lituma insisted.
Se?ora Adriana snorted. She had sat down on a rock and was fanning herself with the large straw hat she had just taken off. There was no trace of gray in her straight hair, which was pulled back and fastened at the back of her neck with the kind of colored ribbon the Indians fastened to the ears of their llamas.
'I told him what I saw. That he would be sacrificed to appease the evil spirits that cause so much harm in this region. And that he had been chosen because he was impure.'
'Can you tell me why he was impure, Do?a Adriana?'
'Because he changed his name,' the woman explained. 'Changing the name they give you at birth is an act of cowardice.'
'I'm not surprised Demetrio Chanca didn't want to pay you.' Tomasito smiled.
'Who was going to sacrifice him?' asked Lituma.
The woman made a gesture that could have indicated either weariness or contempt. She fanned herself slowly, snorting.
'You want me to say "the terrucos, the Senderistas," don't you?' She snorted again and changed her tone. 'This was out of their hands.'
'Do you expect me to be satisfied with an explanation like that?'
'You ask and I answer,' said the woman calmly. 'That's what I saw in his hand. And it came true. He disappeared, didn't he? Well, they sacrificed him.'
'She must be crazy,' Lituma thought. Se?ora Adriana was snorting like a bellows. With a plump hand she raised the hem of her skirt to her face and blew her nose, revealing thick, pale calves. She blew again with a good deal of noise. In spite of his apprehension, the corporal chuckled: what a way to get rid of snot.
'Were Pedrito Tinoco and the albino Huarcaya sacrificed to the devil, too?'
'I didn't read the cards for them, or see their hands, or cast their charts. Can I go now?'
'Just a minute.' Lituma stopped her.
He took off his kepi and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The round, brilliant sun was in the middle of the sky. This was a northern kind of heat. But in four or five hours the temperature would begin to drop, and by ten o'clock the cold would make your bones creak. Nobody could make sense out of a climate as incomprehensible as the serruchos. He thought again about Pedrito Tinoco. When he had finished washing and rinsing the clothes, he would sit on a rock, not moving, staring into emptiness. He would remain that way, immobile and absorbed, thinking about God knows what, until the clothes were dry. Then he would fold them carefully and bring them to the corporal, bowing. Son of a bitch. Down in the camp, where the tin roofs gleamed and sparkled, the laborers moved about. Like ants. The ones who weren't blasting the tunnel or shoveling dirt were on their break now, eating their cold lunches.
'I'm trying to do my job, Do?a Adriana,' he said suddenly, surprised at the tone of confidentiality. 'Three men have disappeared. Their relatives came to file a report. The terrorists may have killed them. Or forced them into their militia. Or taken them hostage. We have to find out what happened. That's why we're in Naccos. That's why this Civil Guard post is here. What else do you think it's for?'
Tomás had picked up some pebbles from the ground and was aiming them at the sacks of their fortification. When he hit the target, there was a tiny clanking noise.
'Are you accusing me of something? Is it my fault there are terrorists in the Andes?'
'You're one of the last people who saw Demetrio Chanca. You had an argument with him. What's this about him changing his name? Just give us a clue. Is that too much to ask?'
The woman snorted again with a stony sound. 'I told you what I know. But you don't believe anything you hear, you think it's all fairy tales.' She looked directly into Lituma's face, and he felt her eyes accusing him. 'Do you believe anything I told you?'
'I'm trying to, se?ora. Some people believe in the supernatural and some people don't. That doesn't matter now. I only want to find out what happened to the three men. Is Sendero Luminoso in Naccos? It's better if I know. What happened to those three could happen to anybody. Even you and your husband, Do?a Adriana. Haven't you heard that the terrucos punish corruption? That they whip parasites? Imagine what they'd do to you and Dionisio, who get people drunk for a living. We're here to protect you, too.'
Se?ora Adriana gave a mocking little smile. 'If they want to kill us, nobody can stop them.' Her voice was quiet. 'The same is true, of course, if they want to execute the two of you. You know I'm right, Corporal. As far as that goes, we're exactly the same: it's a miracle we're all still alive.'
