“Where is it?”
“Not far in miles,” says Professor Ubilluz. “Close, if you look on the map. But it might as well be on the moon if you want to get there from Jauja.” Years later, during Belaúnde’s government, they put in a highway that went one fourth of the way. Before, one could only get there on foot, over the peaks, down the gorges and slopes that meet the jungle.
Is there any way I can get there? Of course not, it’s been a battleground for a year now, at least. And, rumor has it, a huge cemetery. They say that more people have died there than in all the rest of Peru. I will not, therefore, be able to visit some key places in Mayta’s story; my investigation will be cut short. Besides, even if I could slip through the army and guerrilla lines, I wouldn’t learn much. In Jauja, everybody is sure that both Chunán and Ricrán have disappeared. Yes, yes, Professor Ubilluz has it from a good source. Chunán six months ago, more or less. It was an insurgent stronghold, and it seems they even had an antiaircraft gun. That’s why the air force wiped out Chunán with napalm — even the ants were killed.
There was another massacre at Ricrán, maybe two months ago. We never did find out what really happened. The people from Ricrán had captured a guerrilla detachment and, some said, they had lynched them for having eaten their crops and their animals. Other people said that they turned the rebels over to the army, which shot them in the plaza, up against the church wall. Then a revenge squad came to Ricrán and did a number five on them. Did I know what a number five was? No. Count off: one, two, three, four, you — outside! Every fifth person was hacked, stoned, or stabbed right there in the same plaza. Now there is no more Ricrán. The survivors are here in Jauja in that immigrant zone that sprang up on the north side, either here or wandering in the jungle. I shouldn’t have any illusions about what was going on. The professor takes a sip and picks up the thread of our conversation.
“Getting to Uchubamba was for tough guys, unafraid of snow or avalanches,” he says. For people without the varicose veins this old man has now. “I was strong and could take it then, and I got there once. A sight you can’t imagine, when you see the Andes turn into jungle, covered with vegetation, animals, mist. Ruins everywhere. Uchubamba, that’s the place. Don’t you remember it? Damn! Well, the members of the Uchubamba commune set all of Peru talking.”
No, the name means nothing to me. But I do remember very well the phenomenon Professor Ubilluz has evoked, as I warm the glass of pisco he’s just served me (a pisco called Devil of the Andes, a remnant of better days, when, he says, you could buy anything in the local shops, before this rationing that’s starving us to death and killing us with thirst). Although a complete surprise to official, urban, coastal Peru, about halfway through the fifties, expropriations of land began to take place in different parts of the southern and central mountains. I was in Paris, and I, along with a group of café revolutionaries, avidly followed those remote events, which were succinctly reported in Le Monde, from which we in our imagination reconstructed the exciting spectacle: armed with sticks, slings, rocks, with their elderly, their women and children, and their animals in front, they would move, at dawn or at midnight, en masse to the neighboring lands. They felt, no doubt rightly so, that they had been dispossessed from those lands by the feudal lord, or his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, or the great-grandson of the feudal lord, so they dug up the property markers and returned the land to the commune. They branded the animals with their mark, they set up their houses, and next day they began to work the land as their own.
“Is this the beginning?” we asked ourselves, openmouthed and euphoric. “Is the volcano finally reawakening?” Perhaps that really was the beginning. In the Paris bistros, under the whispering chestnut trees, we deduced, on the basis of four lines in Le Monde, that those seizures were the work of revolutionaries, new narodniks, who had gone out to the country to persuade the Indians to carry out the agrarian reform that for years every government had promised and none had implemented. Later we found out that the takeovers were not the work of agitators sent by the Communist Party or the Trotskyist groups, that their origin was not even political. They sprang up spontaneously from the peasant masses, who, spurred on by the immemorial abuse under which they lived, by their hunger for land, and, to some degree, by the heated-up atmosphere of slogans and proclamations in favor of social justice that prevailed in Peru then — after the collapse of the Odría dictatorship — decided one day to take action. Uchubamba? Names of other communities — those that took over lands and were kicked out again, bearing their dead and wounded, or still others, which managed to keep the land — whirl around in my memory: Algolán, in Cerro de Pasco; the Valle de la Convención communities, in Cuzco. But Uchubamba, in Junín?
“Yes, sir,” said Vallejos, exultant that he could surprise him that much. “Indians with light skin and blue eyes, more gringo than either of us.”
“First, the Incas conquered them and made them work under the aegis of the Quipumayocs of Cuzco,” lectured Shorty Ubilluz. “Later the Spaniards took away their best lands and made them go up to work in the mines. That is, to die in the mines after a little while, with their lungs turned to sieves. The ones that were left in Uchubamba they gave over for ‘Christianizing’ to the Peláez Rioja family, who bled them dry for three centuries.”
“But, you see, they couldn’t finish them off,” concluded Vallejos.
They had left Ubilluz’s house to take a walk, and they were sitting on a bench in the Plaza de Armas. Over their heads, they had a marvelous silence and thousands of stars. Mayta forgot the cold and the mountain sickness. He was in a state of exaltation. He was trying to remember the great peasant uprisings: Túpac Amaru, Juan Bustamante, and Atusparia. And so, though the centuries passed, and they went on being exploited and humiliated, the communities of Uchubamba had gone on dreaming about the lands they had lost and had gone on asking to have them returned. First, they asked the snakes and the birds. Later, the Blessed Virgin and the saints. After that, they asked all the courts in the region, in lawsuits they always lost. But now, just a few months or weeks ago, if what he had heard was true, they had taken the decisive step. One fine day, they had simply moved onto the lands with their hogs, their dogs, their burros, and their horses, saying, “We want what is rightfully ours.” All that had happened, and you, Mayta, didn’t you know about it?
“Not a single word,” Mayta said softly, rubbing his arms, goose-bumpy from the cold. “Not even a rumor. In Lima, we knew nothing about it.”
He spoke while gazing at the sky, amazed at the brightness of the stars in that jet-black, sparkling dome, and by the images that what he was learning called forth in his mind. Ubilluz offered him a cigarette, and the lieutenant lit it for him.
“It happened just as I’m telling you,” affirmed Vallejos. “They took over the Aína ranch, and the government had to send the Guardia Civil to get them out. The company that left Huancayo took a week to get to Uchubamba. They got them out, but only by resorting to shooting. Several dead and wounded, of course. But the community is still stirred up and unsettled. Now they know what they have to do.”