“I asked them if they were going hunting,” don Eugenio says. “Because this is not a good season for deer hunting, lieutenant.”
“We’re just going to do a little target practice, doctor,” he says Vallejos told him. Up on the pampa.
“Wasn’t it perfectly normal for some boys from the Colegio San José to come here for training?” don Eugenio asks himself. “Weren’t they taking military training courses? Wasn’t the lieutenant a soldier? The explanation seemed more than satisfactory to me.”
“I’ll tell you something. Until we got here, I hadn’t given up hope.”
“That the Ricrán guys would be waiting for us with horses?” Vallejos smiled.
“And Shorty Ubilluz, too, with the miners,” confessed Mayta. “I still had my hopes.”
He looked over Quero’s small, green plaza a couple of times, as if trying to make the missing men appear by an act of will. His brow was furrowed and his mouth trembled. A bit farther on, Condori and Zenón Gonzales were talking with some people from the community. The joeboys stayed by the truck, keeping an eye on the Mausers.
“A real knife in the back,” he added, in a barely audible voice.
“Unless some accident held them up on the highway,” said the justice of the peace, standing next to him.
“There was no accident. They aren’t here because they didn’t want to be here,” said Mayta. “What else could you expect? Why waste time feeling sorry about what they’ve done. They didn’t come and that’s that, what’s the big deal?”
“That’s the spirit.” Vallejos clapped him on the back. “Better on our own than in bad company, damn it.”
Mayta made an effort. He’d have to shake off this depression. Let’s get to work, get the horses and mules, buy supplies, get going. Only one idea should be in your head, Mayta: Cross the mountains and get to Uchubamba. There, out of danger, they would be able to recruit men and calmly go over their strategy. On the road, while he was standing in the pickup, his mountain sickness had disappeared. But now, in Quero, as he began to move around, he felt the pressure in his temples again, the same accelerated heart rate, the same dizziness, the same vertigo. He tried to cover it up as he walked through Quero, Vallejos on one side, the justice of the peace on the other, trying to find people who would rent them pack animals. Condori and Zenón Gonzales, who knew people in the village, went to get something to eat and to buy supplies. Cash, of course.
They should have held a meeting here to explain the insurrection to the peasants. But, without even talking it over with Vallejos, he rejected the idea. After this morning’s failure he didn’t want to remind the lieutenant of it. Why was he so depressed? He just couldn’t shake it off. The euphoria he’d felt on the road had kept him from thinking over the day’s events. But now he reviewed their situation again and again: four adults and seven adolescents hell-bent on putting plans into action that fell apart with each step they took. This is defeatism, Mayta, the road to failure. Like a machine, remember. He smiled and tried to show he understood what the justice of the peace and the lady who owned the house where they had stopped were saying in Quechua. You should have learned Quechua instead of French.
“They screwed themselves by staying here so long.” Don Eugenio takes one last drag from the minuscule butt of his cigarette. How long did they stay? At least two hours. They got here around ten and left after twelve.
He really should say, “We left.” Didn’t he go with them? But don Eugenio, eighty years of age and all, commits not the slightest lapse that might even suggest that he was an accomplice of the rebels. We are in the gazebo in the center of the plaza, besieged by an impertinent rain the gray, hunchback clouds pour over the town. An intense, rapid cloudburst, followed by the most beautiful rainbow. When the sky clears, there always remains a light, imperceptible drizzle, the kind we get all the time in Lima, which makes the grass in the Quero plaza glisten.
Little by little, the people who still live there emerge. They appear from out of the houses like unreal figures — Indian women lost under multiple skirts, babies wearing hats, ancient peasants wearing sandals. They come over to say hello to don Eugenio, to embrace him. Some leave after exchanging a few words with him; others remain with us. They listen to him recall that episode of times past, at times nodding slightly; at other times, they interpolate brief comments. But when I try to find out how things are now, they all lapse into an unbreachable silence. Or they lie: they haven’t seen soldiers or guerrillas, and know nothing about the war. As I supposed, there is not a single man or woman of fighting age among them. With his vest buttoned up tight, his wool cap pulled down to his eyes, and with the shoulders of his shiny old jacket too wide for his body, the old justice of the peace of Quero looks like a character out of a book, a gnome who’s lost his way among these Andean peaks. His voice has a metallic quality, as if he were speaking from inside a tunnel.
“Why did they stay so long in Quero?” he asks himself, his thumbs stuck in the buttonholes of his vest. He observes the sky as if the answer were in the clouds. Because they had a hard time getting the pack animals. These people here can’t rent out the animals they need for work just like that. No one wanted to rent, even though they were willing to pay top dollar. Finally they convinced the widow, doña Teofrasia Soto de Almaraz. By the way, what became of doña Teofrasia? There’s a murmur, some remarks in Quechua, and one of the women crosses herself. Ah, she died. In the bombing? So the guerrillas had been here after all. Damn. Had they gone already? Did many die? Why did they put doña Teofrasia’s son on trial?
Thanks to don Eugenio’s marginal comments in Spanish during his conversation in Quechua with the townspeople, I begin sorting out the episode that obliquely reintroduces the present into Mayta’s story. The guerrillas were in Quero and had “meted out justice” to several people, doña Teofrasia’s son among them. But they had already gone their way, when a plane flew over the town, strafing the place. Among the victims was doña Teofrasia, who, when she heard the plane, had gone out to see what it looked like. She died in the doorway of the church.
“What a sad way to go,” comments don Eugenio. She lived right down this street. Hunchbacked and a bit of a witch, according to local gossip. Well, it was she who accepted their offer after letting them plead with her. But her animals were out in the pasture, and it took her more than an hour to round them up. At the same time, they were held up by the food. I told you already, they were hungry, and they ordered lunch over at Gertrudis Sapollacu’s place — she had a little inn and rented rooms.
“So they were sure of themselves.”
“The police almost caught them with bowls of chicken soup in front of them,” don Eugenio agrees.
The chronology is clear enough. Everyone agrees. An hour after things had calmed down, the busload of Civil Guards from Huancayo, commanded by a lieutenant named Silva and a corporal named Lituma, arrived at Jauja. They stopped briefly in the city to get a guide and to pick up Lieutenant Dongo and the guards under his command. The chase began immediately.
“And how is it you went with them, sir,” I ask him point-blank, just to see if I can rattle him.
The lieutenant tried to get him to stay in Quero. Mayta listed the reasons why he should come with them. They needed someone to act as bridge between the city and the country, especially now, after all that had happened. They had to set up auxiliary networks, recruit people, get information. He was the right man for the job. All the arguing was useless. Vallejos’s orders and Mayta’s entreaties were obliterated by the resolve of the diminutive lawyer. No, gentlemen, I’m no fool, I’m not going to wait around here for the police so I can pay the piper. He was going with them whether they liked it or not. The polite exchange of ideas turned into an altercation. The voices of Vallejos and the justice of the peace grew louder, and in the somber room reeking of grease and garlic, Mayta noticed that Condori, Zenón Gonzales, and the joeboys had stopped eating to listen. It was unwise to let the argument turn bitter. They had enough problems already, and there were too few of them for internal squabbles.