They were following them along the line of the ridge, and even though Mayta from time to time thought they had left them behind, they always reappeared. He’d already changed clips a couple of times. He didn’t feel ill; cold, yes, but his body was holding up well under the tremendous strain of running at this altitude. Why hasn’t anyone been wounded? he thought. After all, the guards had taken lots of shots at them. It’s that the guards are being cautious, they barely stick out their heads and take potshots, just to do their duty, without pausing to aim, afraid of being easy targets for the rebels. It seemed like a game, a noisy but inoffensive ritual. Would it last until dark? Could they slip away from the guards? It seemed impossible that night would ever come, that this clear sky would ever darken. He didn’t feel discouraged. Without arrogance, without even feeling sorry for himself, he thought: Rightly or wrongly, Mayta, you’re doing just what you always wanted to do.
“Get ready, don Eugenio. Let’s run. They’re covering us.”
“You go on without me, my legs have given out,” said the justice of the peace very slowly. “I’ll stay behind. Take this, too.”
Instead of handing it to him, don Eugenio threw him the revolver, which Mayta had to bend over to pick up. The justice of the peace was sitting down, with his legs spread apart. He was perspiring copiously and his mouth was twisted into an anxious grimace, as if he’d been left without air to breathe. His posture and his expression were those of a man who’s reached the limits of his resistance, who’s been rendered indifferent by exhaustion. Mayta understood there was no point in arguing with him.
“Good luck, don Eugenio,” he said, starting to run. He quickly crossed the thirty or forty yards that separated him from Vallejos and Perico Temoche and didn’t hear a single shot. When he reached them, they were on their knees, firing. He tried to explain what had happened to the justice of the peace, but he was gasping so furiously that he couldn’t get the words out. He tried to fire from the ground, but couldn’t. His weapon was jammed. He fired the revolver, the three final rounds, with the feeling that he was doing it for fun. The wall was very close and there was a line of rifles aimed at them: the enemy caps appeared and disappeared. He heard them shout threats that the wind brought to them quite clearly: “Give up, damn you.” “Give up, motherfuckers.” “Your accomplices have already surrendered.” “Start praying, assholes.” It occurred to him: They’ve got orders to take us alive. That’s why no one’s wounded. They were only firing to scare us. Could it be true that the first group had given up? He was calmer and tried to tell Vallejos about don Eugenio, but the lieutenant cut him off with an energetic gesture. “Run, I’ll cover you.”
Mayta realized, from his voice and face, that this time he was really alarmed. “Quickly, this is a bad spot, they’re cutting us off. Run, run.” And he gave him a pat on the back.
Perico Temoche began to run. Mayta got up and ran, too, hearing the shots whistle by him. But he didn’t stop. Gasping, feeling ice piercing his muscles, his bones, his very blood vessels, he kept on running, and even though he tripped and fell twice and once lost the revolver he held in his left hand, he got right up both times and went on, making a superhuman effort. Until his legs gave out and he fell to his knees. He huddled on the ground.
“We’ve gotten ahead of them,” he heard Perico Temoche say. And an instant later: “Where’s Vallejos? Do you see him?” There was a long pause, with gasps. “Mayta, Mayta, I think those motherfuckers have got him.”
Through the sweat that clouded his vision, he saw that down there where the lieutenant had remained to cover them — they’d run about two hundred yards — there were some greenish silhouettes moving about.
“Let’s run, come on,” he said, panting, trying to stand up. But neither his arms nor his legs would move. Then he bellowed, “Run, Perico. I’ll cover you. Run, run.”
“They brought Vallejos in at night, I saw him myself, didn’t all of you?” says the justice of the peace. The two old folks with us in the gazebo confirm what he says by nodding. Don Eugenio points again to the little house with the shield on it, the government office. “I saw it from there. They put us prisoners in that room with the balcony. They brought him in on a horse, wrapped in a blanket they could barely pull off him because it stuck to the blood pouring out of all his wounds. He was very dead when they brought him into Quero.”
I listen to him ramble on about who killed Vallejos and how. It’s a story I’ve heard many times from so many people, both in Jauja and in Lima, that I know no one can tell me what I don’t already know. The former justice of the peace for Quero will not help me determine which among all the hypotheses is the correct one. That Vallejos died in the exchange of fire between the insurgents and the Civil Guards. That he was only wounded and Lieutenant Dongo finished him off, to avenge the humiliation Vallejos inflicted when he captured his police station and locked him up in his own jail. That he wasn’t wounded when they captured him, and was executed on orders from above, out there in the Huayjaco flatlands, to set an example to officers with revolutionary fancies. The justice of the peace recites all these hypotheses and — with his usual prudence — intimates that he accepts the thesis that Vallejos was executed by Lieutenant Dongo.
Personal vengeance, the confrontation between the idealist and the conformist, the rebel and authority: these are images that correspond to the romantic appetites of our people. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that they can’t be true. The fact is that this part of the story — under what circumstances Vallejos died — will never be cleared up. We won’t even know how many times he was shot: there was no autopsy, and the death certificate doesn’t say a thing. The witnesses give the most disparate accounts: from a single shot in the back of the neck to a body turned into a sieve. All we know is that he was dead when they brought him into Quero tied to a horse, that from here they brought him to Jauja, and that his family took him back to Lima the next day. He was buried in the old cemetery in Surco. It’s not used anymore; the old headstones are in ruins, and the paths are covered with weeds. Around the lieutenant’s tomb, which gives only his name and the date of his death, there is a thick crop of wild grass.
“And did you see Mayta when they brought him in, don Eugenio?”
Mayta, who never took his eyes off the guards gathered around down below, where Vallejos was, began to catch his breath, to come back to life. He was still on the ground, pointing at nothing in particular with his jammed sub-machine gun. He tried not to think about Vallejos, about what could have happened to him, but about recovering his strength, getting to his feet, and catching up to Perico Temoche. Taking deep breaths, he sat upright, and then, almost bent double, he ran, without knowing if he was being shot at, without knowing where he was going, until he finally had to stop. He threw himself on the ground with his eyes closed, waiting for the bullets to pierce his body. You are going to die, Mayta. This is what it is to be dead.