Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa Read Free Book Online

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 vicuña 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