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

vicuñas.
    A family was hired to tend the flocks when the vicuñas began to be transported to an altiplano half-hidden in the mountains between the Tambo Quemado and San Juan Rivers, a day’s travel from the community’s center. It had ichu grass, ponds, little streams, caves in the hills, and the vicuñas soon became attached to the place. Trucks brought them from distant regions in the Cordillera to the spot where the road forked toward San Juan, Lucanas, and Puquio, and from there they were taken up to the altiplano by Auquipatan shepherds. Pedrito Tinoco went to live with them. He helped them build a shelter and plant a potato field and construct a pen for guinea pigs. They had been told that the authorities would periodically bring provisions and furniture for their shack, and pay them a salary. And, in fact, from time to time some official would show up in a red van, ask questions, and give them money or food. Then they stopped coming. And so much time went by without anyone visiting the reserve that one day the caretakers tied their belongings into bundles and returned to Auquipata. Pedrito Tinoco stayed with the vicuñas.
    He had established a more intimate relationship with these delicate creatures than he ever had with anyone of his own species. With a dazed, almost mystical attention, he spent the days observing them, learning their habits, their movements, their games, their manias, doubling over with laughter when he saw them chase each other, bite each other, frolic with each other in the dried grass, growing sad when one of them lost its footing on a precipice and broke its legs, or a female bled to death during a difficult birth. Like the Abancayans and the Auquipata comuneros, the vicuñas adopted him, too. They viewed him as a kindly, familiar figure. They let him approach without starting away, and sometimes the more affectionate ones would stretch out their necks, asking him with their intelligent eyes to pull their ears, scratch their backs and bellies, or rub their noses, which was the thing they liked best. Even the males in mating season, when they turned surly and would not permit anyone near their band of four or five concubines, allowed Pedrito to play with the females, though they did keep their great eyes on him, ready to intervene in case of danger.
    Once some outsiders came to the reserve. They were from far away, they did not speak Quechua or Spanish but made sounds that were as strange to Pedrito Tinoco as their boots, scarves, helmets, and hats. They took photographs and went on long hikes, studying the vicuñas. But despite Pedrito’s best efforts, the animals would not allow them to approach. He put the strangers up in his shelter and waited on them. When they left, they gave him some canned food and a little money.
    These visits were the only anomalies in Pedrito Tinoco’s life, composed of daily routines that followed natural rhythms and events: rains and hailstorms in the afternoon and at night, the harsh sun in the morning. He set traps for vizcachas, but for the most part he ate potatoes from his small field, and occasionally killed and cooked a guinea pig. And he salted and sun-dried strips of meat from the vicuñas that died. Occasionally he went down to a fair in the valleys to trade potatoes and ullucos for salt and a little sack of coca. Once some shepherds from the community came up to the reserve. They stayed in Pedrito Tinoco’s shelter and gave him the news from Auquipata. He listened very attentively, trying to remember the things and people they were talking about. The place they came from was a blurred dream. The shepherds stirred forgotten depths in his memory, fleeting images, traces of another world, of a person he no longer was. And he could not understand what they meant by the turmoil, the curse that had fallen on the land, the people being killed.
    The night before that dawn, there was a hailstorm. These storms always took a few young