friday, may 09, 2008
Death in the Andes - Mario Vargas Llosa
Sometimes, when the enormity of reality is simply too great a burden for the mind to comprehend, literature can serve as a midwife to understanding. It certainly is the case with Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Death in the Andes.The Peruvian writer's effort to distill the sense of helplessness and horror that gripped his country for the better part of two decades due to a bloody and violent Maoist insurgency is an astonishing accomplishment. It's also essential reading for those who did not experience that terrible period firsthand (such as myself) to have any hope of understanding what transpired in the Andean nation in those years.
Beginning in 1980, the Shining Path guerrillas began a civil war in Peru from the highlands. Ardent and hard-line Maoists, their intent was nothing less than to destroy the government of Peru and begin a worldwide people's revolution.
Eventually the military moved in to try and quell the insurgency with methods that were, very often, as vicious as those of the Senderistas. While the majority of the estimated 70,000 deaths committed during the 20-year insurrection were attributable to the Shining Path insurgents the number slain by the Peruvian military forces were a damned close second.
The people who paid the price for this were the native highlanders, the rural population that the Shining Path was allegedly freeing from oppression. As many as 80 percent spoke only Quechua, the native Indian language derived from the tongue of the Incas.
The final report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a ten-volume work that fills a generous bookshelf. It's a seemingly never-ending list of massacres, forced disappearances, human rights violations, terrorist attacks, and violence against women.
Even the single volume version of the report Hatun Willakuy is formidably filled with charts, analysis and thickets of personal testimony. Each and every individual account of the violence is horrific and powerful in and of itself but, as a whole, the sheer scope of what happened deadens the observer before too long. It's simply too big to comprehend.
Which is why Death in the Andes is such an important work. While it may not represent the absolute height of Llosa's skill as a writer, it's one of his most effective efforts nonetheless. His labors impart a subtle sense of foreboding and fear that loomed heavily over the whole of Peru during the time of these terrible events. He gives a glimpse into the vicious cruelty and pain that the conflict wrought on not just their victims but on the whole of Peru.
At one point, the main character describes the rough little town but could very well speak for anyone who lived through the uncertainty during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
"People are really scared, have you noticed? At the cantina, on the job, all the work crews. Even the Indians who haven't left the community yet. There's tension in the atmosphere, like something about to happen... Nobody's nerves can take it. The air's overheated. Don't you feel it?"
Death in the Andes revolves around a Corporal in the Civil Guard, Lituma, stationed in a small mountain village whose sole reason for existence is that it is the base camp for a highway being built across the Andes in Central Peru. The insurgents - known as Senderistas or terrucos - have been active and it seems just a matter of time before they reach the town.
With just one other officer and no real way to get reinforcements, it's not a scenario that puts the corporal much at ease. "I tell you something," he tells his adjutant. "You and I won't get out of here alive. Thy have us surrounded, what's the point of kidding ourselves?"
But when three men - a mute, an albino and a foreman - disappear from the camp he becomes determined to find out what happened to them. The thing pricks at his curiosity more than his conscience, like an itch he cannot scratch.
The dangerous situation they are in leaves plenty of reasonable explanations, no one is demanding justice and his superiors in Lima couldn't care less. In fact, the inquiry is more likely to put him in danger than anything.
And he eventually finds out as does the reader. Llosa shows how the untold history of all three men is ineffably entwined in the terrible saga of blood and violence that has gripped the highlands. There are also authorial asides - vignettes, really - of others ancillary to the narrative itself who are subsumed by the miasma of death that seems to hang over the mountains.
Throughout the Death in the Andes Lituma is repeatedly told tales of the dark folklore and mythology that entwines those who live in the Peruvian Andes. Vampires called pishtacos, birds of evil omens and the ever present Apus - the bloodthirsty spirits of the mountains themselves.
He's skeptical of course but he's also acutely aware of the forces of nature very much present and very close indeed. The early pages are filled with dark clouds and thunderstorms, the latter with earthquakes and landslides. Lituma is much like the whole of Peru during this dark period. Lost, alone and terrified.
At one point, he simply collapses, exhausted, and on the verge of tears; "he laughed at his own clumsiness but really felt like crying. For the disastrous condition of his uniform and the gashes on his hands, but most of all because the world, his life, had become unbearable."
And then, of course, he gets up and keeps going. And the mountain moves against him.
Like Lituma, Llosa leads the reader through this terrible situation by twisting the narrative in odd and unusual forms that skew perspective in a literary manner as well. He confuses the reader and creates sympathy with the character's chaotic understanding of their own world in the book.
Tenses switch back and change at a whim. Narrators suddenly are actors in their own stories. The fabric of the novel's reality creaks and groans until the final chapters where it breaks down almost completely. Almost. And rightfully so. This is a world on the brink of destruction and the characters are fearfully peering over the edge every page.
Still, Llosa's sure authorial grip on the structure of the work leads you through the increasing complexities of their plights. You can at least trust the author, the characters don't even have that much.
The truth is what Lituma wants most is to understand. He want's to be able to put things into some reasonable perspective. The problem is that isn't possible. "We make a mistake when we tray and understand these killings with our minds," one character warns. "They have no rational explanation."
In the case of the Sendero Luminoso, explanations are irrelivant. As zealots and they are immune to reason as any who are overly enraptured with a twisted quasi-religious ideology.
"They hear but they don't listen and they don't want to understand what you say to them," says one character. "They are from another planet."
Their speech is highlighted with political jargon and their actions are filled with their love for violence and bloodshed.
"A bourgeois peace reigns in the Andes," one explains. "You don't know this either, but a new nation is being born here. With a good deal of blood and suffering. We can show no mercy to such powerful enemies."
And it was a war. A war the Shining Path promised would require "a quota of blood."
The violence of Peru's recent history is, as a red-bearded Dane points out mid-way through book, a hallmark of the country's entire history. Even the Spanish Conquest was simply a chapter in a horrible cycle of cruelty and blood acted out for millennia by ancestral gods of the mountains, the Apus.
- "I wonder," murmured the blond engineer, completely lost in thought and talking to himself, "if what's going on in Peru isn't a resurrection of all that buried violence. As if it had been hidden somewhere, and suddenly, for some reason, it all surfaced again."
Perhaps. But, still there is much more to Peru than any single chapter of blood and cruelty. It's unavoidable but not total. Peruvians have an intense pride in their country and its fantastic history even if it can repulse them when examined too closely.
The narrative is also held together by the story the young adjutant tells the corporal every evening. An ongoing tale of the woman he loves and has lost. It's an odd story of obsession, passion and farce he tells compulsively due to the longing he has for the woman.
Like Lituma's frustration, in some ways, the adjutant's lost love is analogous to a feeling about Peru as a whole. The remedy, he learns, can be as painful as the loss itself.
"It's a love that has brought you misfortune that makes you suffer," the witch tells him. "Your heart bleeds every night. But at least that helps you go on living."
By the end the novel, the narrative of the characters and the narrative of the unseen forces at work in this strange version of Peru converge and, somehow, strip back the facade on a truly terrible chapter in the country's actual history.
Because, as much as Lituma wants to understand, there is a point where the events and causes are ineffable. Inquiry eventually fails. Faith, for some, can bridge the final gap but, for the inevitable victims, all that remains is the mystery. And that, Llosa point's out, is one of the most alluring aspects of the country.
"[Peru] is a country nobody can understand." Red laughed. "And for people from clear, transparent countries like mine, nothing is more attractive than an indecipherable mystery."
more: 52 films 26 books | Books | Peru | Sendero Luminoso
| comment posted by: Sebastian on may 19, 2008 @ 1:09 pm |
As someone who heard stories about electrical outages and such things in Lima in my youth, I know that there was more going on. My parents told me a little about it, but not much. My dead grandmother probably, in all her lucidity, experienced this time in Peru more acutely than I may know about. So, I have put this on my list of books to read. Thank you for the review. |
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