In Thankless Pursuit Of Order

Death in the Andes describes Perus irrationalism, its violence, its primordial values and rituals. Myths, ancestral gods, mountain spirits, demons, satan and witches are mentioned everywhere in the book because their constant presence would best describe the poverty, the ignorance or the hostility of the environment. But, of course, we make a mistake when we try to understand the killings with our minds, says one character. They have no rational explanation. And it is because of the sheer madness of the scene that Latin American writers resort to magic realism or the technique of entwining fantasy and reality in a dream-like tapestry in which the fantastic is treated as matter-of-fact and reality as mesmeric invention. Ordinary events then acquire a moral and imaginative density by a process of accretion, as divisions and sub-divisions of living cells cluster around the nucleus.

 

Set in the remote heights of the Andes in the empty copper mines among decaying communities, Death in the Andes tells the story of a series of disappearances, most of them murders in arranged encounters. The logic behind these murders is investigated by Corporal Lituma, a recurrent character in Llosas novels like The Green House, Who Killed Palomina Molero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The Corporal is assisted by his companion who interrogates the people, wander around the country, tell stories to each other about their life and loves, while they remain on constant alert against Maoist guerillas. It is these stories that provide the running subtext to the novel which describes the picture of rural Peru, its misery and pain.

The suspects are members of Shining Path, Perus Maoist guerilla movement and an odd couple who run a bar-cum-liquor joint while performing ancient Inca rituals. The description of the meaningless killings and the possibility that they may be linked to some kind of human sacrifices provide an atmosphere of the dark ages enhanced by the eerie Andes landscape. Death is everywhere and its presence is felt much more than the poverty, the guerilla warfare, the nature and hopelessness of Peru.

Daylight advanced rapidly across the plateau, and their bodies, their shapes, stood out clearly. They were young, they were adolescents, they were poor, and some of them were children. In addition to rifles, revolvers, machetes and sticks, many of them held large stones in their hands.

Stones are the favoured instruments for execution and they are used upon the journalist and lecturer Senord dHarcourt, who had made Peru her adopted home. She is told by a member of the territorial tribunal that she must die: This is war and you are a lackey of our class enemy... You dont even realise that you are a tool of imperialism and the bourgeois state. Even worse, you permit yourself the luxury of a clear conscience, seeing yourself as Perus Good Samaritan. Your case is typical.

Can you explain that to me? she said. In all sincerity, I dont understand. What am I a typical case of?

The intellectual who betrays the people, he said with the same serene, icy confidence. The intellectual who serves the bourgeois power and the ruling class. What you do here has nothing to do with the environment. It has to do with your class and with power. You come here with bureaucrats, the newspaper provides publicity, and the government wins a battle. Who said this was liberated territory? That a part of the New Democracy had been established in this zone? A lie. Theres the proof. Look at the photographs. A bourgeois peace reigns in the Andes. You dont 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.

Llosa was a communist in his younger days and understands Maoism in theory and practice where everything that is good and constructive tree plantations, commerce, local government to enforce law and order has to be destroyed to create the new world of democracy and freedom. He understands the case for revolution and the savagery of its workings, as well as the hopelessness of the situation. Lituma is Llosas alter ego who represents the dogged and thankless pursuit of order and justice in a society increasingly short of both. He also represents Llosas driving force of intellectual curiosity: to unravel the mystery of the missing persons when there is nothing in it for him.

There are two characteristics of the Latin American novel that has made it the most exciting literature today. First, the theme of the corrupt dictator because they seem to have experienced so many forms of oppression for so long that its become a normal state. Second, there is in the Latin American-Indian language the concept of the future the notion of that which has yet to happen set at the back of the speaker. The past which he can see, because it has already happened, lies all before him. He backs into the future unknown; memory moves forward, hope backwards. Is it these two features in Death in the Andes that asks the question whether guerillas cease to be human after our youth ends, or is it only because after a certain age we rarely have friends among the guerillas? The Marxist streak in Llosa has not fully betrayed him, after all.

Latin America presents a world that is chaotic, fragmented, random, discontinuous in a word, absurd

Llosa understands the case for revolution and the savagery of its workings, as well as the hopelessness of the situation