Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa

First published:Lituma en los Andes, 1993 (English translation, 1996)

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: Naccos, a remote Andean village in Peru

Principal Characters:

• Lituma, a Peruvian Army corporal, investigator of vanished people
• Tomás Carreño, his deputy
• Pedro Tinoco, a mute, servant of Lituma and Carreño, vanished
• Casimiro Huarcaya, an albino and an itinerant peddler, vanished
• Demetrio Chanca, alias for Don Medardo Llantac, the foreman of a highway construction crew
• Llantac, the mayor of Andamarca, vanished
• Dionisio, the keeper of the Naccos cantina
• Doña Adriana, his wife

The Novel

Death in the Andes is divided into two parts, of five and four chapters respectively, and an epilogue. Each chapter is further divided into three sections that narrate different parts of the story. The novel is based in part on observations Vargas Llosa made while serving as leader of a 1983 Peruvian government commission investigating the massacre of eight journalists in a remote Andean mountain village.

Vargas Llosa is represented by the fictional character of Corporal Lituma, a native of Piura, a major city in the northwestern coastal valley of Peru. He is sent by army officials to Naccos, a village high in the Andean mountains of southeastern Peru. Since most of the Indian population of the area speaks only Quechua and not Spanish, he must rely on his deputy Tomás Carreño, a native of the region, to interpret for him as he investigates the disappearance of three men.

The communities surrounding Naccos have been the sites of continuous terrorist activities by the Sendero Luminoso, or “Shining Path,” the Communist Party of Peru. To illustrate the brutality and dogmatic mindlessness of the Senderos, there are several independent accounts in which the author tells how, for example, a young French tourist couple and a team of humanitarian ecologists are mercilessly stoned to death for no reason other than that they are outsiders. Since the three men who have disappeared could also be considered outsiders—one is a mute who works for Lituma, the other is an albino in an area where everyone has black hair and dark, weathered skin, and the third is an outsider foreman on the road construction crew—it is quite logical to conclude that these are further acts of terrorism committed by the Senderos.

As members of the army’s Civil Guard, Lituma and his deputy are in Naccos to determine who is responsible for the disappearances and to protect the few remaining members of the construction crew, an assignment that causes them great nervousness and concern for their own safety. To allay their fears and to cope with Lituma’s homesickness, the author has introduced another story totally distinct from the main plot. Each evening, Tomás entertains Lituma with the lusty tales of his love affair with Mercedes, a wayward prostitute from Piura. Although there is virtually no connection between these stories and the everyday reality of the investigation in Naccos, they illustrate that life among the Andean Indians, the real descendants of the Inca Empire, is experienced on a very different plane.

In former times, the village of Naccos was a successful mining town where many of the native mountain people, the serruchos, found profitable employment. However, with worsening international economic conditions and increased terrorist activities, the mine has been closed, and the only source of limited employment has been on a local road-building project. The one and only public meeting place in Naccos is a shabby, disreputable bar, the cantina operated by Dionisio and his wife Adriana. The patrons of the bar are the serruchos who work on the road crew and the few outsiders—engineers and foremen—who are supervising the project. By interviewing these patrons and the owners of the cantina, Lituma hopes to learn how and why the three men disappeared.

The stories associated with the three vanished are simple and brutal but also mysterious. Pedro Tinoco had been unable to speak all of his life. As an orphaned youth, he found pleasure in working with local farmers and herdsmen. When a herd of vicuña was abandoned in the mountains because the Senderos identified vicuña wool as a product that enriches only foreign exploiters, Pedro remained with the herd. Although the animals lived in caves and reverted to the wild, Pedro had won their confidence and lived with them in harmony. One day the terrorists found him, persuaded him to entice the animals into the open, and then shot the entire herd.

The mute Pedro was found wandering aimlessly by Tomás Carreño, who brought him to Naccos, where he performed simple tasks for Lituma and Carreño. One evening, they asked him to go to the cantina to buy them beer. While there, Pedro was served several drinks; then he disappeared.

Casimiro Huarcaya, the albino, left home as a youth and worked for an itinerant peddler. Eventually, he became independent, successfully going from town to town selling his wares at local markets and fairs. On one occasion, he met a young Quechua girl whom he liked and made pregnant. He gave her some money to use either for the child or to obtain an abortion. Affection and curiosity led him to look for the girl while he continued his business travels in the area, but he never found her.

Five years later, he was in a village selling his wares when a mob surrounded his truck and proceeded to rob and beat him. Out of the crowd emerged a young woman, the Quechua girl, who was now a Sendero. She approached with her rifle aimed at his head and shot.

Casimiro survived this assassination attempt in some mysterious way. When he comes to the Naccos cantina one evening, he believes that he has experienced death and has been resurrected as a vampire, what the mountain people call a pishtaco. After drinking heavily, he disappears while returning to his barracks.

Demetrio Chanca, foreman of the highway construction crew, disappeared four days before Lituma arrived in Naccos.

It is revealed that Demetrio was actually Don Medardo Llantac, formerly the lieutenant governor of a nearby village. During a Sendero attack in which all persons in positions of power and authority were stoned to death, Medardo Llantac saved his life by hiding in a grave that had not been closed after the funeral services. After the terrorists left, he fled with his wife to Naccos and changed his name to Demetrio Chanca.

Lituma was able to collect this background information on the three vanished men by interviewing patrons at the bar and elsewhere. In each case, however, he was able to trace their lives only up to the point at which they went to drink at the Naccos cantina. Since there was no specific evidence of Sendero activities in the Naccos area, Lituma had to conclude that the cantina owners, Dionisio and Adriana, were somehow involved. However, he was unable to obtain any concrete evidence that showed them to have any direct association with the disappearances.

The Characters

Lituma’s inability to understand Dionisio’s and Adriana’s involvement in the three disappearances may be the result of his lack of knowledge of Incan mountain lore and Western mythology. Dionisio’s name recalls that of the Greek Dionysus, or Bacchus, who was the leader at many great festivals (Dionysia or Bacchanalia) that included not only the worship of wine but also frenzied orgiastic and ecstatic rites performed by his group of young women (maenads), sometimes even leading to variations of cannibalism.

Adriana’s name recalls that of Ariadne of Naxos; as a young woman, Adriana assisted in the slaying of a powerful pishtaco devil, an episode that parallels Ariadne’s role in the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. When she was abandoned by the giant-killer, it was Dionisio (Bacchus and Ariadne) who rescued and wed her. Once married to this powerful mythological figure, she perpetuated the native witchcraft, including the superstitions about the pishtaco, vampires that kill their subjects by leaching the fat from their bodies, about the mukis, devils that inhabit the mines, and about the apus, mountain spirits that require human sacrifices before a temple or road can be constructed successfully.

Once Lituma recognizes that the surface Christianity of the native serruchos is profoundly interwoven with the idolatrous cults of their forefathers and with the fundamental myths that influence all societies, he too can understand how and why the three men vanished. He comes to this realization, however, only after he has participated in the ritual drinking at the cantina on his last evening in Naccos. Afterward, he greatly regrets having learned the truth.

Critical Context

Death in the Andes is a powerful, multifaceted exploration of contemporary life. It can be classified among various genres of writing and can be read on a variety of levels. The most obvious classification would suggest it is a mystery or detective novel that attempts to answer the question of who is responsible for the disappearance of the three men. Equally important, though, is the discussion of the political turmoil of contemporary Peru brought about by the Sendero Luminoso during its heyday. Most important, Vargas Llosa presents an anthropological study of the Peruvian mountain people, which he then expands to a cross-cultural examination of Western and American mythology. This not only illustrates the origins of some of the local cultural practices— however base they may be—but also demonstrates the universality of such behavior.

Vargas Llosa has often been compared to the great European novelists of nineteenth century realism such as Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert. Like them, Vargas Llosa documents the contemporary society of his story and characters with truth and great objectivity. Like his distinguished predecessors, moreover, he is an extraordinary storyteller. In 1995 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor.

Bibliography

The Atlantic. CCLXXVII, March, 1996, p. 122. For a review of Death in the Andes.

Booker, M. Keith. Vargas Llosa Among the Postmodernists. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. A meticulous examination of specific aspects of form and content in Vargas Llosa’s innovative and revolutionary fictional writings.

Castro-Klarén, Sara. Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. A very good introduction to Vargas Llosa’s writings. Examines the political and cultural themes that dominate his works.

Chicago Tribune. March 3, 1996, XIV, p. 6. For a review of Death in the Andes.

Kristal, Efraín. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. A survey of the novels from the 1960’s to the 1980’s that concentrates on Vargas Llosa’s commitment to political reality in his writings.

Library Journal. CXXI, January, 1996, p. 146. For a review of Death in the Andes.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 11, 1996, p. 3. For a review of Death in the Andes.

Moses, Michael Valdez. The Novel and the Globalization of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Provides a discussion of the cultural context of Vargas Llosa’s earlier major novels, with specific reference to La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984).

The Nation. CCLXII, February 12, 1996, p. 28. For a review of Death in the Andes.

The New York Review of Books. XLIII, May 9, 1996, p. 16. For a review of Death in the Andes.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, February 18, 1996, p. 7. For a review of Death in the Andes.

The New Yorker. LXXII, April 15, 1996, p. 84. For a review of Death in the Andes.

Strong, Simon. Shining Path: Terror and Revolution in Peru. New York: Times Books, 1992. An excellent overview of the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru. Chapter 2 provides an extensive historical review of the conflicts experienced by the native Indian population from the days of the Inca empire to the present.

Time. CXLVII, February 12, 1996, p. 75. For a review of Death in the Andes.

The Times Literary Supplement. June 21, 1996, p. 22. For a review of Death in the Andes.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. “The Story of a Massacre.” In Making Waves, edited and translated by John King. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. This essay is a later version of “Inquest in the Andes,” published in The New York Times Magazine of July 31, 1983. It is Vargas Llosa’s report on the findings of a commission set up by the Peruvian government to investigate the killings of eight journalists in the Andean village of Uchuraccay. The essay calls attention to religious and magical aspects that may have contributed more significantly to this massacre than the political and social context.

The Wall Street Journal. February 16, 1996, p. A8. For a review of Death in the Andes.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVI, February 25, 1996, p. 1. For a review of Death in the Andes.