Red April (18 page)

“Pick it up like a man, Chacaltana. Now leave. I have work to do.”

The prosecutor stood. He did not know if his appointment was an honor or a liability. He did not know whether to say thank you or request a transfer. There were many things he did not know. Mayta's was a long act of vengeance. It had taken ten years to arrive. From the door he turned to the commander to ask a final question:

“Commander, I need to know something. Edwin Mayta Carazo … was he innocent?”

“I don't know, Chacaltana. I don't think even he knew.”

It was afternoon when he left the commander's office and found himself in crowds of tourists waiting for the first processions
of the day. He realized it was Friday of Sorrows. No one would be at the Office of the Prosecutor. He hurried to his own office and locked the door.

He put the holster on his desk. He looked at it. He did not want to take it to his house, so close to his mother. He thought about the mother of the Mayta family. Two sons lost at ten-year intervals. The bullets had reached her family from both sides of a battle that this woman surely never understood completely, just like the prosecutor. He opened the holster and took out the pistol with two fingers before putting it down again on the desk. It was black, 9mm, with a box of ammunition on the back of the sheath. The kind of weapon lieutenants use, like Cáceres, who had become intoxicated by the death of other people and in the end had left his job and run directly toward his own. Why?

It was difficult for him to take out the cartridge to verify that the weapon was loaded. It cost him even more effort to think what would happen if Sendero was rearming. He would not be enough to control it, or Commander Carrión, or all the functionaries in Lima. He closed the pistol carefully and put on the safety, or what he thought was the safety. If Sendero was regrouping, the best thing he could do with that pistol was blow his brains out.

But there were some very strange details in the latest deaths. Things he ought to investigate, which did not fit with traditional Senderista methods. His function now was to investigate on his own, to put his head where nobody wanted to put it, not even himself. Perhaps it was a promotion after all. That is what those famous ambitions brought one to.

He returned the pistol to the holster and put it under his jacket, between his armpit and his waist. He made certain it could not be seen. It felt strange and heavy. He took it off again and locked it in his drawer with two turns of the key. Before he closed the drawer, he took out the report and put it in an envelope to take to Carrión personally. When he walked without the weapon, he
was filled with a sensation of peace and normality. He left the office at night, when he could begin to hear the procession of the Virgin of Sorrows.

The Magdalena district was packed with Limenians in sports clothes holding beers and cameras in their hands. The younger Ayacuchan girls approached the tourists calling them “amigo, amigo” and smiling at them. The older ones, the ones who had grown up shut in their houses during the war, looked at those brazen girls disapprovingly, though many mothers harbored the hope that some Limenian or, better yet, an American, would fall in love with one of their daughters and take her away from Ayacucho. It became difficult for the prosecutor to move forward. He was trapped by people, by the stands selling drinks, the smell of punch, the din. His mind wandered with the movement of bodies. Each person he bumped into seemed like a blow in his memory.

When he thought he had found a way through the crowd, an even larger surge of people blocked his way. Beside him the platform carrying St. John emerged; it had just left the church. He let himself be carried along, exhausted. The lights of the city and the fireworks gave him the impression of an overpopulated sky filled with souls circulating together toward some destination. At times the explosion of a firecracker startled him, but the sound was muffled by the mass of people. The prosecutor advanced with the procession until the moment he found most interesting: the encounter of the Lord of Agony and the Virgin of Sorrows, which symbolized the suffering of Christ and his Mother. When the platforms began to approach each other, the Associate District Prosecutor felt spurred on by a presentiment. Filled with tension, he tried to get closer, in among the men carrying the platforms, until he felt himself held back by his shirt. Somebody had sewn his sleeve to the sleeve of someone else. It was part of the celebration. The prosecutor freed himself violently, to the surprise of the other man, who laughed. He felt dizzy, perhaps because of the
smell of the platforms and the people. He felt a jab. Beside him, several women were jabbing one another with needles and laughing, “to help the Lord in his pain.” He managed to move closer to the platform of the Virgin, who now was shining almost above him, like a true apparition of light, like a mother who materializes before her son, the Lord of Agony, the son who is going to die in his final farewell to life. He reached the edges of the platform and at last could see her clearly. The Virgin's black dress, the candles on the platform that illuminated her from below, her immaculate face, and the seven daggers that pierced her chest, as they pierced the chest of Justino Mayta Carazo, the son of the mother who searched mass graves.

The prosecutor tried to kneel before the holy image, but the movement of the people was too dense. He tried to move away, avoiding the jabs like daggers waiting in ambush. With the seven stab wounds piercing his mind, he tried to move away from the center of the procession. He looked up when he calculated he was in front of Edith's restaurant. Shoving his way through the crowd, he reached the door. Edith looked at him from the counter. She smiled, showing her brilliant teeth. Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar got around the last human obstacles to reaching her, went into the restaurant, rushed to her and embraced her, very closely, surrounded by people who for the first time filled the restaurant. Some tourists applauded, others smiled, like the startled Edith herself, but he did not stop embracing her. He clung to that small body, that smell of the kitchen, with his eyes closed, as if it were the last time.

Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar welcomed in Saturday by dancing. He had not done that for a long time. Since he did not consider it appropriate to his state of mind, he tried to resist. But Edith insisted when she left work and took him to a concert of indigenous groups at a fairground.

In the middle of the field an enormous bonfire was shining, and around it hundreds of bodies were dancing, sometimes embracing, sometimes alone, moving to the rhythm of the folk music and drinking punch and beer. At first, the prosecutor refused to dance. Edith dragged him to the floor, but he felt rigid, incapable of moving a body that was good only for carrying out basic vital functions.

At a certain point, worn out by the crowd and the noise, he went to a food stand and asked for Ayacuchan chorizo and a glass of punch. The woman gave him a piece of fried spiced pork with hot
ají
peppers and vinegar. It was good. As he ate, he saw Edith, who had stayed with the group in the middle to dance. He wondered if what he was doing made sense. Edith was no more than twenty, she had been born at the same time as the war. And he felt old.

He drank a little punch. The taste of the milk and cinnamon with the effect of the
pisco
warmed his body. Now Edith was dancing close to the bonfire, her smile hidden at times by her hair. The prosecutor ordered another punch while the Gaitán Castro brothers came up on stage and people welcomed them with enthusiastic applause. Even in their happiest songs, what predominated
was the Andean lament that their public loved. The prosecutor realized he was keeping time with his foot. He took a few steps forward.

Edith saw him approaching and gave him a smile. At times the mass of people hid her, because she was very short. Pushing his way through, and in a good humor after two glasses of punch, the prosecutor reached her side. He began moving his feet, trying to look like all the people around him. It was good to look like everyone else and disappear into the crowd, dissolve in it. Edith directed a smile at him and he did not know if it showed tenderness or mockery for how badly he danced. But he kept on. Now he had to move his arms, as if he were harvesting a crop, now his waist, and again his feet. It was difficult for him to do everything at the same time. As he made the attempt, Edith whirled around him, framed by the fire, moving her head and shoulders, laughing, with a laugh that to the prosecutor seemed as welcoming as a warm room in winter.

The next morning started out gray, but as noon approached, the sky began to clear. Prosecutor Chacaltana got up later than usual and hurried to greet his mother and open the windows in her room. He told her he had danced. He knew she was returning his smile from somewhere. Then he went out.

At the prefecture and at the market they were distributing yellow and green palms brought in from the province of La Mar in Ceja de Selva. The faithful walked through the city carrying their branch for Palm Sunday. At the Church of Pampa San Agustín they were preparing the procession of the Lord of the Vineyard, scheduled to go out that night, holding a cluster of grapes in his hand to guarantee fertility. The entire city was given over to the celebration.

The Associate District Prosecutor appeared at the Church of the Heart of Christ at approximately 11:35. In the priest's office, the stewards of the eight processions of the celebration were arguing with Father Quiroz because they wanted to
modify their routes. Quiroz responded without restraining his indignation:

“We've been following the same route for almost five hundred years, and we're not going to change now so that they can stop at the hotels!”

“But that's where the tourists are, Father. The hotels will give more financial support to the processions if we pass in front of them …”

The stewards were prosperous merchants and professionals. In earlier years they had tended to be very devout, observant gentlemen, but since the end of the war they had demonstrated more interest in the hospitality industry than in the preservation of traditions. As he listened to their discussion from the waiting room, the prosecutor thought of an impresario from Huanta who had proposed the previous year that the celebration be extended to an entire Holy Month with different processions each day. He had calculated that this would multiply the influx of tourists. And money.

The stewards came out of the office visibly annoyed. The Associate District Prosecutor preferred to wait a moment before going into the office. When he finally did, Father Quiroz was preparing to go out.

“I hope this will be brief, Señor Prosecutor,” said the priest, without inviting him to sit down. “This is the most complicated week in the year.”

“I understand, Father.”

“How are things? Do you have another burned body to investigate?”

“No. Not a burned body. I have Justino Mayta Carazo. Do you remember him?”

The priest seemed to make a slight effort to remember as he looked inside his briefcase. He replied as he closed it:

“Ah, yes. What happened to that little thief? Did they find him?”

“Yes, but dead.” The priest froze. The prosecutor wondered if his words had not been too abrupt. “I mean … They found him on Acuchimay Hill, eaten by buzzards. It happened early Friday morning.”

The priest crossed himself. He seemed to whisper a few rapid words, perhaps some formula for those who rest eternally in peace. Or not. The prosecutor did not know how corpses rest.

“Was it an accident?” the priest asked.

“No.”

“Was it the same … the same as last time?”

“We think so.”

“Come with me.”

They went to the eating hall for the poor of the Church of the Heart of Christ, which was half a block away. The Associate District Prosecutor wondered if he would ever succeed in talking to Father Quiroz while they were sitting down. When they reached the eating hall, they found a long line of beggars sitting on the sidewalk in front of the door. The beggars immediately surrounded the priest, who avoided them with an amiable gesture that indicated broad experience of this kind. The prosecutor and the priest went inside, where a short dark nun was waiting anxiously for Quiroz's arrival.

“How are we, Sister?”

“We have a new donation of milk, Father, but it won't be enough. There are too many,” she added, pointing outside.

“We'll do what we can. Divide the servings in half, and when that's finished, then it's finished.”

“All right, Father.”

The nun hurried to give instructions in the kitchen and then returned to the door. She opened it. Dozens of beggars pushed their way in. Some had been disabled during the time of terrorism, others were simply campesinos who had come to the city for Holy Week but could not pay for food. They sat at four enormous tables.
The nun, with two other sisters, served pieces of bread, glasses of milk, and a thick soup in deep bowls.

“Your killer seems like a very devout man,” the priest remarked, returning to the subject.