Death in the Andes Read Online Free PDF

spread the clothes on the rocks with the same meticulous diligence he brought to everything, his body and soul concentrated on the task. When his eyes happened to meet the corporal’s, he would stand erect, rigid and alert, waiting for orders. And he bowed all day long. What could the terrucos have done with that poor innocent?
    The corporal had just spent two hours making the same obligatory rounds—engineer, foremen, paymasters, crew bosses, co-workers on the shift—that he had made following the other disappearances. With the same result. Nobody knew much about Demetrio Chanca’s life, of course. And even less about his current whereabouts, of course. Now his wife had disappeared, too. Just like the woman who came to report the disappearance of the albino Casimiro Huarcaya. Nobody knew where they had gone, or when or why they had left Naccos.
    â€œDon’t you think these disappearances are strange?”
    â€œYes, very strange.”
    â€œIt makes you think, doesn’t it?”
    â€œYes, it makes you think.”
    â€œMaybe it was the spirits who took them away?”
    â€œOf course not, Corporal, who could believe anything like that?”
    â€œAnd why would the two women disappear, too?”
    â€œWho knows?”
    Were they making fun of him? Sometimes he thought that behind those blank faces, those monosyllables spoken reluctantly, as if they were doing him a favor, those opaque, suspicious, narrow eyes, the serruchos were laughing at him for being a coastal man lost up here in the barrens, for the discomfort the altitude still produced in him, for his inability to solve these cases. Or were they dying of fear? A panicked, raw fear of the terrucos. That might be the explanation. Considering everything that was happening every day, all around them, how was it possible he had never heard a single remark about Sendero Luminoso? As if it did not exist, as if there were no bombings, no killings. “What people,” he thought. He hadn’t been able to make a single friend among the laborers even though he had spent so many months with them, even though he had already moved the post twice to follow the camp. None of that mattered. They treated him as if he came from Mars. In the distance he saw Tomás walking toward him. He had been making inquiries among the campesinos from the Indian community, and the work crew that was opening a tunnel a kilometer from Naccos on the way to Huancayo.
    â€œSo?” he asked, certain he would see him run his finger along his throat.
    â€œI found out something,” said the guard, sitting down beside him on one of the rocks that dotted the hillside. They were on a headland, halfway between the post and the camp that sprawled along the gorge where the new highway would be located if it was ever completed. They said that Naccos had once been a bustling mining town. Now it would not even exist except for the highway construction. The midday air was warm, and a blinding sun shone in a sky filled with fat, cottony clouds. “That foreman had a fight with the witch a few nights ago.”
    The witch was Señora Adriana, Dionisio’s wife. Fortyish, fiftyish, ageless, she spent her nights in the cantina, helping her husband serve a steady flow of drinks, and if the stories about her were true, she came from the vicinity of Parcasbamba on the other side of the Mantaro River, a region that was half sierra and half jungle. During the day she cooked for some of the laborers, and at night she told their fortunes, reading cards or astrological charts or their palms, or tossing coca leaves into the air and interpreting the shapes they made when they fell. She had large, prominent, burning eyes, and her ample hips swayed as she walked. Apparently she had once been a formidable woman, and there was endless speculation about her past. They said she had been the wife of a big-nosed miner and even had killed a vampire, what the serranos called a