We could still see the cross. I pointed across the muddy plain at my resting wife. “Only one,” I said.
Efraín had picked out headbands for his sisters. My children were a row of Danish neckties. “Only one,” they said in a chorus.
war by candlelight
I. Oxapampa, 1989
The day before a stray bomb buried him in the Peruvian jungle, Fernando sat with José Carlos and together they meditated on death.
They were childhood friends. Three decades before, you might have found them together on the steps of the cathedral, sharing a piece of bread, tossing pebbles at the stray dogs that came to lick the crumbs at their feet. Or on hands and knees, playing marbles in the dusty courtyard of José Carlos’s house on Tarapacá. Such trivial things come to mind now, Fernando thought. A lifetime’s supply of meaningless memories. He could make out the dark blue tint of the sky above. Later it would rain.
They sat at the edge of the campsite. Here, hidden in a tangle of vines and leaves and wrapped in a tarp, were the explosives. Fernando and José Carlos had slipped away from the others, had chosen this place to talk. They shared a rolled cigarette and a stale piece of bread, and agreed both were the worst they’d ever tasted. The bread especially. “Tougher than flesh,” José Carlos said. “Worse than prison food.”
“Worse than your mother’s cooking,” Fernando added. He watched for a smile spreading across his friend’s face.
But José Carlos looked worn, unshaven, and grim, wearing a frayed white shirt and a straw hat that unraveled at its edges. His eyes drifted, unfocused, and his hands, crisscrossed with nicks and scratches, twitched almost imperceptibly. Fernando watched him closely, looking for answers in José Carlos’s face, wondering how they had come to this place and why. Though he had tried to forget, it was no use: the heat was murder, the air unbreathable. A kind of paralysis gripped Fernando those last days. He found himself unable to concentrate on the present. Instead his brain was clogged with memories half-eaten by moths and flies, incomplete records of moments in no semblance of order: Arequipa at night, circa 1960, in the middle of the lonely street looking up, all sky and silence; the women who had cared for him, from birth through childhood and beyond; his wife, Maruja, his daughter, Carmen, fragile, beautiful, and above all, his.
It couldn’t help to think too much of those he left behind. Each of the previous four mornings Fernando had woken to the prickling tiptoes of insects meandering among legs or arms. Each day, as the jungle closed in on them, they took to the machetes for a half hour in the late afternoon, hacking and swinging and beating it back. The jungle was their greatest enemy. Unattended food vanished in minutes, with living things bursting from the soil to retrieve it, digest it, destroy it. It was not life that he thought of in the jungle, beneath the forest’s thick canopy, in the darkness.
“Does this place have a name?” José Carlos wondered aloud. “Have the mapmakers made it here yet?”
Of course they had not. Oxapampa had a name, but it was a three-day hike from here, and along the way they had passed nothing but forest and rising heat.
It was Fernando who suggested they name it. But what kind of name did this patch of earth deserve? Indigenous? Revolutionary? Should they call it Tarapacá, in honor of their old street?
They settled on Paris, where poets lived, and ate their bread in silence.
In the life he had left behind José Carlos was a professor of philosophy, a life he would survive to reclaim. Fernando could see him trying to laugh but unable. “I’m not scared that they’ll catch me,” José Carlos said. “I’m not afraid to die.”
“To die in Paris!” Fernando said.
José Carlos frowned. “I’m not joking, Negro.”
Fernando, his clothes soaked with sweat, felt his body melting into the infinite jungle. José Carlos was right: the time for jokes had passed. These conversations about death made him tired. It was all anyone ever spoke of. What point could there be in it? This moment was all they had worked for in the last fifteen years. The country was at war. The crisis they had foreseen in their youth had finally arrived. It was too late to give up, too late to change course. They were less than three weeks from the New Year and a new decade. Fernando was forty-one years old. His daughter, Carmen, whom he would never see again, was two and a half.
“Me neither,” he said. “I’m not afraid to die.”
II. War by Candlelight, 1983
They had a plan if they ever came under fire: “scatter.”
Not sophisticated or elegant, but real.
This is a coward’s war, Fernando thought, when at the first sign of trouble, I am told to run breathlessly into the heart of the jungle, without stopping or looking back.
“You’re no good to us dead, Fernando. We have enough martyrs.”
There was too much talk of comradeship and brotherhood for those instructions to sit well. He did his work, hoping it would never come to that. But he was touring the camps in the North, in San Martín, when shots were fired. There was no time to think. An army battalion had stumbled upon them in the steep, forested hills. No tactics or strategies involved, only the logic of a war fought blindly in the darkness of the jungle: a scared soldier fires a shot; a frightened rebel shoots back. Both are too young to do little else but bury their doubts in violence, and suddenly everyone is running and the forest is aflame.
Everything he had been taught came to him with the clarity of intuition: “We must only engage the enemy on our terms.”
Neither side sees the other.
“Scatter.”
In the jungle the trees have fingers and hands, the vines trip you up. You run because death is chasing, because the only way to escape is alone. Fernando fought through the jungle for two days before finding his way to the narrow path along the ridge where they were to regroup. Two days, alone, following trickles of water and minute hints of shadow, calling him first this way, then that. His instincts were urban, made for estimating bus routes and arrival times, not for looking to the skies for clues. He found his way, but not before wondering aloud if this were the place and the moment God had chosen for him to die. He met up with his comrades, they counted heads, quietly mourned the missing without abandoning hope that they might step out of the jungle, shaken but breathing. What had happened? No one knew anything more than he did. They licked their wounds and gathered their resolve. Back into the trees, to wander, to engage the enemy, to fight the people’s war.
But Fernando’s tour ended there. In five weeks, he had never carried a gun. He had never laid an explosive. The war, he thought — his war — had amounted to walking circles through the forest, going hungry, and picking insects off his skin each morning. Trying to stay dry. Praying not to be found.
He boarded a bus in a provincial town and began his journey back to the coast. He wondered if people knew, if he would ever feel completely safe again. Three times the bus was emptied while soldiers searched the baggage hold for weapons. His forged identification papers were inspected by police at isolated mountain checkpoints. Each time Fernando tensed, but they let him through. “Go on,” the soldiers said, and Fernando did his best not to act surprised, or worse, grateful. The ride home took two days. Fernando ate in minuscule mountain towns, on wooden benches that sagged beneath the weight of a half dozen bleary-eyed passengers. He did his best to sleep, his head bumping against the fogged-over window. He returned to Lima overjoyed to be alive. It was a relief so overwhelming it made him dizzy.
That first night back he told Maruja he wouldn’t leave Lima again. She’d thrown her arms around him when he first came in but had almost immediately pulled away. She avoided him, wouldn’t even look at him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.