War by Candlelight: Stories

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.

There were lines on her face he’d never noticed before. She bit her lip. Her eyes were red. “I thought you were dead,” Maruja said.

Their apartment was cramped and small. He sat at the kitchen table while she prepared the candles and the matches. They listened for the rumble of war’s progress, for a bomb to scratch out the quiet, the calm. It happened almost every night now. Electrical towers felled by explosives, a hammer and sickle ignited on the hillsides. It was best to be prepared. A pot of water boiled on the stove. He skimmed six weeks’ worth of newspapers. She’d saved him the front pages, thrown away the rest. She summarized for him: “While you were dead,” Maruja told him, “things got worse.”

She wasn’t going to forgive him easily. From the stack of scattered pages, she pulled one. It was dated from a week and a half before, and told of the ambush he’d fled. There were photos of the camp, of the weapons seized, and one of six lifeless bodies laid in a neat row. Though their faces were covered, Fernando knew them. They were his men, his friends. They had names. He recognized them by the shoes they wore.

An hour later, they heard it: boom.

Lights flickered and faded.

In the tense dark of their apartment, it occurred to him that he wanted a child. It struck him as exactly right. He felt embarrassed to tell Maruja. He said nothing. His entire body ached. They listened in darkness to the radio announcer calmly describing the evening’s events. The room glowed orange.

Sometime in the middle of the night, when she was asleep and the candle had gone out, he reached for her.

It took him weeks to regain his courage. The city appeared strange to him, and his two-day walk through the jungle still had the glow of an apparition. Some mornings he woke and caught himself dreaming of insects and flittering birds. Bombs. Running. He caught himself paying attention to strangers’ shoes. Every day he thought of the child he wanted. He rode through the city, debating quietly with himself: a child was a preposterous thing to want at a time like this. Absurd. Dangerous. Around him, men and women were disappearing, people dying. It was no time to indulge in bourgeois fantasies. But he let himself imagine fatherhood and a hundred other conventional pleasures: a small house with a courtyard, an olive tree, and a tomato plant, a childhood like the one he’d had. Sometimes Fernando imagined himself as an old man, the war long since over and nearly forgotten. His children now grown, his grandchildren asking to be told stories. What stories would he and Maruja tell them? Stories of survival, perhaps: How we fled Lima, Fernando mused. How we escaped the war.

He was riding a bus one day when a young woman got on. Visibly pregnant, her belly pushed dramatically against her dress. She was pretty, her lustrous hair in a single braid, woven as thick as rope. He gave her his seat. She didn’t thank him, or notice him hovering over her. The bus stumbled on, filled past capacity. Fernando kept his right hand in his pocket, holding his wallet, and the other he placed on the back of the pregnant woman’s seat. What was he expecting? He wanted her to pull out a book of baby names, or a spool of yarn to knit tiny socks. She didn’t. She chewed gum. There was nothing at all special about her except that beautiful roundness. Fernando couldn’t help but stare. He tensed. Finally, she opened her bag, pulled out a newspaper, and turned it to the crossword. Then there was a pushing and a jostling on the bus, and someone was being robbed at that exact moment. Everyone knew it: a dozen pairs of eyes darting back and forth, accusing. The pregnant woman sat still, unconcerned, nibbling on the tip of her plastic pen. By the time he got off, she’d fallen asleep with the crossword half-done in her lap.

That night, like every night, he and Maruja sat by candlelight, listening to the radio. But he had heard enough: the news was uniformly dismal, and it did no good to hear it all. He turned it off. He told her: “Let’s have a baby.”

They sat close together and spoke in circles about the child, he saying yes, she saying no.

He’d already heard her arguments, of course. They were his own. He suspected they were true, but as she voiced them, they sounded profoundly pessimistic. Hadn’t they always believed in a future? Had they come to this place so soon: were they this defeated already? He held his head in his hands and cried, Maruja stroking his hair, wrapping the black curls around her fingers. Did she have to hurt him like this? She took his glasses and laid them on the nightstand. Their bed, resting on cinder blocks, creaked as she stretched. With the flame clinging to the wick, orange light gliding along the walls, Fernando told her for the first time of the jungle. “I walked for days. Alone. I could barely see the sky, and I was sure someone was following me.”

Maruja touched him, kissed him. She laid him down and undressed him. Fernando could scarcely keep his eyes open. It wasn’t such a terrible thing to want, was it? The city was full of children.

“We can’t, Nano.” She sighed deeply. “I can’t.”

Maruja had two boys from her first marriage, the oldest now nearing fifteen. Fernando was good with her children. He took them to San Miguel or to the movies. The noise and chaos of parenting seemed to excite him, to energize him, and Fernando would drive the children, singing and shouting. When they played soccer, Fernando would feed the pass that let his stepchildren shine. They were the youngest players on the field, but he made them feel welcome, wanted. He picked them first. Maruja’s children were in love with Fernando. They let him know. All of this, Fernando thought, was proof. Hasn’t she seen me with them? “I’d be a good father,” he said.

“For how long?” she asked.

III. Drive, 1987

The call came before dawn, a phone ringing, startling him from dreams. He hoped it wouldn’t wake the baby. Maruja didn’t stir. It was a man’s voice. He seemed to know who Fernando was. “Can you drive?” the voice asked.

Fernando dressed without turning on the lights. The station wagon started on the second try. He drove along deserted city streets, avoiding the known roadblocks, hoping not to stumble upon others. They changed every night. He had documents ready — real ones — and an excuse, a story to tell, if it came to that: “I’m going to pick up my brother. He’s a doctor. My little girl is sick.”

It was four-thirty in the morning. He idled his car on the fourth block of Avenida Bolivia and waited. He blew hot air on his hands. His neck hurt, his mouth was dry. It was cold, but in an hour, the darkness would lift, and the curfew as well. He closed his eyes and buried his hands in his armpits. A few moments later, a man stepped out of the shadows, glanced up and down the empty avenue, and got in the car. He muttered a greeting and gave an address on the other side of town. With a nod, they were off.

These people, whoever they were, always seemed like ghosts to Fernando. They shared many things, one might suspect, but nothing they could talk about. There was an unreality to this existence, floating from house to house. The art of clandestine life was to be invisible, to leave no trace. Fernando only saw it from the outside, these predawn drives through the backstreets of Lima, a morose stranger in the seat beside him. He could imagine the rooms where they stayed: the bare white walls, the single bed and thin mattress, the creaky chair. He had promised Maruja he would never do it. He had a daughter now, and the thought of that life made him sick. Fernando gripped the steering wheel tightly.

There were no traffic lights at this hour, or at least none that anyone paid attention to. The city was shuttered and asleep. The car rattled noisily. The man took off his knit cap and rubbed his face. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from an inside pocket and offered one to Fernando. They smoked and said nothing. There was no one out, not a soul. The radio had been stolen a few months before, but Fernando had never missed it as much as he did now: a song, a voice, anything to erase this quiet. He ran through a handful of questions in his mind — How long were you at the old house? Do you know José Carlos? Where will you go next? — but they were all wrong. He couldn’t ask anything like that. Nice sweater, Fernando nearly said, where did you get it? He was embarrassed by the thought. Was it allowed? Talking about clothes? Soccer? The weather?

“It’s cold,” Fernando offered.

“Sure is.”

It was a terrible life. Fernando felt afraid, as if his passenger were not an anonymous comrade, but the victim of an unnamable illness. Something contagious. He felt revulsion. What did comrade mean anyway? Who was this man? He wanted him out of his car, the errand over. He wanted to be home, next to his wife and child, asleep again, away from the misery this man carried with him.

They hadn’t spoken for blocks when the man said, “Oh, I know this street.” He asked Fernando to stop at the corner.

“This isn’t the place.”

“Just for a moment.” The man turned to him. “Please.”

Fernando let the car slow.

“Here,” the man said and rolled his window down. The air was cool and damp.

“What are we looking at?” Fernando asked.

The man pointed at a nondescript building across the street. It had a high, rusty fence, the kind a house thief would sneer at. The curtains were drawn, and there were no lights. “Someone you know?” Fernando asked.

“Sure.”

They sat like that for a moment. The man was sailing, he was dreaming. Fernando could see it: that despairing look of a man confronted with his vanished life. “Do you want to get out?” Fernando asked.

“Not especially.”

“Then we should go,” Fernando said after a moment. The spell was broken.

The man shook his head. “That’s right, compadre,” he said. “We should go.” He sighed and pulled out another cigarette. This time he didn’t offer. “I knew a girl there. Once.”

“How long has it been?”

“Since she died.”

They rode on. The man left his window down. Fernando didn’t complain about the cold. He pushed the gas and the engine groaned. It would be morning soon.

IV. Mother, 1984

These were the days when his mother was dying. She had in fact stopped living several years before, when her husband passed away. Fernando just out of the university. The children huddled together in Lima, and, over the course of three nights of drinking and storytelling, forgave the old man everything. Fernando’s mother sat on her own, alternately accepting and rejecting her children’s affections. She had already done her forgiving, of course, but dying was his last betrayal. She moved to her daughter’s house, where they made up a small room for her. It had a window looking out on a quiet street, and a terrace where she sat if it wasn’t too cold. But she missed him. She confessed to Fernando that she couldn’t remember what her life had been like before his father. Grief exposed all her weaknesses and showed her strengths for what they were: circumstance coupled with faith. She fell into dreams. She lost her faith.

“I’ll be dead soon,” she told her son, but nearly seven years passed this way and she was still alive. She began to forget. In the afternoons, in deep concentration, she sat down to drink her soup, cradling the bowl in her lap with a napkin spread primly across her thin legs. She smiled and nodded her head in greeting on Sundays when Fernando came to see her, but her smile was civil rather than warm. At times, she felt her family’s eyes on her and wished that she could disappear. Other days, her daughter’s children played in her room and told her jokes that made her laugh. She had to smile at their friendly disposition, even if she wondered who they might be.

Fernando still came by, but his visits were short. He could squeeze in a drink with his brother-in-law, but never two, and tried to be discreet when he looked at his watch over the rim of the raised glass.

There was hardly any time for socializing. Fernando felt weak. He often woke up dizzy, aching, unable to move, as if sleep, having let his mind go free, were jealously refusing to relinquish his body. He kept his eyes closed tightly, trying to blink away the pains that gripped his body. Unable to sleep, unable to wake, he lay on the bed immobile. Maruja worried about him. He wouldn’t let anyone see him this way except her. She wrapped ice in an old shirt and pressed it to his forehead. By midmorning, his fever had cooled, and Fernando could stand, slowly. Once he was up, he wouldn’t stop moving until the late evening, when, after telling others there was no time to rest and that the time to act was now, he would lie down to sleep, worried and brooding. The war had been killing him for a long time before he died.

This was not the man his mother would have remembered, if within her clouded memory, something had sparked a moment of lucidity. If she could have recalled Fernando, she would have described a young man who made strangers feel instantly comfortable.

“He was a Boy Scout in Arequipa, and an altar boy at the little church on the Plaza San Antonio de Miraflores. We lived in the little house on Tarapacá and walked to church every Sunday.” His comrades called him Negro, but in the family he was Nano, her youngest child, the one who cost her the most heartache and confusion. He had studied at Independencia, like his older brothers, and years later he still sang his alma mater’s hymn proudly, fighting sleep with song as he struggled to stay awake on the eighteen-hour drive back to Arequipa from Lima. He told his mother that melody was unforgettable: En tus aulas se forjaron grandes hombres… In your halls, great men were molded. He had come to Lima, entertaining little hope of being accepted to the university to study engineering. His older brothers and sister had come before him: Oscar, to the army. Elías, to study accounting. Mateo, to the national police. Enrique, to study medicine. Inés, to study pharmacology. His mother would have remembered the way she saw Fernando off at the bus station, the little bag he carried, his unconcerned smile. It was early morning at the bus station, the first shades of purple sky announcing morning in the east; Padre Alfredo, the priest, a family friend, came to see him off, to wish him luck. His mother would have remembered how sad she was to see her youngest go that morning, how she wondered what she would occupy her day with now, if not waiting for little Nano to come home.

That first year in the city, he sent letters home nearly every week. He had refused to live with his brother or sister, wanting to strike out on his own. Of course they sent him money from Arequipa, which he acknowledged gratefully in his letters. His correspondence was full of a young man’s awe at living alone, with enthusiastic descriptions of his boardinghouse in Barrios Altos, of the crowded neighborhood with its teeming street life, panegyrics to Lima and the opportunities it seemed to promise. These were letters that Fernando would have been embarrassed to read later, but his mother had held them nearly sacred at the time. Of course both had forgotten them, and perhaps this was just as well.

She might have remembered his childhood friends, his crew of mischievous, quick-witted boys, nearly all of whom made their way to Lima eventually. If Fernando had ever brought José Carlos around to see her, it might have jogged something in her memory — an image, a flicker. The two boys had been inseparable. She’d found them once, not even eight years old, discussing with great seriousness the creation of a superhero who would be a combination of the two of them, an amalgam of their unique virtues. She had lingered in the doorway, listening, laughing to herself. Having humbly appraised their various qualities, the two boys had left the most contentious topic for last: a name for their conqueror.

All this was forgotten, along with a hundred other details, moments, words: she had never thought much of his politics, had avoided the room whenever the heated talk began between father and son. The boy had opinions on everything. She hadn’t wanted to notice when his letters took on a different tenor: his new obsession was Lima and its poverty. One long note was spent describing the trials of a destitute newspaper vendor, a wizened man who claimed to carry his meager life savings in a pouch around his neck. He’d lost his family in a landslide, Fernando wrote, but the man held on. He walked to Lima. No one had come to help them. Fernando found it horrifying, or at least his letters said so.

His mother found it appalling as well. “There are poor right here!” she exclaimed as her husband read the letter aloud. She felt pity for Fernando then: he was such a sensitive boy, to let other people’s problems upset him so.

Now she was dying. Inés called one Sunday to tell him this fact. She was older than Fernando by eight years, and liked to make that clear. He had been promising to come visit for weeks, had meant to. “Honestly,” he said.

“You don’t remember us. You don’t come around, Nano. Meanwhile your own mother—”

Fernando cut her off. It was early morning, a Sunday. In better times, he might have come by that afternoon, taken Inés’s sons to play soccer in the park, filled up the station wagon with Maruja’s boys too and made a day of it. Through his bedroom window, he could see the sun peeking through the fog. Maruja sat at the foot of the bed, her hair wet, pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweater. It was the last time he spoke with his sister for over a year. He would remember it clearly. Inés was excitable, given to waves of sentimentality that could come at any time: a mention of Arequipa, a song, an old picture tugging at her heart from behind a dirty glass frame. But her mother — nothing and no one was more sacred or more special than her mother, who had raised her and guided her. “Fernando, we owe her everything.”

“Inés, Inésita. Cálmate…”

His head hurt each morning in a new way. Sometimes the dizziness overcame the pounding, sometimes his body shook with such force that he wondered if others could see he was falling apart. But to Inés, he was whole, composed. He spoke quietly but did not waver.

“Our mother has everything. She has a home to sleep in. She has food to eat. She has a family to care for her. What about the other mothers? The ones who have nothing? Who will visit them?”

“Their children.”

“Their children are busy,” he said. “They’re cleaning your house.”

“Go to hell, Nano. I don’t need your lectures.”

“I can’t come today.”

“You’re cruel.” She hung up the phone softly.

V. Father, 1966

Fernando placed first in the national exam. He was admitted to the university. It came so suddenly, such good news so unexpectedly, that his parents drove to Lima to congratulate him. They met at Elías’s house, the family gathering around to toast Fernando, their youngest. His unruly black hair had been shaved down to the scalp. It made him look even younger than he was, seventeen, but it was tradition. Around Lima, on the buses and in the streets, you could spot the bald young men who had just been accepted. At the party, everyone made fun of his bald head. The photos show Fernando smiling happily, his arms slung over his brothers’ shoulders, with Mateo’s large hands curling over his younger brother’s scalp and onto his forehead. Everyone is laughing in the photograph, including Enrique behind tinted frames, and Elías, the oldest, whose smile was a replica of his father’s.

Fernando made a toast, to the coming challenges, to his chosen profession, engineering, and to all the people without homes whom he planned to build houses for. There were chuckles all around, but not from Fernando. He meant every word.

And there was no laughter from his father, Don José, who perhaps knew his son best. Fernando, who argued but always listened. Fernando, who threatened his family with his failure just to remind them he was independent. Fernando, who at age four, undersized and quiet, had refused to eat another bite — not for his mother, not for his sister, and not for his brother. “Who will you eat for, Nano?”

“For Guminga,” he said emphatically. “For Gu-min-ga.”

Dominga, the maid. Even then he was with the people, Don José thought. Dominga was a child herself when she first came to the house, barely eighteen, taking care of the home, cooking, cleaning, and looking after the infant Fernando. She was the first maid the family had been able to afford. Now Dominga lived in a small room, next to the kitchen. She had sewn a curtain out of scraps of fabric and hung it from a rod above the door. If a candle came down the hallway in the middle of the night, she would sit up in bed, peering out into the kitchen to see if she was needed. She was from Puno, from the cold altiplano, where she went every August on her two-week vacation. She wore her hair in two even braids that stretched to the center of her back. Not beautiful, not even pretty, she had an oval face and inky black eyes. Still, the simplicity of her desires gave her an air of satisfaction that others spend their lives chasing. A bed, a roof, a little money to send home; that was all, and when she held Fernando, she was somewhere altogether different, and there was nothing ordinary about her life because she was wanted. Don José had seen her, and it amazed him: the child could do that to her, with his searching look, with his conviction that she stand by him, and be near him, before he drifted into sleep. Even now she had sent a small tin of jam wrapped in newspaper, a present, she said, for the young engineer. She still remembered him. “Little Nano,” she had said to Don José. “Give him a kiss for me.”

Don José, watching his son toast the houses he would build for Peru’s homeless, watching his son tremble with emotion at the warmth of the family surrounding him, recognized that Fernando’s heart was like his own: nostalgic but combative, caring but suspicious, able to bundle great ideas into intractable knots of personal anxiety. It is the way men begin to carry the world with them, the way they become responsible for it, not through their minds, but through their hearts. And though they shared much, the differences between Don José and his son were also striking, and also a question of heart. Don José saw that as well and did not, as others did, attribute those differences to something as simple as youth.

Don José, as a young man, had been a Communist. It was easy and logical. His brothers and sisters had all taken the well-worn paths that life in the provinces afforded them. Ricardo and Jaime were farm workers and spent their days bent over in fields they did not own. Luis worked in a leather shop, crafting saddles and belts, bags and soccer balls. By the time Fernando entered high school his uncle Luis was nearly blind. Don José’s sisters had never had schooling beyond the fifth grade. They had married young, become the kinds of women who tended to their husbands’ houses without complaint or worry. They shopped every morning for that day’s meals and went to the plaza to have their letters read to them. Life was work. Life was spent living. Don José read books, studied, became a schoolteacher, and eventually a principal. He loved, he married, and he strayed. Mateo, Fernando’s half brother, came to live with the family when he was five. Don José found himself, now the gentleman he had always imagined he could be, disappointed in himself, in his lack of drive and desire. Fernando carried within him those qualities that time had conspired to take from his father.

One must understand what it means to be born at the foot of a volcano. Arequipa is less a city than a living temple to El Misti, that imposing mass of rock rising behind the cathedral. Men invoke its name to describe what is right. What does a volcano do to a man but impress upon him the need to dream on a grand scale?

In 1950, when Fernando was two years old, Independencia went on strike. The students closed the doors of the school, locked themselves inside to protest the raising of school fees. Three tense days followed, with skirmishes along the fences and students pulling stones from the courtyard to throw at police. The government sent in the army, a student was killed. The city took to the streets. Every man in Arequipa knew that if the cathedral’s bell was ringing, it was time to rally in the square. The city’s narrow lanes filled with angry townspeople, farmers, ranchers, merchants, students. In Arequipa, you had a right to be angry. You had a right to demand better: didn’t their volcano prove that they were destined for much more? And people listened: as Arequipa went on strike, other cities and towns across Peru followed suit. The crisis came and power changed hands. The stage shifted. If only for a day, a week, a month, those in power were forced to listen to the people. This was how things got done. This was tradition.

The party rose to a boil. Someone had dusted off a guitar, and Mateo was threatening to sing. He had returned from a trip north, bronzed and happy, telling stories of Ecuadorian girls and nights on the beach. Enrique was dancing with Inés, chiding his sister for her lack of rhythm. Don José felt a warmth in his chest, the comforting sensation that everything was going to be fine; that his work, if such a thing existed, was nearly done. He wasn’t old, not yet, but look at what he had accomplished! His children stood before him in diverse stages of drunken cheer, and they all seemed like the kind of people he’d like, if he were to meet them as strangers on a train station platform or in a European café. He had raised them well, or his wife had, or maybe they had done it together — but still: he hadn’t ruined them! Don José felt like weeping: his children were the sort of people who would make something out of this country, who could redeem this mess they’d inherited. He wanted to touch their faces, to show them off to the world. Could they be real?

Someone called for a toast. The room had the flickering warmth of a silent movie, except suddenly Don José was talking, the words, he feared, pouring forth without poetry, without grace. He was forced to admit he’d lost count of the drinks. His loved ones laughed with him. Fernando stood with his mother, their hands clasped tightly. She had missed him most this year. It was terrible to see her this way, Don José thought. Watching their son from afar held no pleasure for her: she couldn’t appreciate the spectacle the way Don José could. Now, their youngest nearly a man, and look at her: holding his hand like a child, and Nano, generous-hearted, letting her.

He was a beautiful boy.

When he finished, Don José found a place on the sofa, a comfortable position from which to gaze at his family. An hour passed and the liquor ran out. Inés apologized, smirking. “I didn’t prepare for you hooligans.”

Mateo consoled a red-faced Fernando, shouting in his ear as if he were hard of hearing, “No more liquor? It’s all right, Nano, we’ll drink vinegar!”

To Don José’s surprise, his wife joined him after a while. She brought him coffee and sat close to him, their thighs touching for the first time in many months. He took her hand and raised it to his lips. She blushed. Someone was singing — off-key, out of tune — did it matter? Don José kissed his wife’s hand softly.

VI. Pinochet’s Graveyard, 1973

In December of 1973, José Carlos arrived from Santiago de Chile, thin, broken, with hands that shook uncontrollably. He stumbled over his words and brooded in long silences, looking away into the distance, the ash from his cigarette floating into his lap.

“They killed me, Negro, they killed me,” he said, his voice trembling. Fernando met him at the airport; José Carlos staggered off the last airlift of Peruvian citizens from Chile. The rest stayed to die.

“Where did they keep you?”

“In Pinochet’s graveyard, in the stadium. We had nothing to defend ourselves with.”

The story came out slowly, over many nights. José Carlos was smaller and weaker than Fernando remembered. His movements came haltingly: a finger rubbing his temples, a foot tapping an uneven rhythm. Five years at the university in Santiago. José Carlos had been expelled without papers, without a degree, with nothing.

“What did they do to you, José Carlos?”

“They killed me. They kept us in the stadium. There were thousands of us. I was locked in a dressing room under the stands with two hundred others, mostly students. Communists. They kept the lights on, fluorescent lights, burning our eyes. We slept in groups, took turns standing. Twelve hours at a time, standing with people I’d never met before and others I knew well. It was impossible to sleep. We heard shots sometimes from outside. People were dragged out screaming and never came back. They pulled me out too. I was angry. You’re going to die, you piece of shit. Comunista. They spat on me. Peruvian dog, you’re going to die in Chile today! I told them to go to hell. They were young, the soldiers, just children, but cold. They wouldn’t look me in the eye. I remember one of the officers: he was silent, standing behind. He had big hands. Finally, he yelled out, Tie him up, and they did. They put my hands behind my back and then blindfolded me. I spat at them. Say your last words, Communist. Fuck off, I said. I’m ready.”

José Carlos spilled the ashtray with a clumsy brush of his arm; he was shaking violently. Fernando moved quickly to sweep the ash into his hands.

“They shot me, Negro! They killed me!” José Carlos brought his hand down hard against the table, slapping it loudly. “They shot me with blanks! They played at killing me!”

“They dragged me back to the dressing room. I smelled from my own piss and shit. My friends there held me. Someone threw water on me. You’re alive, they said, but I didn’t believe them. No bullet touched you, they said, but I knew I had felt it. I spent three days dead, Fernando. Three days…”

José Carlos’s voice was thin and smoky. “That’s what they’re going to do to you.”

“What do we do, Perucho?” Fernando took his hand and squeezed. “You’re home. We’re alive.”

José Carlos shook his head, and coughing loudly, put out his cigarette. “It’s simple, Negro. The side with guns always wins.”

VII. To Lima, 1965

Then there was the bus that took Fernando to Lima. It was the kind of contraption held together by ingenuity, built from salvaged parts with the practiced art of making do. Learn what the engine can handle and disregard its feelings, its wishes, and its whims.

Repairs were cruel surgeries of convenience, and the bus grew hardened, indifferent, and ran from spite and disgust, crossing Andean passes, wheezing and cursing the broad-bowed freighter that brought it from Germany, the United States, or Sweden. Soon the seats were cracked and choking with dust, the windows rattled with each bump, each pothole, each patch of rough stones. The passengers rode, somehow coaxing sleep from the nauseating pounding of metal and glass, and the murderous odors of diesel.

This is how Fernando came to Lima at age seventeen: wearing a brown sweater over a modest button-up, with blue slacks and black shoes worn thin at the heels. Riding that bus, seated in the back row with six others, a mishmash collection of souls on one or another of life’s various errands: to buy, to sell, to visit, to marry, to find, and more than a few, to forget.

Young people climbed onto the bus in the dead of night, leaving behind bankrupt and miserable villages of adobe houses and cold fields of cotton and maize. They carried a change of clothes, a picture, a little food, a plastic comb, a letter of introduction, a bag of coca leaves, or a crucifix. They dropped their bundles in the aisle and stood for twelve hours, until the sun was up and roaring, the bus warm and drowsy with heat, and still they stood, beads of sweat forming on their lips and on their temples. Fernando watched them. They were his contemporaries. His countrymen. He watched them pull a few soles from their pockets, haggle with the driver, shake their heads, and point their fingers. Their skin toughened by the sun and the wind. Some spoke only Quechua and some seemed not to speak at all.

Sometime in the afternoon the driver lost control. In a frightening half-second, the tires slid on the gravel, the road slipping beneath them. With a punishing blow, the bus slammed into the side railing, swerved back toward the mountain, toward safety, and came to rest, half-leaning, half-balancing against the brittle and crumbling earth that overlooked the road. To their right, just beyond the guardrail, a jagged drop-off and the valley below. People picked themselves up slowly. Bags and blankets were pushed aside. Fernando found himself stretched across three strangers. Legs and arms sorted themselves out. Mothers attended to crying children. Someone handed him his glasses with a smile and asked if he was all right. Everyone seemed to be reasonably well, though shaken — except the driver, who had taken it worst of all, perhaps because he had seen that shocking flash of blue across his window as the bus peered over the edge. He knew better than anyone how close they had come. The force of the accident had thrown him from his seat, but he had climbed back up to his perch, pulled the door release, and then sat still, pallid, gripping the wheel, rocking his head back and forth, eyes glazed, reliving the accident. A few people stopped to check on him, to pat him on the shoulder, to urge him outside, but he ignored them.

The men, with Fernando eagerly helping, set about the business of righting the bus. It was leaning precariously against the dirt rock wall of the road, its right tires about two or three feet off the ground. The cargo tied to the racks on the roof of the bus had come loose. Now it draped over the edge of the right-side windows. The tarp that covered the cargo had held, the suitcases, sacks, and crates together still, but dangling dangerously from the top of the bus.

Fernando walked to the edge where the bus had nearly taken flight and looked out over the valley. It was a tremendous sight, a magnificent Andean landscape, a silver-gray sheath of rock, a fierce blue sky, and along the hills, footpaths where man and beast walked. Perhaps the Inca’s own messengers had marched along those paths in the days before the Spanish, before Atahualpa tossed Pizarro’s Bible to the ground, before the killing began. There was a spectacular loneliness in the mountains, in the grand theater of wind and sky, mountain and water, and so much quiet, Fernando felt ashamed to speak. Perhaps he imagined this, or imposed it on himself, or perhaps he adopted the quiet rectitude of his fellow passengers, who nodded and gestured more than they spoke. Fernando longed to know their language.

Then the driver, still shaken, stepped into the sun-struck day, pointing frantically at the luggage compartment beneath the coach. And suddenly they heard it — the banging, clawing against metal, a sound previously lost in the wind. The men sprang into action, and in an instant, the door was open, and beneath luggage and crates, a man emerged. He had been asleep beneath the bus, having driven all night, waiting to replace the driver at the next town. They pulled him out, his legs kicking, arms flailing, a man being born again, having experienced death blindly.

“Brother,” the driver said, rushing toward him. “My brother!”

Fernando could hear the man breathing, pulling in enormous lungs full of oxygen, replenishing himself. The man was crying and fearful. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,” he murmured. A thin stream of blood curled from his bottom lip. The brothers embraced and Fernando fell in love with his people.

VIII. Carmen, 1986

His mother died. Lima accepted his sadness and gave him a month of sunless days. At the funeral, Fernando held Inés’s hand. The war had worsened. It seemed that the city might fall at any moment. In Lima, people tried to live their lives as if nothing were happening, but no one slept by the windows anymore. Bombs could go off at any moment. Fathers rushed home to beat the curfew. Young people used it as an excuse to stay out all night. Parties had devolved into fatalistic bacchanals.

Sixteen journalists were killed in a faraway mountain village. The peasants had mistaken them for collaborators. News crawled into Lima ten days later. In San Martín, a group of rebels took over a jungle town and waved rifles in the air. Guerrilla leaders, drunk with victory, pulled bandanas from their faces and announced to television cameras that victory was near. A shocked nation stared at its tormentors. The papers called them terrorists. In Lima, Fernando cringed. A backlash would come soon.

On July 13, 1986, Carmen was born on the third floor of the public hospital in central Lima.

With Carmen, Fernando and Maruja were finally alive. It was as if they had been sleeping all along. He had never seen anyone more beautiful than Maruja that morning she gave birth to his child, and when Carmen slept for the first time on his chest, he felt complete. Even as he held her, he realized he was placing a wager on his life: that the war might not spare him long enough to see her grow. Still at the hospital, he confided with Maruja that he was afraid. She said that she had always been.

Carmen was an accident. Maruja had never been convinced, not until that moment that she held the child and discovered that she could love that much again. She told Fernando that she hadn’t expected to find that within her once more. Fernando’s health reappeared, and he carried Carmen with him everywhere. He relished changing her diapers. He rode the bus with his daughter asleep on his lap. In meetings, while comrades waved fingers and spoke forcefully, Fernando rocked the child and whispered nursery rhymes in her ear, so she wouldn’t be afraid of the loud voices.

Maruja brought home a map one day, and they tacked it to their bedroom wall. That evening, once the baby was asleep, they stood hand in hand to marvel at the size of the world. It was comforting to see how little their war was, and to think there were places out there where their struggles were not news.

But in public, they showed no signs of retreat. Maruja stayed with her union. Fernando traveled to the interior and back, lightning trips to visit universities in Piura and union meetings in Huancavelica, returning to Lima on the overnight bus to see his daughter in her crib. His promise — to never leave Lima — was not mentioned.

He took Carmen with him one day when he was called to the home of a murdered syndicalist in San Juan de Lurigancho to offer the Party’s condolences. It was daylight and safe, he thought, but he hated this work. The man had lived in that part of the city built of dust. The bus let Fernando off in front of a newspaper stand. It was a warm day, inexplicably sunny. Children in tattered clothing watched Fernando as he passed, while his baby girl slept against his chest, oblivious. He’d been here, to this very home, ages ago, in the dead of night. Fernando had met the murdered man, but no picture came to mind: no toothy smile, no salt-and-pepper hair, no bushy eyebrows or face creased with wrinkles. It worried him. Now he would meet the man’s widow, and the prospect of her sadness seemed daunting. He walked on to the house, certain his feet would remember the way. His daughter yawned. Her tiny mouth opening, she blinked, and then fell asleep again. It took only a moment. Her hair had fallen out a few weeks after birth: thin, reddish brown, and straight like her mother’s. Fernando held her in his shadow so that the sun wouldn’t wake her.

He was walking along a dusty street a few blocks from the bus stop when a boy came toward him with a steady stare. He appeared suddenly from the shadowed doorway of a storefront, as if he’d been waiting. “Hey, mister,” he asked, “are you the man from the city?”

He said city as if it were far away. Fernando shook his head and walked on.

But the boy insisted. His voice was deep for his size, or maybe he was small for his age. “She’s waiting for you. Señora Aronés.”

“The widow?”

“My mother,” the boy said flatly. He cupped a hand over his eyes. “She said you were coming.”

Fernando followed the boy. “How is she?” he asked.

“The house is just over there.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

The boy frowned. “Were you his friend?”

“We worked together.”

“I’m not stupid, mister.” He rubbed his eyes. “You got him killed.”

Fernando stood, dumbstruck. The boy didn’t back down. His jaw was set fiercely. He hates me, Fernando thought, and the idea shocked him. “You’ve misunderstood, son.”

But the boy didn’t answer. Someone from the house had recognized Fernando, was calling his name, “Negro…”

“My mother’s in there,” the boy said grimly and walked away.

The home was surrounded by mourners. Fernando made his way inside, shaking hands on the way with men who recognized him. No one here seemed to blame him. Still, he felt numb. There were more people crowded inside, forming a circle around the widow. Fernando sat on the dirt floor. The widow thanked him for coming without even glancing up at him. When she finally looked up, she nodded. “You’ve been here before.”

“Your husband was a good friend.”

Someone brought him a glass of soda and he drank politely. He was there to watch her cry. He was there to show that she hadn’t been forgotten.

“Can I hold her?” she asked after a moment. She meant Camucha. The widow’s face was flush and red. He looked around her bare home; all her worldly possessions could fit into a trunk. And now she had lost it all. It was there on her face for anyone to see. Her son would never recover. Fernando passed her his sleeping child. Something like a smile graced the widow’s lips, flashed for a moment, and was gone.

VIII. La Uni, 1977

At La Uni, they were safe. Inside they could speak their minds, wear their affiliations on their sleeves. Students denounced their professors, stormed out of class and into the streets. Some disappeared into the mountains to learn the art of war. Every wall spoke politics: an angry poster announced a meeting; a slogan appeared, scrawled in red across the bricks. With angry partisans looking on, a frightened groundskeeper painted over it all. He did it every week.

Some hid their entire adult lives in and out of halls of La Uni. Fernando knew them. One man, Victor, never stayed in a house very long, two weeks but not more, and came to the university with fake papers to meet his comrades. He had left medical school in his second year and spent some time in Cusco with the peasants during the land takeovers. He plowed the earth with the Indians and carried water for their crops in leaky wooden pails. Back in Lima, he threw rocks at the Presidential Palace and broke windows at the Congress building. When the situation allowed, he set fires, and then people began to whisper his name. In 1977, he was already wanted. His friends remarked that the posters made him look even slighter than he was.

Victor fell ill in the early spring. A man came looking for Fernando at La Uni and told him the news. The messenger was paunchy and dark, careful with his words. Each syllable escaped through his teeth, so Fernando was forced to lean close simply to hear him. It was the way people in the movement spoke. “Victor needs a doctor. He says he knows what it is, only he can’t operate on himself.”

Fernando’s brother Enrique was a doctor. He had trained in North America. He would know someone, or he could even see the patient himself. Fernando called him and they met at Inés’s house in San Miguel. It was a Saturday afternoon in October. Inés poured drinks while her brothers spoke. Her two boys ran through the living room, screaming and laughing. They attacked their uncles with hugs and jumped into Enrique’s lap. “What are you learning in school now, Ciro?”

“Nothing,” the boy said, laughing.

“And you, Guillermo?”

“Can’t remember.”

He was only in first grade, but Fernando was afraid it was true. Public schools in Lima were not like Independencia; they were crowded, chaotic, dirty. Enrique was urging Inés to save for a private school. The boys ran outside to play.

When it was quieter, Fernando told Enrique about Victor. “He’s a friend,” he said. “He can’t go to the hospital.”

“Don’t ask me to get involved, Nano.”

“Involved?” Fernando laughed. “Come on, hermano. It’s just a small favor.”

“I wish I could help.”

“It would all be very quiet.”

Enrique shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

Inés’s boys were kicking a deflated plastic ball in front of the house. Ciro waved and smiled through the window, then kicked the ball straight at them. Both Fernando and Enrique flinched, but the ball ricocheted harmlessly off the iron bars in front of the glass. The boys smirked, then Ciro raised his arms and shouted gol with such exuberance that Fernando couldn’t help but smile.

But Enrique didn’t. He turned away from the window.

“Well?” Fernando asked.

“You know what, hermanito?” Enrique said in a sharp whisper. “I have a wife. I have two daughters. I have a son on the way.”

They had discussed this before, across their father’s kitchen table in Arequipa: What will you do when the time comes to act? What is demanded of people like us in a country like this?

“When you’re my age you’ll understand, Nano.”

A radio hummed in the background. They could hear Inés singing along to the old tune from the kitchen. Enrique got up without saying another word. Fernando watched his older brother through the window. Enrique picked up one of the boys and put him on his shoulders. The boy shrieked with delight.

Sometimes Fernando thought they scarcely seemed like brothers at all.

Victor died in a windowless basement apartment in Barrios Altos of complications resulting from acute appendicitis.

X. Mateo, 1989

Fernando stopped by Mateo’s apartment one evening. It was November. Soon the city would be beautiful again. The brothers embraced warmly; though they lived nearby, they had not seen each other in months. Fernando sat down, and Mateo brought him a drink. “This apartment is killing me, Nano,” he said.

The curtains were drawn. All the furniture was covered in dust. “You changed the arrangement here, no?” Fernando asked.

“We moved everything toward the center. Away from the window,” Mateo said, nodding absentmindedly. “Bombs.”

Outside, along the avenue, just one hundred feet from Mateo’s window, there was a red brick wall that read NO STOPPING UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH. Behind it, there was an army installation. Every two hundred feet or so, a turret stood above the brick wall, each with an armed soldier inside. Mateo had been pleading with the landlord to let his family move to another apartment, one that wasn’t so compromised by its location.

The sofa was set in the middle of the room; two strips of electrical tape made an X across each window. “To keep the glass from blowing inward.”

Fernando nodded. He had done the same in his apartment. Mateo’s neighbors had moved away. “We try not to look out the window,” Mateo said, finishing his drink.

“Someone has been watching me, Mateo.”

“Of course.”

Mateo knew exactly what his brother was involved in. They had never discussed it, but each assumed that they knew the same people, only from different sides. They were right. Mateo was an officer. Policía Nacional del Perú. “What happened?” he asked.

“My car was stolen, the other day, near the university—”

“Which doesn’t in itself mean anything.”

“No, of course not.” Fernando chuckled. “It’s a piece of shit, but still, it’s surprising it hasn’t happened sooner. But what happened after was strange. I reported it to the police. At the station, they made me wait. Then an officer came out, less than two hours after it had gone, and told me they had found my car.”

Stolen cars don’t appear in Lima, not like that, not until the piranhas have taken them apart. Mateo knew that. Everyone knew that.

Fernando continued. “They took me right to it, right where I had left it. Exactly as it was before I had reported it missing.” He paused, and leaned over the table toward Mateo. “Except my briefcase was missing.”

“You’re certain?”

“Gone.”

“Did you go back for it?”

Fernando nodded.

“You shouldn’t have.” Mateo shook his head. “What did they tell you?”

“‘So, it seems you’re some kind of politico, no?’”

“And you said?”

Fernando paused, taking a deep, tired breath. He hadn’t slept. “I said where’s my fucking briefcase.”

“Nano!” Mateo stood up with a start. “How could you put yourself in that kind of position? How could you have so little regard for your own life?”

“I don’t know. I messed up.” He looked down. He wiggled his toes inside his shoes.

“Nano,” his brother said. “Look at me. What was in the briefcase? What did you have in there?”

“Documents. Papers. Names. I don’t know exactly. Maybe nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Fernando was suddenly afraid. “I haven’t told Maruja.”

“Is she implicated?” Mateo asked.

“No.”

“Are you?”

Fernando closed his eyes but didn’t answer. Mateo was still standing over him when he opened them again. The brothers stared at each other for a moment, in silence.

Mateo slumped down in his chair again.

“The circle is tightening, Nano…. Be careful.”

XI. Oxapampa, 1989

A few weeks before Christmas, the Party called on Fernando to make a trip. He didn’t tell Maruja where he was going, although she must have suspected. He didn’t inform the university that he was taking leave, nor did he expect to be gone for long. Fernando took a bus to Huancayo, and in the noisy bus station he met his contact, a comrade from the Party. Together, they rode away from Huancayo, north into the valley, and then into the jungle. They spent one night in Oxapampa, registered under false names at a local hotel, and woke with flea bites and neck cramps. They hiked for the next two days and then met another man, who led them even farther. And then, in a clearing, three days from anywhere, Fernando met the combatants. José Carlos had been waiting for him.

The fighters were young and frightened and dwarfed by their weapons. They had scarcely begun to live. They had never read Marx or heard of Castro. Some had never been to Lima. There was little bravado among them, little of that swagger that one would associate with carrying a gun. The forest was dark and damp. In camp, they made space for the visitor from Lima in one of the olive green tents. Fernando thought they looked ill, gaunt, tired. He briefly felt shame.

There was a clearing, where the rebels learned the basics of engagement. In the mornings, they dispersed in squadrons, drifting into the jungle; they ran exercises, learned how to use their guns. They hid from one another and shot the branches off trees from a hundred yards away. They tossed rocks at targets, pretending they were grenades. Fernando watched as they threw, counting — one, two, three, four — and whispered the coming explosion:

Boom.

Those who saw him then described Fernando as electric, brilliant, defining the sacrifices that still awaited them, and the injustices that had steeled their resolve. No question animated him more, sparked more passion within him, than why. Why there were no choices; why the time was now; why victory was assured.

It came from his heart, but he spoke with his hands, his arms, his entire body. Why the people had been denied schooling; why their fathers worked land they would never own; why their mothers cleaned houses; why their uncles did not stop working until blindness overwhelmed them. Why the defeated chased happiness in drink; why wealth bred depravity. Why the history was cruel and maniacal; why blood must be shed.

Standing in front of a map of the Americas tacked to the mossy trunk of a jungle tree, Fernando ran his finger up and down the peaks of the Andes, the spine of his continent, and told the tattered and inexperienced group of fighters what he would die believing that very day:

“All of this will be ours once more,” he said.

And he smiled as they repeated it with him. He delighted in the sound of their rising voices.

He looked up and caught a glimpse of the swollen sky through the forest’s canopy.

“All of this will be ours once more!” he said again.

And the words filled him with an inexplicable joy, even hope.

He was still alive.