5 The Trauma of Incompetence: Violence and Viewpoint in Santiago Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo

How do we talk about violence? How do we tell stories that respect the dead? How do we do so when that violence overwhelms us, when it has become part and parcel of the air we breathe, the very warp and woof of our social and cultural fabric?

These questions are not new. Violence has plagued humankind from its origins and not surprisingly is intertwined with its literary traditions. The Epic of Gilgamesh, typically considered the earliest surviving work of great literature, is a story of oppression, combat, murder, and the search for justice, concluding with the sobering warning: “Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.” The Western tradition continues on from there, with the divinely mandated genocides of the Hebrew Bible and the lust, deceit, and slaughter of The Iliad. The Americas give us more of the same. The creation myths contained in the Popol Vuh depict a world almost sadistic in its cruelty. Early iterations of humankind are wiped out after failing to satisfy the gods. The Popol Vuh details how the last of these protohumans are set upon—the eyes of their decapitated heads gouged out and their bones ground to powder—by the animals, plants, and even rocks eager at last to avenge themselves of their superiors’ abuse. Quasi divine beings then bring humans into existence through the plotting and execution of a series of ambushes and murders. And so on up until the present.⁸

For all the former models, authors continue to wrestle with the question, if not suffer under the burden, of representation. Perhaps even more so today when unprecedented prosperity has raised the economic and existential costs of violent or violence-prone behaviors. Even worse, thanks to such prosperity and the technology that often accompanies it, violence today can be and often is more systematized than ever. Never has the brutality humans perpetuate on each other been both so well organized and so carefully documented. Finally, never has it been so painstakingly reported. Such organization, documentation, and information is part and parcel of the most developed, prosperous, and technologically advanced culture the world has ever known. We are more ordered and civilized than ever, yet the violence not only continues but is itself more ordered and hence, in contrast, feels all the more barbaric. Not only have humans moved beyond animal existence in the last centuries but, in increasing numbers, we appear to be moving beyond human existence.⁹ Ours is a world of the new and the clean: scientific and technologic advances in energy, agriculture, transportation, and medicine tempt us with the possibilities of ever-heightened pleasure, enduring beauty, and lengthy, pain-free (if not eternal) lives. We cannot help but feel ourselves as morally superior, long removed from the bloody daily struggle, red in tooth and claw, that until recently has always characterized Homo sapien existence.

So it may seem a double affront when writers, inhabiting the clean, well-lit homes of the slick and systematized, presume to peer into the chaos and make themselves the voice of the violated. Inevitably, the privileged caste writes from the very prosperity that makes the violence described appear so utterly barbaric. In fact, it may be the case that they write from the very place that enables if not impels such violence. Is it not the same comfort of ideas hardened into unbending ideology that provides the platforms for both perpetration and condemnation? It is one thing to be horrified by violence and to bear witness of it to a society tucked safely away in the artificial air of far-off, beach-front high rises. It is quite another to do so from within the same high rise.

Hence the hand wringing in Peruvian literary circles over a series of novels portraying that nation’s own most recent experience of violence. The novels in question were works that international readers are likely to view as eye-opening tales offering invaluable insight into what Peruvian’s call la Guerra or the War. La Guerra was not some formal conflict with some foreign power but a long decade (officially 1980–1992) of domestic terror and counterterror centered in the Peruvian highlands and revolving around the activities of the Marxist guerrilla operation, Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. Spreading out from those highlands, it engaged at its height the breadth of national territory. According to official estimates, the conflict claimed nearly seventy thousand lives, making it the most violent period Peru had known since the Spanish conquest nearly five hundred years earlier.

Writers who were experiencing La Guerra firsthand began converting their experience into fiction while the nightmare was still underway. Their works were dubbed Peru’s “novels of violence.” A decade or so after La Guerra’s conclusion, a new batch of novels appeared, this time not just in Peru but in international venues as well. This new cluster of novels bore similar testimony to the violence of La Guerra treated by the “novels of violence.” In contrast, however, the authors penning these works did so from situations of relative safety and comfort. None of them had experienced the trauma of La Guerra firsthand. Some were mere children during the era. Moreover, they penned their works from the safety of Spain and the United States. Known by critics collectively as “novels of trauma,” works such as Alonso Cueto’s La hora azul, Daniel Alarcon’s Lost City Radio, and Santiago Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo [Red April] were heralded by the international press as “disquieting” looks at “the futility of violence.” They were said to describe the war with “lucidity,” and to offer “an unsparing view of life controlled by a repressive and paranoid government.”¹⁰ The novels enjoyed a series of prestigious cultural honors as well: the Premio Herralde for La hora azul, the Premio Alfaguara for Abril rojo, and inclusion on several North American best-books-of-the-year lists for Lost City Radio.

From within Peru, however, the narrative was different. There the novels were often viewed as works of privilege, as stories fabricated by authors taking advantage of the pain of others. Moreover, their success was sometimes portrayed as a consequence of access to prestigious and powerful international editors rather than to any particular literary excellence (Castro 30; Virhuez Villafane 31). These authors, it was argued, offered themselves as witnesses to violence while frequently perpetrating the very stereotypes, and thus the very divisions, that contributed to if not caused the violence in the first place.¹¹

The case of Roncagliolo’s 2006 novel Abril rojo is particularly interesting. A winner of the Alfaguara Prize, granted by the powerful Spanish publishing house of the same name, Roncagliolo’s novel was surely the closest most of its readers would ever come to Peru’s war. While the Alfaguara label carries a certain literary prestige, it’s a publishing house generally known for making commercially safe bets. Its eponymous prize is, in the mold of many Spanish publishing-house prizes like the Planeta or the Nadal, a cash award for unpublished works submitted to that same publishing house. In other words, its principal intent is to drum up sales for its own soon-to-be-released commodities, not for celebrating proven literary quality, as in the Booker, the Pulitzer, or Spain’s annual National Prize and Critics Prize. The recipient authors, then, tend to be writers of some literary pedigree, but their novels err on the side of general, if not mass, appeal. The authors, as noted in this book’s introduction, also have historically enjoyed Spanish citizenship.

In the case of Roncagliolo and Abril rojo, the Alfaguara criteria generally fit. While Roncagliolo is by birth Peruvian, at the time of the publication of Abril rojo, he had taken up permanent residence in Barcelona after growing up in Mexico City, among other foreign locations. From the comforts of the Catalan capital, Roncagliolo had penned his novel, which, while set in Ayacucho, Perú, and built around the events of the war against Sendero Luminoso, is immediately recognizable—and may be enjoyed—as a detective thriller modelled on works with more universal appeal. Critics have, in fact, called it “a thriller,” a “Peruvian police procedural,” and “a puzzling whodunit” (Irish Times, Midwest Book Review, Publishers Weekly).

Roncagliolo’s choice of format raises red flags from the get-go. Detective novels are, of course, what we would call genre fiction, with their adherence to familiar plot patterns and common character types, set up via transparent language and tone, all with the intent of hooking readers into an entertaining search for clues and ultimately a culprit. Whatever the setting, a detective novel focuses its audience above all on the question of solving a crime. The reader typically accompanies the detective-protagonist in his (the protagonist historically being male) ignorance, working through clue after clue to discover the criminal, his mode of operation, and ultimately his motive. Thus while the detective novel wants to know, what it wants to know is typically limited to formulaic criminal plots. Moreover, because it is so enigma-driven and the drive to solve the mystery so intensely focused, it leaves little space for other forms of knowledge or contemplation.

And so the case appears to be with Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo. The novel begins with the official transcription of a murder. The report is the work of a certain Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, Fiscal Distrital Adjunto, or in other words, Assistant District Prosecutor. Prosecutor Chacaltana’s task will be to solve and then prevent what turns out to be a series of increasingly gruesome, ritually charged murders. The crimes occur against the backdrop of Peruvian presidential elections and, later, the Ayacucho district’s famous Holy Week celebrations. Prosecutor Chacaltana is a recent arrival to Ayacucho, transferred there after nearly an entire life spent in what is, for Ayacuchanos, the safe, desired, and always far-removed world of Lima.

While Chacaltana was born in Ayacucho—as he likes to remind the locals—the decades he has spent in Lima have left him utterly unprepared for provincial life.¹² His understanding of the people, their problems, and especially their history appears derived from textbooks and official government propaganda. His approach to the crimes and misdemeanors he confronts follows a similar pattern, being legalistic to a fault. This is especially challenging when he begins to investigate the crimes around which the novel is built. When assigned to investigate the first murder, Chacaltana proceeds out of duty and nothing more. It is not that he shirks responsibility like every other officer in the novel, passing as much time as possible in the safety of the station while desperately awaiting a transfer back to Lima. Those officers soon discover that Chacaltana is instead diligent to a fault, as he relentlessly hounds them for correct information, proper review, and the requisite signatures for the reports he assiduously files for each and every case he’s assigned. Liliana Wendorff and J. Thomas Morley describe him in terms of Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog, “the embodiment of a single, central vision of reality” reading everything “only as it relates to an organizing principle” (31).

Chacaltana’s diligence, however, has little to do with justice. The man who will be our protagonist in the crime-solving adventure is, simply put, not really interested in solving crime, let alone in righting wrong. Rather, he is driven by a simple respect for the law. He wants to obey, indeed he is obsessed with obedience to the law. And while his obsession gives him the outward appearance of excellence, it actually leaves him more blind to the realities that surround him, even those that drive the work—or lack thereof—of his fellow law officers.

Spurred on by his obsession, Chacaltana spends the first pages of the novel pestering his coworkers for signatures and clarifications surrounding his assigned case. The case revolves around an unidentified corpse, found abandoned in a barn, partially burned and missing an arm which appears to have been violently removed. One of Chacaltana’s superiors, the aptly named local military commander Carrión, puts a temporary halt to the prosecutor’s pestering by assigning him a task that may be more in line with his talents: supervising voting in a remote area of the district. But even there Chacaltana’s strict adherence to procedure gets him into trouble, while the circumstances of the Ayacucho murder follow him. Again, Carrión runs interference for the hapless assistant district prosecutor, sending him back to the provincial capital to continue his investigation. Unfortunately, Chacaltana’s work appears to produce only more murders, as the people he pursues, then interviews, then befriends, and finally loves, are gruesomely and ritualistically executed. The climax of his investigation arrives when the prosecutor realizes that he himself will be the sixth and final victim.

The plot, then, is quite traditional in terms of detective murder mysteries. Roncagliolo’s narrative presentation of it appears similarly traditional. He organizes his novel by dates: a first section is “Thursday, March 9” while the ninth and last is “Wednesday, May 3.” Most of the violence is packed into six sections covering a period from the 6^th to the 23^rd of April, the two and a half weeks of the Ayacucho Holy Week celebrations, from which the novel’s title—Abril rojo—derives. The narration in each of these sections remains consistently third-person with the narrative focus limited to Chacaltana’s activities. The only deviation comes in the form of Chacaltana’s official police reports of the various murders, and second, in the form of a handful of nearly illegible, cryptic, stream-of-consciousness messages left behind by the murderer. While deviations from the main plot, unlike the passages of the Chorus in Gopegui’s The Real, neither of these series of inserted texts challenges our enjoyment of what is, again, a rather straightforward detective novel. Undoubtedly we wonder at the origin of the stream-of-consciousness messages, to say nothing of their meaning, but their presence is hardly unusual within the genre, and they ultimately contribute to our pursuit of knowledge-via-page-turning.

Chacaltana’s reports, however, demand more analysis. While on the one hand they describe the basic facts of each murder and, after the first report, contain official descriptions of the grizzly crimes—exactly what we would expect as readers of detective fiction—the passages also open a window into the mind of our protagonist. They are our only chance to see him without the filter of what is otherwise a third-person narrative. Critic Lorena Cuya Gavilano describes these reports as littered with errors, thereby pointing to Chacaltana’s “estrangement from his country’s lettered world and, therefore, from the legal system he supposedly represents (7). Cuya Gavilano reads this strained style as representative of larger problems facing the assistant district prosecutor: “The protagonist’s ‘contaminated’ language is an indication of his ‘racial contamination.’ The use of so-called ‘español castizo’ signals the ‘pure’ origin of the speaker as a white criollo. Chacaltana, with his impure Spanish, is depicted as a cholo, and, moreover, as a mediocre mestizo intellectual” (7). Furthermore, his report is composed on a broken typewriter—missing certain keys—and so its language is even more artificially manipulated in order to avoid the absent letters, foregrounding the entire report as a strained construct. We should recall, moreover, that this stilted language constitutes the first words of the novel. Poorly executed prose becomes both Chacaltana’s and the novel’s calling card. And, as Cuya Gavilano points out, it’s slightly off, basted in archaic legalese, so stylized to impress that its effect on educated readers is the opposite. It’s signed by Fiscal Distrital Adjunto, Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, the same name with which the main narration begins on the following page: “El fiscal Chacaltana puso el punto final con una mueca de duda en los labios” [Prosector Chacaltana wrote the final period with a grimace of doubt on his lips] (16). As the narration proceeds, we soon understand that this same fool—who becomes increasingly foolish as the novel proceeds—will be our unwitting guide through an unstable and violent corner of the world so misunderstood that citizens of neighboring regions within the same country haven’t any idea what’s going on there, to say nothing of the European and North American tourists who flock there for what they assume to be picturesque and pacific local festivals. While detective-novel protagonists are often more anti- than hero, Chacaltana is particularly problematic. He doesn’t appear to know what’s going on. He is foolish, if not an outright fool.

Despite recognizing his foolishness, we can’t help but feel some connection to him. This results in part from the natural affinity readers feel for the protagonist of any novel they’re willing to stick with. It’s the nature of the reading process. But we also cannot help but admire Chaclatana’s own earnest, hard-working, and morally upright approach to whatever tasks he’s assigned. He may be frustratingly naïve, but he is unimpeachable in his work ethic and sense of duty. And he wouldn’t hurt a fly: “El fiscal distrital adjunto nunca se había portado mal. No había hecho nada malo” [The Associate District Prosecutor had never misbehaved. He had done nothing bad] (22). This appreciation grows only stronger as we observe the reluctance of his fellow officers to involve themselves in potential political violence around Ayacucho. While this attitude is, in part, an act of self-preservation, it is equal parts laziness, if not a consequence of outright corruption.

Even so, we can’t help but return to the fact that our protagonist, while sympathetic, is hardly noble and, of course, is still clueless. Following up on the fact that he’d never done anything bad, we read, “no había hecho nada bueno, nunca había hecho nada que no estuviese estipulado en los estatutos de su institución” [he had done nothing good, he had never done anything not stipulated in the statutes of his institution] (22). He is a functionary, plain and definitely simple, lacking any moral or philosophical compass. As such, his observations—those which paint the world of Ayacucho in the exotic, mysterious light that bothers critics—are foregrounded as, above all, the observations of a naïf, even a rube.

Pulling back from the story for a moment, Chacaltana’s naivete doesn’t mean that Roncagliolo himself knows any better. The Barcelona-based author may still be guilty as charged: an outsider availing himself of other people’s pain in order to sell novels on the global market and win international prizes. He has not experienced Ayacucho. He never lived the war against Sendero. Nor has he been in Peru suffering through any of its aftermath. Still, within the novel, he is careful to travel there, to carry the reader there, on the back of a character who is not only similarly clueless, but explicitly so. In other words, Chacaltana’s ignorance in a sense reflects and confessionally foregrounds Roncagiolo’s own.

As the novel proceeds, Chacaltana’s flaws only compound. While everyone whose path he crosses longs for a promotion to Lima, Chacaltana has followed the opposite course. The move, which no one understands, appears to challenge rational explanation. Why would anyone leave the capital, they wonder. While he likes to inform people of his Ayacuchan origins, his stay there was too brief and too long ago to justify a return or to provide him with any local wisdom. On the other hand, he isn’t from Lima either—as he insists—and therefore doesn’t get credit for any of the sophistication or education that one from the capital might otherwise enjoy. The combination casts him as strangely landless. He is from nowhere. Or at least nowhere that his fellow Peruvians can make any sense of (a state that may remind us, again, of the dilemma faced by Roncagliolo himself).

The reasons for Chacaltana’s move to Ayacucho are instead sentimental, though this information casts only further doubt on his qualities. It appears that he might have left Lima to escape a failed marriage, to separate himself from an ex who describes him as an absolute zero (”Eres un incapaz sin futuro, Félix. Nunca serás nadie” [You’re an incompetent with no future, Félix. You’ll never amount to anything] [63]). What we know for sure is that the transfer is allowing him to care for an apparently overbearing mother for whom he must rush home from official legal duties to ensure her constant comfort. But it is also possible that he has been demoted for the same reasons that every law enforcement officer with whom he crosses paths in Ayacucho ends up hopelessly exasperated by their dealings with him.

Being from Lima—the land of people as inexperienced as they are supposedly well-informed—Chacaltana is obsessed with the idea of the return of Sendero Luminoso. He can’t help but attribute the murders he investigates to them, even though the presentation of the bodies by their murderer mixes in ritualistic, religious elements that might have informed but are far beyond Sendero’s modus operandi, as Luis Veres has shown in his thorough study of the question (555–59). Instead, the presentation of the victims points to a postconquest Incan tale of the Inkarri. The legend arises from the sixteenth-century execution of the last Incan king, Tupac Amaru, who was drawn and quartered and whose limbs were displayed across the former Incan empire as a warning to any and all would-be rebels. Since then his legend has grown, including a prophecy that one day the limbs will reunite, and that when they do, the peoples of the former Incan empire will rise up to at last overthrow their Spanish occupiers.

As Chacaltana begins to investigate his victims, each missing a corresponding separate and distinct limb that together would form a whole body, the assistant district prosecutor concludes that the murderer is planning to reawaken the spirit of Tupac Amaru. The idea is not his own, but when someone shares with him the legend, Chacaltana falls for it immediately. Such foolishness actually encourages the murderer not merely to kill but to maim and, finally, to do so to victims who are increasingly close to Chacaltana. Chacaltana, slavishly reading the murders according to law and history books, is not only provoking additional killings but encouraging enhanced violence.

For all that, nowhere is Chacaltana’s incompetence more clearly revealed than in his personal life. This, if anything, should be where the poor guy might excel. But after an entire year in Ayacucho he remains friendless and loveless, perhaps confirming his ex-wife’s assessment. When he actually meets a young woman who, for reasons never explained, takes a fancy to him, he again makes a mess of things. Initially his failure is a question of miscommunication and underplaying his hand. However, when his investigation begins to heat up and he finds himself enjoying the protection and promotions offered by the Military Commander Carrión, Chacaltana grows bolder. But now he goes from underplaying that hand to overplaying it, inviting his love interest to his home and then moving too quickly for her comfort.

But his excessive zeal is not merely sexual. His invitation to his home is also an opportunity to introduce his girlfriend to his mother. The girlfriend discovers, as we readers have earlier, that his needy, beloved mother is actually dead. She has in fact been dead for decades, the accidental victim of a fire that, we learn by the end of the novel, was set by none other than the young Chacaltana himself in an attempt to rid himself of an abusive father. Back in Ayacucho, he decides, whether true or not, that his principal reason for being there is to look after his “señora madre” [dear mother]. His devotion is extraordinary. He organizes his days around obligatory visits, where he tidies up her bed, airs out her room, and chats with her about his latest activities, including sharing details of his intimate life. All of this makes Chacaltana, to the reader, no longer simply incompetent but possibly mad, a topic that critic Eduardo Chauca has explored at length in his reading of the novel (67). At the same time, his attention to his mother draws attention to the only other mother in the novel, a woman called Nélida, who keeps vigil on the edge of a mass grave like a woman possessed, refusing to be denied by army officials the opportunity to mourn her disappeared son and thus bear witness to the horrors of Peruvian violence, as Pablo G. Celis-Castillo has shown in his exhaustive study of the question (323–36).

The disruptive role of mourning—or its impossibility thanks to disappearances and mass graves—literally interrupts what readers expect to be a long-awaited romantic encounter between Chacaltana and his girlfriend. When the assistant district prosecutor finally brings her to his home, instead of leading her to his bedroom, he takes her to his mother’s. He tenders no warning that his mother is dead, but merely offers to “introduce” them. That his girlfriend appears to take this in stride may be read as another incidence of Roncagliolo exoticizing Ayucuchan culture. Or it may show—per Celis-Castillo’s reading—how attuned Chacaltana’s girlfriend, a local of the area, is to the problem of loss and melancholia in the Ayacucho region. Whatever its meaning, while the girlfriend displays no shock at the encounter with what is merely an altar to his mother, the event marks the beginning of the end of what had been until this point a slow-blooming but promising relationship. From here on out the girlfriend will increasingly resist Chacaltana’s physical advances, even if their relationship for some time appears to grow more emotionally intimate.

The final collapse of the relationship is again ultimately his doing. When Chacaltana learns in his investigations that his girlfriend’s parents were members of Sendero, he concludes—wrongly again—that she is the assassin he is pursuing and that he is her next victim. The erroneous verdict leads to a devastating rape scene in which our until-then bumbling but sympathetic hero temporarily loses his mind, emotionally destroying the only person who believes in him and shattering for readers the one relationship that had made him redeemable in their eyes and doing so, moreover, “with a flush of pride,” as Wendorff and Morley describe it (34). Not surprisingly, given the pattern unfolding in the novel, he learns within hours of the rape that his now ex-girlfriend has become instead the murderer’s next victim. Tragically the responsibility is his to survey the crime scene and record the grizzly and once again ritualistic nature of her murder. In an ironic twist, within hours of his visit to the scene he finds himself incarcerated for her murder. While we readers know that he is not the actual assassin, we also by now are coming to understand the responsibility he shares in so much of the violence he officially is determined to stamp out. His incompetence—a consequence of ignorance, superstition, and an absurd obsession with policy and procedure—is catastrophic.

The novel reaches its climax when Chacaltana finds himself almost immediately, and inexplicably, released from jail. He has been saved, he learns, by the grace of a powerful protector, someone in the military with the authority to overturn any decision made by local police or judges. While Chacaltana is culturally ignorant and socially inept, he does at least understand the law. The prosecutor realizes that he will be the final victim required to complete a government cover-up of violence that, ironically, is connected ultimately to the 1980–1992 war, la Guerra. As wrong as Chacaltana has been with his suspicions, even his incompetence cannot ultimately escape the long shadow of la Guerra. And so he correctly concludes at last that the murderer must be his protector, Comandante Carrión, the same who has pulled the strings leading to his release. But he also realizes that the only reason the Comandante would do so would be to execute a final murder, that is, his own.

In the novel’s concluding scene, Chacaltana confronts and kills Carrión at the commander’s headquarters. In fine detective-novel fashion, he doesn’t pull the trigger until after the commander confesses and explains his crime. If there is a difference in this work of detective fiction, however, it is that our hero hardly rides off into the sunset, triumphant and prepared to solve another crime in next year’s proximate installment of a Chacaltana crime series. Very much to the contrary, after eliminating Carrión, Assistant District Prosecutor Chacaltana drops out once and for all from civilization. The linguistically overwrought, legalistic, government official takes to the hills. But first he takes part, caught up in the Ayacucho Holy Week crowd, in a religious ritual involving the burning of Palm Sunday branches:

Secándose las lágrimas de los ojos, el fiscal salió a la calle. En cada esquina de la plaza atestada se quemaba la retama del domingo anterior. En la catedral, la imponente pirámide blanca de la Resurrección empezaba a asomar por la puerta, entre los fuegos artificiales. Sobre cda una de sus gradillas llevaba cirios encendidos. El fiscal se confundió entre la gente. Lentamente, desde el interior de la pirámide, fue emergiendo Cristo resucitado entre aplausos del pueblo. Más de trescientas personas empezaron a pasar el anda de hombro en hombro alrededor de la plaza. Cuando el anda llegó a sus hombros, Chacaltana se persignó y dijo mentalmente una oración. Al fondo entre los cerros secos, el sol insinuaba las primeras luces de un tiempo nuevo. (322)

[Wiping away his tears, the prosecutor walked out to the street. At each corner of the crowded square, the previous Sunday’s branches were burning. In the cathedral, the imposing white pyramid of the Resurrection was about to appear at the door, to the accompaniment of fireworks. It carried lighted candles on each of its steps. The prosecutor was lost in the crowd. Slowly, from the interior of the pyramid, the resurrected Christ emerged to the applause of the people. More than three hundred of them began to pass the platform from shoulder to shoulder around the square. When the platform reached his shoulders, Chacaltana crossed himself and said a silent prayer. In the background, between the dry hills, the sun intimated the first light of a new time.]

In the final pages of the novel, Chacaltana has become a madman, wandering the outskirts of Ayacucho, the place once occupied by Sendero Luminoso and perhaps still inhabited by remnants or sympathizers of the group, haunting both locals and their military occupiers. But more than merely insane, Chacaltana’s participation in the religious procession foregrounds him to the reader as a voice crying in the wilderness, a hidden but constant reminder, disquieting all with his knowledge—if not intellectual than at least experiential—of what there was, what there is, and what may still yet be. He is the crazed prophet, a John the Baptist figure, a madman speaking truth to power—even if accidentally—declaring the coming of a new Messiah.

Perhaps a bit extreme? But what has Chacaltana been? For critics to date, he’s been the view and ultimately the voice of a somewhat ignorant vision of traumatic events that once rocked the lives of real people in a real part of the world. He was also, at an extratextual level, the vehicle of a neoliberal culture taking emotional and, ultimately, financial advantage of victims still in mourning, doubling down on the victimizing that had already, once upon a time, found its origins in the culture and politics of foreign powers and their discourse.

At the same time, Chacaltana’s view and voice, as we have seen in carefully reading that voice and thereby seeing that view, has, from the beginning, been explicitly flawed. What is Chacaltana? Perhaps he is none other than us, the cosmopolitan, supplychain-managed readers of twenty-first-century international fiction, safely informed but finally ignorant and afraid. We hail neither from Ayacucho nor even Lima. We are bereft of cultural knowledge or really any deeply informed ideas or opinions on the matters at hand. We come armed only with the most scanty, sketchy knowledge of the realities of life and suffering in rural Peru. We readers likely pick up this book out of a combination of simple desire for a bit of literary entertainment and perhaps a pinch of interest in the issue at hand. We engage this novel because, though neither local nor even Limeño, we are tinged with a bit of Latin America or perhaps simple Hispanidad or perhaps simple cosmopolitanism. In this sense, while somewhat like Chacaltana, we are even more like his author, Roncagliolo. And, arguably, with this identification we find some sense of redemption.

As critics have noted, while Roncagliolo may occupy a position of relative privilege, his childhood experiences as a foreigner unable to return home precisely because of la Guerra, produce their own psychological scarring. His novel and those of Cueto and Alarcón mentioned earlier, may not arise from the red-hot theater of la Guerra, but they still hail from the traumas of exile, fear, and homelessness. Though not “novels of violence,” they are still “novels of trauma.”

And while the indirect nature of this trauma has been reason for critique, the presentation and hence the guidance of Chacaltana over the course of the novel effects what we might call a traumatic novel-reading experience for the reader. Chacaltana is our man. And he is us. We do not understand what is afoot in the novel. We are prone to accept and even embrace Chacaltana’s exotic reading of the culture he encounters. But we understand that we do so only from a position of ignorance, innocent perhaps, but also willful and all the more destructive. Chacaltana has no internal moral compass, no coherent philosophy of life. He is stuck with nothing to guide him but a set of rules that keep us safe and ironically smug in the face of a suffering that pervades far beyond the silent, exotic indigenous peoples and well into those who he would judge as arrogant, indifferent, and corrupt—security forces and magistrates and simple bureaucrats. Like him, we readers coming from the West, be that west located in Lima, Peru, or Lima, Ohio, find ourselves grasping at equally simplistic laws, both official and discursive. We impose these laws on all things exotic, on all that is foreign, on all that is other to us, first to make sense of it all but finally to control it, if not to profit thereby. We declare laws of democracy and free trade. We proclaim laws of supply and demand. Our laws demand structural adjustments. They insist on wars on drugs and terror. They impel quantitative easing and cry out for fair and free elections. They render self-evident the benevolence of NGOs and the trickle-downs benefits of MNCs and the organizing principles of IGOs. And yet, are not these laws themselves the product of our own traumas? Do we not, like Roncagliolo, also come to this reading with our own accidental mishaps, guilty of our own crimes, not bad but not good either, with no response to the naked, unmasked face of otherness?

And where are we when the negotiations, the elections, the kidnappings, the tortures, the disappearances, the renegotiations, then the reconciliations, and finally the trade deals at last sort themselves out? Do we close the book and move on, victims of another superficial piece of genre fiction, the helpless, hopeless dupes of the burnished veneer of another delicious detective novel? Perhaps. But is it at all possible that we, like our hero, having concluded our read, are now—by way of that hero’s journey—trapped, as it were, in those hills above Ayacucho, wandering about, now witnessing the open graves, now occupying the towns and villages of those who until now had been for us both exotic and silent. Are they silent any longer for those of us whose heads are yet in the hills? Will we readers simply move on? Chacaltana wanders. It is possible that at least some of us readers may still wander as well, if only in part.

Chacaltana los vio entonces. En realidad, lleavaba un año viéndolos. Todo el tiempo. Y ahora la venda se le cayó de los ojos. Sus cuerpos mutilados se agolpaban a su alrededor, sus pechos abiertos en canal apestaban a fosa y muerte. Eran miles y miles de cadáveres, no sólo ahí, en la oficina del comandante, sino en toda la ciudad. Comprendió entonces que earan lo muertos quienes le vendían los periódicos, quienes conducían el transporte público, quienes fabricaban las artesanías, quienes le servían de comer. No había más que habitantes que ellos en Ayacucho, incluso quienes venían de fuera, morían. Sólo que eran tantos muertos que ya ninguno era capaz de reconocerse. Supo con un año de retraso que había llegado al infierno y que nunca saldría de él. (316–17)

[Then Chacaltana saw them. In fact, he had been seeing them for a year. All the time. And now the blindfold fell from his eyes. Their mutilated bodies crowded together around him, their chests, split open from top to bottom, reeked of the grave and death. There were thousands and thousands of corpses, not only there in the commander’s office but throughout the city. He understood then that they were the dead who sold him newspapers, drove the buses, made handicrafts, served him food. There were no other inhabitants in Ayacucho; even those who came from elsewhere died. But there were so many dead that by now no one could acknowledge it. He knew a year too late that he had come to hell and would never leave.]

Perhaps it is the same for readers.