Word: lituma
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...novel begins with what might have been a simple puzzle: three men have recently disappeared from the remote Andean village of Naccos, and Corporal Lituma and his adjutant, Tomas Carreno, want to find out what happened to them. The two protagonists are members of the Peruvian Civil Guard assigned to this village, where work is inching ahead on construction of a government-financed highway. Although the guardsmen are supposedly there as keepers of the peace, they know the mountain people regard them at best with mistrust. "To tell the truth, you have to be pretty dumb to join the Civil...
...Lituma knows--indeed, everyone in the Andes seems to know--that the Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, is gaining control in the region. To underscore this point, Vargas Llosa inserts flashes of Sendero violence throughout the early portion of his narrative: the stoning to death of two young French tourists and a prominent ecologist visiting from Lima; the slaughter of a herd of vicunas being raised as a cash crop for the local economy; the invasion of a village in which residents are persuaded to massacre one another...
...Still, Lituma does not believe that Shining Path, for all its ferocity, is behind the vanishing of the three men he was supposed to protect. "Does Sendero ever disappear people?" he wonders aloud. "They just kill them and leave their leaflets behind to let everybody know who did it." Instead, the corporal directs his attention to the husband and wife who own the dreary bar where the construction workers gather each night: Dionisio, who, as his name suggests, is a prodigious reveler in his own establishment, and Senora Adriana, who reads palms and is regarded by her customers...
Questioning these two gets Lituma nowhere. Adriana's replies are particularly obscure and Delphic: "All these hills are full of enemies. They live inside. Day and night they weave their evil schemes," she tells him. After listening to such divinations, Lituma mordantly imagines the report he might telegraph back to his headquarters about the missing men: "Sacrificed in manner as yet undetermined to placate evil spirits of Andes, stop. Written in lines of hand, witness claims. Case closed, stop...
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