The surplus of meaning also gives rise to duplicity and doubling. Villagers learned that survival might well depend on showing one face to the soldiers and another to the guerrillas. People lived their public and secret lives, masking their torn allegiances. Many people insisted that everyone became “two-faced” (iskay uyukuna), and one could never know which way anyone might turn. Duplicity gives rise to rumor, and rumor is divisive. As Luise White notes, “if we can historicize gossip, we can look at the boundaries and bonds of a community. Who says what about whom, to whom, articulates the alliances and affiliations of the conflicts of daily life.”33 As villagers attempt to forge community as a strategic identity that allows them to make demands upon the state—to suppress internal conflicts in order to present a unified front to state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—gossip becomes explosive. In one community village authorities passed the Ley Contra Chismes (Law Against Gossip) in an attempt to control the power of words to rip the village apart. Authorities tried to control the verbal economy, recognizing that words wound.
This novice anthropologist sought to help, to heal, to demonstrate she meant no harm. I did not realize I was engaging in fields of power I did not perceive or comprehend. I had entered a world of stories, silences, secrets—a world in which trying to catch my bearings left me reeling more often than not.
Teodoro Huanaco’s Eye
One day a high-pitched voice sang greetings from outside our door in Carhuahurán. A slender man with smooth skin and a tightly clenched left eye stood outside, his hands grasped in front of him. I had never seen him before, but he brought potatoes to barter for sugar, and I invited him in.
Efraín and I learned his name was Teodoro Huanaco and that he was from Pera. He had come to Carhuahurán during the violence, as had so many people from his village. As he told us, Sendero arrived killing, not talking, in Pera.
We sat sipping miski yaku (coffee sweetened with sugar until it reached a syrupy consistency) and chatting for quite awhile. I did not want to be rude but was more than a bit curious about his left eye. It remained closed during his entire visit. I finally asked if he felt well, hoping that might lead us to the topic. It did, and he began explaining why his eye was clenched shut, only opening from three to five o’clock each afternoon.
Several weeks earlier, don Teodoro had gotten very drunk coming home from the feria (open-air market) when it was still held an hour-and-a-half walk away in Huaynacancha. He fell down a steep slope and passed out, spending the night in the bitter cold. The next day, he could no longer open his eye: he had been grabbed by daño (an illness caused by the mountain gods).34
He had thought about joining the Evangelical Church to see if that would cure his eye, but he was reluctant to give up his trago (alcohol) and his coca. “Without coca we can’t do anything here. To work we need coca. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with chewing coca—it’s what the Virgin Mary gave us. During her flight when she was so tired and worried, she sat in the shadow of the coca plant and she began chewing the coca and she realized how good it was for fatigue. She said, ‘This plant is good for my children, and I will make the leaves increase for them.’ That’s why the coca leaves grew—this is a well-known fact,” don Teodoro assured us. “But I have been looking at the libro de los hermanos [the Bible] just in case.”
Efraín and I nodded, understanding he would have to give up his coca if he joined the Evangélicos. As our Evangelical friends explained, just as coca turns the teeth green, so does it stain the soul. Chewing coca was forbidden because you cannot walk through heaven’s gates with a green soul.
“Has no one been able to help?” I asked. “It must be so difficult to work.”
Don Teodoro nodded. “Arí mamacita linda. I’ve tried so many things for my eye. But nothing has helped.”
He left a bit later, and Efraín and I continued to wonder about his eye and why it only opened for two hours each afternoon. Daño worked in many ways, and evidently he had an unusual case.
A few days later, the same high voice called out, and it was Teodoro Huanaco again. He explained that he wanted to talk with us but could not do so in front of anyone else. “May I come back tonight?” he asked.
“Absolutely, we’ll be here,” replied Efraín. “Just come by, papi.”
It was around eight o’clock when Teodoro appeared again in our doorway, his poncho wrapped tightly around him and the candles casting his shadow against the wall. This time, it became clearer why he wanted to speak to us alone. Teodoro wanted to know if I could cure his eye. I was a bit surprised at first—daño was not an illness I knew how to treat.
“I’m not certain, don Teodoro. What would help your eye?”
“We could try flowers, candles, fruit, trago, a pagapu—it would need to be after midnight. Could you try?” he asked, looking straight at me.
Efraín glanced my way and we spoke softly to each other. He had heard about how people cure daño, although he had never tried before. I asked him if he thought we could figure it out and he nodded, reluctantly.
I then asked Teodoro exactly what we would need and that I would try to make the purchases the following Friday at the feria. He thanked me repeatedly and left.
Efraín and I were curious—why me? As a gringa, I hardly seemed like a sure thing. However, I had been giving people Ibuprofen for pain, antibiotics for infections, and massages to the women when talking about the violence made them ache. In one instance, amoxicillin probably had saved a man’s life.
A few weeks prior to don Teodoro’s first visit, a knock at the door had sent me scrambling for my flashlight. I slept with a rock propped against my door, figuring that if the soldiers planned a nocturnal visit, at least I would have a few minutes’ warning. But the voice that replied to my “Who is it?” clearly belonged to a child.
I slid the rock back, creaked open the rusty aluminum sheet, and found a little boy and his mother standing in a slender stream of moonlight, both in tears. The boy told me his father, Jesús, was very ill and asked me to come look at him. I gathered up my first aid kit and flashlight, and we made our way down past the preschool, silvery light reflecting off the roofs and barely illuminating the rocky path beneath my stumbling feet.
We entered their house and they directed me toward the heap of blankets piled on the bed. A man was lying there, breathing laboriously. I could feel the heat that emanated from his body before even touching him, and the gurgling congestion in his chest was audible with each strained breath. I thought he had bronchitis, perhaps even pneumonia. We began a seven-day treatment with antibiotics and aspirin, massages with mentholatum—and sugar, requested by his wife to give him strength.
He did recover, and the seriousness of his illness was impressed upon me during the rainy seasons I spent in Carhuahurán. The interminable rains of December–March left everything and everyone damp: we could go for days without a moment of dryness, torrents alternating with drizzles. Each rainy season the cemetery was filled with more children and adults who first had bronchitis and then, in combination with malnutrition and a reluctance to go to the health post, pneumonia. Jesús and his family insisted I had saved his life: the strips of dried beef hanging from the rafters in my room were the proof, along with the hugs and exclamations each time we crossed paths.
Thus it was not as strange as it might seem that Teodoro came to my door. Unfortunately, the Friday feria was poorly attended and we could not obtain all of the necessary supplies. We spoke with Teodoro
