Sustaining Dominant Narratives La Hora Azul Abril Rojo and Un Lugar

Liverpool University Press
Chapter Title: Sustaining Dominant Narratives: La hora azul, Abril rojo, and Un lugar
llamado Oreja de Perro
Book Title: Andean Truths

Book Subtitle: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining
Path Peru
Book Author(s): Anne Lambright
Published by: Liverpool University Press. (2015)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gpcbmx.6
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chapter 1
Sustaining Dominant Narratives

La hora azul, Abril rojo,
and Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro
La hora azul, Abril rojo, Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro CHNAGE THIS
Among the most celebrated post-CVR literary publications are three Spanish-
language novels by Alonso Cueto (La hora azul, 2005; The Blue Hour, 2012),
Santiago Roncagliolo (Abril rojo, 2006; Red April, 2009), and Iván Thays [Un
lugar llamado Oreja de Perro (A Place Called Oreja de Perro), 2008]. Written
by limeño male writers of international stature, published by multinational
firms for international audiences, these works of fiction explore many themes
that occupied the CVR: memory and forgetting, the search for truth, the
insufficiency of language for articulating that truth, and the level of guilt
and responsibility that should be borne by those not directly involved in the
conflict. Read in conjunction with transitional justice processes and with
the Informe final, the novels also help interrogate the role of the dominant
classes in truth-gathering, interpreting information gathered, integrating
victimized populations, and articulating a post-conflict future for the nation.
Nevertheless, despite containing important reflections on these issues and
critiques of transitional justice processes in Peru, these works rely too acriti-
cally on historically reiterated tropes of indigeneity, ultimately adding to the
symbolic violence suffered by native cultures and reaffirming their margin-
ality to the national project.
There were certainly works of fiction written in the midst of the conflict,
before the Truth Commission. Mark R. Cox, in an introduction to his
anthology of fiction written during the conflict, counts over one hundred short
stories and thirty novels published between 1986 and 2000.1 I am interested
in these three narratives, however, because they were published after the 2003
release of the Informe final, and thus become a lens through which we can read
the activities and report of the CVR, by teasing out and focusing on certain
themes that are present in the Informe. I will argue that, even as they attempt
to analyze critically the conflict and post-conflict eras, the novels, like most
1 Mark R. Cox, ‘El Perú: Su narrativa y la violencia política desde 1980.’ Among the
most critically significant of these works are Julio Ortega’s short novel Adiós Ayacucho
(1986); Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel, Lituma en los Andes (1993); and Oscar Colchado
Lucio’s Rosa Cuchillo (1997).
l a hor a a zul , a br il rojo , u n luga r l l a m a do or eja de per ro 31
official transitional justice processes in Peru, ultimately return to the status

quo. Unable to shake the confines of a discourse comfortably familiar to their
intended audiences, La hora azul, Abril rojo, and Un lugar llamado Oreja de
Perro sustain and reaffirm the notion of two Perus, whose purportedly irrecon-
cilable differences continue to justify the marginalization of Andean (and
Amazonian) cultures and peoples within the national imaginary.
This discourse is driven by what Juan Carlos Ubilluz, Alexandra Hibbett,
and Víctor Vich call an ‘unconscious cultural knowledge,’ which for these
critics is ‘a hegemonic common sense that stigmatizes as pathological
everything that erupts with violence from outside (dominant culture’s) social
dominion.’2 In their excellent volume on Peruvian literature and political
violence, Contra el sueño de los justos, the editors point to the ‘symbolic
violence’ that, in their view, underlies dominant representations of subaltern
cultures in Peru, facilitates ‘the systematic violation of the most basic human
rights’ and permits ‘State genocide’3 to occur with the silent complacency of
the majority of the country.4 Pierre Bourdieu defines this symbolic violence as
‘a gentle violence, imperceptible even to its victims, exerted for the most part
through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more
precisely, mis-recognition), recognition, or even feeling.’5 Beyond material
violence (what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘objective violence’), symbolic violence has
assaulted indigenous cultures since the conquest; literature has been one of its
principal weapons, as national literary production has consistently redefined
and symbolized indigenous cultures and peoples as other, not just as periph-
eral, but as impediments and threats to a Europeanizing national project of
modernization.6
Thus, Spanish-language literature in Latin America has developed and
sustained certain tropes about indigenous cultures as pre-modern (even
2 Ubilluz, Hibbett, and Vich. ‘Introducción,’ 13.

3 Ibid. 10.
4 Contra el sueño de los justos examines Spanish-language fiction and poetry from
both during and after the conflict. The volume includes an article by Ubilluz that
analyzes La hora azul and Rosa Cuchillo, as well as two articles by Vich, one on La
hora azul and a second on Abril rojo. Their Lacanian readings (informed in turn by
contemporary theorists such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek) find an ‘oligarchic
and colonial cultural supplement’ (‘Introducción,’ 9) that underlies official discourse
on democracy and that pervades certain representations of political violence, even
those that purport to undercut Peru’s ‘colonialist and oligarchic heritage’ (11).
5 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 1–2. Žižek theorizes symbolic violence
not just as ‘violence embodied in language and its forms’ (Violence: Six Sideways
Reflections, 1) but as an essence of language itself, due to its ‘imposition of a certain
universe of meaning’ (2).
6 Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos
write about the connection between the marginalization and othering of indigenous
cultures and Westernizing modernization and globalization projects, as I discuss
elsewhere in this book.
32 an dean truths
anti-modern), barbarous, extremely violent, or overly submissive, irrational,

etc., tropes that have been widely disseminated in part through global
mass marketing of Latin American literature since the 1960s. As will be
explored in the following individual analyses, these novels were written with
this global (read: Western) audience in mind. They have been translated
into multiple languages and have won many awards; their authors enjoy a
certain international stature, and claim an affinity to other Latin American
writers of international prominence (such as compatriot Mario Vargas Llosa).
The awareness of their non-Andean national and international audiences
permeates the works and, I argue, overly shapes the parameters of their
representations of the political violence of the Shining Path era in particular,
and of Peru and Peruvian cultures in general.
Considering Abril rojo, Víctor Vich notes that the novel ‘finds itself
influenced by a set of demands that the global market currently imposes and
in this case (these demands) end up taking shape in specific representations
of violence, religion, and the subaltern other.’7 He finds the novel, ‘a good
example to observe how the national literary (scene) is obliged to perform
in the context of globalization and how this process redefines a specific field
of representations among which stands out that which depoliticizes violence
and converts it almost exclusively into a problem of religious fanaticism.’8
Noting the collusion of human rights discourse and post-conflict neoliberal
aspirations, Fernando Rosenberg, commenting on Abril rojo and La hora
azul amidst what he terms ‘truth and reconciliation narratives,’ proposes
that these novels ‘are fed by a transnational juridical-institutional framework
that, in different national contexts but the same geopolitical climate, the
commissions promoted.’ Furthermore, argues Rosenberg, these narratives
must be read ‘from a transnational grammar in which the publishing market
participates.’9 These observations coincide with those of others who recognize
how human rights discourse often responds to and engages with the demands
of the global market economy, such as Joseph Slaughter (Human Rights,
Inc.) or George Yúdice (The Expediency of Culture). Certainly, this bowing
towards the interests of a globalized literary market provides another link to
the processes of the CVR, which conducts its own national and international
marketing campaign.
Reading the Novels with the Informe final

One of the most readily apparent thematic coincidences between the novels
and the Informe final is the sense of surprise and ‘discovery’ that the protago-
nists—middle- and upper-class males from Lima—repeatedly express. Like
7 Vich, ‘La novela de la violencia ante las demandas del mercado,’ 249.
8 Ibid.
9 Fernando J. Rosenberg, ‘Derechos humanos, comisiones de la verdad y nuevas
ficciones globales,’ 91.
the CVR, the novels’ protagonists set out on specific fact-finding endeavors
that lead them to ascertain surprising information about their country of
which they were previously unaware. They uncover atrocities committed
during the internal conflict—torture, rape, disappearances, massacres. They
detect the government’s and military’s detrimental roles and the failure of
national institutions to prevent gross human rights violations and, indeed,
to repair damage done by insurgents and soldiers. They notice apparently
irresolvable ethnic and class disparities. They also encounter their own willful
ignorance and, I argue, ultimately opt to return to it.
These discoveries are linked to reiterated concerns about the question
of memory. Each of the novels repeats obsessively the tropes of memory
and forgetting. They ask whether memory is trustworthy and reliable, and
ponder the perils and the benefits of forgetting. The theme of memory is in
turn linked to the question of truth. The novels constantly reveal how truth
is discovered and articulated on the one hand, or buried and manipulated
on the other, with an apparent preference for the latter in the Peru they
are portraying. Furthermore, memory and truth are inextricably bound
to the question of language. The protagonists of these novels search for a
language capable of expressing atrocities, and ultimately find the language
available to them lacking. At the same time, there seems to be a certain
faith in ‘talk therapy,’ as if putting the horrors into codifiable language—be
it legal, ethical, or therapeutic—were the primary, if not the only, step in
moving forward. As will be discussed in this chapter, all of these issues
are presented as urgent concerns of the dominant culture and are explored
from that point of view.
Joseph Slaughter analyzes the cooperative exchange of literature, particu-
larly the novel in the form of Bildungsroman, international human rights
law, and liberal human rights discourse. For Slaughter, these forms are
‘mutually enabling fictions: each projects an image of the human person-
ality that ratifies the other’s idealistic visions of the proper relations between
individual and society and the normative career of free and full human
personality development.’10 It would be an unnecessarily restrictive stretch
to place these novels in the Bildungsroman genre; however, each does contain
certain elements of maturation and of realization of the narrator’s place in
the world, which reaffirm dominant, ‘universal’ values of personhood and
citizenship. Slaughter maintains that ‘tracking the formula of free and full
human personality development in literature and law—and in literary and
legal theory—allows (one) to excavate a neglected discursive genealogy of
human rights that intersects with German idealism and its particular nomina-
tion of the bourgeois white male citizen to the universal subject.’11 Certainly,
this universal subject is privileged in these three novels, which reveal how
10 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 4.

11 Ibid.
34 an dean truths
a specific sector, namely upper middle-class, limeño, male intellectuals,

processes the civil war and its consequences. In each case, the protago-
nist works through a personal trauma by confronting some aspect of the
larger political situation. In this manner, the novels highlight the individual,
intimate traumas of the dominant class, and their working-through, over the
collective (and individual) political, social, and cultural traumas experienced
by the vast majority of the victims of the conflict.
Thus, in these narratives, while terror is spatialized as belonging to
the highlands, invading, much like a serrano squatter community, the
unsuspecting coastal city, trauma is mapped largely on the psyches of
non-Andean subjects. In her book Trauma Culture, Ann Kaplan examines
different types of individual trauma in order to explore the effects of what she
terms ‘collective cultural trauma.’ Kaplan contends, ‘that trauma produces
new subjects, that the political-ideological context within which traumatic
events occur shapes their impact, and that it is hard to separate individual and
collective trauma.’12 For my purposes, one of her most pertinent discussions
is that of ‘vicarious trauma,’ similar to an ‘empathetic’ distress experienced
by therapists dealing with trauma patients. Kaplan maintains that, ‘arguably,
being vicariously traumatized invites members of a society to confront, rather
than conceal, catastrophes, and in a way may be useful. On the other hand,
it might arouse anxiety and trigger defense against further exposure.’13 In a
sense, it could be argued that both the authors and the readers of the Informe
final experience vicarious, or secondary, trauma. The majority would not
have been immediate victims of the human rights violations and extreme
structural, symbolic, and material violence outlined in the Informe, but rather
would have experienced after-the-fact horror at what had gone on. The
protagonists of the novels analyzed here provide examples of Peruvians of a
certain social standing who vicariously experience the trauma of the war in
a manner that coincides with and heightens personal traumas.
In this fashion, the novels become an exploration more of the individual
traumas of non-indigenous, middle and upper middle-class males than of
the collective cultural trauma the nation has experienced. Nonetheless, they
provide important insights into issues affecting the nation as a whole, issues
that in turn shed light on transitional justice efforts. As proposed earlier,
they explore the questions of memory, truth, and narratability that so haunt
the Informe. Furthermore, they echo aspects of the CVR that frame Andean
peoples, their culture and their experience as unknown and unknowable,
peripheral to national politics and world history. While the CVR expresses
a desire to ‘rescue’ the indigenous peoples (by incorporating them into a
neoliberal national project that could ultimately destroy their culture), these
novels do not even pretend to concern themselves with the marginal popula-
tions or with any inclusive national project. Rather, they reveal what Jean
12 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 1.

13 Ibid. 87.
Franco (referring to broader cultural phenomena in Latin American countries

with large indigenous populations) terms ‘an anxiety over modernity and the
fear that the indigenous … would put a brake on modernization.’14 Indeed,
every aspect of Andean cultures presented in these novels is expressed as
‘alien to modernity,’15 and indigenous peoples become but ‘a negative and
undesirable mass.’16 As will be argued throughout this chapter, the novelistic
portrayals of Andean culture and indigenous peoples expose the deep-seated,
historical racism that still underlies and sustains Peru even after the CVR
reveals racism’s malignant consequences. In this manner, the texts participate
in and sustain a dominant culture with a national project that does not look
very different from the one that preceded the conflict. While Roncagliolo,
Cueto, and Thays offer valid critiques of this national project (as will be
discussed in the following individual analyses), they are ultimately unable to
confront critically their own collusion in the reification and solidification of
the ethnic divisions and social inequalities that shackle Peru.
La hora azul
Born in 1954, Alonso Cueto was an adult studying for his PhD at the
University of Texas at Austin when the internal conflict began. Having spent
his early years in Paris and the USA he returned with his family to Lima
in 1961, and he graduated with a degree in literature from the Catholic
University in 1977. Currently a professor of literature at his Peruvian alma
mater, he is the author of several collections of essays and short stories, and
ten novels. His work has been recognized with national and international
awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and he is widely consid-
ered a significant voice in contemporary Peruvian literature.
La hora azul was published in 2005 by the Spanish publishing house
Anagrama, after having been awarded Anagrama’s Premio Herralde de
Novela, given annually to an unpublished work written in Spanish.17 Frank
Wynne’s English version, The Blue Hour, was published by Random House
UK in 2012, and to date the novel has been translated into over ten languages,
including French, Portuguese, German, Russian, and Japanese. The novel tells
the story of Dr. Adrián Ormache, a wealthy lawyer from Lima, who, upon
his mother’s death, discovers some dark truths about his father. A military
officer, the elder Ormache had been responsible for innumerable tortures,
deaths, rapes, and disappearances during his command in Ayacucho. The
younger Ormache learns that his father, however, had also fallen in love with
14 Franco, Cruel Modernity, 8.

15 Ibid. 7.
16 Ibid. 8.
17 At the time, Cueto was only the second Peruvian to win this prize (Jaime Bayley
was the first), and the sixth author from a Spanish American country. Since 2005,
however, Spanish Americans have dominated the competition.
36 an dean truths
Miriam, a peasant woman who had been taken prisoner, and had kept her
as his lover. Miriam escaped and settled in Lima, where she gave birth to a
son. Set in the late 1990s, in a pre-CVR Peru, the novel recounts Adrián’s
search for Miriam and the child he suspects is his half-brother. Along the
way, Adrián unearths disquieting facts about his father’s past and about
contemporary Peruvian society.
La hora azul recounts events and actions that in many ways mirror how
Peruvian society had dealt with the Shining Path era and its aftermath. The
novel insists upon the multiple acts of covering up and deliberate forgetting
that took place, especially among the elite sectors of limeña society. The work
begins with the protagonist-narrator contemplating a photo of himself and
his wife, Claudia, that had appeared in the society pages of a local magazine.
As the protagonist describes it, the photo captures the perfect happiness that
accompanies a successful career, beautiful wife, adoring family, and social
prestige. It is also a portrait of carefully orchestrated and jealously guarded
innocence, of the happiness only possible when turning a blind eye to the
social, cultural, and political realities that besiege the country. As Ormache
explains, the scene evokes the period before his awareness of a truth that
irrevocably would transform him, a time when ‘mi hija abrazaba a un hombre
que ha desaparecido para siempre’ [‘my daughter was hugging a different
man, a man who has gone for ever’].18
Adrián’s mother has for years carefully covered up his father’s activi-
ties, working prodigiously to preserve the family name for the sake of her
sons. This work included paying off the (false) aunt of Miriam, to keep her
silent about the atrocities committed by the older Ormache. The mother’s
actions mirror a collective silencing of the atrocities committed by state
forces, in a country that preferred to blame the ‘terrorists’ and deny the
gross human rights violations of the counter-insurgency measures. In this
manner, Ormache’s discovery of the sins of his father echoes the country’s
discovery of the realities of state violence. As Adrián says when interrogating
Chacho, a soldier who had served under his father, about his father’s actions,
the situation in the highlands ‘era algo que en Lima ni nos imaginábamos’
(HA, 69) [‘Here in Lima, we couldn’t imagine what was going on’ (BH,
62)]. It becomes progressively clear that this lack of imagination is directly
linked to a series of cover-ups and collective forgetting. Chacho suggests
to Ormache, ‘Mejor hablemos de otra cosa’ (HA, 69) [‘Maybe we should
change the subject’ (BH, 62)]. Adrián’s brother says of his father’s acts,
‘mejor ni volver a eso. Ni volver a hablar de eso’ (HA, 44) [‘Best thing you
could do is forget it, never mention it again’ (BH, 36)]. And Adrián himself
reflects, ‘Mi vida había transcurrido por caminos perfectamente pavimen-
tados por el olvido de quién fue mi padre’ (HA, 117) [‘My whole life had
run smoothly on roads that paved over any memory of who my father had
18 Cueto, La hora azul, 16; The Blue Hour, 4. Subsequent references to these works will
be cited parenthetically in the text and referred to as HA and BH respectively.
been’ (BH, 116)]. Indeed, the novel paints Lima as a city enveloped in that
same calculated ignorance.
Curiously, the willful forgetting is juxtaposed to the question of memory
and its importance for the highlands, but from a stance that reifies a political-
affective hierarchy present in many therapeutic interventions in the highlands.
In a trip to search for Miriam, Ormache meets the village priest, an outsider
who hails from Cuzco, a city located in the Andes, but in a region where
the violence was considerably less than in Ayacucho. Ormache asks how he
consoles his parishioners, in light of the horrors they have experienced. The
priest responds:
Ya no quieren consuelo, señor. Pero quieren hablar, quieren contarme sus

cosas, eso nomás quieren, y por eso los oigo pues. Los oigo y ellos hablan
y los sigo oyendo y cuando ellos se van yo me quedo solo y lloro todo lo
que puedo, señor. Entro a mi cuarto, me echo boca arriba en la cama, y
rezo un rato y entonces me pongo a llorar y me pongo de costado, el llanto
se me viene solo, yo no hago nada y de repente estoy llorando, es mejor
así, y después ya me siento mejor, y les digo que recen mucho, y que no
los olviden, sobre todo eso, que no se olviden de sus muertos pero que
los recuerden con alegría, así les digo, y así se la pasan recordándolos, y
yo también. Así podemos seguir viviendo, pero llorando siempre, eso sí.
(HA, 176–177)
They don’t want comfort, my son, but they want to talk, to tell me their
stories, so I simply listen. I listen and they talk and I go on listening and
when they leave, I sit alone and cry until I have no more tears. I go to my
room, lie down on my bed and pray for a while and then I start to cry and
I turn onto my side. I don’t do anything, the tears just come and I find
myself weeping, and it’s better that way, and I feel better afterwards, I tell
them to pray, tell them not to forget—that above all things—not to forget
their dead but to remember them with gladness, that’s what I say, and so
they go on remembering them, and so do I. This is how we manage to go
on living, though always weeping. (BH, 182)
The priest’s attitude indicates an ethical stance to that point not considered
by the protagonist, representative of dominant Peruvian society—that of
listening.
That this alternative is presented as radical, or at least sufficient, is not
unusual; given that the voices that desire to speak have been silenced on a
national level for hundreds of years, the general public is not accustomed to
listening to them. As the priest shows, the act of listening implies a certain
solidarity, to cry alongside the victims, to feel their pain, yet in this example
of listening goes no farther than affective identification. Furthermore, the
priest, the vicarious witness, overly identifies with the pain of the victims
to the point that he appropriates it—what the reader experiences is not the
victims’ testimony of suffering, but the vicarious witness’s testimony, as he
38 an dean truths
recounts his weeping, his pain, his trauma. His is what Megan Boler identi-
fies as a ‘passive empathy,’ which ‘produces no action towards justice but
situates the powerful Western eye/I as the judging subject, never called upon
to cast her gaze at her own reflection.’19 Beyond an affective realignment,
there is no transformation of social relations.20 The priest’s assertion that ‘eso
no más quieren’—that is all they want21—forswears calls for justice, repara-
tions, or reconsideration of social and cultural values in Peru. Here, listening
does not provoke the form of empathy that leads to reconciliation, marked,
according to Jodi Halpern and Harvey M. Weinstein, by ‘perceptual shifts
… that occur when one becomes interested in another’s distinct subjective
perspective (and that) are central to rehumanization.’22 Rather, listening takes
on two functions that are stated purposes of the CVR: that of articulating
a history (or histories), and that of providing therapeutic processing for the
nation at large.
The priest’s and Ormache’s insistence on remembering (soliciting,
recording, and recounting difficult memories) is tellingly contrasted with
Miriam’s posture. She does not want her son to know about his origin,
or about the fate of his many relatives who were killed in the conflict. As
Miriam says, ‘la esperanza es difícil cuando una tiene tantos muertos que
te hablan’ (HA, 252–253) [‘Hope is hard when you have so many dead who
talk to you’ (BH, 261)]. Even as the novel puts forth the importance of
remembering, it suggests that in some ways it may be better to forget. Hope,
the future, depends on leaving the past behind. By having Miriam—victim
of the conflict and mother of the future—articulate a preference for forget-
ting, the novel unwittingly subverts its expressed preference for remembering;
it also frees dominant culture, charged with reconstructing a past and
imagining a future, from the responsibility of privileging the memories of
the marginalized majority.
Precisely how much and what kind of responsibility (and guilt and blame)
dominant culture should bear is a key theme of the novel, and it is intimately
tied to reconstructing a narrative of the past. After learning of Miriam’s
existence, Adrián remembers a deathbed request by his father, one he had
not understood at the time and had decided to ignore:
Mi padre enfrentando a la muerte se había arrepentido (‘hay una mujer en
Huanta, tienes que buscarla’). Ese día me había dado el encargo. ¿Cómo
19 Megan Boler, ‘The Risks of Empathy,’ 259.

20 José Antonio Giménez Micó offers a passionate critique of the priest’s assertion
that the victims only desire to be heard. He compares the novel’s suggestion that
listening to and knowing the ‘truth’ of individual victims’ experiences is sufficient,
with specific calls for recovery of the disappeared, reparations, social justice, and
acknowledgement of the greater truths of marginalization and inequality articulated
in diverse sectors in Ayacucho (‘Olvidar o no olvidar la violencia’).
21 The English translation omits this phrase.
22 Halpern and Weinstein, ‘Rehumanizing the Other,’ 565.
podría llamarlo? ¿Un encargo de su culpa, de su nostalgia, de sus remordi-

mientos? … Ahora yo tenía la cara de esa mujer entre los dedos, tenía la
cara y el cuerpo en las sombras de esa foto. Cumplir con ese encargo …
El fantasma de mi padre se me había aproximado, me había dicho algo y
ahora me lo estaba repitiendo. (HA, 132)
Faced with death, my father had repented. ‘There’s a woman up in Huanta,
you have to find her.’ That day he had charged me with a duty. What
could I call it? A duty of guilt, of memory, of remorse? … Now I held
that woman’s face in my hands, her face, her body in the shadows of the
photograph. Fulfill that duty … I felt my father’s shadow pass over me,
he had asked something of me and now he was asking again. (BH, 133)
Despite his wife’s insistence that he not pursue his investigations, Ormache
does feel compelled to find Miriam and her son and to understand more
about his father’s past, however painful.
The desire for understanding is inextricably linked throughout the novel
with the question of guilt. Ormache observes, ‘Todos tenemos la culpa de
nuestros padres, y de nuestros hijos también’ (HA, 149) [‘We’re all respon-
sible for our parents’ sins, and our children’s, too’ (BH, 152)]. For Vich, this
aspect is the raison d’être of the novel. He points to the coincidence between
Cueto’s exploration of guilt and responsibility and similar self-examinations
in certain sectors of Peruvian society where, according to Vich, ‘in recent
years … a narrative of mea culpa has been being constructed around the
political violence.’23 Vich argues that through his explorations of guilt, Cueto
aspires to ‘generate a different national consciousness,’24 one that is ‘more
solidarious, more human.’25 This may well be Cueto’s objective; however, a
close examination of the novel reveals that this ‘different’ national conscious-
ness is not so revolutionary after all, but rather repeats patterns of paternalism
and reproduces structures of power.
Ormache eventually finds Miriam, who owns a beauty salon in a northern
district of Lima, in a neighborhood called ‘Huanta Dos,’ because many of
its inhabitants have migrated from Huanta, one of the centers of Shining
Path violence. He begins a relationship with Miriam that takes on Oedipal
proportions when he becomes her lover. In this sense, both men, father
and son, are repeating practices of social and cultural domination and
reaffirming existing hierarchies. There is certainly an implied transfer of
power throughout the novel, from a repressive, unjust, and violent military
man to a gentler, informed, beneficent civilian, but the transfer is clearly
lateral, not vertical.
23 Vich, ‘Violencia, culpa,’ 234. An English version of this article is found in ‘Violence,
Guilt and Repetition: Alonso Cueto’s Novel La Hora Azul.’ In Cynthia Milton, Art
from a Fractured Past, 127–138.
24 Vich, ‘Violencia, culpa,’ 234.
25 Ibid. 244.
40 an dean truths
After Miriam’s death, Ormache recalls their relationship, and this act of
memory curiously connects him with his father:
Había llegado a mi vida como una novia. La dote de la verdad que había
traído a nuestra relación insistía en los pequeños recuerdos acumulados
… Tu padre era un hombre delicado cuando estaba conmigo. Como tú,
un hombre delicado. Las palabras de Miriam resucitaban a mi padre, que
ahora se me presentaba de pie, en la sala, con sus galones y su uniforme
verde y negro. Ella había reconstruido su fantasma y me lo había devuelto.
Yo sólo se lo podía agradecer. La llegada de Miriam había abierto las
puertas del palacio de la indiferencia en cuyos salones hasta entonces yo
me había acomodado. Los diques impuestos por la severidad de mi temor
y mi prudencia habían empezado a ceder desde la primera vez que había
sabido de ella. (HA, 271)
She had come into my life like a bride. Her dowry, the truth she brought
to our relationship, had awoken many fragments of memory. …
‘Your father was like this when he was with me. He was a gentle man, like
you.’ Miriam’s words had brought my father back to life, and now he too
stood before me in the living room, with his military stripes, his green-
and-black uniform. She had recreated this phantom and given it to me. I
was grateful to her for that.
Miriam’s appearance had thrown open the doors of the house of apathy
where I had been comfortable for so long. The walls I had built around
me out of fear, out of prudence, had begun to crumble the first moment
I heard her name. (BH, 279)26
Yet, the man with whom Ormache connects is much more than a lost paternal
figure, whose tenderness his family had not known (and was only known to
his lover—a worn trope). This man is a torturer and a rapist, representative
of the excesses of a state constructed to protect the interests of one group
precisely by ignoring those of another.27 This tension Ormache experiences
between desiring the loving paternal figure he had lacked and desiring the
knowledge that had been so carefully denied him, is perhaps one of the
greater truths of the novel.
Another is the impact knowledge has on the country, specifically on its
ruling sectors. Ormache contrasts the man he was before meeting Miriam
with the man he has become through his relationship with her. Knowledge
of her existence,
26 The Spanish text has this section as one long paragraph, while the English translation
breaks the narration into several paragraphs. I have respected both versions.
27 Vich suggests that Cueto emphasizes sexual violence, ‘the ethical degradation of the
forces of order’ (‘La novela de la violencia,’ 237), in order to disprove the military’s
assertions that rapes were merely the excesses of out-of-control individuals, and to
expose sexual abuses as ‘generalized practices within a calculated strategy of war’ (238).
había sido el boleto de un viaje indefinido hacia la región encantada de la

maldad, el reino que habitaban mi padre y Miriam, un largo cuarto de
ruidos que recorrían sus torturadores y oficiales. Mi cauteloso egoísmo, la
barbarie de mi elegancia me habían protegido hasta entonces de ellos. Yo
me había acostumbrado a descartar los pequeños problemas del mundo
de afuera con una mueca … La muerte, la pobreza, la crueldad, habían
pasado frente a mí como accidentes de la realidad, episodios pasajeros y
ajenos que había que superar rápidamente. Ahora en cambio me parecían
dádivas recién reveladas. (HA, 271)
a ticket for an unknown journey into the enchanted region of evil, the
kingdom in which Miriam and my father had lived, a barracks policed
by torturers—his officers. My carefully cultivated egotism, my brutish
elegance, had protected me from them until then. I was accustomed to
shrugging off the little problems of the outside world with a sneer … I had
seen death, poverty and cruelty, and considered them accidents of nature;
fleeting moments in the lives of other people to be quickly set aside. Now
they seemed to me like gifts I had not noticed before. (BH, 279–280)
Ormache represents change, but within very specific confines. La hora azul
shows us a certain process of transformation and revelation, but for a very
specific group. And the change is only partial. Ormache is transformed
because he possesses a knowledge he did not have (or did not wish to
acknowledge), ‘dádivas recién reveladas,’ gifts recently revealed, a reverse
act of charity from the poor to the rich. But the fundamental structures of
his existence remain relatively untouched—he returns to his home, friends,
and family, ‘ése era mi lugar’ (HA, 274) [‘this is where I belong’ (BH, 283)].
Ormache remains the narrator, the discoverer, and revealer of truth, which
is left in his hands, to do with as he pleases. In the end, there are no real
social transformations. At most, the dominant subject opens his eyes to the
injustices of the country, in order to discover his own blindness, and feel
self-satisfied with his discovery. Finally, after this great revelation, Ormache
returns home, to bed with his wife. He becomes Miguel’s guardian, paying
for his education and for psychological assistance. The novel concludes with a
curious scene, several years after Miriam’s death, when Miguel tells Ormache
that for a long time he had wanted to thank his guardian: ‘Quería agradecerle
… Agradecerle. Nada más’ (HA, 303) [‘I wanted to thank you, … That’s all.
I wanted to thank you’ (BH, 312)]. How are we to interpret the development
of the final pages of the novel and, particularly, this expression of gratitude?
The relationship between Ormache and Miguel allegorizes a relationship
between dominant limeña society and the inhabitants of the highlands.
Miguel, much like contemporary Andean culture, most likely a product of
violence and rape—though his origins are never confirmed—receives the
paternal beneficence of an informed and transformed Ormache. Ormache,
the limeño lawyer, becomes benefactor, guide, and caregiver of the future of
Peru. In the final scene, he drives Miguel to the upper-class neighborhood
42 an dean truths
of Miraflores, where they contemplate the view, and Ormache offers to take
Miguel to an academy that offers preparatory classes for studying engineering
at the university. He becomes the vehicle through which Miguel enters the
middle class and can aspire to contribute to a modernizing vision of Peru.
And Miguel is grateful.28
The novel ends in a ‘today’ in which Miguel’s face lights up when he
sees Ormache approaching, he shares with Ormache a watercolor landscape
of Huanta he had painted, and the two head out to Miraflores, listening
to Eminem, in Ormache’s car. The energetic, ‘euphoric’ view of the coast
replaces the static, idyllic Andean countryside from the painting. Ormache
looks into Miguel’s eyes, which are the same brown eyes of his (their) father.
Ormache reflects that, rather than abandoning those eyes, as he had in the
hospital, ‘me quedé sentado junto a él, un largo rato, en silencio’ (HA, 303) [‘I
sat next to him for a long time in silence’ (BH, 312)]. Miguel and the father
are fused into one and, thus, it is also the father who is grateful. There is a
sense that through Ormache’s accumulation of knowledge (for which he is
also grateful, to Miriam) and acts of contrition, the sins of the father, of the
nation, are somehow purged, and a new future is envisioned—on the coast, in
middle-class Lima, through a transformed, integrated, incorporated Andean
subject.29 The narrative reaffirms transitional democratizing and reconcili-
ation efforts that seek to stabilize a historical socio-political and cultural
hierarchy, in a national project centered on Western-centric modernizing
aspirations of the coast.
Abril rojo
The next two novels were written by men who came of age during the internal
conflict. Born in Lima in 1975, Santiago Roncagliolo left Peru at the age
of two, when his family was exiled for political reasons; he lived in Mexico
until returning to Peru at the age of ten. After graduating from the Catholic
University in Lima, he moved to Spain, where he has lived since 2000. In
28 In this sense, Rosenberg proposes that the novel is a novel ‘not only of reconciliation,
but also of reparation and redemption, a redemption that occurs at the domestic and
psychological levels. Money and recognition are the prime materials of the reparation
because it is the substance with which it is awarded value socially … the reparation
is as necessary as it is necessarily insufficient and inadequate’ (Rosenberg, ‘Derechos
humanos, comisiones de la verdad,’ 107).
29 Ubilluz notes that this subject, symbolized by Miguel, is never incorporated as
family (Ormache does not invite him to his home or ever admit to the boy they
might be brothers), but rather as merely a recipient of charity by the dominant
class. For Ubilluz, this charity is offered not as payment for the sins of the father,
but as compensation for the privileges political violence has protected for Ormache
and those of his class. Ubilluz maintains, ‘charity is the other side of violence’ (‘El
fantasma de la nación cercada,’ 42).
an interview, Roncagliolo states, ‘the research on political violence was also

research in my own life because I was a child when this was happening. This
was the war around me. So writing was also therapeutic because when your
country goes through such violence you just try to forget. But when you
examine those memories you understand why you—and your country—are
the way they are.’30 The fusion of individual and national identities is telling,
and begs the question of just whose memories Rocagliolo turns to in the
development of each. The answer becomes clear on a closer examination of
his narrative fiction.31
Published in 2006, Abril rojo won the prestigious Alfaguara prize for fiction
in Spain, and the novel has been translated into over ten languages, including
a version in Mandarin Chinese, in 2014. It tells the story of Félix Chacaltana,
who, having immigrated to Lima as a child, returns to his native Ayacucho to
occupy a post as a mid-level government investigator. The story takes place
during the Lenten and Easter seasons of 2000. Chacaltana is sent to report
on a dead body, found charred in a nearby town. The protagonist begins
to entertain the idea that the body is an indication of the return of Shining
Path, something the government wishes to deny, especially during the height
of a Holy Week tourist season designed to prove that Ayacucho, and thus the
country, is safe and free of terrorism.32 The dead man is the first of a series of
murders the protagonist investigates, creating narratives of the crimes through
painstakingly constructed reports, along the way revealing deep government
corruption and uncovering the secrets of state-sponsored terrorism.
While there are many themes of interest in the novel—questions of
memory and forgetting, truth and fiction, narration and silence—one that
stands out immediately is the question of the dead and their bodies, as a
central metaphor for the nation in this period of transition. Each body found
has been murdered in a highly symbolic fashion, relating to a religious event
being commemorated, and each body is missing a part. The first, found on
Ash Wednesday, is unrecognizably charred and missing his right arm; the
second, found on Friday of Sorrows, has been stabbed seven times and is
missing his left arm; the third, discovered on Wednesday of Holy Week, is
crucified with a crown of thorns and is missing his right leg; a fourth, killed
on Holy Thursday and found on Holy Friday, is bound and missing his left
leg. Each of the first four victims is guilty of some participation in the war
and represents a national character or institution: the first victim is a military
30 Mundow, ‘The Interview/with Santiago Roncagliolo.’

31 Abril rojo is not Roncagliolo’s only exploration of the Shining Path era. In 2007, he
published La cuarta espada, a biography of Abimael Guzmán.
32 Semana Santa, Holy Week, is Ayacucho’s most important religious celebration. It
attracts thousands of tourists, national (primarily from the coast) and international,
every year. During the decline of Shining Path, the national government invested in
the promotion of tourism during Holy Week, as a sign that Ayacucho was now safe
for travelers.
44 an dean truths
man known for ordering massacres and burying his victims in mass graves;
the second is a peasant collaborator; the third a member of Shining Path; the
fourth a priest who had allowed the government to install an incinerator in
his church to burn the cadavers of torture victims. Through the dismember-
ment of the bodies, one character notes, ‘parece que estos señores se quieren
hacer un muñeco’ [‘it seems these gentlemen want to make a puppet’],33 an
observation that would prove accurate.
On Good Friday, a fifth victim is discovered: a woman, Chacaltana’s
love interest, whom he had recently violently raped. Her abdomen removed,
this victim differs from the others in that, Christ-like, she is innocent of all
wrongdoing. She is the sacrificial lamb, the core of the body maneuvered and
manipulated by corrupt limbs. Chacaltana is accused of the murders and,
from jail, dreams of a body in an open field:
Era un cuerpo hecho de partes distintas, un Frankenstein cosido con
hilos de acero que no cerraban bien sus junturas, de las que goteaban
coágulos y costras. Tenía dos piernas distintas, y tampoco los brazos
parecían corresponderle exactamente. El tronco era de mujer. La visión
era macabra, pero no parecía tener una actitud violenta. Se limitaba a
levantarse e irse reconociendo poco a poco mientras tomaba conciencia
de ser. Lo que sobresaltó realmente fue sólo el fin de la visión, cuando el
engendro terminó de incorporarse y, sobre sus hombros, el fiscal vio su
propia cabeza, atrapada sobre ese cuerpo que no había elegido. (AR, 307)
A body made of different parts, a Frankenstein sewn with steel threads that
did not close the seams very well, for clots and scabs were dripping from
them. It had two different legs, and the arms did not correspond either. It
had a woman’s trunk. The sight of the body was macabre, but it did not
seem to have a violent attitude. It limited itself to standing and recognizing
itself gradually as it became aware of itself. What really startled the
prosecutor came only at the end of the vision, when the monster finished
standing, and on its shoulders the prosecutor saw his own head, trapped
on a body that he had not chosen. (RA, 253–254)
If the reference to the Andean legend of Inkarrí were not self-evident, the
novel makes it explicit [‘parece que trata de destruir el cuerpo para que no
pueda resucitar’ (AR, 195); ‘he seems to be trying to destroy the body so
it can’t be resurrected’ (RA, 157)]. According to the myth of Inkarrí, the
Spaniards buried the dismembered parts of the last Inca’s body in various
towns, as a lesson against rebellion. Over the years the parts have been
coming together; when they unite, the Inca will rise from the dead and lead
the indigenous peoples to a Pachacutic, a return of Andean society to power
in the region. In his dream, Chacaltana, like so many other Peruvians of the
33 Roncagliolo, Abril rojo, 174; Red April, 139. All further citations from these works
will be listed parenthetically in the text as AR and RA respectively.
time, the reluctant witness who is just beginning to discover and confront the
truth of the horrors, becomes the head of this resurrected national subject.
But this is a dream, an illusion; the reality is that the true assassin is also the
sixth victim, the only one Chacaltana actually does kill.
On Easter Sunday, Chacaltana is unexpectedly released from jail, and he
confronts and kills the assassin, Commander Carrión, the head of the military
forces in Ayacucho, whom the narrator reveals was awaiting this moment to
provide his own head for this death doll [‘solo había caminado hacia su muerte,
igual que todos los demás, igual que hacemos todos’ (AR, 322); ‘he had merely
walked to his death, just like the others, just like all of us’ (RA, 266)]. The
image created is the nation as a dead—violently and perversely murdered—
and dismembered, disarticulated body, whose limbs are corrupt institutions,
whose head is a military assassin (not an average citizen), but whose core,
whose heart, is innocent. The body is not united under an informed Peruvian
citizenry, as in Chacaltana’s dream, rising to begin a new era, but rather
remains disarticulated, subject to the violent excesses of its head and limbs.
While these six cadavers are the primary focus of the novel, the text also
refers to multiple dead without bodies, whose ghosts populate the novel.
Chacaltana maintains a meticulous copy of his dead mother’s bedroom in his
home; he cohabits with her ghost, and we eventually learn he has repressed
the fact that he had accidently killed her when he was a child. Ayacucho,
which translated from Quechua means ‘the corner of death,’ is repeatedly
described as populated by dead people and ghosts. In their confrontation at
the end of the novel, Carrión points out to Chacaltana that they have been
surrounded by the dead all along:
Eran miles y miles de cadáveres, no sólo ahí, en la oficina del comandante,

sino en toda la ciudad. Comprendió entonces que eran los muertos quienes
le vendían los periódicos, quienes conducían el transporte público, quienes
fabricaban las artesanías, quienes le servían de comer. No había más
habitantes que ellos en Ayacucho, incluso quienes venían de fuera, morían.
Sólo que eran tantos muertos que ya ninguno era capaz de reconocerse.
(AR, 317)
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. (RA, 261–262)
Furthermore, of course, the religious background of the text evokes the

phantasmagoric body of Christ and his ultimate sacrifice. Indeed, the
setting of the novel during the Lenten and Easter seasons seems to point to
the necessity of the violence of sacrifice to redeem the nation. Yet, there is
decidedly no redemption.
46 an dean truths
What we are left with is a country stuck in a state of melancholia.

Dominick LaCapra, drawing on Freud, distinguishes melancholia and
mourning thus: ‘mourning might be seen as a form of working-through, and
melancholia as a form of acting-out … characteristic of an arrested process in
which the depressed, self-berating, and traumatized self, locked in compulsive
repetition, is possessed by the past, faces a future of impasses, and remains
narcissistically identified with the lost object.’34 In Abril rojo, the protagonist,
who also maintains a melancholic obsession with his mother, is unable to
facilitate the social working-through necessary to lead his community/country
to a state of mourning. The corrupt institutions and power structure prevent
the articulation of a new future. The time of narration is 2000, before the
commission has done the memory work, before the country was symbolically
provided 69,000 victims to bury and mourn, yet Abril rojo, written after
the release of the Informe final, does not seem to hold hope that the acts of
memory and narration, giving words to the unnarratable, will indeed move
the country forward, to a state of proper mourning.
In fact, the question of the promise and possibilities of language is as
central to the novel as it is to the CVR’s report. The work begins with an
official account of the first murder, written by Chacaltana. Upon evaluating
his effort, the protagonist determines, ‘Era un buen informe. Seguía todos
los procedimientos reglamentarios, elegía los verbos con precisión y no caía
en la chúcara adjetivación habitual de los textos legales’ (AR, 16) [‘A good
report. He had followed all the prescribed procedures, chosen his verbs with
precision, and not fallen into the unrestrained use of adjectives customary
in legal texts’ (RA, 6)]. Chacaltana’s assessment of his work is based entirely
on the eloquence of his words (precise and correct despite antiquated
technology—a typewriter that lacks an ñ and thus limits his vocabulary)
and his adherence to rules and formula. Indeed, Chacaltana’s focus on rules,
regulations, and law at the expense of factual information and truth become
a comic, pathetic, leitmotif in the novel.35
The problems of fact-finding and truth-gathering in Peru are highlighted
in this first report and Chacaltana’s subsequent investigation. As recorded
in the first report, eyewitnesses provide unreliable information, because they
cannot remember or confirm details, offer conflicting versions of events, or
were drunk and thus mentally incapacitated when the events occurred. Based
on information gathered from these witnesses—all Andean peasants—the
report conjectures on various possibilities, each of which proves false as
the narrative progresses. Chacaltana’s attempts to collaborate with military
34 La Capra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss,’ 713.

35 In an interview published in the Boston Globe, Roncagliolo states that his protagonist
is ‘more or less like me, really. I worked in human rights in Peru in the 90s. Like
Chacaltana, I was this ridiculous little figure who saw himself as enforcing the law
and upholding order. His process is the same process I lived, which was gradually
realizing that the state and the terrorists could be really similar’ (Mundow).
and police agencies to investigate the crime show that in fact his goal is less
to secure justice than to assert the country’s stability by affirming inter-
institutional cooperation and establishing well-constructed official versions of
events. The second report he produces establishes an undeniable (yet false)
truth, and resolves many problems for the associate district prosecutor. As a
result, Chacaltana receives a new typewriter, becomes a trusted ally of the
Commander, and earns the respect for which he yearns. The report even
pacifies his dreams, ‘corriendo un velo de paz sobre sus pesadillas’ (AR, 84)
[‘a curtain of peace closing over his nightmares’ (RA, 64)].
While his concerns with procedure and documentation are reaffirmed by
authorities (Carrión tells him, ‘lo mejor es siempre tener todo archivado y
organizado legalmente. Nuestra mejor arma es hacer las cosas bien’ (AR, 84)
[‘it is always better to have everything archived and organized legally. Our
best weapon is doing things well’ (RA, 64)]), by the third report, Chacaltana
becomes concerned with content:
Los hechos narrados no tenían nada que ver con el asesinato, sino con
el hallazgo … No tenía nada que ver con lo importante. Ninguno de sus
informes, en realidad, tenía nada que ver con lo importante. Pensó que la
información relevante era justamente la que el informe no contenía: quién
lo hizo, por qué, qué pasaba por su cabeza. (AR, 234)
The narrated facts had nothing to do with the murder but with its
discovery … It had nothing to do with what was really important. In
reality, none of his reports had anything to do with what was important.
He thought the relevant information was precisely what the report did not
contain: who did it, why, what was going through his head. (RA, 190)
This content is provided by alternative ‘reports’ that the novel supplies, written
by the killer (and unsigned, so that it is not until the end, when Carrión hands
his writings to Chacaltana, that their author is revealed). Unlike Chacaltana’s
official reports, these narratives are poorly composed, filled with orthographic
and grammatical errors, and with no pretensions of objectivity.
When confronted by Chacaltana, Carrión hands him the papers and says,
‘Lo he escrito todo. Lo he explicado todo’ (AR, 315) [‘I’ve written down
everything. I’ve explained everything’ (RA, 260)]. Chacaltana’s response is,
no había nada que entender en ellos. Sólo incoherencias. Barbarismos.
No eran sólo los errores ortográficos, era todo. En el caos no hay error,
y en esos papeles ni siquiera la sintaxis tenía sentido. Chacaltana había
vivido toda su vida entre palabras ordenadas, entre poemas de Chocano
y códigos legales, oraciones numeradas u ordenadas en versos. Ahora no
sabía qué hacer con un montón de palabras arrojadas al azar sobre la
realidad. El mundo no podía seguir la lógica de esas palabras. O quizá
todo lo contrario, quizá simplemente la realidad era así, y todo lo demás
eran historias bonitas, como cuentas de colores, diseñadas para distraer y
para fingir que las cosas tienen algún significado. (AR, 315)
48 an dean truths
there was nothing to understand in them. Only incoherence. Barbarity.

Not simply spelling errors, it was everything. There is no error in chaos,
and in those papers not even the syntax made sense. Chacaltana had
spent his entire life among ordered words, Chocano’s poems,36 legal codes,
sentences numbered or organized into verses. Now he did not know what
to do with a heap of words thrown haphazardly at reality. The world could
not follow the logic of those words. Or perhaps it was just the opposite,
perhaps reality was simply like that and all the rest was pretty stories,
like colored beads designed to distract and pretend that things have some
meaning. (RA, 260–261)
By the time the reader reaches this assessment, the intercalation of reports
has already set up certain dichotomies, between reason, law, and logic on the
one hand, and chaos, error, and madness on the other. Yet, as Chacaltana
begins to reflect towards the end of his assessment, the narration also asks
us to consider which side leads to or facilitates truth. The answer is not
entirely clear, for, just as Carrión’s messages appear to reveal the truth of
what has happened in the murders and the Commander’s motivations for
his actions, the reasoning is obscured with what seems a strange mix of
Christian beliefs and symbolism, revolutionary rhetoric, and badly articu-
lated indigenous millennial discourse. In each of Carrión’s messages, he
addresses his victim directly and in the present, as if reliving the murder,
and he speaks as though through his actions he were redeeming past sins
and creating a new world. The confused rhetoric seems partially explained by
the fact that Carrión believes the dead victims of the conflict have asked him
to carry out the murders: ‘Me pedían que la sangre no fuese derramada en
vano, Chacaltana, y yo lo hice: un terrorista, un militar, un campesino, una
mujer, un cura. Ahora están juntos. Forman parte del cuerpo que reclaman
todos los que murieron antes … Servirán para construir la historia, para
recuperar la grandeza’ (AR, 317) [‘They asked me not to spill blood in vain,
Chacaltana, and I didn’t: a terrorist, a soldier, a peasant, a woman, a priest.
Now they’re all together. They form part of the body demanded by those who
died before … They’ll help to construct the history, recover the greatness’
(RA, 262)]. This narrative points, perhaps, to an alternative ‘truth commis-
sion’ process, one led by indigenous victims. But this alternative endeavor is
an impossible one—it would be conducted by dead victims who would try
dead perpetrators. The novel seems to suggest that an indigenous-driven
process is impossible in Peru, that the indigenous victims can only count on
an intangible divine justice.
If Carrión’s testimonies purport to contain truth both in fact and in spirit,
the official reports become increasingly false. In fact, Chacaltana’s account of
36 José Santos Chocano (1875–1934) was one of Peru’s most celebrated poets of Spanish-
American modernism. Chacaltana’s reference to this poet, known for his exquisite
Spanish, is telling.
the fourth murder, that of the priest, must create lies and cover up acts that
would incriminate the prosecutor himself. In the end, the novel closes with
its own ‘Final Report,’ written by an official tellingly named ‘Eléspuru’—El
es Perú, he is Peru.37 Eléspuru, described only as a civilian with a blue tie,
initially turns up after the first murder, at a cocktail party where Chacaltana
approaches Commander Carrión and proffers his theory that Shining Path
has resurged. Eléspuru joins the rest of the guests in laughing at the prosecu-
tor’s paranoia. Chacaltana encounters him later while serving as an election
official in a local village, Yawarmayo. When at that time Chacaltana tries to
warn Carrión of electoral fraud, Eléspuru ‘parecía tranquilo, miraba hacia el
otro lado’ (AR, 117) [‘seemed unperturbed and looked away’ (RA, 92)], and
his interest peaks only briefly when Chacaltana warns as well of Shining Path
activity in the area. Eléspuru, then, appears as a silent and somewhat distant
and uninterested observer. Later in the novel, Carrión insists that Lima can
know nothing of the series of murders taking place during Holy Week and
then says specifically of Eléspuru, ‘Nada de esto debe llegar a sus oídos’ [‘he
shouldn’t hear anything about this’], and that if Chacaltana encounters the
man he is to repeat, ‘el terrorismo está acabado … el Perú libró esa gloriosa
lucha, cualquier cojudez que se le ocurra’ (AR, 182) [‘terrorism is finished
… Peru waged a glorious struggle, any fucking stupid thing you can think
of’ (RA, 147)].
Thus Lima and Eléspuru, figurative embodiment of the nation, are
conflated, and both are portrayed contradictorily as those who govern and
command the Andes and as those who are to know nothing and, even armed
with knowledge, will ultimately do nothing. The only time the reader encoun-
ters Eléspuru’s voice is in the ‘final report,’ which ends the novel, burying
the truth and creating a fictional, but official, account of events—Chacaltana
is accused of all the crimes and said to have disappeared; documents have
been destroyed for the sake of peace and the reputation of the country, the
government, and the armed forces. The status quo is reaffirmed; there is no
hope for a different future. Eléspuru is revealed as an agent of the intelli-
gence service, which ‘ha cumplido ya con su misión de salvaguardar la paz
y la seguridad de la región, a la vez que ha canalizado la información hacia
derroteros que mejor convienen a los intereses del orden y la ley, coadyuvando
así en el desarrollo en un país con futuro como el nuestro’ (AR, 328) [‘has
fulfilled its mission of safeguarding the peace and security of the region, at
the same time that it has directed information to the channels most suited to
the interests of law and order, thus collaborating in the future development
of a nation like ours’ (RA, 271)].38 Truth is revealed as constructed; facts are
manipulated in service of a greater social project.
37 Eléspuru is a historic and aristocratic surname in Peru. Even so, I believe its phonetic
correlation with the sentence ‘él es Perú’ is not a coincidence.
38 ‘Un país con futuro’ (‘A country with a future’—the English translation is different and
thus misses this clearly purposeful reference) was one of the Fujimori government’s
50 an dean truths
Thus, the novel becomes an important critique of transitional justice

processes, where procedure and craft can take precedence over more
important purposes. Through Chacaltana’s focus on the manipulation of
language, at first seeking truth, then simply beauty of expression, Roncagliolo
underscores the absence of what should be a central element in truth-seeking
endeavors—the pursuit of justice. At no point in the investigation of the
crimes is there a goal beyond establishing a coherent, consumable narrative
of events, something the country as a whole can easily absorb. Never is
there a desire to bring the culprit(s) to justice (though some of the deaths do
represent a sort of divine retribution). The focus on language and narrative
parallels the fact-seeking and truth-providing mission of the CVR, as well,
somewhat, as its results and impact.
Beyond the transmitted narratives—Chacaltana’s, Carrión’s, and
Eléspuru’s—however, is another narrative, that of the novel itself. The
reality, the facts, it presents differs from all three transmitted narratives, and
thus leaves the reader feeling satisfied upon resolution of the crime and of
the novel. The omniscient third-person narration of the novel pretends to
represent the ‘whole truth,’ at least to the extent that it can. It is a ‘whole
truth’ written from a largely masculine perspective (the treatment of women
is as superficial and stereotyped as the treatment of indigenous peoples), it
remains an outsider in relation to both contemporary and historical events
in Ayacucho, and it assumes an audience largely unfamiliar with the region,
and even with Peru. Many events, customs, and products are explained
that would not need elucidation on a national or regional level, such as
anticuchos, grilled meat on skewers, the turupukllay, an Andean form of
bullfighting,39 or the Uchuraccay incident. In fact, Roncagliolo is so aware
of his international audience that he finds it necessary to include an author’s
note at the end of the novel, explaining that the Shining Path and military
methods and strategies depicted in the novel were real and were taken from
documented sources.
What is hardly real or well-documented, however, is the treatment of
Andean life and culture in the novel. As Javier Torres Seoane notes, ‘no
ayacuchano would recognize himself or recognize their Holy Week in this
slogans, and its propaganda campaigns were largely run by Vladimiro Montesinos, de
facto head of the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (National Intelligence Service), of
which Eléspuru, in the novel, is an agent. The SIN is known to have been involved
in cases of torture, murder, and disappearances, and in 2000 Fujimori had no choice
but to dissolve the organization after Montesinos was discovered bribing politicians,
military officers, and other public figures using government funds, in the infamous
‘Vladivideos’ scandal. For more on the history of the SIN and its activities during
this period, see Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path, ch. 17, ‘The Colloquium of the
Blind: The Intelligence War,’ 198–213.
39 Arguedas’s 1941 novel Yawar fiesta famously depicts an Andean defense of the
turupukllay.
novel.’40 While the fiction’s Ayacucho remains defamiliarized for the native
ayacuchano, the novel, adopting always the perspective of the outsider, insists
on the incomprehensibility of the Andes for the ‘average’ Peruvian. Father
Quiroz tells Chacaltana, ‘los indios son tan impenetrables’ (AR, 56) [‘the
Indians are so impenetrable’ (RA, 39)]. Chacaltana finds them impossible to
talk to; when trying to find Justino, he asks directions from a street vendor,
who points him in a certain direction, then, ‘masculló varias frases en
quechua. El fiscal entendió que “aquicito nomás” podía significar “a dos días
de camino”. Recordó lo difícil que resulta interrogar a un quechuahablante,
sobre todo si, además, no le da la gana de hablar. Y nunca les da la gana.
Siempre temen lo que pueda pasar. No confían’ (AR, 65) [‘she mumbled a
couple of phrases in Quechua. The prosecutor understood that “not too far”
could mean “two days away.” He remembered how difficult it is to question
Quechua speakers, especially if they also do not feel like talking. And they
never feel like talking. They are always afraid of what might happen. They
do not trust anybody’ (RA, 47)]. The narration emphasizes well-worn stereo-
types of Andean indigenous peoples: an inability to express the truth directly,
an aversion to speaking with strangers.
It also characterizes Quechua as an incomprehensible form of expression,
not as recognizable language—this woman mumbles her words, while later
Justino is depicted ‘profiriendo espumarajos quechuas’ (AR, 122) [‘frothing at
the mouth and sputtering in Quechua’ (RA, 97)]. Chacaltana ‘entendió que
no sabía decir mucho más en español. Entendió a qué se referían Pacheco y
Carrión cuando decían esta gente no habla, que no sabe comunicarse, que
está como muerta’ (AR, 123) [‘understood he could not say much else in
Spanish. He understood what Pacheco and Carrión were alluding to when
they said these people do not speak, do not know how to communicate, it
was as if they were dead’ (RA, 97)]. Thus, proper language in this novel
is decidedly Spanish; Quechua is but incomprehensible mumbling and
sputtering, and communication by indigenous peoples is eventually reduced
in the novel to ‘gemidos y lloriqueos’ (AR, 123) [‘sobbing and whimpering’
(RA, 98)]. If Quechua is incomprehensible and indigenous peoples are not
heard, it is due to an inherent defect in the language and in those who speak
it, not to the ignorance of the limeño characters, who, despite this inherent
incomprehensibility, do understand greater ‘truths’ (note the repetition of the
verb ‘understood’ in the previous quote).
They ‘understand’ an incommensurable difference between self (dominant
culture) and other (these people), and construct an Andean otherness so
radically other that it is outside of life itself (‘as if they were dead’). Within
this conception, it is impossible to conceive of Andean peoples as having
any place in or making any meaningful contribution to the Peruvian nation.
Constructed as peripheral to the socio-political and cultural progress of the
40 Torres Seoane, ‘Arte, memoria y violencia.’
52 an dean truths
nation, in Abril rojo, indigenous people, and even, for the most part, Andean
mestizos, are consistently denied voice and agency. They are shown huddled
in groups inside their homes, or prostrated at the feet of an authority figure.
Their subjectivity in the novel is constituted exclusively through their interac-
tions with the main character, and through interpretations of their culture
proffered by members of the dominant culture (government representatives
from Lima, or the local priest). The final blow to any sort of Andean agency
or sense of future comes at the end of the novel when, as noted above, all
inhabitants of the region—and even those who visit—are pronounced dead.
Ayacucho, and by extension the Andes, is constructed as only a past—there
is no conceivable future when that future leads only to death. Even beyond
‘alien to modernity,’ in Abril rojo the Andes are the place where time (as
future, progress, moving forward) dies.
In an interview, Roncagliolo defends his treatment of the rural Andean
characters in Abril rojo:
I didn’t dare write from the point of view of the campesino. My protagonist
was born in Ayacucho, but he grew up in Lima. I needed him to come
from the coast, so he could be as close as possible to me. The campesinos
do appear, but I didn’t want to delve too much into that too complicated
issue. That decision also helped highlight something that I thought with
respect to this conflict: everyone said they were defending the campesinos,
but those in charge were either in Lima, in the case of the military, or
were intellectuals from the provincial mestizo middle class, in the case of
Shining Path. The campesinos were, once again, labor. That situation was
very useful so that I did not have to deal with them. The conflicts in the
novel are conflicts among mestizos.41
Through his choice of avoiding the ‘too complicated’ ethnic question,
Roncagliolo falls into the very trap he critiques; the campesinos in Abril rojo
provide a sort of labor for the benefit of the global literary market. That is,
Roncagliolo has managed to create a Peru for mass literary consumption, with
easily digestible images of the backwards, archaic Andes. As astutely as the
novel critiques the political situation of post-Shining Path Peru, it is unable
41 Vervaeke and Maeseneer, ‘Entre las venas.’ In this same interview, Roncagliolo
praises Arguedas from an aesthetic viewpoint but criticizes the Andean writer’s
political stance: ‘I believe Arguedas himself was not aware that his stories were
good, not because they dealt with a political reality, but because he was a person
with sensibility who had something to tell. He felt he had a political obligation … I
think that being able to write without that obligation is a great freedom’ (Vervaeke
and Maeseneer, ‘Entre las venas’). Roncagliolo’s comments seem idealistic and naive
on two accounts: first, that Roncagliolo’s (or Vargas Llosa’s, to whom he compares
himself vis-à-vis Arguedas) own writing is somehow apolitical; and, second, that a
marginalized, subaltern author has the same luxury of writing (supposedly) without
a ‘political obligation’ that a white, male, middle-class writer has.
to turn the lens on itself and contemplate a more complex and nuanced vision
of past, present, and future for the nation.
Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro

Born in 1968 in Lima, like Cueto and Roncagliolo, Iván Thays studied
literature at the Catholic University of Peru, where he later taught. He has
published five novels and two short story collections, maintains a popular
literary blog, Moleskine literario, and for eight years (2000–2008) hosted the
literary television program, Vano Oficio. Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro was
a finalist for Anagrama’s Premio Herralde de Novela just three years after
Cueto’s win.42 This is his first work that deals directly with the national
political situation, and Thays acknowledges that his past production and
privileged position draw criticism.43 In an interview with Damián Blas Vives,
Thays defends his creative choices and comments on his position vis-à-vis
his subject matter:
In Peru, for some readers and writers there are certain topics (like the
political violence) and certain places (like the Peruvian highlands) that
only belong to society’s ‘excluded.’ The fact that I, who am not part of
this imaginary group, have touched even in passing those themes … is
unpardonable. That I have done it, as well, from a perspective they did
not expect (that my main character does not understand what he sees in
the highlands, that he talks about books and film to explain his feelings,
that he imposes his personal drama on the collective) ends up convincing
them of my ‘frivolity.’44
As will be discussed later, Thays expresses a desire to distance his fiction
from the type of national commentary found in the work of predecessors
such as Vargas Llosa, Cueto, and Arguedas, but Un lugar llamado Oreja de
Perro is far from apolitical.
The only work studied in this chapter whose action takes place after the
CVR released its Final Report, the novel is set in a small, isolated section of
Ayacucho. Described as ‘a forgotten point on the map’ by the Informe final,45
Oreja de Perro (dog’s ear) refers to the district of Chungui (La Mar province,
Ayacucho), which earned its nickname because, on a map, its form resembles
a dog’s ear. Infiltrated by Shining Path early on, around 1982, this area was
a site of violent struggle between subversive and military forces throughout
42 The novel has yet to be translated into English, though there are versions in French,
Italian, and Portuguese.
43 See, for example, a review by Javier Agreda that accuses the novel of being ‘schematic’
and ‘frivolous.’ Agreda, ‘Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro.’
44 Blas Vives, ‘Iván Thays: Subjetividades.’
45 Informe final, vol. 5, ch. 2, p. 87.
54 an dean truths
the conflict.46 In the novel, President Alejandro Toledo has chosen the
communities of Oreja de Perro to present a campaign of financial repara-
tions for peasant victims of the conflict.47 The unnamed protagonist is a
limeño journalist assigned to travel to Oreja de Perro to cover the president’s
visit. He arrives having recently received a letter from his wife requesting a
divorce, which we learn has been in the making since the death of the couple’s
five-year-old son from epilepsy.
Again, the themes of violence, memory, language, and trauma take central
stage in this novel. The work is filled with ancillary journalistic references
to violence—a Rottweiler that had killed a man trying to rob the store the
dog protected; an economist who had threatened his ex-wife in a telephone
message. The image is one of a society that sensationalizes and commercial-
izes violence: the economist’s threats can be downloaded as a ringtone. The
resulting impression is that, despite all of the surprise exhibited by CVR
investigators and their audience regarding the extreme brutality of the armed
conflict, violence is so ingrained and celebrated by contemporary Peruvian
(and international) culture that one should see the Shining Path era not as
an aberration but as a logical consequence of late capitalist society (which
is defined by what Nelson Maldonado-Torres terms a ‘paradigm of violence
and war’).48
Memory is a constant theme and obsession of the protagonist, and the
novel opens with the journalist reading an article on Gabriel, a man whom
the protagonist had previously interviewed, who had lost his memory after
killing his wife and son in a car accident. A month after the initial interview,
the protagonist returns to report on the victim’s ‘recovery.’ He finds that the
amnesia has just erased a few years of Gabriel’s life; the man remembers
everything from after the accident and has even discovered a few pleasant
holdovers from before, such as the fact that he reads English. Gabriel also
shares his own thoughts on memory, including those spoken by his Chinese
tutor—‘No tienes por qué lamentarte por la amnesia. La memoria es un
espía. Tú has logrado librarte de ella, has conseguido extraviar a tu espía.
Considérate un hombre muy afortunado’ [You don’t need to feel sorry for
yourself because of your amnesia. Memory is a spy. You’ve managed to free
yourself from it, you’ve led your spy astray. Consider yourself a fortunate
man].49
46 I will return to a discussion of this region in Chapter 5, when analyzing the work of
Edilberto Jiménez on the Chungui communities of Oreja de Perro.
47 While a Comprehensive Reparations Plan was approved by Peruvian legislature in
2005, reparations of any form, be they individual compensation, community compen-
sation, education, health care, housing, or symbolic reparations (memorialization) has
been underfunded, sporadic, and sparse.
48 Maldonado-Torres, Against War.
49 Thays, Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro, 81. Subsequent references to the novel will
be found parenthetically in the text as LLOP. Translations are mine.
That the reflections on memory dialogue with the nation’s contempo-

rary memorialization projects is made evident at many points. Pondering
his own recollections of his son Paulo, the narrator notes, ‘pensamos que
las fotografías, los recortes de periódico, los videos, los testimonios, los
recuerdos, sostienen la memoria. Pero no la sostienen, la reemplazan’ [we
think that photographs, newspaper clippings, videos, testimonies, souvenirs,
sustain memory. But they don’t sustain it, they replace it] (LLOP, 82). Thus
the trip to Oreja de Perro becomes an occasion to slip into memories, of
conversations with the amnesic Gabriel, of his relationship with his wife
Mónica, of Paulo and Paulo’s death. The national trauma is sidelined,
marginalized, as the personal, intimate trials of the middle-class limeño man
dominate the narrative.
What remains of the national experience in the novel is the spectacle
of the Commission and its labors. The efforts and impact of the CVR are
treated with extreme skepticism. Toledo’s visit to Oreja de Perro is defined
as populist theater and political opportunism ‘carente de objetivos concretos
salvo la vanidad’ [lacking concrete objectives beyond vanity] (LLOP, 15).
The protagonist describes the fact-gathering trials, broadcast daily with no
interruptions, in clearly theatrical terms. In his characterization, Commission
members practice studied gestures of indignation, horror, curiosity, and
surprise; witnesses resort to ‘mímica’ (mimicry) (LLOP, 16) to express their
experiences. And the protagonist, obsessively viewing the hearings, cannot
remove himself from the ‘espectáculo’ (spectacle) (LLOP, 17), which he also
describes as a ‘striptease’ (LLOP, 17). For the protagonist, the testimonies of
the witnesses demanded a performance:
Incluso para hacer un testimonio de esa naturaleza había que actuar un

poco. O, mejor dicho, sobre todo cuando uno quiere decir una verdad tan
grave como aquélla, debe saber fingir.
Sólo mediante una representación convincente podemos acercarnos al
hecho objetivo, real, del terror y la crueldad.
Just giving a testimony of that nature required a bit of acting. Or, better
put, especially when you wanted to tell a truth as serious as that one, you
had to know how to pretend.
Only through a convincing performance can we get close to the real,
objective fact of terror and cruelty. (LLOP, 17–18)
Upon observing a witness who did not fit the mold, who was, in effect, a
bad actor who bored his public, the protagonist is inspired to write about
the hearings, and produces an article which is ‘muy celebrado, lo cual no
me sorprendió porque era un zurcido de lugares comunes’ [very celebrated,
which did not surprise me because it was a concoction of commonplaces]
(LLOP, 19).
The journalist claims that his obsession with the trials stems from a deep
concern with human evil: ‘en cada testimonio percibía el funcionamiento
56 an dean truths
de un artefacto humano, el alambicado armazón de la maldad, instalado

entre aquellas anécdotas y expuesto ante nuestros ojos’ [in every testimony I
perceived the workings of a human artifact, an intricate framework of evil,
installed in those anecdotes and exposed before our eyes] (LLOP, 17). But
it is clear that the trials serve another function; they are his escape from his
own personal trauma of losing his son and his marriage. The national trauma
and its public working through substitute for his inability to resolve his private
traumatic experience, even as he admits that he remains ‘encerrado’ [encased]
in the death of his son (LLOP, 95).
The protagonist becomes a vicarious witness himself through a relation-
ship he has with Jazmín, a young woman from Oreja de Perro. One night
she tells him of her experience with the war; she gives him her testimony.
Jazmín’s mother was taken prisoner by soldiers, and she was forced to have
sexual relations with one of them in order to receive information about her
mother. Jazmín never learns of her mother’s fate, though the soldier takes
advantage of her many times, and eventually she is removed from her town
by her aunt. She now presumes her mother dead, and Jazmín is pregnant,
having been raped by another soldier. The protagonist has brief fantasies of
protecting Jazmín and her child, and even asks her to come with him to live
in Lima. His actions, however, recall those of the majority of outsiders in
human rights situations, listening to the testimonies of the victims, briefly
feeling compassion and a half-hearted desire to help, and then returning to
daily routines. He later reflects, ‘¿Realmente quiero salvar a Jazmín? No, no
quiero hacerlo. Ni siquiera la conozco, no sé quién es, no soy responsable
de ella’ [Do I really want to save Jazmín? No, I don’t want to. I don’t even
know her, I don’t know who she is, I am not responsible for her] (LLOP, 211).
The narrator abdicates any responsibility for Jazmín, a danger Boler finds
present in passive empathy, which ‘absolves the (witness) through the denial
of power relations.’50 The protagonist denies any social responsibility, even
as he accepts the gift of her story.
Jazmín’s testimony is delivered in the dark, when the two are in bed;
Jazmín is naked. This situation seems symbolically to mimic that of the CVR
victims—who bare themselves before their audience but who are not really
seen. Luis Hernán Castañeda notes the therapeutic function of Jazmín’s
testimony:
The end of Jazmín’s narrative proposes … a model for mourning, which
the journalist is able to assume as his own. In this sense, the communica-
tive situation of sharing allows the identification of individual subjectivities
and the production of a therapeutic discursive community, in which collec-
tive memory is submitted to a purification and an exteriorization: it allows
itself to be organized and told.51
50 Boler, ‘The Risks of Empathy,’ 261.

51 Luis Hernán Castañeda, ‘El viaje terapeútico,’ 273.
Castañeda’s assessment, however, points precisely to problematic elements

the critic does not address. Who organizes and retells the story? The novelist
who insists on creating, on maintaining a fiction. And who benefits from
the experience? Castañeda correctly interprets the ‘positive value of the
therapeutic experience,’52 but it would appear the encounter only has positive
consequences for the (male, limeño) protagonist. He—through witnessing
multiple testimonies—refines his model for mourning, but has this experience
changed Jazmín’s life in any significant way? By the end of the novel she is
forced to flee the town (a friend has murdered her rapist, and she fears she
will be implicated in the crime). She is lost, relegated (again) to silence; she
remains a distant memory in the mind of the journalist.
The sharing of the traumatic experience is one-sided. The narrator only
listens and vicariously mourns through Jazmín’s experience; he never shares
his own trauma. Furthermore, Jazmín’s words are not recorded directly, but
rather transmitted in third person through the voice of the narrator. Put
in most generous terms, this aspect represents what James Dawes refers to
as the ‘paradox of witnessing’: ‘that speaking for others is both a way of
rescuing and usurping the other’s voice.’53 However, Thays’s protagonist
is not necessarily interested in being the empathetic human rights worker
Dawes describes. Immediately after recounting Jazmín’s story, the narrator
returns to the present and casts doubts on his memory of events, on whether
the conversation ever really occurred. He then affirms, ‘el antónimo ideal de
la memoria debe ser la imaginación, fantasear, hacer ficción. No la amnesia’
[the ideal antonym of memory should be imagination, to fantasize, to make
fiction. Not amnesia.] (LLOP, 178). In this move he juxtaposes and contrasts
the ‘memory work’ of an entity like the CVR with that of the fiction writer.
Indeed, Thays affirms his commitment to fiction in answers to interview
questions such as this one:
Carlos M. Sotomayor: Did you travel to Oreja de Perro?
Thays: I am not a topographic writer. I am not a writer like Vargas Llosa
or Arguedas. For me, reality is what is born in the text. Sometimes I have
invented a city, like Busardo, others I have spoken of places I have not
been. And they are places I imagine. So, the problem was deciding whether
or not to travel to Oreja de Perro. I decided not to do so because I wanted
that novel to be my novel. I didn’t want to do what Alonso Cueto or Mario
Vargas Llosa would do with this topic. And at that moment I was in a very
dark time of my life in which I watched many David Lynch movies. So I
said: I am going to make Oreja de Perro a David Lynch city.54
While Thays tries to brush off criticism of his lack of knowledge of the
52 Ibid. 274.
53 Dawes, ‘Human Rights,’ 396.
54 Carlos M. Sotomayor, ‘Entrevista a Iván Thays.’
58 an dean truths
Andes in other interviews (see, for example, the previously referenced

interview by Blas Vives), his posture is as much ethical and political as it
is aesthetic.
Certainly the protagonist’s relationship with the Andes aligns closely
with Thays’s expressed positioning. The narrator-protagonist constantly
highlights his feeling of alienation, and the seemingly insuperable cultural
gap between the coast and the highlands. He portrays Oreja de Perro in
terms that denote a somewhat static, timeless quality to the highlands, as
if the Andes and its inhabitants were outside of history. For example, he
describes the peasants first as ‘huraños’ (elusive) then as ‘cautos’ (cautious),
stating that only the drunks have shed their fear: ‘Están tendidos en la acera,
o recostados en las puertas de algunas casas. No parecen borrachos recientes,
lo son pertinaces, es probable que hayan estado ahí desde hace meses, años,
y seguirán estándolo después de que nos vayamos’ [They are lying about on
the sidewalk, or leaning against the doors of some houses. They don’t seem
recently drunk, but rather persistently, it’s probable that they have been there
months, years, and they’ll still be there after we have gone] (LLOP, 130).
Beyond multiple examples of insobriety among the indigenous inhabitants,
the protagonist underscores an animalesque quality:
También las campesinas se han multiplicado por decenas. Ahora es una

jauría de inquietas polleras de colores, dentaduras incompletas, chompas
amarillas, rojas, azules, celestes, negras. Sombreros de paja ennegrecidos,
sombreros de fieltro con flores. Hay ancianas, mujeres mayores, niñas.
Todas vestidas igual. Y perros, sus perros largos y flacos orbitando
alrededor de sus dueñas.
The peasant women have also multiplied by the dozens. Now it’s a pack
of restless colored skirts, incomplete sets of teeth, yellow, red, blue, light
blue, black sweaters. Blackened straw hats, felt hats with flowers. There are
elderly women, adult women, and girls. All dressed alike. And dogs, their
long and skinny dogs orbiting about their masters. (LLOP, 180)
These descriptions evoke dominant, traditional images of Andean cultures in

Peru and beyond. There is the expected, stereotypical mix of the folkloric, the
barbaric, the static, the pre-modern, and the savage; it is hardly an original
fiction.
The novel ends with the protagonist back in Lima, futilely waiting for his
wife to meet with him in their apartment. Looking for her, he stares out the
window and contemplates some actors filming a scene in the street below.
He recognizes his reality has changed; his life is so irremediably distanced
from that of his wife and son, they no longer form a family. He is incapable
of any human connection, as is shown in his ephemeral relationship with
Jazmín. And this is ‘toda, absolutamente toda la realidad en la que debo
aprender a vivir’ [the whole, absolutely whole reality in which I should learn
to live] (LLOP, 211). Reality is intimate and individual, not social, and any
connection with the other annulled. The writer’s response to the paradigm
of violence and war (Maldonado-Torres) is to retreat.
Conclusion
Even as they construct stories set in the post-war period, with protagonists
who must intimately struggle with the vestiges of violence, these novels, in
tandem with the Informe final, commit their own sort of violence. Indeed, they
participate in and further a sustained project of symbolic violence that begins
with the Conquest and, that, it could be argued, is the very root system that
gave birth to and sustained the war itself, and they offer no viable alternative,
discursive or otherwise. The greatest violence in these novels, then, takes place
in the act of narration. As Cueto, Roncagliolo, and Thays reify central tropes
in the dominant national imaginary—the coastal/highland, white/indigenous,
Spanish/Quechua hierarchical binaries; the strangeness, incomprehensibility
of Andean cultures; the Andes as outside of time and history—there is no
sense of an Andean contribution to the ‘new Peru.’ Rather, these novels
reaffirm the coast’s (Lima’s) control over the future of the country and
the narratives that will be constructed about it. Ann Kaplan asks, ‘How
should one differentiate between empathetic reactions, including vicarious
traumatization, in a reader, listener, or viewer, and witnessing? Arguably the
difference involves distance; empathetic sharing entails closeness but may lead
to the overidentification of vicarious trauma. Witnessing has to do with an
art work producing a deliberate ethical consciousness.’55 If the three novels
described here provide vivid examples of vicarious trauma as experienced by
individuals of a certain class and social standing, what follows are analyses of
works of art that give witness to the traumatic effects of the internal conflicts
in diverse national subjectivities and thereby endeavor to incite a deliberate,
transformed, and solidarious ethical consciousness.
55 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 123.

Sustaining Dominant Narratives La Hora Azul Abril Rojo and Un Lugar

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Sustaining Dominant Narratives La Hora Azul Abril Rojo and Un Lugar

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Liverpool University Press

Book Title: Andean Truths

Sustaining Dominant Narratives

official transitional justice processes in Peru, ultimately return to the status

2 Ubilluz, Hibbett, and Vich. ‘Introducción,’ 13.

anti-modern), barbarous, extremely violent, or overly submissive, irrational,

Reading the Novels with the Informe final

10 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 4.

a specific sector, namely upper middle-class, limeño, male intellectuals,

12 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 1.

Franco (referring to broader cultural phenomena in Latin American countries

14 Franco, Cruel Modernity, 8.

Ya no quieren consuelo, señor. Pero quieren hablar, quieren contarme sus

19 Megan Boler, ‘The Risks of Empathy,’ 259.

podría llamarlo? ¿Un encargo de su culpa, de su nostalgia, de sus remordi-

había sido el boleto de un viaje indefinido hacia la región encantada de la

an interview, Roncagliolo states, ‘the research on political violence was also

30 Mundow, ‘The Interview/with Santiago Roncagliolo.’

Eran miles y miles de cadáveres, no sólo ahí, en la oficina del comandante,

Furthermore, of course, the religious background of the text evokes the

What we are left with is a country stuck in a state of melancholia.

34 La Capra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss,’ 713.

there was nothing to understand in them. Only incoherence. Barbarity.

Thus, the novel becomes an important critique of transitional justice

40 Torres Seoane, ‘Arte, memoria y violencia.’

Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro

That the reflections on memory dialogue with the nation’s contempo-

Incluso para hacer un testimonio de esa naturaleza había que actuar un

de un artefacto humano, el alambicado armazón de la maldad, instalado

50 Boler, ‘The Risks of Empathy,’ 261.

Castañeda’s assessment, however, points precisely to problematic elements

Andes in other interviews (see, for example, the previously referenced

También las campesinas se han multiplicado por decenas. Ahora es una

These descriptions evoke dominant, traditional images of Andean cultures in

55 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 123.

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