Portrait in Sepia Read online

  That January afternoon the troops were ready for the march upon the capital of Peru. After mess, and after breaking down camp, they burned the shacks where they had slept and divided into three groups with the purpose of taking the enemy defenses by surprise under cover of thick fog. They moved in silence, each with his heavy equipment on his back and rifle at the ready, prepared to attack “head on, Chilean style,” as the generals had decided, aware that the most powerful weapon in their arsenal was the daring and ferocity of soldiers drunk with violence. Severo del Valle had seen the canteens of liquor and gunpowder passed around, an incendiary mixture that left a man’s gut in flames but spurred him to unthinkable courage. He had tried it once, but afterward suffered vomiting and headaches for two days, so he preferred to go into battle cold. The march through the silence and blackness of the pampa seemed interminable, even with brief moments of pause. After midnight, the large company of soldiers halted for an hour. They planned to storm a coastal town near Lima before dawn, but the contradictory orders and confusion of their commanders spoiled the plan. Little was known about the situation of their advance lines, but apparently the battle had already begun; that forced the exhausted troops to continue without a breather. Following the example of the others, Severo jettisoned his knapsack, blanket, and remaining equipment; he fitted his rifle with the bayonet and began to run forward blindly, shouting at the top of his lungs like a wild beast, for now it was a question not of taking the enemy by surprise but of frightening them. The Peruvians were waiting for them, and as soon as they were within range, they let fly a broadside of lead. Smoke and dust were added to fog, covering the horizon with an impenetrable mantle as the air filled with terror: bugles sounding the charge, war whoops, sounds of battle, the howls of the wounded, the whinnying of horses, and roar of cannon fire. The ground was mined but the Chileans advanced anyway, with the savage cry, “Gut them!” on their lips. Severo del Valle saw two of his companions blown to bits after they stepped on a mine a few meters away. He did not even stop to think that the next explosion might be for him; there was no time to think of anything—the first soldiers were at the enemy line, jumping over trenches, dropping into them with curved knives clamped between their teeth and bayonets fixed, killing and dying amid streams of blood. The surviving Peruvians retreated, and the attackers began to scale the hills, forcing back the defenders. With no idea of what he was doing, Severo del Valle found himself with sword in hand, obliterating one man, then shooting another point-blank in the head as he ran away. Fury and horror had possessed him completely; like all the others, he had become an animal. His uniform was torn and soaked with blood, a piece of someone’s gut was hanging from one sleeve, he was hoarse from yelling and cursing; he had lost his fear and his identity, he was nothing but a killing machine, dealing blows without seeing where they fell, his only goal to reach the top of the hill.

  At seven in the morning, after two hours of battle, the first Chilean flag fluttered atop one of the peaks, and Severo, on his knees on the hill, saw a large group of Peruvian soldiers retreating in disarray but re-forming in the patio of a hacienda where they faced the frontal charge of the Chilean cavalry. Within a few minutes all hell had broken loose. Severo del Valle, running in that direction, saw the gleam of upheld swords and heard the volleys of shots and cries of pain. By the time he reached the hacienda, the enemy was already fleeing, again pursued by Chilean troops. That was when he heard his commander’s voice telling him to get the men of his detachment together and attack the nearby beach town. That brief pause, as lines were being organized, gave Severo a moment to breathe; he fell to the ground, forehead in the dirt, gasping, trembling, his hands frozen on his weapon. In his mind, advancing was a kind of madness; not only was his regiment outnumbered but, confronting troops positioned in houses and buildings, they would have to fight door to door. His mission, however, was not to think but to obey his superior’s orders and reduce that Peruvian town to rubble, ash, and death. Minutes later he was running in the lead of his companions as projectiles whistled all around them. They entered the town in two columns, one on each side of the main street. Most of the inhabitants had fled at the cry, “The Chileans are coming!” but those who remained were determined to fight with everything at hand, from kitchen knives to jugs of boiling oil poured from the balconies. Severo’s regiment had instructions to go from house to house until the town was emptied out, not an easy task since it was filled with Peruvian soldiers taking shelter behind roof battlements, in trees, windows, and deep-set doors. Severo’s throat was raw and his eyes were bloodshot; he could barely see a meter in front of him; the air, dense with smoke and dust, had become unbreathable, and the confusion was so great that no one knew what to do, but simply imitated the men in front of them. Suddenly Severo heard a hail of bullets, and he understood he could not advance any farther—he had to seek shelter. He butted open the nearest door and burst into the room with his sword drawn, blinded by the contrast between the blazing sun outside and interior shadow. He needed at least a few minutes to reload his rifle but didn’t have that time: a bloodcurdling scream paralyzed him, and he glimpsed the silhouette of a figure that had been crouched in one corner and now rose before him, brandishing a hatchet. He managed to protect his head with his arms and throw his body backward. The hatchet struck like a lighting bolt on his left foot, nailing it to the floor. Severo del Valle had no idea what had happened, his reaction was pure instinct. With all the weight of his body, he thrust with his fixed bayonet, buried it in the belly of his attacker, and then raked upward with brutal force. A spurt of blood hit him in the face. And only then did he realize that his enemy was a girl. He had gutted her like a sheep, and she had sunk to her knees and was trying to hold in the intestines beginning to spill onto the wood floor. Their eyes met for an immeasurable moment, dumbfounded, wondering in the eternal silence of that instant who the other was, why they were in this position, why they were bleeding, why they had to die. Severo tried to hold her, but he couldn’t move, and for the first time he felt the terrible pain in his foot rising like a tongue of fire from his leg to his chest. At that instant another Chilean soldier erupted into the room. With one glance he evaluated the situation and without hesitation fired point-blank at the woman, who was in any case dead; then he seized the hatchet and with a formidable yank freed Severo. “Come on, Lieutenant, we have to get out of here, the artillery is ready to fire!” Blood was gushing from Severo’s foot; he fainted, regained consciousness, and then sank back into darkness. The soldier held his canteen to Severo’s lips and forced him to drink a long swig of liquor, then improvised a tourniquet with a kerchief he tied below Severo’s knee, grabbed the wounded man’s arms, and dragged him from the room. Outside, other hands helped him and forty minutes later, as the Chilean artillery pounded the town with cannon fire, leaving ruin and twisted iron where once there had been a peaceful holiday resort, Severo lay in the patio of the hospital, along with hundreds of mutilated corpses and thousands of wounded abandoned in puddles and besieged by flies, waiting for death or to be saved by a miracle. He was giddy with pain and fear, at times slipping into merciful unconsciousness, and when he did come to he saw the sky had turned black. Following the burning heat of the day came the humid cold of the camanchaca, which wrapped night in its mantle of dense fog. In moments of lucidity, Severo remembered the prayers he had learned in childhood and begged for a quick death, as the image of Nívea appeared like an angel; he thought he saw her bending over him, holding him, wiping his forehead with a damp handkerchief, speaking words of love. He repeated Nívea’s name, voicelessly pleading for water.

  The battle to take Lima ended at six in the evening. In the following days, when a count of dead and wounded could be made, it was calculated that twenty percent of the combatants of both armies had died in those hours. Many more would die afterward as a consequence of infection. Field hospitals were improvised in a school and in tents set up nearby. The wind carried the stench of corruption for miles around.
Exhausted doctors and nurses attended the wounded to the extent they were able, but there were more than twenty-five hundred wounded among Chileans ranks and, it was thought, at least seven thousand among the surviving Peruvians. The wounded piled up in corridors and in patios, lying on the ground until their turn came. The most serious were treated first, and Severo del Valle was not yet dying—despite a tremendous loss of strength, blood, and hope—so the stretcher bearers passed him by again and again, giving priority to others. The same soldier who had carried him on his back to the hospital ripped open Severo’s boot with his knife, cut off his blood-wet shirt, and with it improvised a binding for the butchered foot, because there were no available bandages, or medicines, or phenol for disinfectant, or opium, or chloroform—everything had been used up or lost in the chaos of the battle. “Loosen the tourniquet from time to time so gangrene doesn’t set in your leg, Lieutenant,” the soldier counseled. Before he said good-bye, he wished Severo good luck and gave him his most prized possessions: a pouch of tobacco and a canteen with his remaining liquor. Severo del Valle didn’t know how long he lay in that patio, perhaps a day, perhaps two. When finally he was picked up to be taken to the doctor, he was unconscious and dehydrated, but when they moved him the pain was so terrible that he woke with a howl. “Hang on, Lieutenant, there’s worse to come,” said one of the stretcher bearers. Severo found himself in a large room with sand covering the floor, where every so often a couple of orderlies emptied new pails of sand to absorb the blood and in the same buckets carried away amputated limbs to throw on the enormous pyre filling the valley with the odor of burned flesh. Operations on the unfortunate soldiers were performed on four wooden tables covered with metal plates; on the floor were pails of reddened water where sponges were rinsed after stanching blood from severed limbs and piles of rags torn into strips to use as bandages, everything filthy and gritty with sand and sawdust. On a side table were fearsome torture instruments—forceps, scissors, saws, needles—all crusted with dried blood. The cries of the patients filled the air, and the smell of decay, vomit, and excrement was asphyxiating. The doctor was an immigrant from the Balkans who had the hard, sure, quick air of an expert surgeon. He had a two-day growth of beard, eyes red-rimmed with fatigue, and he was wearing a heavy leather apron slick with fresh blood. He removed the improvised bandage from Severo’s foot, loosened the tourniquet, and needed only a glance to see that infection had set in and to decide to amputate. There was no doubt at all that he had been cutting off many limbs; he didn’t even blink.

  “You have any liquor, soldier?” he asked in an obvious foreign accent.

  “Water . . .” pleaded Severo del Valle, his tongue dry and swollen.

  “Water comes after. Now you need something to dull you a little, but here we don’t have a drop of liquor,” said the doctor.

  Severo pointed to the canteen. The doctor forced him to drink three long swallows, commenting that they had no anesthesia, and used the rest to wet some rags and clean his instruments. Then he signaled the orderlies, who took their places on either side of the table to hold the patient down. This is my hour of truth, Severo had time to think, and he tried to picture Nívea so that he wouldn’t die with the image in his heart of the girl he had gutted with his bayonet. A male attendant made a new tourniquet and tied it securely around Severo’s leg. The surgeon took up a scalpel, plunged it into flesh some twenty centimeters below the knee, and with a skillful circular motion cut through flesh to the bone. Severo del Valle screamed with pain and immediately lost consciousness, but the orderlies did not let go; they just held him down with greater determination as the doctor used his fingers to pull back skin and muscle, uncovering the bones: then he chose a saw and with three decisive strokes cut through them cleanly. The attendant pulled the cut veins from the stump, and the doctor tied them with incredible dexterity, then loosened the tourniquet slightly as the doctor covered the amputated bone with flesh and skin and stitched it together. The attendants swiftly bandaged the stump, then between them carried Severo to a corner of the room to make way for another patient to be brought, screaming, to the surgeon’s table. The entire operation had lasted fewer than six minutes.

  In the days following the battle, the Chilean troops had entered Lima. According to official reports published in Chilean newspapers, they did so in an orderly fashion. According to the memory of Lima’s inhabitants, it was carnage added to the excesses of defeated, enraged Peruvian soldiers who felt betrayed by their leaders. Part of the civilian population had fled, and affluent families had sought safety on ships in the port, in consulates, and on one beach protected by foreign marines, where the diplomatic corps had set up tents to shelter refugees under neutral flags. Those who stayed to defend their possessions would remember for the rest of their lives the hellish scenes of drunken soldiers maddened by violence. They sacked and burned houses, raped, beat, and murdered anyone in their path, including women, children, and old people. Finally, one component of the Peruvian regiments laid down their weapons and surrendered, but many soldiers simply fled to the sierra. Two days later the Peruvian general Andrés Cáceres, his leg badly crushed, escaped from the occupied city, aided by his wife and a pair of loyal officers, and disappeared into the seams of the mountains. He had sworn that as long as he had a breath of life he would go on fighting.

  In the port of Callao, Peruvian captains ordered their crews to abandon ship and light their powder, sending the entire fleet to the bottom. The explosions woke Severo del Valle, who lay on the filthy sand in one corner of the operating room beside other men who, like him, had just undergone the trauma of amputation. Someone had covered him with a blanket, and at his side was a canteen of water; he reached for it, but his hand shook so hard that he couldn’t unscrew it, and so he clutched it to his chest, moaning, until a young canteen worker came to him, opened it, and helped him lift it to his parched lips. He gulped down the entire contents and then, instructed by the girl, who had fought beside the men for months and knew as much about caring for the wounded as the doctors did, he tossed a mouthful of tobacco into his mouth and chewed madly to ease the spasms of postoperative shock. “Killing is easy, soldier, surviving is the hard part. If you’re not careful, death will sneak up on you when you’re not looking,” she warned him. “I’m afraid,” Severo tried to say, and maybe she didn’t hear what he muttered but sensed his terror, because she removed a small silver medal from her neck and put it in his hand. “May the Virgin look after you,” she whispered and bent over and kissed him quickly on the lips before she moved on. Severo was left with the touch of those lips and the medal pressed in his fist. He was shivering, his teeth were chattering, and he was burning with fever; he slept or fainted from time to time, and when he recovered consciousness he was in a stupor from his pain. Hours later the same girl with the dark braids returned and handed him a few moistened rags so he could wipe off the sweat and dried blood; she also brought a tin plate of cornmeal gruel, a chunk of hard bread, and a cup of chicory coffee, a warm dark liquid he didn’t even attempt to taste, his weakness and nausea made it seem so disgusting. He buried his head beneath the blanket, surrendering to suffering and despair, moaning and crying like a child until he went to sleep again. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, my son; if you don’t eat you’ll die.” He was awakened by a chaplain who was going from man to man offering consolation to the wounded and extreme unction to the dying. Severo del Valle remembered that he had come to the war to die. That had been his intention when he lost Lynn Sommers, but now that death was here, hovering over him like a buzzard, awaiting her chance for the last slash of her claws, he was charged with an instinct to live. His desire to save himself was greater than the burning torment that radiated from his leg to every cell of his body, stronger than agony, uncertainty, and terror. He realized that far from caving in to death, he desperately wanted to stay in this world, live in whatever state or condition, however possible, lame, defeated . . . nothing mattered as long as he lived. Like any soldier, he
knew that only one of ten amputees won the battle against blood loss and gangrene—no way to avoid it, it was a question of luck. He decided that he would be one who survived. He thought that his marvelous cousin Nívea deserved a whole man, not a cripple; he didn’t want her to see him looking like a beggar, he couldn’t bear her pity. Even so, when he closed his eyes, Nívea again appeared at his side; he saw her, untouched by the violence of war or sordidness of the world, bending over him with her intelligent face, her black eyes, and mischievous smile; then his pride would dissolve like salt in water. He hadn’t the least doubt that she would love him as much with half a leg as she had loved him with a whole one. He took the spoon in his cramped fingers, tried to control his shaking, forced himself to open his mouth, and swallowed a mouthful of the revolting gruel, already cold and black with flies.

  The triumphant Chilean regiments entered Lima in January 1881, and from there attempted to impose the forced peace of defeat on all Peru. Once the barbarous confusion of the first weeks had calmed, the proud victors left behind a contingent of ten thousand men to control the occupied nations, and the remaining men began their voyage to the south to collect their well-deserved laurels, olympically ignoring the thousands of conquered soldiers who had managed to escape to the sierra and who planned to continue fighting from there. The victory had been so crushing that the generals could not imagine that the Peruvians would harry them for three long years. The soul of that obstinate resistance was the legendary General Cáceres, who had by a miracle escaped death and though critically wounded had fled to the mountains, reviving the stubborn seed of courage in a ragged army of ghostly soldiers and Indian conscripts, with whom he waged a cruel guerrilla war of ambushes and skirmishes. Cáceres’s soldiers, their uniforms in tatters, often barefoot, undernourished, and desperate, fought with knives, lances, clubs, stones, and a few antiquated rifles, but they had the advantage of knowing the terrain. They had chosen the right field of battle for engaging a disciplined and well-armed, although not always well supplied, enemy; here you had to be a condor to reach those steep hills. These guerrillas hid on snowy peaks, in caves and gullies, on windswept heights where the air was so thin and the solitude so immense that only they, men of the sierra, could survive. The Chilean troops’ eardrums burst and bled, they fainted from lack of oxygen, and they froze in the icy gorges of the Andes. While they could barely climb another step higher because their hearts couldn’t take the strain, the Indians of the altiplano bounded like llamas, carrying on their backs a load equal to their own weight, their only sustenance the bitter meat of eagles and the green wad of coca leaves they chewed like a cud. Those were three years of fighting with no respite and no prisoners but with thousands of dead. The Peruvian forces won a single frontal conflict in a village with no strategic value occupied by seventy-seven Chilean soldiers, several of them ill with typhus. The defenders had only a hundred bullets per man, but they fought all night with such bravery against hundreds of soldiers and Indians that in the desolate dawn, when there were but three men left shooting, the Peruvian officers begged them to surrender because it seemed ignoble to kill them. They did not surrender; they kept fighting and died with bayonets in hand, shouting the name of their country. There were three women with them, whom Indian mobs dragged to the center of the bloody plaza, raped, and cut to pieces. During the night one of them had given birth in the church while her husband fought outside; the infant was also killed. The corpses were mutilated, their bellies slit open, the entrails scooped out, and then, as it was reported in Santiago, the Indians ate the viscera roasted on sticks. That bestiality was not exceptional; both sides were equally barbaric in that war. The final surrender and signing of the peace treaty took place in October 1883, after Cáceres’s troops were defeated in a last battle, a massacre by knife and bayonet that left more than a thousand dead on the field. Chile claimed three of Peru’s provinces. Bolivia lost its one seaport and was forced to accept an indefinite truce, which would be prolonged for twenty years before a treaty was signed.