LITMIR.BIZ

      Preface: Ayacucho, 1997

      THE BRIGHTLY COLORED speck in the distance kept coming closer without increasing much in size. I stood still with a large sack of kindling slung over my shoulder, not certain who it was. It was barely dusk, so I was less frightened than curious. People had assured me that the guerrillas only walked at night, as did the other frightening creatures I had been warned about. There were the jarjachas—human beings who had assumed the form of llamas as divine punishment for incest. There were the pishtacos—beings that suck the body fat out of the poor people who cross their paths. There were also the condenados—the condemned dead who are sentenced to an afterlife of wandering the earth and never finding peace. All of these beings derive pleasure from inflicting their vengeance on the living. But it was still dusk. I just wanted to know who the speck in the distance was.

      I finally heard a voice call out, but the wind carried the words upward to the peaks of the mountains. I dropped down to the dirt highway and began calling out my own greeting. Finally an elderly man came into focus. He wore threadbare pants and a green wool sweater, and was stooping beneath the weight of a brightly colored blanket brimming with wood. Standing as upright as his heavy load would allow him, this tiny man pushed back his hat and looked straight up at me: “Gringacha”—little gringa—“where is your husband?” And so I met don Jesús Romero, an altogether different sort of creature to be wary of on isolated paths.

      Don Jesús was also headed to the village of Carhuahurán, so we walked back home together. It was the time of day when cooking fires sent smoke curls up from the roofs of the houses and animals crowded into their corrals for the night. The smoke curls were a prelude to intimate evening hours, when stories from that day or years past were told as families gathered around blackened cooking pots.

      Efraín, my research assistant, already had our fire going by the time we arrived. I invited don Jesús to come in for a cup of coffee and a chapla—round wheat bread I had brought with me from the city a few days earlier. I slathered a chapla with butter and strawberry jam,

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