Intimate Enemies. Kimberly Theidon
be afraid even when they kill in front of you because we are in the last days. We should kneel down to save our souls. We need to ask God to save us. He will save us. If He wants, not even a bullet can kill us.’ She made me understand these words. It made my heart stronger. Since she warned me, I was no longer afraid. That’s how I began to know the evangelio [Evangelical church].”
“So the evangelio arrived during that time?”
“Yes, since that time the evangelio appeared. With this violence we all went mad. There was so much death! With the violence, we were like crazy people. My head aches when I remember these things. During those years, I was like a crazy person.” Her face changed and she stopped threshing the corn. She raised her hands and touched her chest forcefully, thanking God for the healing she had found in the evangelio. “The word of God reached my heart like water, refreshing me. And the word calmed my thirst.”
She waited a moment before she began speaking again. “Señora Margarita, she also went crazy.” Victoria’s face grew sad as she remembered. “Ya, with her head gone mad [uman locayarusqa] from having seen people dying in front of her. She went crazy. She wandered from one place to another. She reached Huancapi and threw herself in front of cars. ‘Let these cars kill me,’ she said, and threw herself in front of them. She grabbed a knife, giving it to people so they could stab her in her chest. ‘Stab me with this, I can’t do it alone,’ she pleaded. To the hermanos [members of the church] she gave them sticks and asked them to strike her in the head. ‘I can’t stand anymore of this!’ Oh, she pleaded so desperately.”
“What happens when a person goes crazy?”
“When a person goes crazy, day is no longer day, night is no longer night. It’s night all of the time. That’s why they like to be in the darkness, a darkness that would scare any one of us. ‘I’ve seen hell,’ she said. ‘Hell reeks horribly,’ she said. ‘Everyone has horns there—goats with horns, cows with horns, everyone has horns in hell.’ But a healthy person, healthy with God, can’t see those things. That’s how it is. ‘Papá Dios made me see these things,’ she said. That’s why she also sought the word of God. ‘I’m going to leave here, leave the darkness,’ she said. That poor woman—morning and night she sang songs of the souls [for the dead]. She said her head burned and she kept putting mud on her head. She would wrap her head in mud because it burned, and walking in circles she’d sing the songs of the souls.”
“Mama Victoria, what happened to her?” asked Dulia.
“She went crazy. She was weak in her thoughts. I also wrapped my head in a chumbi all of the time. At what hour will we die? That thought was in my head, and my head was wrapped day and night.”
“And how was that—to feel mad? How did you feel then?”
“You don’t recognize day and night. You cry, singing songs of the dead.”
* * *
Juanjo and I were walking through the streets of Tiquihua, hoping to find someone home.14 It was early afternoon and most people were either working in their chacras (agricultural land) or pasturing their animals. Only the tiniest children and older women were at home. Peering over a wall, I saw a woman lethargically sweeping her small patio. I greeted her and she answered, but she turned her back again and kept sweeping. We approached her house and asked if we could join her. She nodded and waved us into her house. She looked Juanjo up and down: “Those guerrilleros [Senderistas] came here just like you—young people. Like you,” she repeated, inclining her head toward Juanjo. We explained that we were there to work, and she poured us each a cup of hot barley water (café de cebada).
Señora Julia Rojas was forty-five and had lived in Tiquihua during the violence. At first she had her children with her, but then her husband was brutally killed. After losing him, the political violence and poverty forced her to send her four children away to live with family members on the coast.
“My husband died, my uncles, my cousins—so many members of my family died that there weren’t enough coffins to bury them.” She cried as she remembered. “So my soul—I don’t know where it might have gone. I was alone and the wives of the dead were crying. Their bodies were scattered around. They [the killers] had taken their ponchos and they were nude. They’d also taken their pants. They were innocent! I cried like a crazy person and I had no one. I had no one to tell.” She was silent for a moment, staring at the space in front of her.
“May I ask how they killed them?”
“They shot my husband here,” placing her hand on her shoulder. “When they shot him he began to cry out ‘call my wife’ so that I could carry him. My husband called my name. ‘Julia! Come quickly.’ And they told him, ‘Shut up you motherfucker. Kill him, shit. Kill him,’ and they killed him again in the mouth so he shut up.15 So he didn’t have a face—it was just a hole. I cried like crazy. We walked like crazy people seeing so many dead people, scattered everywhere. It was another life. We were like crazy people! I saw the dead scattered, without pants. They’d taken their good shirts.”
Her crying was contagious, her tears falling across a face prematurely aged by pain. “I had to bury everyone alone, being careful they didn’t come back to kill me and my children. That’s why I had to send my children to Lima. They sent for me later, but it wasn’t the same. I felt useless with everyone taking care of me. I decided to come back to my chacra because at least here I can take care of myself. When I returned, my house was empty—only the walls were standing. I fixed the roof, and I cleaned the patio. I was like a crazy person. I’m still like that. I feel different. We can’t forget the dead. Seeing so many dead scattered around, full of blood! As if you wouldn’t feel pain for people like you! Having so much sadness, you cry, thinking, ‘That’s how they’ll kill me, tomorrow or the day after.’ What curse could they be, those plagakuna [people of the plague, i.e., Senderistas] who came here? What mother or father could have given birth to them [implying the Senderistas had sprung from the devil himself]?”
* * *
People overwhelmingly invoked collective madness when they referred to the sasachakuy tiempo. Certainly villagers recognize individual pathology, which makes the emphasis on the collective nature of the madness even more striking. This emphasis on a disorder larger than one’s own, larger than a personal or family issue, conveys a great deal about living through catastrophic upheaval.16 The emergence of collective madness offers social and political commentary about a world in disarray, in which no one seemed capable of responding to villagers’ demands for an end to the killing and for the reestablishment of a humane social order. At the community level many authorities were targeted for killing or co-optation. In certain regions Shining Path established “liberated zones” and appointed their own authorities, who frequently administered arbitrary and brutal forms of control. There were also armed agents of the state who at times failed in their duty to protect civilians and at others committed abuses against them. Magnifying the ambient terror was the fear that even family members and neighbors were capable of treachery. Many villagers lamented that there was no earthly authority one could turn to or trust. This was a world in which the bewildering loss of context resulted in subjects radically unmoored from the moral limits that tethered life to some sense of predictability, to “social sanity.”
The searing proximity of the violence resonates with Begoña Aretxaga’s work on narratives of madness in post-Franco Spain. Her research on radical nationalist youth in the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) movement shares the themes of intimate violence and collective madness that haunted my conversations in Ayacucho. She found the question of madness was linked to forms of intimate violence that defied comprehension and produced profound shock. The familiarity of local youth turned perpetrators transgressed the moral boundaries of local communities, resulting in violence perpetrated by a “familiar turned stranger.” Narratives of collective madness acknowledged that reality was “de-realized” all the more for occurring within the boundaries of the socially familiar. Importantly, in contrast with individual madness, which does not threaten the premises of the social order, collective madness