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By Root 969 0

along with the two farmhands, in a lean-to a long distance away from the boss’s cabin. The cabin was where Federico and his sister were to sleep. But when the weather was very hot, the little boy would often take his straw pallet down to the banks of the Pendencia, where the sound of the water lulled him to sleep. That was what he had done that night (and all the rest of his life was to reproach himself for having done so). He bathed himself in the river in the moonlight, lay down on his pallet, and fell asleep. In his dreams he seemed to hear a baby crying. But the sound was not loud enough or did not last a long enough time to awaken him. At dawn he felt sharp little teeth biting his foot. He opened his eyes and thought he would die, or rather, that he had died and was in Hell: he was surrounded by dozens of rats, writhing, twisting, stumbling over each other, jostling each other, and above all devouring everything within their reach. He leapt up from the pallet, grabbed a stick, and managed to alert the foreman and the farmhands by shouting at the top of his lungs. Among all of them, they were able to drive the colony of invaders off with torches, clubs, kicks. But when they entered the cabin all that was left of the baby (the piece de résistance of the famished rodents’ feast) was a little pile of bones.

The two minutes were up and Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui started off. In a serpentine of cars, he slowly made his way along the Avenida Tacna, intending to head off down Wilson and Arequipa to the Barranco district, where lunch was waiting for him. As he stopped for the red lights, he closed his eyes and felt, as he always did whenever he remembered that terrifying dawn, a burning, effervescent sensation, like acid bubbling inside him. Because, as folk wisdom has it, “misfortunes never come one at a time.” As a result of the tragedy, his mother, the young woman of Basque descent, contracted chronic hiccups, which brought on spasms, kept her from being able to eat, and struck other people as hilariously funny. She never again uttered a single word: only croaks and gurgles. She went about like that, with terror-stricken eyes, hiccuping constantly, wasting away, until she finally died of exhaustion a few months later. His father let himself go, lost all his ambition, all his energy, the habit of washing. When, out of sheer negligence, he lost the farm and it was sold at auction to pay off his creditors, he earned his living for a while as a raftsman, ferrying human passengers, goods, and animals from one shore of the Huallaga to the other. But one day when the river was in flood the current drove the raft into a clump of trees, completely destroying it, and he lost all interest in building another one. He took to the slopes of that pornographic mountain with maternal breasts and eager hips they call the Sleeping Beauty, built himself a refuge of leaves and stalks, let his hair and beard grow, and remained there for years, eating wild herbs and smoking leaves that make your head swim. When Federico, by then an adolescent, left the jungle, the ex-engineer was known in Tingo María as the Sorcerer and lived near the grotto of Las Pavas, cohabiting with three Indian women from Huánuco, who had borne him several half-wild children with round bellies.

Only Federico was able to confront the catastrophe creatively. That very morning, after having been whipped for leaving his sister alone in the cabin, the boy (who had become a man in the space of a few hours) had knelt beside the little mound of earth that was María’s tomb and swore to devote his life, to his last breath, to the annihilation of the murderous species. To seal his vow, he sprinkled the earth covering the little girl with drops of blood from the gashes left by the whip.

Forty years later, Don Federico Té11ez Unzátegui, the very exemplar of the single-mindedness of men of honor that moves mountains, could tell himself, as his sedan rolled down the avenues toward his frugal daily lunch, that he had proved that he was a man of his word. For in all those years it was