All Peruvians are liars – Mario Vargas Llosa

Peru is not a novel – Shining Path graffiti



In grey wind where snow turns to ice, leaving no shelter,

you are murdering the woman who made you feel guilty,

who called you a fascisti. Your fingers at her throat

you examine her pores and her pock-marks,

her teeth broken by a rifle butt

because her parents worshipped an icon of Stalin.

A high fog is breaking in the acquiescent village.

Faces carved from the hard material of nature

reveal no motives. Your hands close on nothing:

wood, weeds or water. Impossible to tell

if these people are servants to force alone

or to your foreign currency of words

translated from another language – the promise

of conquest, the repossession of forgotten land.

Your eyes fix on the face of the woman,

her ideas reduced to manageable flesh and bone.

What else could subdue them but your own

nervous retraction, making a virtue of fear.

Your tongue removing itself into black cavities,

your eyes concealed among Indians, watching

the woman’s body slowly digested by insects.

The strings of your nerves drawn shrill

by the need to maintain a single extreme moment,

but that was an error, a point of mathematics:

better to proceed by denial, eating your own words

compacted and swallowed in gutters.

The fabricated voice of the journals dissolves behind you,

Your carefully bound diaries left on a train

now somewhere in a distant country – maybe Russia,

the terminus, the last exit. The veins in your cheeks

crackle red, and you are outside time, awaiting

the moment of ignition. But these are autumn colours,

half-formed mountains at the edge of the world.

The Amazon running to rock. Vast crowds

milling together, resisting the pressure to meld or mesh.

At first there was anger, in the fluttering walls of the throat,

at the sight of those faces barely released from stone,

brown feet roasted over open fires.

Torturers winding back their watches

at the sign of the scar, at the hour of the sentry.

Americans with flaccid hands. The light like shroud-cloth

burning your skin. You made yourself dark,

withdrawing into the shadows of the century, accepting nothing.

You are speaking to yourself thanks to the magic

of an alien technology, which is your own,

or at least helps you belong to your time.

But how it really happens, how the same words recur

in this haphazard way outside of any system

remains a mystery. A voice speaking over the radio

mirrors your own, and you cannot break the habit

of these reflections, cannot even retrace your steps.

An insidious machine is reading your thoughts.

The woman raises her head grotesquely,

and even though you are immersed in shiny blood

there is nothing left to be offered or consumed.

The magic of cheap rhetoric is retained

like a forgotten taste, brushing your tongue.

All the things that you can touch refer to secrecy

or symbols, but is that magic any more than a good card-hand

or a huge library reverberating messages between lines of shelves?

You fear asking the simplest question

because the answer is always the same,

and the voice that returns it is the familiar dominating one –

your teacher, your master, robbing you of all will,

keeping you as a servant.

The desire to subvert yourself, to speak

in the voice of another, to knock a chaos

into this order of illusions. And when they pass over you,

these shadows distinct as faces piercing the surface of water,

what do they drag in their wake? The presidential candidate’s

dream-speech delivered in bubbles of his own blood.

The desire to destroy. A selection of words

to mask your jealousy, every tentative emotion concealed.

Your arrogance the revolver in its holster.

Because there is no longer any guilty internal world,

your private thoughts lead you to a plain

where huge figures stand frozen, towers and monuments

shuttling messages into the air, light patterns

and gaudy over-obvious symbols.

There are no more images for you to touch,

only these hard prints on the eye

mistaking jungle-foliage for military uniforms.

Extinction breathes its gentle colours,

pastels of tensions released. Falling softly into a chair

you believe you are outside everything,

a light tune disappearing. At last

you become leader, compelled to speak.

But there is danger, for what have you left to confess

except constructions? The high chair, the fabricated podium,

disgust you like some story spilled at gunpoint.

You take the woman into your arms, but dark smoke

has entered your bones, and there is no remedy

but the need to continue travelling among these tortured bodies,

these trees, these flayed mountains.

You wanted to capture precision,

the insides of things, but each new word

dazzles you, is a prism of caught light,

and you are frozen in captivation.

Each second snaps like a forced door.

You have been absent from the city too long,

concealed in an ambush of riddles,

and now you are scarcely recognisable.

The clear strategies inhaled at high altitudes,

formed from clear air, are swept clean away

by your embarrassing forgetfulness.

What was the use of all the lost time

learning that you could no longer lie?

Perhaps you were only parroting

the words of a saviour, practical solutions

that carry across the seaboard

like the sound of distant gunfire.

The demagogue’s beard cultivated in a garbage dump.

The priest’s sash sweeping across polished boards

as prickly infection wipes a baby’s mouth.

You are too malleable. A servant’s hysteria

scours you with painful laughter. Lawless

your shining objects shake from the walls.

Make neat piles of them. Scrub your empty face

until it burns. Make up a story.