Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B

forty strokes left his curved back bloody and swollen. Fear more than physical pain was behind his vows that he would never taste another drop of alcohol, his abject “Thank you, thank you very much” to each of the neighbors who beat him with whips made of leather or animal gut. His wife dragged him away to put poultices on his wounds.
    Some twenty men and women were tried, sentenced, whipped or fined, obliged to return their ill-gotten gains, to indemnify those whom they had overworked or deceived with false promises. How many accusations were true, and how many were inventions dictated by envy and rancor, the result of an excitation in which they all felt compelled to take part by revealing the cruelties and injustices they had suffered? Not even they could have answered the question when, some time in the middle of the afternoon, they put Don Crisóstomo on trial. He had been the bell ringer back in the days when the tower of the Andamarca church had a bell and the church had a priest, and he was accused by a woman who had caught him just outside the village pulling down a boy’s trousers. Others confirmed the charge. It was true, he couldn’t keep his hands to himself, he was always touching the boys and trying to get them inside his house. One man, his voice breaking with emotion, confessed in an electric silence that when he was a boy Don Crisóstomo had used him the way you use women. He had never had the courage to speak before because he was ashamed. Others, who were right here, could tell stories like his. The bell ringer was sentenced to a beating with sticks and stones, and his corpse joined the bodies of those who had been on the list.
    It was growing dark when the trials ended. Don Medardo Llantac took advantage of that moment to move away the slab covering the grave of his cousin Florisel, crawl out of the cemetery, and run through the countryside like a soul pursued by the devil, heading for Puquio. He reached the provincial capital a day and a half later in a state of exhaustion, his eyes still full of horror, and reported what had happened in Andamarca.
    Fatigued, confused, not looking into one another’s faces, the Andamarcans felt the way they did after the fiesta for their patron saint, after three days and nights of drinking all they could drink, and eating, dancing, stamping their heels, fighting, praying, not sleeping—it was a struggle to accept the idea that the great dazzling explosion of unreality was over, that they had to go back to their daily routines. But now they felt even greater dislocation and deeper malaise as they faced the unburied corpses swarming with flies and beginning to rot under their very noses, the bruised backs of those whom they had whipped. They all suspected that Andamarca would never be the same.
    The tireless members of the militia continued to take turns speaking. Now it was time to organize. There could be no victory for the people without the iron-willed, enduring participation of the masses. Andamarca would be a support base, one more link in the chain that already ran the length of the Cordillera of the Andes and was sending out branches to the coast and the jungle. Support bases were the rear guard for the vanguard. Important, useful, indispensable, they existed, as their name indicated, to support the fighters: to feed them, heal them, hide them, dress them, arm them, to give them information about the enemy and provide replacements for those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Everyone had a job to perform, a grain of sand to contribute. They should subdivide by neighborhoods, multiply by streets, blocks, families, add new eyes and ears, legs, arms, and brains to the million already at the disposal of the Party.
    Night had fallen when the neighbors elected five men and four women to be in charge of organization. To advise the residents and act as liaison to the high command, Comrade Teresa and Comrade Juan would remain in Andamarca. They