Portrait in Sepia (15 page)

The Peruvians had organized two lines of defense a few kilometers from the city and in locations difficult for the attackers to access. On steep, sandy cliffs they had massed forts, ramparts, batteries of cannon, and sandbag-protected trenches for their riflemen. They had also salted the beach with hidden land mines that exploded on contact. These two lines of defense were linked with the city of Lima by railroad to guarantee transport for troops, wounded, and provisions. As Severo del Valle and his comrades-in-arms knew before initiating the attack in mid January of 1881, the victory—if there were to be a victory—would come at the cost of many lives.

•

That January afternoon the troops were ready for the march upon the capital of Peru. After mess, and after breaking down camp, they burned the shacks where they had slept and divided into three groups with the purpose of taking the enemy defenses by surprise under cover of thick fog. They moved in silence, each with his heavy equipment on his back and rifle at the ready, prepared to attack "head on, Chilean style," as the generals had decided, aware that the most powerful weapon in their arsenal was the daring and ferocity of soldiers drunk with violence. Severo del Valle had seen the canteens of liquor and gunpowder passed around, an incendiary mixture that left a man's gut in flames but spurred him to unthinkable courage. He had tried it once, but afterward suffered vomiting and headaches for two days, so he preferred to go into battle cold. The march through the silence and blackness of the pampa seemed interminable, even with brief moments of pause. After midnight, the large company of soldiers halted for an hour. They planned to storm a coastal town near Lima before dawn, but the contradictory orders and confusion of their commanders spoiled the plan. Little was known about the situation of their advance lines, but apparently the battle had already begun; that forced the exhausted troops to continue without a breather. Following the example of the others, Severo jettisoned his knapsack, blanket, and remaining equipment; he fitted his rifle with the bayonet and began to run forward blindly, shouting at the top of his lungs like a wild beast, for now it was a question not of taking the enemy by surprise but of frightening them. The Peruvians were waiting for them, and as soon as they were within range, they let fly a broadside of lead. Smoke and dust were added to fog, covering the horizon with an impenetrable mantle as the air filled with terror: bugles sounding the charge, war whoops, sounds of battle, the howls of the wounded, the whinnying of horses, and roar of cannon fire. The ground was mined but the Chileans advanced anyway, with the savage cry, "Gut them!" on their lips. Severo del Valle saw two of his companions blown to bits after they stepped on a mine a few meters away. He did not even stop to think that the next explosion might be for him; there was no time to think of anything—the first soldiers were at the enemy line, jumping over trenches, dropping into them with curved knives clamped between their teeth and bayonets fixed, killing and dying amid streams of blood. The surviving Peruvians retreated, and the attackers began to scale the hills, forcing back the defenders. With no idea of what he was doing, Severo del Valle found himself with sword in hand, obliterating one man, then shooting another point-blank in the head as he ran away. Fury and horror had possessed him completely; like all the others, he had become an animal. His uniform was torn and soaked with blood, a piece of someone's gut was hanging from one sleeve, he was hoarse from yelling and cursing; he had lost his fear and his identity, he was nothing but a killing machine, dealing blows without seeing where they fell, his only goal to reach the top of the hill.

At seven in the morning, after two hours of battle, the first Chilean flag fluttered atop one of the peaks, and Severo, on his knees on the hill, saw a large group of Peruvian soldiers retreating in disarray but re-forming in the patio of a hacienda where they faced the frontal charge of the Chilean cavalry. Within a few minutes all hell had broken loose. Severo del Valle, running in that direction, saw the gleam of upheld swords and heard the volleys of shots and cries of pain. By the time he reached the hacienda, the enemy was already fleeing, again pursued by Chilean troops. That was when he heard his commander's voice telling him to get the men of his detachment together and attack the nearby beach town. That brief pause, as lines were being organized, gave Severo a moment to breathe; he fell to the ground, forehead in the dirt, gasping, trembling, his hands frozen on his weapon. In his mind, advancing was a kind of madness; not only was his regiment outnumbered but, confronting troops positioned in houses and buildings, they would have to fight door to door. His mission, however, was not to think but to obey his superior's orders and reduce that Peruvian town to rubble, ash, and death. Minutes later he was running in the lead of his companions as projectiles whistled all around them. They entered the town in two columns, one on each side of the main street. Most of the inhabitants had fled at the cry, "The Chileans are coming!" but those who remained were determined to fight with everything at hand, from kitchen knives to jugs of boiling oil poured from the balconies. Severo's regiment had instructions to go from house to house until the town was emptied out, not an easy task since it was filled with Peruvian soldiers taking shelter behind roof battlements, in trees, windows, and deep-set doors. Severo's throat was raw and his eyes were bloodshot; he could barely see a meter in front of him; the air, dense with smoke and dust, had become unbreathable, and the confusion was so great that no one knew what to do, but simply imitated the men in front of them. Suddenly Severo heard a hail of bullets, and he understood he could not advance any farther—he had to seek shelter. He butted open the nearest door and burst into the room with his sword drawn, blinded by the contrast between the blazing sun outside and interior shadow. He needed at least a few minutes to reload his rifle but didn't have that time: a bloodcurdling scream paralyzed him, and he glimpsed the silhouette of a figure that had been crouched in one corner and now rose before him, brandishing a hatchet. He managed to protect his head with his arms and throw his body backward. The hatchet struck like a lighting bolt on his left foot, nailing it to the floor. Severo del Valle had no idea what had happened, his reaction was pure instinct. With all the weight of his body, he thrust with his fixed bayonet, buried it in the belly of his attacker, and then raked upward with brutal force. A spurt of blood hit him in the face. And only then did he realize that his enemy was a girl. He had gutted her like a sheep, and she had sunk to her knees and was trying to hold in the intestines beginning to spill onto the wood floor. Their eyes met for an immeasurable moment, dumbfounded, wondering in the eternal silence of that instant who the other was, why they were in this position, why they were bleeding, why they had to die. Severo tried to hold her, but he couldn't move, and for the first time he felt the terrible pain in his foot rising like a tongue of fire from his leg to his chest. At that instant another Chilean soldier erupted into the room. With one glance he evaluated the situation and without hesitation fired point-blank at the woman, who was in any case dead; then he seized the hatchet and with a formidable yank freed Severo. "Come on, Lieutenant, we have to get out of here, the artillery is ready to fire!" Blood was gushing from Severo's foot; he fainted, regained consciousness, and then sank back into darkness. The soldier held his canteen to Severo's lips and forced him to drink a long swig of liquor, then improvised a tourniquet with a kerchief he tied below Severo's knee, grabbed the wounded man's arms, and dragged him from the room. Outside, other hands helped him and forty minutes later, as the Chilean artillery pounded the town with cannon fire, leaving ruin and twisted iron where once there had been a peaceful holiday resort, Severo lay in the patio of the hospital, along with hundreds of mutilated corpses and thousands of wounded abandoned in puddles and besieged by flies, waiting for death or to be saved by a miracle. He was giddy with pain and fear, at times slipping into merciful unconsciousness, and when he did come to he saw the sky had turned black. Following the burning heat of the day came the humid cold of the
camanchaca
, which wrapped night in its mantle of dense fog. In moments of lucidity Severo remembered the prayers he had learned in childhood and begged for a quick death, as the image of Nívea appeared like an angel; he thought he saw her bending over him, holding him, wiping his forehead with a damp handkerchief, speaking words of love. He repeated Nívea's name, voicelessly pleading for water.

•

The battle to take Lima ended at six in the evening. In the following days, when a count of dead and wounded could be made, it was calculated that twenty percent of the combatants of both armies had died in those hours. Many more would die afterward as a consequence of infection. Field hospitals were improvised in a school and in tents set up nearby. The wind carried the stench of corruption for miles around. Exhausted doctors and nurses attended the wounded to the extent they were able, but there were more than twenty-five hundred wounded among Chileans ranks and, it was thought, at least seven thousand among the surviving Peruvians. The wounded piled up in corridors and in patios, lying on the ground until their turn came. The most serious were treated first, and Severo del Valle was not yet dying—despite a tremendous loss of strength, blood, and hope—so the stretcher bearers passed him by again and again, giving priority to others. The same soldier who had carried him on his back to the hospital ripped open Severo's boot with his knife, cut off his blood-wet shirt, and with it improvised a binding for the butchered foot, because there were no available bandages, or medicines, or phenol for disinfectant, or opium, or chloroform—everything had been used up or lost in the chaos of the battle. "Loosen the tourniquet from time to time so gangrene doesn't set in your leg, Lieutenant," the soldier counseled. Before he said good-bye, he wished Severo good luck and gave him his most prized possessions: a pouch of tobacco and a canteen with his remaining liquor. Severo del Valle didn't know how long he lay in that patio, perhaps a day, perhaps two. When finally he was picked up to be taken to the doctor, he was unconscious and dehydrated, but when they moved him the pain was so terrible that he woke with a howl. "Hang on, Lieutenant, there's worse to come," said one of the stretcher bearers. Severo found himself in a large room with sand covering the floor, where every so often a couple of orderlies emptied new pails of sand to absorb the blood and in the same buckets carried away amputated limbs to throw on the enormous pyre filling the valley with the odor of burned flesh. Operations on the unfortunate soldiers were performed on four wooden tables covered with metal plates; on the floor were pails of reddened water where sponges were rinsed after stanching blood from Severod limbs and piles of rags torn into strips to use as bandages, everything filthy and gritty with sand and sawdust. On a side table were fearsome torture instruments—forceps, scissors, saws, needles—all crusted with dried blood. The cries of the patients filled the air, and the smell of decay, vomit, and excrement was asphyxiating. The doctor was an immigrant from the Balkans who had the hard, sure, quick air of an expert surgeon. He had a two-day growth of beard, eyes red-rimmed with fatigue, and he was wearing a heavy leather apron slick with fresh blood. He removed the improvised bandage from Severo's foot, loosened the tourniquet, and needed only a glance to see that infection had set in and to decide to amputate. There was no doubt at all that he had been cutting off many limbs; he didn't even blink.

"You have any liquor, soldier?" he asked in an obvious foreign accent.

"Water…" pleaded Severo del Valle, his tongue dry and swollen. "Water comes after. Now you need something to dull you a little, but here we don't have a drop of liquor," said the doctor.

Severo pointed to the canteen. The doctor forced him to drink three long swallows, commenting that they had no anesthesia, and used the rest to wet some rags and clean his instruments. Then he signaled the orderlies, who took their places on either side of the table to hold the patient down. This is my hour of truth, Severo had time to think, and he tried to picture Nívea so that he wouldn't die with the image in his heart of the girl he had gutted with his bayonet. A male attendant made a new tourniquet and tied it securely around Severo's leg. The surgeon took up a scalpel, plunged it into flesh some twenty centimeters below the knee, and with a skillful circular motion cut through flesh to the bone. Severo del Valle screamed with pain and immediately lost consciousness, but the orderlies did not let go; they just held him down with greater determination as the doctor used his fingers to pull back skin and muscle, uncovering the bones: then he chose a saw and with three decisive strokes cut through them cleanly. The attendant pulled the cut veins from the stump, and the doctor tied them with incredible dexterity, then loosened the tourniquet slightly as the doctor covered the amputated bone with flesh and skin and stitched it together. The attendants swiftly bandaged the stump, then between them carried Severo to a corner of the room to make way for another patient to be brought, screaming, to the surgeon's table. The entire operation had lasted fewer than six minutes.

In the days following the battle, the Chilean troops had entered Lima. According to official reports published in Chilean newspapers, they did so in an orderly fashion. According to the memory of Lima's inhabitants, it was carnage added to the excesses of defeated, enraged Peruvian soldiers who felt betrayed by their leaders. Part of the civilian population had fled, and affluent families had sought safety on ships in the port, in consulates, and on one beach protected by foreign marines, where the diplomatic corps had set up tents to shelter refugees under neutral flags. Those who stayed to defend their possessions would remember for the rest of their lives the hellish scenes of drunken soldiers maddened by violence. They sacked and burned houses, raped, beat, and murdered anyone in their path, including women, children, and old people. Finally, one component of the Peruvian regiments laid down their weapons and surrendered, but many soldiers simply fled to the sierra. Two days later the Peruvian general Andres Ciceres, his leg badly crushed, escaped from the occupied city, aided by his wife and a pair of loyal officers, and disappeared into the seams of the mountains. He had sworn that as long as he had a breath of life he would go on fighting.