Intimate Enemies. Kimberly Theidon

eight times and miscarried on three other occasions. Her soft stomach seemed so vulnerable beneath my hands. We had spoken many times, muscular back stretched out in the warmth of the sun. But today was different.

      Teodoro had been her favorite son, the one named after her father, the one who brought her sweet mandarins from the jungle each time he returned from working on the coca plantations. Her eyes began to glisten, and she shook her head: “Better to have been a rock all of those years, better never to have felt anything.” Teodoro had left one last time for the jungle and had never returned. The Shining Path guerrillas had killed him with a crushing blow to his head. “They killed people like that, just smashed their heads as though they were frogs.” The glistening turned to tears, and her stomach began to heave beneath my hands. Dionisia had not been able to bring his body back for burial, but friends told her how he had died and how they had buried him as best they could so far from home.

      I was also crying as we lay in the sun. Dionisia kept speaking, her face wet with tears. She told me that she had cried for so long that some of the other women in the village had told her, “Mama Dionisia, if you don’t stop crying you will lose your sight. If you cry too much you’ll go blind.” So they prepared herbs for her and had her drink them everyday. But her tears did not subside.

      The women continued to worry about her, and they insisted she must try to stop crying and cleanse her body of llakis. Llakis had been known to drive people mad. The women led her to the river where they caught the water as it ran downstream. Pouring the water into a mortar and pestle, they ground it several times and had her drink. But the llakis continued to make her body ache, and her pensamientos (thoughts) refused to stop. Her head throbbed as the pensamientos opened the nerves in the nape of her neck.

      Finally one of the older women came to visit her and told Dionisia what she must do. She was to search her entire house and gather up every shred of her son’s clothing, place it in a large burlap sack, tie it tight with rope, and walk it out behind her house. Then she would be able to forget, and her tears would finally subside.

      “So I went through every bit of my house, and I gathered up everything,” she said, “even the shreds of his clothes that I found hanging from the rafter above my bed. I found a large sack, put all of his clothing in it, tied it up tight, and carried the sack out to behind my corral—that’s even farther than behind my house.” She fell silent. My hands stopped—my entire body paused to listen. By now her stomach was heaving even harder, and Madeleine and I were crying as well. Finally I asked, “So, mama Dionisia, did it help?” Her tears turned to sobbing and she shook her head: “No. I just walked out everyday behind my corral and untied that sack.”³⁸

      This conversation with Dionisia still unsettles me, and I have returned to it many times as I struggle to understand memory, the body, and affliction. Memory is achingly bittersweet. Of course she wants to remember her son but has tried so hard to forget the horrible way Teodoro was killed and the impossibility of mourning his death and burying him as would befit a beloved son. So she ties the sack tightly, only to open it and touch his clothes an innumerable one-last-time.

      During my research in Ayacucho, various women asked, “Oh, why should we remember everything that happened? To martirize our bodies, and nothing else?” Others insisted their martirio (martyrdom) had already begun, starting with an audible rasping in the marrow of their bones. The term “martyr” shares a root with the Latin word memor. The martyr is one who voluntarily suffers as punishment for having been a witness. The corporality of memory is central, and the link between the body and memory is evident in the Latin root “testes,” from which the words “testicle” and testigo (witness) are drawn. The root privileged men as the bearers and reproducers of memory, eclipsing women and their “martyred bodies.” In contrast, Veena Das has suggested, “the representation of suffering is such that it is experienced metonymically as bodily pain and it is the female body that shelters this pain in its insides forever.”³⁹ These women were lamenting the bodily toll of remembering and bearing witness.

      Dionisia was plagued by llakis, one of the most prevalent afflictions throughout the region.⁴⁰ Llaki, in the singular, can be translated as “sadness” or “pain,” but that scarcely does justice to this complex term. Llakis are painful thoughts or memories that fill the heart where they are charged with affect. These “emotional thoughts” blur the distinction between intellectual and affective faculties, just as the heart is the seat of emotion as well as memory. Llakis can be the product of either political violence or the poverty that serves as a trigger for remembering all that one has lost. This suffering is not merely a state of mind: it is an embodied state of being.

      The thoughts begin in your head, but they drop down to your heart. When they reach your heart, they become llakis because of the pain.

      —Hilario Pulido, promotor de salud, Accomarca

      When you have pain/sadness, thoughts arrive in your heart. Your heart opens up like a pot with no lid. Your heart cannot contain all of this, all of the llakis, and you become pure pain/sadness.

      —Benedicta Mendoza, Accomarca

      Llakiwan kachkani can be translated as “I am in pain,” consumed by sadness. Llakis surge from the heart, overflowing its capacity to contain so many hurtful memories. As they fill the body, “you become pure pain or sadness.” This is a “hydraulic model” of the emotions; emotions rise, fall, bear down upon, and travel through the body. There was another powerful expression several women used: Yuyaynipas tapawan (“My memories suffocate me”). Beneath the weight of reminiscence, the person cannot breathe and their heart aches. Llakis can rob the person of their use of reason, leaving them sonso (senseless or mad). And as llakis mature in the body, they can be fatal.

      Many people described their search for a way to cleanse their bodies of llakis. Among methods of cleansing are the use of guinea pigs to “scan” the body, drinking agua de olvido (water of forgetfulness, caught as river water runs downstream and forms whirlpools), and the faith healing that occurs in the Evangelical churches. When the women took mama Dionisia to the river and had her drink water caught in the whirlpool, they hoped to cleanse her body and relieve her suffering.⁴¹ Another important point: to claim one is in pain is to place a demand upon others to respond.⁴²

      The word llakis frequently appears together with pensamientos (thoughts or worries). Señora Victoria Pariona in Cayara described the effect of pensamientos:

      I always have pensamientos. I’m worried. Sometimes I’m so enraged that I cry, and I have to calm myself down. That’s how I am. This pensamiento is very heavy, and because of this I ask myself, “What sort of life is it that God allows our destiny to be like this?” The pensamientos grab you, really suddenly. A pensamiento arrives when you’re doing just anything. In that exact moment it grabs you. When you’re headed to the path, walking, or sometimes at night, too, when you’re tired and sleeping—you’re calm and then suddenly a pensamiento arrives and you ask yourself again, “What sort of life is this?”

      There is a temporal aspect associated with llakis that allows us to distinguish between llakis and another term that was prevalent in testimonies during the war years: ñakariy (to agonize).⁴³ One agonizes in the moment of horror, but it is with the memories and their unchecked accumulation over time that llakis grab the person. The person suffering from llakis is suffering from a memory affliction. Just as a person can possess memory, so can memory possess the person, grabbing them, filling their body, maturing to the point that their body itself becomes unbearable. So villagers emphasize their desire to forget.

      I had a long conversation in 1997 with a group of women in Umaru, a community that had been virtually destroyed during the war. I was seated with the women amid the burned-out remains of someone’s home, conducting a health care needs assessment for an NGO. At one point during our conversation, I asked the women which health care services were a priority in their community. Past experience indicated that a question about services needed could solicit responses that ranged from livestock