Peruvian Memories and the 'Shining Path' : TUNGSTEN A Novel by Cesar Vallejo; translated by Robert Mezey; foreword by Kevin J. O'Connor (Syracuse University Press: $19.95; 168 pp.; 0-8156-0226-X)

By Edith Grossman

Jan. 1, 1989 12 AM PT

Grossman is a critic and translator of Latin American literature. She teaches at Dominican College in New York State, is the author of " The Antipoetry of Nicanor Parra " and recently translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez's " Love in the Time of Cholera. "

Why read “Tungsten,” a partisan novel written almost 60 years ago in which evil is unmitigated, virtue unblemished, and the characters seem to lack dimension or complexity as they play out their predetermined roles on the stage of the class struggle? Why read a book in which ideology reigns supreme, and why celebrate its first, belated translation into English? Because the author is Cesar Vallejo, one of the great poets of the 20th Century and a major figure in Latin American literature.

Vallejo created a wrenching poetic language for Spanish that radically altered the shape of its imagery and the nature of its rhythms. No facile trend setter, Vallejo forged a new discourse in order to express his own visceral compassion for human suffering. He saw the world in piercing flashes of outrage and anguish, terror and pity, and what he saw wounded him like knife thrusts. A passionate, tragic poet, he mourned our loss of moral innocence and despaired of the injustice that moves the world. In the late 1920s, when he was living in Paris and eking out a meager livelihood as a journalist, the pain at the roots of his being found objective substantiation in radical politics.

Born in the Peruvian Andes in 1892, he witnessed firsthand the victimization and exploitation of the South American Indians. Although his own family was not financially destitute (his father was a notary and minor bureaucrat in the small town of Santiago de Chuco), Vallejo was a cholo, a person born of mixed European and Indian ancestry. The fact is not irrelevant. In a society where social and economic status followed the color line with cosmic certainty, where racial discrimination was rigidly adhered to although rarely acknowledged in public, the representatives of foreign companies, with the wholehearted complicity of domestic colleagues, extracted high profits from the near-slavery of the illiterate, utterly alienated and ultimately helpless victims of that racism. Vallejo had ample opportunity to witness the brutalization en masse of the Indian underclass and the appalling greed of their lighter-skinned masters who carried on the colonial tradition of using Indians as forced labor in mines and on plantations.

Twentieth-Century writers from Ciro Alegria to Manuel Scorza have denounced the Peruvian tragedy in their books. “Tungsten” was one of the earliest novels to do so in modern terms. As a young man, however, Vallejo’s greatest energies were devoted to writing and publishing his poems (“Los heraldos negros, “ his first book, appeared in 1918); consequently, he remained on the periphery of the windstorms of political and social unrest that swept through South America in the second decade of the century, although he was in the time and place where growing agitation to establish justice for Peruvian Indians and workers began its inexorable march toward Marxism.

Vallejo, Jose Carlos Mariategui (the “Shining Path” in today’s Peru takes its name from his writings) and Victor Raul Haya de la Torre (a founder of the important APRA movement--the “Popular Revolutionary American Alliance”) crossed paths at the university in Trujillo. But Vallejo was an intermittent student. His family began to experience economic difficulties during his adolescence, and he was obliged to interrupt secondary school and then his university studies to take a series of jobs, which included office work in the mines at Tambores and Quiruvilca, and on a large sugar plantation in the Chicama Valley.

These facts are not irrelevant either. They provided the historical raw material for “Tungsten,” the documented background to Vallejo’s outcry against the grim realities of Indian life in Peru. The shape that material would take--his conviction that the problem of race was indistinguishable from the problem of class--was determined by his increasingly active commitment to socialism, a political engagement that, by 1930, led to his expulsion from France, where he had gone to live seven years earlier.

The action of the novel is centered in a fictional mining town and its provincial capital, Colca. The time is 1917, just before the U.S. entry into World War I when a ready supply of tungsten would be crucial to the weapons industry. A North American corporation takes over the mine, and the boom is on: Peasants are first lured and then coerced into working for the company, local Indians, the Soras, are cheated of their land and animals, petit bourgeois entrepreneurs scramble on the backs of the poor for wealth and position, and venal officials and dignitaries find a new source of bribery and power-brokering in the foreign capitalists. The first two-thirds of the book, in fact, constitutes a genre study of unashamed thuggery, a series of vignettes of corruption, repression and brutality that sets the stage for the violent heart of “Tungsten” and the appearance of its proletarian Indian hero, Servando Huanca.

Two Indian boys are forcibly conscripted into military service (the military as well as the mining contractors have “body quotas”--numbers of recruits or workers that must be obtained by any means), and on the long march from their homes to Colca, when they are tied by the waist to the mules that their captors ride, they are so badly abused that one of them eventually dies. Outside the Subprefecture an angry crowd gathers, indignant at the visible signs of the conscripts’ mistreatment. One defiant man, Servando Huanca, steps forward to speak for the crowd with natural authority and an instinctive class consciousness. These qualities inspire the people and momentarily cow the authorities, but then the troops are ordered to fire into the crowd, and later that night officially sanctioned vigilantes pursue any Indian they can find, shooting to kill. Some, however, are taken into custody, and deals are struck by sleazy officials which allow the prisoners to be sent off to a sure death in the mines to help fulfill the company’s “body quota.”

Last and certainly least, the third section of the book is a kind of postscript to the Colca massacre. Vallejo allows his indignation and passion to turn into mechanical ideology: Servando Huanca “duckspeaks” a mercifully brief exercise in orthodoxy, proclaiming that world revolution is under way, that it will be led by a militant proletariat inspired by Lenin and not by bourgeois “intellectuals,” that it will sweep away the ruling classes in Peru. Vallejo even permits the novel to end with this ponderously symbolic sentence: “Outside, the wind was rising, portending storm.”

Kevin J. O’Connor has written a thoughtful and informative foreword, Robert Mezey has done a fine job of translating Vallejo’s often quirky Spanish, and both of them deserve our gratitude for their sensitivity and skill in bringing the work to the attention of an English-language audience. I am sorry that I cannot say as much for the editing. The typographical errors are frequent and unforgivable, and there is no indication as one reads that Mezey has provided important end notes to the text. This is a disservice to the reader; Vallejo and his translator deserve better.