Untangling Memories of Violence:
The Khipu in El rincón de los muertos by Alfredo Pita

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it’s a node within a network. - Michel Foucault

El rincón de los muertos [The Corner of the Dead, 2014] is a Peruvian novel that addresses the Internal Armed Conflict of Peru (1980-2000). It is also a polyphonic narrative that forms part of a web of texts; “it’s a node within a network,” following Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (23), because it explicitly mentions and includes fragments of other texts, even other voices, to play essential roles within the novel’s narration. Vicente the protagonist seamlessly and creatively threads these texts/voices to explore and gain a deeper understanding of the antagonistic worlds of which Peru is comprised. The text that ties it all together—pun most definitely intended—is the khipu. Contrary to a graphic writing system, the Incan empire’s khipu was a mnemotechnic system, a three-dimensional communicative device, an archive of memory that recorded information using different colored strings, and a system of knots. Pita, with this novel, makes us reconceptualize conventional notions of textuality and how a novel’s complex structure, that makes us decodify its hidden message, is comparable in part to a khipu. The reader’s physical engagement with the novel, the riffling of pages, and the process of reading and re-reading is like the khipukamayuq’s (khipu creator/reader’s) process of constructing and reading a khipu. Therefore, this essay proposes a structural reading of El rincón de los muertos to decode and trace echoes to the khipu. This type of analysis is fruitful because these memories are presented as an entanglement and would not be available in a more conventional reading process. I acknowledge the difficult endeavor of comparing a literary work to a completely different medium of communication that does not use a graphic writing system. Nevertheless, this research will explore why these trans-medial references are made and precisely what aspects of a khipu are ‘translatable’ via a written text. I conceive Pita’s novel as a metaphoric ‘translation’ of this recording device, provided that an exact translation is impossible based on the textual limitations of a novel. However, the narrative strategies and the structural components in this literary work challenge its medial limitations and reconceptualize how we perceive the process of reading. Pita does this by embedding some elements of the khipu throughout the novel. My study will demonstrate how the novel utilizes a metaphorical approach to translate a khipu, symbolically embodying the preservation and interweaving of memories, experiences, and emotions. This approach holds profound emotional and cultural importance, serving as a tribute to the Andean communication system while conveying a deeper resonance. El rincón de los muertos’ polyphonic narrative, the explicit references to the khipu, and the novel’s structural components are a few of the several aspects that make a metaphoric comparison to a khipu plausible.

Quipu, the word in Quechua for “knot and to knot,” was a system of dyed knots to communicate various types of information throughout the Inca empire. Most associate this system solely with recording simple reminders or the accounting of crops, animals, etc., however, it is much more sophisticated and complex. It’s an intricate system, an archive of memory, which is comprised of several components that convey a multitude of information.[1] Precisely like other Peruvian authors (José María Arguedas, Mario Vargas Llosa, Manuel Scorza), Pita rekindles the ember of the khipu[2], not in an anthropological sense, instead, he represents aspects of this mnemotechnic device in a literary form.

A khipu, at first glance, seems hermetic and complex, which is difficult to comprehend—especially to outsiders. This is similar to how the protagonist Vicente (a Spaniard) felt while trying to decipher the violence in Ayacucho, Peru, and the antagonistic ‘worlds’ that exist side by side but are marginalized from one another. Vicente grapples with a profound sense of estrangement towards his own personal narrative and even more so when confronted with the intricate tapestry of the fragmented Peruvian national identity exacerbated by the divisive nature of violence. This complexity transcends into his role as a writer and translator of the Peruvian narrative particularly concerning the violence in the Andes, specifically Ayacucho. His presence in Peru also serves as a catalyst for unraveling and weaving together his intricate and multifaceted personal identity. Consequently, a cross-media translation of the non-written artifact aids in the constructive processes of interpretation and intensifies feelings of estrangement. Ayacucho, a city in south-central Peru, is also the Quechua translation of the title of the novel El rincón de los muertos. Provided that Vicente engages in dialogue with the dead in order to comprehend the origins of violence, this title foregrounds the importance of the dead’s narrative. While in Lima, Vicente attempts to organize his thoughts, to hopefully write a book about his experiences in Peru, and genuinely and ultimately, understand these divergent Peruvian realities. Vicente says to himself, “Poner orden, poner en claro, entender, hallarle el hilo a esta puta madeja de gruesos hilos de colores. Y después pensar en libros, que no es el momento” (196).[3] He compares the complex Peruvian identity to that of finding a khipu in a fragile state, perhaps frayed and/or tangled. Throughout the novel, he figuratively attempts to untangle the frayed strands of the khipu — the lost, forgotten, and neglected narrative of the origins of violence in the Andes.[4]

One of the textual limitations of a novel that makes it seemingly impossible to “translate” the khipu’s narrative techniques, and the more obvious one, is the material. The materials used to construct the khipu were cotton and alpaca (Conklin 60-62). “[I]n khipu construction, there was no ball of twine or hank of yarn from which the individual strings were harvested. Each cord was created as a unique fabric structure by a process of selecting its proposed materials, its colors, its directionality, its spinning, doubling, plying, and lastly its knotting” (Conklin 59). Vicente also carefully selects the writing utensil he will use. His obsession with the writing utensil, its origins and durability, the writing process, and the order of things correlates with the constructive processes of the khipu because each fabric is carefully chosen to fulfill a purpose within the network of chords, knots, and nodes. The way in which an author of a novel constructs his or her work, khipukamayuq “khipu creators/readers” do the same. Therefore, just as these chords and strings were often of different colors, Vicente (the narrator), threads together various voices and texts that represent these diverse worlds and ethnicities in Peru. These testimonies are interviews with members from different sectors of society (a lawyer, a priest), diary entries, photographs, newspaper fragments, political discourse, Peruvian novels, testimonial songs and Andean folk music, apus (mountain spirits), indigenous myths such as Inkarrí.[5] Additionally, as Vicente collects information from his exchanges with different people, he says, “Ahora tengo hilos que voy a ir tirando para descorrer sombras y cortinas que, sospecho, me van a ayudar mucho para entender e ilustrar la historia de Perú y lo que ha ocurrido después” (117)[6]. Here, he is describing his own reading and writing processes and explicitly compares it to a khipu’s structural components. However, to make sense of it all, he relies on other voices and his journalistic abilities to then piece it together, but more importantly a reader.

El rincón thus becomes a literary khipu as it invites for posterior reconstruction or knotting together of the different threads (texts/voices) that make up the novel. This novel, if it were truly a metaphoric representation of a khipu, would also in many cases require an implicit reader (a metaphorical khipukamayuq) who would have to interpret its hidden message and be able to, hopefully, identify the structural comparisons that correlate with the khipu. Pita employs a narrative technique that resembles the one of a khipu, that of a textual disassembly.[7] This technique implies the posterior reconstruction of the text(s) or in this case finding common threads between them and plying them together. The reading of a khipu involves vision and touch, and although the pages of a novel are black and white, El rincón de los muertos requires a reader who will engage with it. connect the voices and texts by finding commonalities between them to create some sense of coherence. This coupled with semantics creates a visual image of knotting, plying, and untangling in the reader’s mind, while they rifle through the pages for the tactile component. The need for an engaged reader correlates with the performative processes of reading a khipu as Rosaleen Howard describes subsequently: “In this case, the branches, knots, and nodes could be seen as the structural equivalents of the constant motifs in narratives, while the extratextual circumstances of each khipu reading performance, not least the imagination of the individual khipukamayuq, would be brought to bear in the decoding process” (29). Thus, simultaneously, and theoretically speaking, the reader and the protagonist untangle and then thread together, reconstruct, and then connect the various texts and voices that make up this novel. This is precisely what I did to trace the explicit references to the khipu and then locate other aspects of the khipu that were integrated into the narrative structure.

The novel parallels the intricate structure of a khipu, encompassing primary, secondary, top, and tertiary chords, through its structural, thematic, and narrative components. Pita’s use of a geometrically symmetrical structure complements the narrator’s deliberate choice of semantics, evoking the essence of a khipu. “[C]omo en el quipu donde se aprecia a primera vista un cierto desorden e irregularidad en las longitudes, distancias, nudos y colores de las distintas cuerdas verticales, aunque, posteriormente, al conocerse su función textual, se revela un espacio bien ideado y definido, estructurado y codificado” (Calatrava 503) [8]. The chapters in El rincón de los muertos are metaphorically the chords and sequence of knots. There are different types of chords that the khipu is comprised of: the primary chord, secondary chords, top chords, and tertiary chords. “The primary chord usually seems to announce the nature of the khipu by its materials, colors, and ply directionality. Thus, the primary chord, using linguistic terms, could well be called the title cord” (66). The primary chord is the title of the novel, El rincón de los muertos. Provided that secondary chords announce the order in which the information was stored, these would then be the chapters of the novel. Secondary chords, on the other hand, symbolize the chapters within the novel. However, secondary chords are typically grouped in sets of five, six, or ten. I noticed during my readings that the first chapter can be grouped with the first six chapters, while the last three chapters seem to be loose threads awaiting connection. The same pattern occurs in the second part of the novel with chapters seven, eight, and nine, although thematically, they align. The realization that these groupings occur doesn't happen until the desenlace (unraveling), which could better be named the enlace since it allows the reader (alongside Vicente) to link or weave these chapters together. The narrator explicitly acknowledges these loose threads through inner dialogue with himself when he mentions, “Lima también estaba cargada de historias, hilos sueltos y de códigos. Tenía, pues, razones para volver, y para entender” (132-133) [9]. This passage appears at the end of his first trip to Lima among the three chapters that initially lack a common thread. These groupings of secondary chords are known as top chords and can either exist adjacently, arise from the center, or, in this case, I visualize them in their encompassing form. Finally, tertiary chords, attached to the secondary chords, can be seen as moments of introspection for Vicente, where he connects his personal life, past experiences, and his struggle to forge meaningful connections with people and places.

Vicente, the translator of this text into a literary khipu, can be seen as what is known as a “chasqui.” Chasquis played a crucial role in the Inca communication and administrative system, the khipu. Chasquis would carry these encoded messages across the vast Incan empire (Conklin). Depending on the distance, if one chasqui would get weary and too tired to continue onward, they would, using a relay system, pass the quipu on to another chasqui. This ensured messages would be delivered quickly and efficiently across long distances despite the challenging Andean terrain. This dynamic is mirrored in the novel through a subtle shift in narrative voice. Shortly after Vicente confronts the profound impact of personal loss by Luis’ death, leaving him physically, mentally, and emotionally drained, this narrative shift takes place. The narrative voice transitions from first-person to third person, symbolizing the intricate relay of experiences and emotions within the story. For example, the narrator says:

Vicente Blanco camina por la calle Lima, de Ayacucho, pasado el mediodía implacable de un día solar, de un día que es el más negro de su vida. (. . .) Vicente Blanco pocas veces se ha sentido tan ajeno al mundo absurdo que lo rodea y lo invita a abandonarlo todo, todo lo que él ha sido hasta ese momento, sus ideas, sus principios, su sustancia y su carne. Caminaba sin rumbo, lejos de sí mismo, pero algo en él, de todos modos, en el fondo dirigía sus pasos hacia un punto preciso, intuido, hacia un puerto obligado. (378) ¹⁰

The abrupt change from a first-person to a third-person narrative also accentuates Vicente’s sense of detachment, particularly concerning forging a connection with both a place and a person. Until this moment, Vicente had never experienced a sense of belonging anywhere. However, now he found himself woven into their narrative, as he too had become a victim of the violence.

It is in the third part of the novel that the loose threads from parts one and two are finally understood, and even one of the most emblematic passages from earlier in the novel makes more sense to him. “Ayacucho está lleno de muertos, pero están debajo de las piedras. Sólo tienes que levantarlas para verlos” (129).[11] Ayacucho embodies its toponym in a literal fashion when Luis, Max, and Vicente find the remains of a cadaver near a military base. Shortly after this discovery, the narrator considers this moment, “Un hilo que nos acercaba a la verdad y nos llevaba al centro mismo del laberinto de sangre que era la ciudad” (356 my emphasis)—but one thread remained untied.[12] Shortly after the discovery, Vicente observes Max, who seems eager to speak but is left speechless, unable to comprehend what they’ve just witnessed. The narrator says, “Parecía no poder hallar el hilo de su pensamiento, una frase que lo ayudase a desentrañar ese misterio” (361 my emphasis).[13] These occurrences lead to the assassination of Luis Morelos, and, as a result, the testimonial song performed by a young Quechua-speaking girl earlier in the novel makes sense to Vicente because he also had sus propios muertos in Ayacucho, the corner of the dead.[14]

In khipu, knot placement is important to understand the message it contains. “[E]very knot . . . has a deep relationship to its context: each knot has one fixed end, its root in the khipu, and one free end, providing it with an organic and directional relationship with the rest of the fabric structure” (Conklin 72). Knots, in a practical sense, symbolize repair of two broken threads, thus a knot in the middle indicates bad news or destruction. The previous quote from the novel echoes the use of a knot in the khipu but instead of a narrative component it represents, in this instance, a moment of silence or Max’s inability to express his thoughts. This “knot” or tangled ideas that couldn’t be unraveled foreshadow the imminent death of Luis. Then, a more explicit reference to knots appears when they approach Luis’ cadaver for the first time. Vicente says, “Las palabras penaban en nuestros cerebros y se anudaban en nuestras gargantas. El mundo parecía haber salido de su órbita y era difícil de mantener el equilibrio, pensar en lo ocurrido, en lo que se venía, en lo que se debía hacer” (376 my emphasis)[15]. The use of the word anudar (to tie a knot) represents the loss of words after receiving this bad news, thus a knot is tied in the middle of their vocal cords. Vicente attempts to make sense of the violence despite being confronted with silence and traumatized gazes, by creating an analogy with the khipu. However, instead of having an “organic and directional relationship” with the rest of the oral narrative, this knot silenced them, despite indigenous culture hinging on orality.[16].

Luis’ death turns Vicente’s world upside down, ushering in his own personal pachakuti, a transformative period. Vicente even states, “Luis ya no estaba, y su ausencia crecía y modificaba todo, incluso el color de las cosas, de las calles, hasta los sonidos y las voces de la gente. Era extraño. Era un final de mundo para mí, para Max, para todos (387)” [17]. Vicente, akin to a chasqui, now carries the responsibility of preserving Luis’ legacy through this literary quipu, disseminating his narrative to a wider audience. Similarly, to how a khipu records information in its knots, El rincón de los muertos could be seen as a place or concept where memories, experiences, or the essence of those who have passed away are symbolically “knotted” or preserved. For example, the narrator describes Luis’ death and the expression in Max’s eyes: “Max se quitó los anteojos oscuros para frotarse los ojos, que parecían zozobrar en su mirada seca, sembrada de arena y sangre, arrasada por la lucidez. El círculo se había cerrado y el mundo, lo que había sido su mundo, y el de Luis, se acababa” (385) [18]. The expression “el círculo se había cerrado” suggests the completion of a cycle or the coming full circle. It implies that something has reached its conclusion, analogous to tying a knot. Additionally, the ending of the world conveys the idea that the world or the shared reality of the characters has come to an end. It symbolizes closure, change, or transformation, similarly to the closure of a knot symbolizing the end of a process. This profound personal loss ultimately enables Vicente to thread together the disparate elements of his life, finally feeling he belonged somewhere, in Ayacucho—the corner of the dead. Vicente narrates, “Mis muertos españoles eran remotos, y mi padre se había quedado para siempre en algún lugar de Alemania, en un pueblito cerca de Karlsruhe, que yo nunca había visitado. En Ayacucho estaban ahora mis muertos verdaderos, y no solo eran de Luis y Margarita, eran miles, lo sentía en ese instante” (417) [19]. This only fortifies the argument regarding desmontaje textual because while trying to untangle and decodify the “puta madeja de gruesos hilos de colores” mentioned earlier in the novel, he ends up getting entangled in the Peruvian context. This entanglement becomes transformative, granting him a sense of unity even amid the turmoil of violence. Now, his narrative becomes an integral part of this interconnected web, or “network of nodes,” known as El rincón de los muertos, weaving together diverse experiences and stories.