Pacazo (16 page)

The issue with bee and sheep is nothing like the issue with spring, is closer to the case of womanizer and Batman, and there is movement inside the knickknack shop. I cup my hands over my eyes, peer through my reflection. Something shifts toward me, a vague face, then nothing.

I turn away, should have saved a dozen copies back, would take them as before to the market though there is no clear reason to do so, no reason to think Pilar ever made it that far. The police interviewed all of the fruit vendors at the beginning of the investigation, but none of them recognized Pilar’s picture or the partial license plate. None remembered seeing anything untoward the night she was taken. I spoke with each vendor in later months and received the same answers and now a horn, a car swerving toward me and away, gone around the corner.

Back home, and Casualidad carries Mariángel from one room to the next, and Mariángel whimpers against her shoulder. Eight days ago I came home for lunch and found Casualidad struggling to dust the top of the refrigerator. I asked where Mariángel was, and there were sounds from elsewhere: splashing, gurgling. We found Mariángel upside down and drowning in the toilet. I pulled her out unhurt but surprised. Casualidad toweled her dry and I shouted and we agreed that the bathroom door would be opened only when necessary and always immediately closed. There was nothing for a few days but then bloody pus came from one of Mariángel’s ears and it is always the ear, always, unless it is the stomach or something else. I administered drops, held her as she cried all night. The next night also was very long, and the next, but last night we slept well, the infection seemingly receded.

Casualidad hands her to me, says that we are nearly out of drops, that she will bring more in the morning. She gathers her things and goes. I carry Mariángel to the bathroom, find the drops. The bottle is not nearly but wholly empty.

I start to bundle Mariángel for the walk to the nearest pharmacy, but her whimper, it seems not the same as before, not quite as loud or sharp, more spoiled than in pain. For a time we walk and walk, patio to bedroom and back. I sing Carole King and it does not help and no this is not a time for singing. I walk and whisper, and Mariángel quiets, smiles, whispers back.

We go to my bedroom, play games with pocket change, amuse ourselves with the shifting sounds and patterns. This suffices for a time. Then she teaches me to beat on the mattress with my fists to make the coins dance.

When all the coins have fallen behind the bed I propose milk but she is not thirsty; I propose sleep but she will not close her eyes. At her suggestion we move to the floor. She opens the closet and goes inside, puts each foot into each shoe in turn. She loses herself in the hangered shirts and trousers, turns and ruffles them, laughs, a forest of clothing between us.

She pulls at the hangers, pushes her way out. She takes me by the sleeve and leads me back to the bed but will not yet let me lift her. Instead she reaches, grabs the image of Sarita Colonia in both hands, pulls until the string breaks. She chews on the corner of the plasticized card, reaches one arm around my neck, chews harder. I take her up and again we walk. I hear her gnawing there close to my ear, the click of her teeth on the card, and she slumps.

I wait, certain that she is only pretending. I walk to her crib, and she does not move. I lay her down and yes: asleep, breathing deeply. Mosquito netting, fan, curtains. I pull Sarita from her hands, back out of the bedroom.

It is very late. I sit on the couch, hold the remote control but do not turn the television on. The image of Sarita is undamaged. No tearing, no holes, no indentations or marks of any kind. I set down the remote, walk to my bedroom. I reknot the string and hang the image again from my headboard. I work a sentence back and forth in my mind until it is sufficiently concise: that Sarita find the taxista, and break him. Let lips do what hands do, Sarita, and I do not pray as such but hold the sentence gently in my mind.

IT IS TIME FOR ECUADOR: my visa expires tomorrow. I feed Mariángel her bottle, trace her cheeks, set her on my bed. I pack a few things into my knapsack and Mariángel watches until watching is insufficient, comes to help, rearranges the objects until the pattern they form pleases her. Arrangement and rearrangment are two of her favorite activities.

My trip up the coast to Tumbes and across the border to Machala at times takes five hours each way, and at times takes nine. The exact amount of time required depends on many things: some I do not understand and others I cannot control. The alternate route—north as always to Sullana but then northeast into the foothills and across the Macará River—is faster, more attractive and more interesting. I took it often for visas and research in early years here, but the border crossing at the bridge is open only until six in the evening, closes on and off throughout the day without apparent reason, and I do not want to risk being away any longer than necessary.

Now Casualidad arrives: she will stay with Mariángel for an additional day’s wage. I thank her, kiss Mariángel, take up my knapsack. My daughter reaches for me and I kiss her again. As I pull away she grabs at my hand, catches my ring-finger, tugs at my wedding band. I ask her if she would have me go ringless. I walk to the door and she starts to cry. The humid heat swarms around me and there is an old yellow taxi parked at the curb. The license plate is wrong but it is as though the driver were waiting for me. I have not arranged to be picked up. Casualidad would not have called without my asking, and perhaps not even then.

I step slowly to the curb, and look in through the window on the passenger’s side. The driver is asleep, and his thin dark face is almost familiar.

- It was you, wasn’t it? I say.

The man wakes, rubs his face.

- Mister?he says.

His eyes are muddy green. We come to agreement on a fare to the El Dorado station, and I am silent all the way there. I have ridden with El Dorado many times before. Their buses are not fast or comfortable. Neither are the buses of any other company, and here rather than a single large bus station we have many small ones, each company with its own dark hot room where one goes to buy tickets and wait and wait. El Dorado, the Gilded One. It was a Muisca ritual on Lake Guatavita: the king-elect borne onto a raft of rushes, incense burning in four braziers on the corners and hundreds more on shore, the king-elect stripped naked, coated with resin and covered in gold dust, ornaments of gold and emeralds stacked at his feet, four subject chiefs on the raft as well and they row him to the center of the lake, pour the treasure into the water as offering and sacrifice, row back to shore where the rest of the tribe sings, dances, and now the king-elect is king.

The Spaniards hear of the ritual, conquer the Muisca but find less gold than they had imagined, and slowly El Dorado becomes not a man but a place. Gonzalo Pizarro has it clear in his mind: a city of gold in a forest of cinnamon trees. He gathers hundreds of Spanish soldiers and thousands of native bearers, chooses his nephew Orellana as one of his lieutenants, and Carvajal is taken on as chaplain, will later write the chronicle that fixes them in history. Pizarro leads southeast out of Quito. Through the Andes, then downriver along the Río Coca, the foothill gorges, water surging fast and cold beside them. Machete and ax, storm and flood, seven months of this slow work. Finally they approach the endless furling green of high jungle, the river now navigable, but half the Spaniards and three quarters of the bearers have died of sickness, snakebite, ambush. Pizarro orders camp built on a bluff, puts his carpenters to work on a boat, a twenty-five foot brigantine to carry the sick, the wounded, the heaviest of gear. They eat the last of their horses and dogs. They finish the boat and a van pulls sharply out of an alley, cuts us off, my driver shouts, curses, sees that the other driver is a friend, laughs and waves.

By Christmas the Spaniards are at risk of starving but their guides say a confluence is near, the Coca and Napo joining, and one day’s travel up the Napo there is food. Orellana offers to take the brigantine and sixty men, says he will be back in twelve days with supplies, and does he know or suspect the truth? His men no longer have the strength to row upriver or cut trails along the shore. He sends messages, and they never arrive: Pizarro has turned back toward Quito, will accuse Orellana of betrayal, and Orellana will be saved only by Carvajal’s record of decisions justified, lands claimed, villages torched.

Onto Sánchez Cerro, the city woken, the haze building. On and on. Orellana orders stops when necessary: to hunt sloths, monkeys, lizards; to steal cassava and sugar cane; to build a more seaworthy boat; to heighten its bulwarks against arrows. Six months, on and on, the men delirious in the heat, and the Napo flows into the widest river they have ever seen. Attacks grow more common, native archers on shore or in canoes. One day Carvajal sees them as tall pale-skinned women with braided hair, and he knows this story already, the story that will give the jungle and river their name, women of the moon, archers of Artemis: the Amazon.

And now the weather changes, the heat lessening, stirred at times by breeze. Now in places the jungle cedes to shallow hills. Now the men sense the tidal surge; eighteen months and four thousand miles from Quito, they spill out into the Atlantic, among the greatest voyages ever accidentally made, El Dorado now elsewhere, still waiting.

Sidewalk stands, hay limas hay piña hay plátanos de seda. It was not only the Spaniards, of course. There were Portuguese explorers, and Germans. Sir Walter Raleigh placed El Dorado well up the Orinoco in Guyana and Jim Jones must have known of this, perhaps saw himself as the Gilded One and Jonestown as his city of gold, his myth of freedom, his point of access to the twisted divine and the taxi stops in front of the station.

Up the walkway, into the dark hot room, standing in line at the counter and all I wish to do is sit down. El Dorado in Milton, in Voltaire, in Poe and Conrad,
El Dorado
with Robert Mitchum and John Wayne. Nothing in this station is gilt but in theory there are buses to Tumbes leaving every fifteen minutes for the next hour and today is like many recent days in that I would rather slouch and detest myself than search. I would like to be less tired. I would like for the cinema to be once again just a cinema. I would like for bars to be only bars, and for the desert to be only sand and rocks and deeply improbable plants.

As penance I walk the room, stare into the faces of thin young men until they look away. When I have seen them all I sit and look at the ticket I bought. Each ticket corresponds to a given seat on a given bus. On buses from Piura to Tumbes the correspondence is ignored and on the same buses back to Piura it is strictly observed.

To the extent that there is a line I am well back in it, so far back that I will not make it onto the first bus that comes. I put my ticket away and eat a tangerine, spit the seeds into the coil of peel in my hand. Then I drop the peel and seeds on the ground behind my seat. There are few garbage cans anywhere in Peru. Years ago the Shining Path used them as bomb casings, so they were removed, even in cities like Piura where terrorists rarely attacked, and most have not yet been replaced.

A newspaper on the bench beside me, and there is a smiling near-naked woman on the back cover. This newspaper calls them Naughty Ones, and she holds a revolver as if about to execute the photographer. She wears incandescent blue eyeshadow and something of a police uniform made into a bikini, the top sprung open, a small red star covering part of one immense bleached nipple. Her name is listed as Deisi, and this may well be true.

On the inside pages are stock markets crashing across Asia and aliens landing in Ica and a fight between an American company and a Franco-Australian consortium to control Yanacocha, the richest gold mine in the world, thirty miles from Cajamarca and there is no end to these things. Also there are injury reports for the soccer games to be played later today, and Guzmán has been locked in a tiny cell in Callao since he was captured in 1992. Psoriasis eats small pieces of him daily, and terrorists do not appear to be such a problem now. Of course, that also seemed true ten months ago, and then men and women came to the Japanese ambassador’s residence dressed as waiters and waitresses, poured champagne and smiled at each of the hundreds of gala guests, pulled out automatic weapons as their colleagues blew a hole in the back of the building.

Nearly everyone at the university knew someone who knew someone related to one of the seventy-two hostages still there four months later. Then music was heard, military marches played through very large speakers, while underground there was digging, Chavín de Huántar, the operation named for a temple complex three thousand years old in Ancash, not far from what once was Yungay. The assault lasted fifteen minutes, and afterwards Fujimori himself walked in, stepping over MRTA cadavers to shake hands with his commandos.

The first bus comes and the people in line behind me mob forward, a marvelous thing to see, viscous and fast and unacceptable: when the shoving is finished, those who would have had to wait for the third or fourth bus are seated at the head of the line. I take up my knapsack and walk, address the women nearest the gate, my voice starting low and rising quickly:

- I wish to sit down.

- Sorry, says one of the women. I am sitting here, so you must sit somewhere else.

- You are sitting in my seat. Please move.

- This is not your seat. I have been sitting here for an hour, waiting for a friend.

- Do not lie to me, madam. You pressed forward with all the others.

The women to either side of her begin to berate me. Both are well dressed and have unsightly moles. A man standing beside me shrugs and shakes his head as if to say, But yes, but yes, the race is to the swift after all, and the battle to the strong. He smiles at me, and at the women, wishing both to commiserate and make peace, but there will be no peace. I lean down to the woman.

- Will you move? Or shall I move you?