Pacazo (17 page)

The women around her shout and one rises up as if to slap me and the second bus comes. It is now that I notice my right hand, not hand but fist. I smile at the woman in the seat I no longer require. I board the bus, sit halfway back, and wait for the seat-thieves to get on. They do, one by one. All except the woman I threatened. She is still sitting inside the station, scanning the crowd for her friend who has not yet arrived.

The desert north of Piura is littered with bright blue plastic bags. This is always the case. They are strewn in the sandy openings and caught in the branches of the thorn-scrub and algarrobos. I suspect they come from the small collections of reed huts that hunch beside the highway. In most contexts the bags would be garbage, but in this wide brown desolate dry death, they are beautiful.

There are rumors that some of the MRTA members were disarmed and executed in the course of the assault. This may be true, but I have not yet met anyone who cares. Perhaps they will care later. Perhaps not. It is also said that this tactic was ordered not by the president or any of his military commanders but by Vladimiro Montesinos, who is the head of the intelligence service and is said to run most aspects of the government. It is thought that he arranged for the massacre in Barrios Altos, fifteen dead; and a year later at La Cantuta, nine students and a professor taken and later found murdered; and for the torture of intelligence officers who leaked information about these and other extra-judicial killings. Everyone cares about these things and yet I have not heard too much dissent. Inflation is down and most people here are less afraid than they have been in some time.

Armando deserves an answer and so for a while I read Oquendo de Amat. So then for you the rain is an intimate apparatus for measuring change, he says. I am not sure how much this matters, but I like how it sounds, and this trip through the desert to Machala, it is the reverse of the last leg of the first time, my arrival.

That trip was planned to make a certain kind of sense—after four months of cash carpentry for an uncle in Orange County, I would visit archives in Managua, in Panama City, in Cajamarca and Lima. Then the trip ripened into something else. Managua, yes, twelve days with the Colección Somoza at the IHNCA, and a single afternoon on the Pacific coast: a beer, two, staring out at the route of Espinosa’s expedition in Balboa’s ships, Orellana and Francisco Pizarro onboard. Panama City next and the Biblioteca Nacional yes but then a visit to Panama la Vieja. The remains of the cathedral and bell tower and Bishop’s House, staring at stones overgrown, pointless on so many levels and there were other days in the archives but more spent chasing: Pizarro’s land on the Chagres and his blood trail through the Pearl Islands with Morales; the scattered bricks of Acla and a guide who swings an invisible sword three times, claims that I am standing where Balboa’s head lands. Back to Panama City and a taxi not to the airport but to the Muelle Fiscal. From there the long slow green coast: an old cargo boat to Jaqué, dolphins and a whale alongside; a low lancha across the Colombian border to Juradó; cargo boat again to Bahía Solano and from there to Buenaventura, the San Juan delta and Andagoya falls into the water, returns years later to found or refound the city, stows his family and heads east, challenges Benalcázar and is crushed, returns to find his wife and children dead of fever. A bus inland to Cali, fighting freight trucks on each straightaway; another down through Popayán to Pasto, and small quiet roads to the coast. A fisherman takes me to Isla del Gallo. Pizarro here three months and the line in the sand. Gorgona, eight months with Ruiz’s interpreters and here is the difference. A twelve-hour ferry across the border to Esmeraldas, the Ecuadorian border guards careful through my bags, then down the coast to Coaque, Pizarro and Orellana taking gold and silver and emeralds, a plague of buboes and inland to Quito, south to Guayaquil, a ferry to Puná, Pizarro plotting but the islanders attack first, kill three Spaniards and Soto arrives, will carry them to Tumbes and the invasion will begin and a ferry to Machala where I will be in four or eight hours.

Talara, and the oil wells here pump so slowly and never stop. Mariángel would find them dinosaur-like, would tilt her head to either side and smile. Guzmán too once believed he had the one and only truth. I wonder what he believes now. I put the Oquendo book away, lean my head back and hope for sleep.

Sweat is pooled in my navel, is thick in the rolls of fat above and below. The bus has stopped. There are no passengers waiting beside the road, no stores or restaurants nearby. Perhaps the bus has run out of gas.

Running up the stairs now is a bent man who climbs aboard, stands at the head of the aisle and shouts hoarsely about how sorry he is for this disturbance, but he has books to sell, books on plumbing and gardening and the Virgin of Guadalupe, and he is sure such books will interest such well-educated people as ourselves.

We ignore him in unison, as if we had rehearsed it. After a time he falls silent, looks around for an empty seat. The only one on the entire bus is the one next to me. This is often the case. The man comes and sits down, untucks his shirt, smells slightly of vinegar. We look at each other and then we look out the window.

- The desert, says the man.

- Yes, I say.

- Very hot.

- Yes.

- And dry.

I close my eyes.

- But it will not be dry much longer, he says.

I open my eyes.

- El Niño, he says. Today or tomorrow or the next day. The ocean is heating up. Soon Piura will be like the jungle.

- Nothing is like the jungle.

- Were you here in 1983?

- No.

- So you know nothing about El Niño.

The ocean can be seen out the window, which makes the air feel not quite as hot as it truly is. I wish to ask more questions but do not know which. The bus slows, enters a town, and the man stands and walks up the aisle.

This is Máncora, where Pilar and I spent our honeymoon. Máncora is much nicer than the coastal towns closer to Piura. There are cheap bungalows with patios giving on to the beach, and hammocks that will take my weight, and every restaurant knows the secret to enrollado de pescado, a rolled flounder filet stuffed with shrimp or prawns. The sauce is sometimes white and flecked with crabmeat, and sometimes red, now sour, now sweet. I think briefly, stupidly, of stepping off the bus. The beach here, how Pilar swam and loved, her body turning in the water. But Mariángel, the taxista, and we pull away.

A few minutes later the bus stops in a long line of highway traffic. There is something like far-off thunder but the sky is cloudless. We wait. The heat thickens the air like soup. We wait. The driver turns off the engine and goes to sleep.

I follow several other passengers as they debark, and we stand in the shade of the bus, where it is no cooler than anywhere else. One man walks forward up the stalled line of cars. We watch until he disappears. We wait and wait. Then he comes back, and someone asks.

- The army, he says. Artillery practice, he says.

- In case Ecuador invades, I say.

I mean this to be amusing but everyone nods somberly as if I have named the most likely scenario, as if closing the Panamericana in the middle of the day for artillery practice were reasonable, as if there were nowhere else in the desert to do it.

In Tumbes the colectivos are waiting. The driver of the first one in line grows sad as I approach: when other potential passengers notice me sitting in a given car, they often select a different one. Sometimes the drivers ask me to pay a double fare, and I always refuse on principle. This man does not ask, is simply sad, and I slump deep into the seat.

It is only forty minutes to Ecuador now. Pizarro makes land, but Tumbes is not as he remembers it from the second voyage: the civil war has left it in ruins. He continues south, founds the first Spanish city on this side of the continent, San Miguel de Piura and we push north through the last waste of desert, come to the strewn plastic and paper and rags of the market stalls in Aguas Verdes.

My passport is observed and stamped by the Peruvian officials, who do not care how many times I return with a tourist visa only. Then I walk through the heat and across the Zarumilla River, litter-scabbed and brown and almost dry.

In Ecuador my passport is observed again, the years of tourist visas, and the officials here touch their lips and smile. They welcome me to their country and ask how long I plan to stay. They know the answer but this is our game.

- I am not entirely sure, I say.

- Would a month be sufficient?

- A month would be ideal.

They smile again, welcome me again, stamp my passport and direct me to the customs office. I have never in my life had anything to declare. What would it feel like, declaring?

Back out into the screaming sunlight. The market stalls of Huaquillas are precisely the same as those of Aguas Verdes. Underwear and coat hangers and pirated cassettes and unidentifiable plastic objects. Dollars and sucres and soles can all be used, and I watch as two European tourists are pickpocketed: a thief kneels in the dust, pretending to have dropped something at the feet of one of the women.

- My keys, he says in Spanish, and then in English, as he takes romantic, attentive hold of her pant-leg, and lifts her foot.

- Your what?

- My keys, I have lost my keys.

The woman laughs, off-balance, and calls to her friend, who comes and takes her hand, steadies her. The woman’s foot is lifted and set down, lifted and set down. Behind the women are two more men, their hands deep in the matching purple backpacks, so agile, so quick, so deft, but as I step forward I see that this once they have failed—they shake their heads at the kneeling man, who pretends now to find his keys, and says attentive, romantic goodbyes.

Leaving the border is like throwing a switch: the desert ends, is replaced by banana plantations. Another bus takes me to Machala, and a taxi to the water at Puerto Bolívar. There is no beach here, just pavement and waveless murk, and I must wait for a minimum of six hours. I once tried staying only five, and for an hour the border guards did not let me back through. You have not seen enough of our country, they kept saying. You have not seen anything at all.

I choose a restaurant, take a seat on the patio. Across the brown of the strait is the Jambelí Archipelago, pleasant enough and green. Hard to the north is an arc of the gulf, bluer water and slivers of polished lead: dolphins, eight or ten of them, headed toward Puná.

The waiter comes. I ask if he has enrollado de pescado, knowing already that he does not, but hoping, hoping. He does not. He apologizes. He says that there is a fine ceviche today, and I agree to try it, though the ceviche here is for some reason less heartening than what one receives in Piura or Máncora. Perhaps there is a secret to ceviche too, and no one has told the people of Machala.

The last time I saw dolphins was in Colán, two years ago or more. Colán is the closest reasonable beach to Piura. The rich have lined the shore with their fine summer houses, and the restaurants and cafes are built behind. The water cannot be seen from their patios, and the dust from the street settles in your beer.

Of those who wade in the water at Colán, all but the tourists know to scuff their feet until the water is deep enough to dive. If one instead takes normal steps, sooner or later one’s foot will land on a stingray, and the barbed spine will plunge in and rip out, taking its plug of flesh. The venom is black and must be sucked from the foot as it is dipped in boiling water.

Reynaldo’s aunt had money once, and still has a house in Colán, glass and salt-stained wood. From the deck each night Reynaldo and I watched as the sun set. Piurans believe that the sunset in Colán is the most beautiful in the world, and as far as I know they are correct. They also speak of the moon as seen from Paita across the bay, and they could be right about this as well.

The dolphins we saw that afternoon would not swim with us, and the next morning the beach was thick with eels. The waiter brings the ceviche, and a beer, and a plate of onions in lemon juice. The eels were three and four feet long, white with brown shading. Their mouths were wedges and their teeth were the tips of needles.

Half of the eels were already dead or dying. The others were burrowing into the wet sand. Once in, only six or seven inches of tail stuck out, and by the end of the day they were gone, eaten by dogs and seagulls and vultures. Reynaldo told me that when certain eels are caught by fishermen, they are sold to the Japanese for hundreds of dollars per pound. There is a trick, Reynaldo said. The eels must be skinned, but if this happens after they have died, they secrete a substance of some kind which fouls the meat, so they must be skinned while still alive.

Over time the waiter brings a second beer, a third and a fourth, and the sun goes down, not as in Colán but not unbeautifully. The mosquitoes come out. I am careful to read no more than half a meter per hour. For a bookmark I am using a cancer brochure, its cover a sketch of a woman checking herself in the mirror.

Finally it has been long enough. I call to the waiter, scribble in the air. He brings the bill and I pay. Another taxi, another bus. Huaquillas, like everywhere else in this world, is less ugly by night.

Customs, and then Immigrations.

- But you have been in our country less than a day! says one officer.

I pantomime distress.

- Ecuador cannot be seen in a day, says another.

- Yes, I know. I wish there were something I could do. But I have been called back. What can I do? They have called me back.

- Who has called you back? Your employer?

- No. My friends. They—

- You are lying to me, sir. You have come to Ecuador only for the visa. You care nothing for our country. You will not be allowed to leave.

I bow my head, reach mournfully for my wallet, and ask if there is any way this uncomfortable situation can be rearranged so as to make it more comfortable.

One of the officials takes out a calculator, punches random numbers.