Pacazo (25 page)

Then the guest lecturer wraps her hands around my elbow. My willingness is inspirational, she says. At first it seemed impossible, she says, but now it doesn’t. I begin to suspect that I understand her meaning, hope that I am incorrect and sadly am not: she holds out her hands, requests the machete.

The crowd, still bigger, rippling—assistant gardeners, students from distant buildings, professors from every department. I suggest to the guest lecturer that this is not the moment to begin learning butchery. She looks at me, squeezes my elbow tighter. She reminds me quietly of all her work in preparation for the feast this evening. Then she tells a long anecdote about cousins of hers who live on farms, how as children they used to insult her, and in what terms.

Arantxa elbows me, says something too softly for me to hear. I look up. It is the rector. He is smiling. He nearly always smiles. He says he heard that great and important events were unfolding, and hoped to witness them firsthand. Arantxa explains the dinner and its ramifications. The guest lecturer tells her anecdote again, and details her plan. She adds that I have volunteered to hold the turkey still.

The rector could not be more pleased. He congratulates his friend on her newfound heartiness, and thanks me for my assistance. I say that he is welcome, and hand her the machete. I tell her that she will have to chop with great force so as to kill the turkey cleanly, but also with great precision so as not to hit my fingers. She nods. The circle of professors and students and gardeners and now minor administrators, now housekeepers, now couriers draws tighter around the wooden block.

I ask the guest lecturer to practice first, and she does, striking the block with great force and precision a sufficient number of times in a row. She smiles at me, and wipes away some sweat. I stretch the turkey’s neck across the block.

She draws back the machete, the circle leans in, the machete falls with sufficient precision but little force and the turkey seems to explode in place. Blood spurts into my face from the partly severed neck and I hold as tightly as I can and beg her to swing again. One wing comes free and she swings, her eyes closed and the machete landing square between my fists, the turkey’s head limp in my left hand and its body wrenching out of my right, both wings free and beating and blood spraying from the neck as the turkey ricochets from rector to student to gardener, blood jetting into our eyes and hair and open mouths, the guest lecturer still swinging, again and again into the wooden block.

It is Don Teófilo who catches the turkey mid-air, pulls it to the ground, holds it until it goes still. Tonight’s feast will be subdued, perhaps even vegetarian. The yams, however, will be delicious. The yams here are always delicious. There is an International Potato Center in Lima, and I have heard that it has each of Peru’s four thousand indigenous tuber species displayed. One day I shall go and learn them all, and Eugenia drapes my tie around my neck. I nod to her. I hand the turkey’s head to the rector. I clap him bloodily on the shoulder, and thank him for his continual support.

AND ALREADY IT IS TIME FOR SAN TEODORO AGAIN: the first anniversary of Pilar’s death. It will be a few hours only of flowers and quietness and Mariángel will stay with Casualidad so the preparations are far simpler. Then as I open the door to leave, the telephone rings.

This new telephone, I often appreciate its cordlessness, and it has many types of ring from which to choose, though I have not yet found one I enjoy. Casualidad answers, comes running for me with the receiver. The line pops and crackles. It is Pilar’s father, calling from Chiclayo. I cover the mouthpiece, ask Casualidad if she is sure he wants to speak with me. She says that he said my name specifically.

I greet him quietly. He asks how I am, and his voice comes to me low, rich, warm in spite of the crackling, as if this call were something else, something new and larger. He says that he and his wife are well, that their sons are also well. He asks if Mariángel has begun to talk, and I say that she does not yet speak clearly as such but that her walking and applauding have greatly improved.

He laughs, asks if she truly likes her birthday dolls. In fact they are still hidden on her highest shelf but I tell him that there are few things she enjoys more than taking off their felt hats and putting them back on. He says he was unaware that the hats were removable. The phone changes shape and texture, will not rest steady in my hand as I finally understand: there is nothing to match forgiveness for unlikelihood. I go to thank him for calling on such a day, for everything such a call signifies, but he interrupts.

- Do you remember what I told you at the wedding?

His voice has thinned and tightened and a chiclón has appeared in the back yard.

- You told me many things.

A chiclón is a bird the size and color of a crow, but it is not a crow.

- I told you to take care of Pilar.

They have thick black beaks that appear too large for their bodies.

- Yes.

On the ground they move like very small dinosaurs.

- And do you remember what I told you at the funeral?

Whatever this call began as, it is now something else, and I am unsure whether he intended this change from the beginning, whether it matters, and the eyes are massive and only black, pure pupil, or so it seems from this distance.

- You told me many things there as well.

When they copulate, the male stands on the female’s wing joints, flapping to maintain his balance.

- Why did you let her go alone to the market at night? What sort of husband does that? What sort of man?

The chiclón leans back on its tail.

- I do not know the answer to any of those questions.

It spreads its wings low.

- Perhaps you do not know, but I do. Pilar loved you very much, but at times she was unhappy and then she would tell us the truth: how careless you were, how lazy, how selfish with your time. So careless and lazy and selfish that you would let her go alone to the market at night.

This is something I have seen them do on the open grass of the university. I have been told that they do so to warm their bodies in the sun, and I do not answer.

- God punishes us every day with grief, he says.

At the moment the sky is a melding of gray clouds and black.

- Why would God punish you?

It must be something else.

- For letting Pilar marry someone who would not protect her. Do you know why we did not go to her grave on the Day of the Dead?

They are sometimes called guardacaballos, follow horses and cattle through fields, eat the insects raised by the heavy hooves.

- No.

At the university they follow lawnmowers instead.

- Because we knew you would be there, he says. And are you going to the cemetery today?

The noise of the chiclón is not a song of any kind.

- Yes.

The chiclón gathers itself, hops to the base of the almond tree.

- This year, but not any subsequent year, and not on her birthday, not ever. You have all the other days, yes? So those two days, let her be ours again.

I tell him that it will be as he says, and the chiclón stares in through the window, stares and flies away.

There are far fewer men and women selling flowers and candles and food and cardboard images than there were before, but even so there are several of each. I purchase a spray of sunflowers, a packet of candles, walk in through the gates and past the empty chapel. Today there are no young men with ladders, and not many mourners. A few of them, the oldest, are sitting on lightweight portable chairs of the type I will most likely never remember to buy.

I clean the dust from Pilar’s niche with my shirttail, and fan the sunflowers across the ground. Her father’s words were and are true but nothing new, nothing I have not already held to myself like coals. I sit down, lean back, close my eyes, work to rid my mind of his voices.

And now I can bring the good pictures, one by one, easy at first. Pilar dancing marinera at the coliseum, her dress garnet and gold, a sheen of sweat on her forehead as she lifts her vast handkerchief and smiles. Pilar swimming in Yacila, teaching a young girl to hold her breath, coming slow out of the water. Pilar walking to where I sit on the terrace of our hotel in Máncora; she is carrying two coconuts, two plastic straws, hands one of each to me, is astounded that I do not find the milk delicious. Pilar at the deer pen, Pilar standing in strings of huayruro beads. Pilar at an ice cream cart in the Plaza de Armas, her hair bright in the sun.

A voice, and I look. Not far away a middle-aged woman is praying her way around a string of rosary beads. I watch her, wish suddenly for beads, as suddenly am glad I do not have them.

Pilar asleep on the bus to Chiclayo. I kiss her cheek, close my eyes, a jolt and now the world at an unlikely angle, the skyline diagonal to us, Pilar leaning into me so strongly that I cannot move and it is a moment before we understand: the bus, a turn taken too wide, we slid off the highway and came to rest not quite at the tipping point. We step carefully toward the door, and walking is both difficult and complex, as if gravity itself has been altered. At the door we each panic, jump and run, convinced that the bus is at this moment falling. An hour waiting for another bus and it never comes. Finally giving up, walking along the highway, hitchhiking. The empty bed of a truck. Not the bus to Chiclayo but the bus coming home from there. The truck bed not quite empty, sacks of something, perhaps rice.

The middle-aged woman walks away, passes a young man who stands at the near edge of the next whitewashed structure over. He is leaning forward, his forehead resting against the stone or so it seems, his lips unmoving and Pilar at a chifa, asking the waiter for an Inca Kola and another tray of dim sum. Pilar. There must be more. Pilar lying on the beach at Colán and her bathing suit is new, I remember that it was new, do not remember the color and something small hits the top of my head, another and another, it is raining, harder and harder.

I do not know what I am meant to do: staying seems stupid and leaving seems wrong. My candles go out. I stand, step into what seems like shelter tight against the niched wall but there is no shelter, the rain filling the air and the oldest mourners stand, fold their chairs, shuffle toward the gates.

If they are going then I will stay. I sit back down in what is now mud. Pilar. Pilar in Cajamarca. Cajamarca, yes, but I cannot hold her clear in my mind, not with the water drilling holes in the ground around me, not with the steam that rises, not in the dense heart of this heat. Pilar in a taxi, and she laughs. Pilar in the desert, the ravine, both of her wrists broken and why did he do that, why did he feel that need and I stand, walk out of the cemetery.

Dusk. I circle, my clothes stuck to me, heavier and heavier. The rain masses, thins. The circle wider, ever wider. A foot of water in the gutters. The rain at last silent and soft but perhaps preparations will begin truly now, preparations for what can only come.

For a time there are high-walled buildings, signless, and I cannot guess their use. Farther along the arc are small grocery stores, chifas, hardware and paint. Then a set of angles that is known to me, and the light is a known light, the colors also known.

I stop at the doorway, look in. There are many coffins displayed: open and closed, painted and varnished, of many materials and many sizes, and in that sea of coffins is a desk, and a boy is sitting at the desk, his hair shaved almost to the skull, no shoes, his shirt and shorts clean, pressed. He is writing on brown paper, and the fluorescent lights tremble above him. His father comes out from the back, sees me where I stand dripping on the sidewalk, recognizes me and beckons me in.

We shake hands, and he presents his son to me, Leoncio, the best grade-school soccer player in Piura, he says, though last week’s match did not go well. Leoncio smiles and returns to his homework. The father asks how the cemetery was, if my time there was satisfactory. I ask how he knew, and he says that he never allows himself to forget a date—death, wake, burial, hundreds of them, thousands if he lives long enough. He has not yet forgotten a single one, he says, and this is part of the service he provides.

I lean over Leoncio. The mimeographed sheets are his English homework, and the exercises themselves are rife with typographical errors. I ask how he likes English class. It is fine, he says.

- And the homework, is it hard?

- Not so hard, except for today.

I ask if I can be of help. He says he believes that I can. His father apologizes for the lack of chairs, closes a coffin and pushes it closer to the desk. Leoncio and I work carefully through the last section, irregular verbs in the past, I was and you slept and he drank and she said and it ran and we swam and they fought.

Afterwards the walk is a certain drifting, the streetlights muted by mist. Home is not far away. A shower first, then coffee, I think. Time with Mariángel. Dinner and sleep, sleep, yes.

In through the front door. The house is very quiet. Then suddenly it is not and oh they have failed, both of them, the aspirin and llama fetus have failed, there is screaming and the breaking of plates in the kitchen and Casualidad runs past me tearing at her hair. The birds, she says, the birds, runs past me again and into the wall, bounces off, I catch but cannot hold her and Mariángel is more or less singing out on the patio. Casualidad runs into my bedroom. I chase after her and find her thrashing on the floor, wound in the mosquito netting I had strung around my bed.

My weight on top of her is enough. I lift and she goes to scream and I lower. I wait. When I lift a second time she is barely breathing.

- The hummingbirds, she whispers, in my hair.

I check her hair and promise that no hummingbirds are present. I gather Mariángel, grab at the phone, call Arantxa, and she comes soon enough. She sits with Casualidad on the floor of my bedroom, strips the netting away and smooths her face. Casualidad is quiet now. I find the telephone number for her sister in Catacaos, and twenty minutes later she comes as well.