Pacazo (26 page)

When Socorro has seen what there is to see, there is a small discussion. Arantxa holds my hand unnecessarily for a time, then says that she and Socorro will take Casualidad to the hospital. She says other things as well, but it is hard to know what any of them mean.

THE WALK IS LONG, the night air is hot and thick and wet, and Mariángel moves like a netful of cod on my back. She is not unhappy but unquiet, and I know where we are going but not why: Arantxa called me to her office before my first class, asked if I could be at her house by eight, left the nature of the event opaque. Her voice was ever so slightly higher pitched than usual. I suspect that either I am to be fired or the evening will involve candles, incense, quiet jazz on the veranda though Arantxa hates jazz and her house has no veranda.

It is now Socorro who cleans and cooks and looks after Mariángel each day. She charges me half again what I paid Casualidad. This is not unfair, as Casualidad and Fermín have since moved in with her and her husband and their four daughters in Catacaos.

On Socorro’s first morning with us, when I went to leave for work Mariángel cried, wailed, reached for me and screamed. Socorro said that by day’s end all would be well, and she was right. The two of them are warily cordial associates and Mariángel pounds on the back of my head, grabs fistfuls of my hair and pulls.

I shift her around to my chest, and she will not have it. I shift her back to my back, and when I am again walking steadily she calms. Parallel now to the river and two blocks away. I listen for its sound, hear only nightbirds and cars.

This morning Socorro reported back as she strained Mariángel’s juice: the first doctor had not had any helpful suggestions. She dropped the strainer in the sink, shrugged, said that there were still other doctors to see. I agreed, doctors of all kinds. I told her that Casualidad will see one after another until the problem is solved, that she will take all necessary tests, that I will pay, need only to know whom to pay and how much, and we cross the Old Bridge into Miraflores.

This evening my Upper Intermediate Students began worrying about their final exam. They asked me questions, dozens, many of them less than straightforward and none entirely new. I gave answer after answer. Finally the questions became repetitive, a sign that the students are not yet at ease but can think of no more specific needs. In response I handed out that which I save for each semester’s moment of this type: the first page of
Finnegans Wake
.

Miraflores is more pleasant than Castilla, less dry and dusty in normal times, though the tap water here is abysmal, a sulfur stew. I asked my students to begin at the beginning. They read silently for ten or fifteen seconds, then looked up. I told them to continue. They read for another five seconds, leaned back and looked up again—all of them, very nearly simultaneously. I told them that discussion would be an option once they had finished the page, and they pretended to try until Hector stood and announced that he spoke for everyone in saying that my joke was not amusing. I said that it was not a joke. He asked why I was doing this to them. I said that as regarded their future lives, they would need to become accustomed to such bafflement, but that the upcoming exam would be the text’s mirrored image.

This helped less than I had hoped, and Arantxa’s was not the only invitation I received today. The dean of Communications came to my office in person and asked me to be his guest at their department’s verbena on Friday. I paused, and thanked him for thinking of me.

At last Arantxa’s house. The front steps are less well lit than they might be. I knock on the door, and the weight of my fist swings it open. The inside of her house is even darker.

I call out, hear nothing, wait. I observe my immediate surroundings, and call out again. I partially crouch, call out once more, charge into the house and the lights come on and thirty people yell.

They do not yell quite in unison and the words are thus indecipherable, but now I see their faces, the faces of so many of my colleagues and friends. All of them are smiling, then cooing as Mariángel begins to cry. I twist to get at her, calm her, and the smells register at last: not incense but once again stuffing and yams.

So it is a surprise post-Thanksgiving party of sorts, and these people, these colleagues, they regard me with great warmth. They lead me to the dining room where there is not jazz but blues. They seat me at the head of a table beautifully laid with candles and flowers and plates but empty of food, and the chair they have chosen is a sturdy one. They all stand back as Arantxa comes from the kitchen.

She is happy and sweating and aproned and holding a hat. At first the hat is a mystery, and then it is not: it is a homemade pilgrim’s hat. It fits perfectly, which is another mystery. My colleagues fear that I won’t want to wear it, insist that it must stay. I would not take it off for anything, but it is enjoyable to pretend to be barely convinced by their pleading.

When Arantxa comes out again she is bearing a turkey on a platter, and I suspect it is the turkey whose head I once held—with the guest lecturer we had ham. Arantxa looks at me, seems about to speak but then the turkey slips. Günther jumps to her side, rights the platter, helps guide it to the table.

A constant coming and going, Arantxa and Günther and half a dozen others, kitchen to dining room and back until the table is loaded with local approximations of Thanksgiving foodstuffs: tamarind sauce instead of cranberry, white rice instead of mashed potatoes. Arantxa pours wine and raises her glass. No one falls quiet. She raises it higher, taps it with her spoon, finally shouts and there is silence. Günther brings a shrouded whiteboard from behind a door, reveals one colorful point at a time and Arantxa reads:

- Here’s to our bronze medalist!

Everyone applauds.

- And to our turkey restrainer!

Louder applause and laughter.

- And to everyone’s favorite English professor!

More laughter, less applause, a tiny bit of whistling. Arantxa blushes as I toast her back and thank her, thank them all, bid them drink. Now at last we sit, begin, and Mariángel is passed from lap to lap. She is calm for longer with some people than with others, and it does not depend on age or gender or how long she has known them, is for now an unbreakable code.

The food is excellent except for dessert: dry donuts, plain. Eugenia says that she made them from scratch, and hopes they are similar to the donuts one might eat in California. I tell her they are exactly the same.

At last Mariángel tires, pouts, and I take her to Arantxa’s bedroom, sing her to sleep—Sarah Vaughan, in case Arantxa is listening. The objects on the dresser are less perfectly aligned than I would have suspected, and there is a piled foot of clothing on the floor of her half-closed closet. The photographs on the walls are mostly of her family and home in Bilbao, but there are also a few taken here. One shows Arantxa standing between Günther and me, our arms interlocked. It was taken outside the cafeteria perhaps three years ago. We all look younger and thinner and tanner and stronger than I ever remember feeling.

By the time I return the dishes have been cleared and everyone has moved to the living room. The discussion widens: the rain, the river, the Olympiad and its upcoming closing ceremony. We analyze recent encouraging efforts from some of Peru’s youngest professional soccer players. We lament the difficulty of finding certain kinds of illustrative realia.

I tell Arantxa that it is inappropriate if not illegal for her to love blues and hate jazz. She says that she doesn’t see why given how many of her best friend’s siblings she detests. We all then discuss which of the two forms is better and happily reach no consensus.

Of everyone here, only Reynaldo does not seem delighted. I go to sit beside him and ask. He nods and smiles, a sad and tired smile.

- You were right, he says. There is not enough time. Everything in your country must be done excessively in advance.

- Not everything, but most things, yes. I’m sorry.

- It does not matter. I will simply wait another year, will start my preparations early next fall, and all will go well.

- Your ticket will still be good by then?

- No, it is only good for a year, but I am working on a plan for it too, will tell you as soon as I am sure that it is correct.

I nod, pat his back, ask about the new species he discovered in the desert.

- Nothing new about it.
Ziziphus obtusifolia
, very common in Mexico. The only question is what it was doing this far south.

There is a short silence in the room. I lean to Günther, tell him that not long ago I was admiring the steins that he gave Pilar and me for our wedding, and ask where he got them. A far deeper silence now. I look around, smile, tell them that it’s all right, tell Günther that I really would like to know. He looks at Arantxa, nods and smiles, says that he isn’t sure where they were made, but his mother mailed them from Mainz.

- They are beautiful, I say, and so useful.

- I hoped they would be, Günther says. They are originals.

Dr. Guardiola signals for quiet, coughs, coughs at greater length. We wait, and when he has recovered he asks me to list things for which I am thankful. This moment, I think. If only, I think.

- The sun of Colán and the moon of Paita, I say.

There is much shouting and hooting of support but Reynaldo says that regional clichés are disallowed. I add the flesh of the cherimoya and the juice of the maracuyá. Those around me will now not be restrained, must each name their favorite Piuran foods.

When that is done, the chairs are pushed back, the coffee table is slid to one side, and of course we dance: rock and salsa, salsa and rock. I am asked to demonstrate a typical Thanksgiving dance, and invent one that involves much dipping and waving of the pilgrim hat. Everyone claps, and comments on the similarity of my dance to tondero, and wonders which one came first.

Later I rest in the bathroom. Arantxa’s scale has colored markers at a variety of different weights—another code, one best left unbroken. Now a gecko scuttles up the far wall. As I watch it, exhaustion comes for me.

First to the living room, to begin the process of saying goodbye. I thank Arantxa, thank them all, for what they have managed this evening. The men shake my hand and the women kiss my cheek and they each protest that I am leaving too soon. But Mariángel, I say. They nod as if understanding, and perhaps they do. Perhaps they understand perfectly.

Next to Arantxa’s room. I gather Mariángel from the bed, and here is another cause for thanks, this pleasure, lifting her warm and smelling faintly of caramel, limp in sleep, then curling into me. I walk back to the living room, expect the light and noise to wake and frighten her, but the lamps have been dimmed, the music quieted. My colleagues are still dancing, but silently or very nearly so, each pair set face to face, undulant parallel lines to the open front door, the dancers’ arms arced above us, a tunnel that echoes with whispered fondness, my friends trailing us out and down the steps, dispatching us into the night as if a message.

MONTHS. CHILDREN, PAINT ON THEIR FACES. Cotton candy and a sudden perfect erosion: every mountain, every butte mesa hill worn flat and the canyons and valleys and gullies filling with that selfsame mud and rock and ice. Then quietness. Stasis, yes. Metal hands. A single altitude, everywhere.

DAWN, CLOUDLESS, SILENT. There was something, not gold but gold-colored. I wait. Gone. I reach through the new netting, turn off the fan, snuff out the mosquito coils that are now also necessary. Today is the fourth and last day. I think I will not start it just yet.

The rains came again as exams began, fell heavy but incoherent, splintered sunlight and downpour. The doors and windows of my house no longer open easily and its smells too are new, subtly sodden. The university’s first leak was not large but also not to be missed: a steady drip in the office where salaries are paid. On my walks that week I saw men carrying bags of concrete, women bearing sheets of corrugated tin, children dragging rolls of plastic sheeting. Fights broke out over canned peaches. No one would sell toilet paper at any price.

The government has also at last become alarmed. The damage done fifteen years ago by the last El Niño has disappeared, the drains rebuilt throughout the city, even in front of my house. Many streets are unusable for the piles of asphalt, the stacks of shovels and picks, the barefoot men pouring tar. Earthmoving equipment has been arrayed along the riverbanks, fresh cement lines the causeway walls, loads of rock have been dumped at the bases of the bridges, and all these things look wrong. The river itself remains thin, almost ridiculous. The shanties and their chickens and crops are all still in place, as if there is no chance of change.

A noise outside my room, Mariángel stirring but not yet awake. Her new hobby is pulling me to my feet so that she might pass back and forth between my legs. She is tall enough now that it is not always undangerous. She still enjoys applauding, clapped with Socorro and the rest of the crowd as I stepped onto the stage to receive my bronze medal. It weighed exactly as much as I suspected, and Arantxa shook my hand with both of hers, once again delighted although the race had gone to Business in the end.

Reynaldo has just come back from Lima. His current plan is to use his ticket to visit the United States as a tourist, to observe firsthand the graduate schools he is considering. He renewed his passport, applied for a visa, was turned down though he had a letter from the university in hand. Familyless working-age men are rarely awarded such visas, he was told, and tickets won in contests are immaterial. He says that he is already planning his next application, that he now understands the vectors in play. The consul assumes that no Peruvian intends to return to Peru unless the contrary can be proven incontrovertibly, and Reynaldo himself must provide the proof.