Pacazo (32 page)

The boxes holding all these months of evidence have rotted and collapsed. The pile is three feet high, a mass of mold and mud. Everything is covered in a filth of itself.

I dig down in, search for what might be salvaged. There seems to be nothing. I stand and stare, stand and look down, stare. There is no longer any reason to be here, and no reason to be anywhere else. I gather muck in my fists, walk to the front door, throw it as far as I can. Back to the closet, and more gathering. Running now, armfuls when I can, and my hands and chest and face are covered with this sludge of what I thought would lead me to him.

Some small bits toward the bottom are identifiable but pointless all the same, were always pointless, clumps of hair and shards of plastic, broken glass cutting into my hands, for all I know my taxista left Piura the day he murdered Pilar and is now in Iquitos or Arequipa or somewhere still farther away, muddy aluminum foil and chunks of rubber, has moved to Bolivia, to Chile or Argentina, back and forth and back and forth until all of it has been thrown into the street, and even this is not enough, my books, my notebooks, back and forth until they are gone and I rage, wade out into the street, this pointlessness, those hours and that hope, fall and stand and the dense stench has filled me.

A bell, ringing, nearing. Blood and rainwater drip from my fingers. I step back through the piles, and around the corner comes the garbage truck. Slowing, stopping. There are half a dozen men, their mouths and noses covered with handkerchiefs. They lower their shovels and begin to work.

New Year’s Day—the symmetry, so precise and absurd. I start to laugh, laugh and gasp, look at the mud on my hands. I spread my fingers, wipe the mud in careful lines beneath my eyes. Ready now. Exquisite. The rain harder and I spin, laugh. The truck, the men and their shovels, I will help but another noise, not the ringing of the bell but a scream.

I turn. Socorro is standing in the doorway. She is holding Mariángel, who fights to get down. I drop my hands to my sides. Mariángel screams again and my breath catches in my chest, cuts its way up through my throat, spills black into the air.

THE MAN ON THE BUS TO TUMBES WAS CORRECT. The weather has The man on the bus to Tumbes was correct. The weather has gone wholly from desert to jungle. Floors everywhere are lined with pots and pans and cans, a symphony of water into water. Taxi fares have risen above reasonable levels, and as the roads grow less passable, the taxis take more often to the sidewalks. This would bother me a great deal if I still walked back and forth to work.

Mariángel sits in her crib and I stand alongside. The rain is loud and the house is very dark. There has been no electricity since dinner, and we are playing the game where she is the fish and the crib is her pond and I am the night wind. She flutters her hands like fins and puckers her lips. The ripples of froth I blow across the top are particularly convincing tonight, as I have added a new layer of finer mesh.

In addition to mosquitoes there are now tiny black flies—lameojos, eye-lickers. They come in clouds at the hottest times of the day, and waving one’s arms about one’s face does no good. They return to swarm again and again until one catches and crushes them individually, and their miniscule bodies are harder than one might guess, beetle-like almost.

The repellents available in Piura work well against neither mosquitoes nor lameojos. The electricity comes on, goes immediately back off, and the rain has softened slightly. My mother has promised to alert her sister in Shreveport. I do not know exactly why.

Mariángel lies on her back, flutters less flamboyantly. Also there are many moths, most of them small, others three or four inches across. They stay for a time, live on my walls, leave at moments when rain is not falling. The smaller ones are most often brown. The larger ones are black or appear so.

There are ants as well, several types, some very small and black, some amber and still smaller. And crickets: summer evenings in a cabin by a lake, cheerful chirping as one drifts to sleep, yes, but not here, not now. These crickets come in thousands. They swarm the streetlights, and the fallen soak the sidewalks. In our house I track them down and smash them. More come the following morning, and these crickets, they are cannibals. This is not hearsay. I see them at their work, reach for the nearest shoe and Mariángel’s eyes close, open, close, stay closed, then open.

I send wave after wave across the top of the crib, and massive green grasshoppers have cracked two of my windows, yes. Also there are latigazos, which look like long thin black ants with wings, but the tip of their abdomen emits venom of a sort. This venom leaves blisters on your skin, and the blisters hurt for days and last for weeks.

The rain has stopped. I make up a song about the loveliest fish in the lake, “Ventilator Blues” reimagined as reggae. Mariángel and I save certain insects in bottles no longer filled with mustard. Moth, latigazo, cricket, grasshopper, and also small black beetles that look like ants and act like cattle and pop like dry seaweed when stepped upon. They appear to eat nothing, and survive indefinitely regardless of whether we remember to punch air holes in the lid.

Mariángel is asleep or pretending. I whisper that it is time for chocolate. There is no response, and so I may begin.

I step carefully over the dike, pull her door closed, walk from darkness into darkness. The pots and pans and cans in the dining room are more than one sort of solution. I check the level of leakwater in each, ensure that none is more or less than half-full, and there was and is a single sentence of Oquendo’s in a box at or near the middle of a poem at or near the middle of the book: Sadness is prohibited. This sentence is magical or dictatorial. I hope soon to decide.

Most of the receptacles have already been rigged with metal hangers twisted to form a loop above. I locate the few that are hangerless, fetch my pliers and bend to the work, and Armando came to my office early this afternoon. He was smiling extremely widely, was sober and yet ever so slightly off balance. I invited him to sit down. He stayed standing, kept smiling, waited for me to ask, finally said that the shipment would arrive tomorrow.

When all of the hangers are emplaced I walk pot to pan to can inserting a candle in each loop, and I very nearly asked Armando to which shipment he referred, then remembered two weeks before, the first time I have seen him in perhaps a month and he is not smiling at all. Before he can even speak I nod, apologize, bring his copy of
5 Metros de Poemas
out of my bottom drawer and hand it to him. He appears confused. I wait. This is not what he has come for, he says, though he is grateful to have it back and hopes I have enjoyed it. I promise that I did. He says that he had heard about the flood in my house, the loss of so many books, so much research, had wanted to help in some way. The new texts will not be for me to keep, he says, are for the library’s permanent collection, but he has chosen only works he thinks I might find interesting, perhaps even useful. Armando has always meant well. I thank him at great length. Tomorrow I will go look and thank him again.

Circling again through the darkness, this time to crease it with light.

When all of the candles are lit, I close each door leading out of the dining room, open the windows that give onto the patio, and remove the screens. I take my seat in the darkest corner. The air grows brighter and warmer as wax melts and wicks lengthen, brighter and warmer and brighter and warmer, sweat runs down my face and arms and chest and I watch as the room fills with insects.

Mosquitoes, crickets, beetles, moths: the candles flare as the insects fly through them, the darkness itself catching fire or so it seems. The insects fall into the pots, pans, cans, fall and drown, hundreds of them, until the surface of the water is so thick with death that the next insect to fall lands as if on solid ground, walks to the rim and escapes to further life.

The room, hotter and hotter. The dense high whir of a thousand transparent wings. The insects do not seek me out but land on me occasionally nonetheless—in my hair, in my beard, on my shoulders, on my thighs. I brush them to the floor and crush them.

As the receptacles fill, I empty them into the toilet. I add new water, return to the dining room and light the candles again, sit back to watch, again. A stench, burnt feathers and dried blood. I watch and I watch and I watch.

There was rain this morning, and there will be more this evening, but at the moment there is sun. I sit in the cafeteria and drink my awful coffee. I swipe at lameojos. Today would be my second wedding anniversary if Pilar were still alive.

A distant bell rings. It is not meant for me. Our summer courses consist of three straight daily hours per class, and I have Elementary in the morning, Upper Intermediate in the afternoon. The amounts bet on which bridge will fall first have reached appreciable proportions. There are many leaks in the classrooms, and some of the leaks are not small, and we have been instructed to pretend that nothing is wrong.

Pilar. The cypress of her. She smiles, says that if we don’t start now we will be late. Dressing then, both of us, and dressing one another—she draws her long black hair forward over one shoulder so that I might zip up the back of her dress, and she turns. Snugs my tie gently to my chin. Kisses me on the cheek. A fine dinner somewhere, anywhere, wine and flowers, and a gift, a necklace or brooch. For the pleasure of it also some manifestation of the traditional gift, whatever it is that one gives on a second anniversary—paper or leather or bronze? Home and yes and then and perhaps I will not go to the library after all.

Another coffee, worse, and this morning as I left for work I asked Socorro about Casualidad. She took up a broom, began sweeping insects into piles, said that all is well except for the birds and the fact that Casualidad refuses to eat. I waited, said that I was sorry. Socorro nodded. Her husband is going to Frías next week, she said, can take anything I might wish to send.

This evening I will thus fill another envelope and rewrap the colorful useless blouses meant for Casualidad for Christmas. I have already given Fermín his bicycle. He is now back in Catacaos. Socorro says that he would rather be there than in Frías, and this does not show in his face.

More probably Casualidad does not wish for him to watch her die. He bicycles to my house weekly, weeds in the rain, and from the patio I ask what life is like for him in Catacaos. He smiles but never answers. It is as if he were free to speak only at certain altitudes.

A third coffee, the worst so far. I have not seen Reynaldo since the evening at the bridge, have heard that he is less often here at the university than at his aunt’s house in Colán. The house has survived the ocean’s rising thus far, but the job is not yet done. Many other homes are already gone, reduced to foundation and scraps of wall.

Now I see Armando, a hundred feet away and nearing. He sees me as well, waves, stops, waves again, then turns and walks in the opposite direction. This is him giving me the opportunity to be gracious, and so I will.

Out of the cafeteria and into the sun, across the grass, past a bench in thin shade. The smell of decomposing leaves. Along and across, sun and shade and sun, and at last into the library.

The foyer here has always been a pleasant space. It is most often filled with local paintings or sketches and they are generally better than they have any reason to be. Today it is photographs of sand. There are perhaps thirty of them, dune after dune, and as I look they turn abstract, pure line and shade. They are so beautiful that my stomach starts to ache.

To the reception desk, and yes, Armando has reserved a dozen books in my name. They are brought to me in the reading room: a handsome gathering of new Ginzburg essays, a doorstop collection of monographs grouped in Rostworoski’s honor, a beautifully managed Justice-and-Power inventory of the Cuzco Departmental Archive; O’Phelan Godoy on the Great Rebellion and Varón Gabai’s take on the Pizarros and a critical edition of Pachacuti Yamqui’s
Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Piru
that I’ve seen before and would like to see again. Two volumes of linguistic enthnography, and two of anthropological linguistics, and the Alianza edition of Cabeza de Vaca’s
Naufragios
. At the bottom of the stack is a book by Inge Schjellerup called
Incas and Spaniards in the Conquest of the Chachapoyas
, and how perfect it would have been a decade ago.

Altogether, then, a well and kindly chosen shipment—a few books of personal interest only, a few central to my work, and several just far enough from it that any link could be ignored should I so wish. I take up the O’Phelan Godoy, and Arantxa sits down beside me. She is as sad as I have ever seen her. I close the O’Phelan Godoy. She shakes her head.

- I don’t know, she whispers.

- Perhaps I can help, I whisper back.

- You are not the solution. You are the problem.

- And if I solve myself?

- I wish that was amusing. I wish anything was amusing. But I am tired. And Reynaldo is tired. Do you know what he said to me?

- He is here in Piura? I thought—

- I was called to the rector’s office to account for you, and was told to wait outside, and waited and waited and waited. The secretary stared at me the entire time. You understand how that might make me feel? And then Reynaldo came out. He did not look up as he walked past, but he spoke to me. And do you know what he said? He said, That was the final time.

Arantxa waits for me to answer, and I do not, and finally she continues.

- It is best for all of us, John, if I am not entirely clear as to his meaning. You are very, very fortunate to have such a good friend.

- I am.

- Yes. And here is something I wish you to know: I no longer care how good your friends are. I no longer care what you did or did not do at the Mobil Station or anywhere else. I just want you to stop causing problems for other people.

- Today is the—