Pacazo (33 page)

- I know what today is for you. I know. But I’m not sure how much I care about that either. It has been too long for me to care the way I once might have.

She stares at the floor. I wait. Finally she shrugs.

- Okay, she whispers. The rector knows that something is deeply wrong, but doesn’t know what. Several students came to tell him about what happened, but their accounts were confused—some said you started a fight, some said a taxista attacked you for no reason, some had no idea. Reynaldo’s version was, I suspect, of no help whatsoever in terms of clarification. I told the rector that I knew nothing about it, which was true at the time.

- Thank you.

- Your thanks do not interest me. And I assure you, John, that this is my final time as well.

Arantxa stands, walks away. I am surprised and then unsurprised that she remembers the date of my anniversary. I think about this for a moment. The other professors in the room finish glaring at me and return to their reading.

A month after her graduation, Pilar in her wedding dress, beautiful, yes. My mother, her fear of flight withstood or drugged just long and well enough. The church in Chiclayo, rustic and fine. The ceremony, long and imperfect and true: a dropped ring rolling and rolling and saved at the edge of a grate by an old woman no one recognized, and an accidental vulgarity as I worked through my vow, and a flower-girl cousin who stepped on Pilar’s veil-train, snapping her head back as we exited.

Then the reception in Ferreñafe. My mother lovely in a summer dress, beige and gold and tan, unready for the heat but she smiled and smiled and smiled. The extremely wealthy man for whom Pilar’s father ploughed and planted, ploughs and plants, had lent us his back yard. There was a massive tent, a cascade of flowers. There was a raised wooden dance floor, and music from somewhere unseen.

Like most Peruvian receptions ours commenced with ten or twelve runs through “The Blue Danube” such that I might dance with Pilar, with my mother, Pilar’s mother, Pilar’s aunts and nieces. From my family there were no men but me, and this was surmountable: three friends had come from Berkeley and two from Irvine, and after them were Pilar’s own brothers and uncles and nephews.

The afternoon sky a rich full blue, the sun bright and not too hot, and pachamanca begins as a large hole in the ground. A base of eucalyptus is laid, covered in stones, and the wood burns alone for hours. When the stones start to glow they are removed. More wood is added, and the stones put back in layers with spices and that which is to be cooked. Stones and potatoes and yams, stones and beef and pork, stones and chicken and plantains, stones and marmaquilla and paico, stones and corn and cheese. The hole is covered with plantain leaves, canvas and soil. In the soil one places a bouquet and a cross and then one waits.

At our reception the results were outstanding. The problem, then, as plates emptied: there is an equally delicious northern variant called copús. It involves vinegar-cured goat heads, lamb and bananas and yucca, is cooked likewise underground but in clay pots and over algarrobo, and when the wealthy man of Ferreñafe came to see that all was as it should be, he noted our choice and announced that eating pachamanca rather than copús showed a lack of regional loyalty.

There are persons like this everywhere, yes, men and women who heighten their sense of worth by sticking shovels up the asses of others. I do not often lack an appropriate response to such people, but this once I was left mute. Perhaps it was the tight tuxedo.

Happily my silence did not matter. Pilar’s brothers turned brave and stood. Pachamanca was the older and more authentic form, they said, born of the Incas themselves. The food as prepared was honor and tribute and gratefulness, they said. Eat, they said. Eat and be grateful.

The man of Ferreñafe waved their answer away. He turned, and Pilar’s mother led us in a toast to his departure. Then her father toasted the memory of my father. It was an odd moment but I loved him for the act.

The cake was served, the magnificent cake, and the air filled with the scents of vanilla and cinammon and cloves. Afterwards came rock and salsa, salsa and rock, beer in endless pitchers, happiness. My mother danced and danced and how did I not know that she loved to dance? There were cryptic references to honeymoon pleasures, even on the part of Pilar’s father. Drunk, Arantxa and Günther danced negroïde, and she was very good, and he was very German. There was laughter, and promises were made and chocolates passed.

I have not seen my mother since then and was it Pilar’s father, or one of her uncles? Máncora, yes, the bungalow, yes, and yes. But in the whole of those days I believe I did not think even once about the exchange student who came to my high school from Abancay. I know what this makes me, do not have to be told what this makes me.

Yes, and still. Perhaps there will be a time to visit those beaches again. Currently the highway is broken in all directions, but workers go each day, bear materials and equipment to each gap.

It is late. The slaughter is done, and tonight there is electricity: fan, lights, music. Ginzburg’s essays are very good if often far from my field, and he would smile at the use of those words in this context, far and field.

I finish “Idols and Likenesses,” glance through “Style,” start “Distance and Perspective.” It begins with a retelling of Sokal’s parody of people like me, and I am unsure how offended to be. Mariángel wakes and whimpers. I go to her, hold her and suddenly remember: chickenpox, her vaccination, scheduled for today and forgotten. There is further whimpering, and my forgetting, unforgivable, but then a quieting, and it may have been only a return to the night-waking of many months ago.

I lay her down, sing her to sleep and return to Ginzburg. He says, Here I shall insist on a different and even opposite theme: the irreducibility of memory to history. I wipe sweat from my hands, my face. In any culture, he says, collective memory conveyed through rituals, ceremonies, and similar events reinforces a link with the past of a kind that involves no explicit reflection on the distance that separates us from it and the power goes out.

I bring five candles from the dining room, set them on the coffee table, light them, can now just barely read. The past, Ginzburg says, must be understood both on its own terms and as a link in the chain that in the last analysis leads up to ourselves. I lower the book, lean back. I stand, walk to my room, and yes, in the drawer of my nightstand: a notebook, empty, clean. There is no reason to take it from the drawer, no reason not to, and finally I do.

A pen from the kitchen and back to the dining room, sitting down on the couch, rebeginning the essay. Slow notes on half a dozen thoughts. Reading further, and there is movement near my head and away: a moth the size of a sparrow has flown into the living room.

It circles the couch where I sit, circles again and lands on the floor. I do not know how it survived the pots and pans and cans. I could easily crush it, perhaps would if we were in the dining room, but we are not, and there has been enough death. I go to the kitchen, return with a glass of lemonade, step too close and it flutters up, lands again a few feet away.

I have no answer to this question, says Ginzburg, and the moth lifts again though I have not moved; it circles and goes for the candles. Three of them are extinguished in various passes. The moth flails against the tabletop, strikes me twice in the mouth. I set down the Ginzburg and watch.

This moth, too, appears black, though flickers of color come from its body each time it catches the light. With time its passes through the candles grow ragged, almost desperate. Then it collapses on top of the stereo.

I watch it a bit longer, unmoving, both of us unmoving. I go to it and look. I touch its abdomen, and the moth flops back into the air. It circles the table and the remaining candles once more, lands again on the floor, very near the wall this time, its head against the base of a ceramic owl, its body heaving tinily.

Its wings are not solid black, I now see, but striated with varying grays. Its body is still segmented like that of the caterpillar it once was, and high on its abdomen are small quadrilaterals of metallic orange-gold that can only be seen like this, the body at rest. A moment later the heaving stops.

The lights blare, Charly García sings suddenly of love and strange new haircuts, the fan spins and blows the last candles out. Again the moth flies, flame-singed wings, invisible striations and quadrilaterals, falls spiraling. In a good world it would find its way out of my house, would fly into the wet night and away, and instead it is dead on my floor.

THE FILM HAS ALREADY BEGUN. The houses, the flowerpots,the houses are flowerpots, the countryside bright as lemon rind and Pilar wants to play golf with him. We ring the doorbell. Piura becomes Vilcashuamán. Men and women arrive on bicycles, bring out images and sell them cheaply, ever more cheaply. The view has unfolded. We are dwarves, all of us. The cities must have been built on the tips of umbrellas and now life seems better because it is higher up and the film is half-over, the borrowed film, half-over.

DOWNRIVER THE PIURA BROKE ITS LEFT BANK, flooded a dozen villages, washed most of Chato Chico away. This was ten days ago. Now there are something like refugee camps tucked into small spaces throughout the city. The shelters have walls of straw matting, and plastic tarps for roofs. In some cases livestock was saved and the camps are thus louder than one might expect.

Those same rains continued, and bridges all over the region slumped and closed or fell: Talara, Paita, Tumbes. On most Piuran streets one less walked than waded. Also there was thunder and lightning, rarities here, and the dogs howled for hours.

Lately however there has been a sort of lull. The pools of standing water have grown shallower. The clouds are still battleships, and the humidity and temperature are still appropriate only in jungles, and the epidemics have begun, malaria and cholera, dengue and yellow fever, three cases of bubonic plague confirmed in Cajamarca, but no rain fell the day before yesterday, none fell yesterday, none is scheduled for today and I am suddenly very late.

I cinch my tie, take up my briefcase, and it will be too small so I dump its contents into my daypack. Stumbling over the dike in the doorway, remembering my wallet on my nightstand, turning and stumbling again and there will be scrapes if not bruises. Quickly to the kitchen, and I do not know why it took me so long to decide. I load the three bottles in, zip the daypack barely closed, hurry to the entryway where I thank Socorro for breakfast, kiss Mariángel goodbye, open the front door and very nearly step on the hairless dog curled on the stoop.

I retreat into the house and pull the door closed, then nudge it back open. Broken tail, scarred haunches. The dog has lifted its head half an inch off the cement to look at me. I wait for it to do something, anything, to growl or snarl or leap. It lays its head back down and closes its eyes. I tell it loudly to go away. Its eyes do not open.

Again I wait. Then I call to Socorro, ask her to bring last night’s leftovers. She comes, has brought nothing, wants to know what I need them for. I glare at and show her. She says that if I feed the dog it will never leave. I say that it does not look inclined to leave regardless.

She goes to the kitchen, returns not with food but with a mop. I ask her to stop. I tell her that I will deal with the dog, that all I need are the leftovers, that she should not worry herself. She does not believe me but brings a bowl of stiff cold boiled white rice, and when I fling the rice to the far corner of the yard, the dog stands, goes, eats, lies down there on what is left of the grass.

Thus with luck a custom has been formed, an arrangement, bad food at irregular intervals in exchange for sleeping anywhere but my stoop. I run down the walk and to the corner. Today is Friday the Thirteenth, which means nothing in Peru—here it is Tuesday the Thirteenth that is thought to bring bad luck. The first taxi I see is full but the second is available, and whiskey has always seemed to me improbable in regard to the status it confers among my Piuran acquaintances. At Cossto each given bottle costs twice what it should, and whenever offered will be accepted, will be emptied before anything else is touched.

Past the park, and in the center is a group of small children filling water balloons from a spigot. This is a matter of Carnaval, which in Piura is nothing like what occurs elsewhere and on television. We do not have the intricate masks of Venice, do not have the towering feathered floats and full brown breasts of Río. Instead we have these children filling their balloons with water and occasionally much worse.

We also have their older brothers and sisters armed with tins of shoe polish and small sacks of flour and plastic bags filled with paint. Last year there was an evening when a group of adolescents swarmed me. I came so very near to catching one of them, the tallest, but sweat had slickened his wrist. It took an hour to get the shoe polish out of my eyebrows.

In theory Carnaval begins a month before Easter. I do not know why the children have started so early this year. We round the corner and here they are already emplaced. One balloon is thrown too perfectly, enters through my window and exits through the window on the far side, as if a heavy wet thought now forgotten. Another arrives as I am rolling my window up, and it bursts against the frame, drenches one shoulder of my shirt and the top half of my tie.

Thus despite the absence of rain I arrive to work damp and smelling faintly of sewage. Quickly across campus, and Arantxa’s bottle is first. I knock, enter without waiting, set it on her desk. She is talking on the telephone. She covers the mouthpiece as if to speak to me but says nothing. I apologize for interrupting, point to the bottle. She looks at it, at me, at my shirt and tie. I nod and shrug. She looks at the bottle again, seems very slightly more tired but less sad, and I wave and back out of her office.