Pacazo (40 page)

On and on, the two of us trying to remember still louder things, the loudest. My eyes began to itch, then to burn. I rubbed them, and my fingertips came away smeared with yellow. I told Günther that we had complained sufficiently, hung up and went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror. My eyes were a surprising red and finally Karina arrives.

She is wearing sunglasses, is led by Alejandra, the elder twin by a minute. They have brought eye drops and ointment. The eye drops stop the infection, Alejandra says, and the ointment kills the pain.

Killing as such is not the word, but the pain lessens, and the itching. Alejandra takes Mariángel to the yard to look at grass. Karina and I soak washcloths in cold tea and lay down on my bed and place the washcloths over our eyes. It is a further comfort, and lasts until one of us is needed—a diaper to be changed, vegetables to be boiled and mashed. We take turns. I have not taken turns like this at anything with anyone since Pilar died. It is disconcerting and the only possible option.

Clouds come, elide, and rain starts, grows, and there is thunder, lightning, and Alejandra trembles. We turn on the television and listen to what it says: hard rain in the foothills, predictions of a peak, the Fourth Bridge to be closed even to pedestrians. They both want to leave, and I help by saying that I do not want them to but they should, and Alejandra looks at Karina and says they won’t.

Karina accuses Alejandra of being unsuitably nice to me as a form of revenge against Karina herself for not having invited Alejandra to join the rest of us at the pool. Alejandra denies this and looks to me for support. I look from one to the other and say that in retrospect missing the pool was a blessing, and this angers both of them.

The rain thins. Mariángel is angry as well, and it is not clear why. She begins tearing pages from the first book she finds, a guide to Argentina. The rest of us watch her tear and tear. With luck I will never need to visit Argentina. The rain stops, and there is a sudden rift in the clouds, sunlight spilling into my yard. Alejandra takes Mariángel up and says the two of them are going to the park.

Karina and I repeat the cycle, eye drops and ointment and washcloths soaked in tea. For a time we play at being blind. It is more difficult than I might have anticipated: I have lived years in this house and do not know its distances at all. Inanimate things move darkly. The dikes are all higher than I built them. Brushing against a doorframe levers me twice to the floor. Embarrassment too has a smell, almost the smell of copper.

Karina has a thought of music, and so we listen, classical in deference to her idea of Italy. Blindness helps or that is my impression. Even so it is four or five times through each movement in each piece before things clarify: at last the different lines of harmony can be heard, and each individual instrument, or this is what we pretend. The play between lines is what I have always missed, the way the keeping of time shifts from one instrument to another, and a note played at octaves in sequence or echo is more than simple doubling, and Karina and I, yes, the music and blindness, a finding, until Alejandra arrives with Mariángel asleep on her shoulder and we pull our clothes back on as quickly as we can.

I carry my daughter to her crib, come back to the living room, and here it is very quiet. Alejandra is looking at Karina. Karina’s shirt is inside out. Alejandra blushes, turns and walks to the front door. Karina asks if I would like her to stay, and the answer is that she can’t, and must, and can’t.

LATE OR VERY EARLY, MARIÁNGEL ASLEEP, rain falling but lightly now. A third glass of rum. Back to my bed and stretching out again: no electricity since nightfall but my eyes have healed enough to read by candlelight and far fewer insects and
Naufragios
at last. I had forgotten what a good and strange book it is. If only Cabeza de Vaca had come to Peru instead.

The Spaniards who survive the hurricane spend the winter in Cuba, then sail for Florida, make land near Sarasota. Narváez leads three hundred inland and north before the ships have found safe harbor. They are aided by some local tribes, attacked by others. By the time they reach the mouth of the Apalachicola they are starving, have little idea where they are, and a third are malarial, too sick to walk any more. They decide to continue by water, though they have no boats. They also have no tools, and no boat-building experience, and no navigational skills.

They steal a hundred bushels of corn from the nearest tribe and kill a horse every third day to feed the workers. They construct bellows out of saplings and deerskin, melt down armor and stirrups and crossbows. They make oakum and rigging from palmettos, and pitch from pine resin, and canteens from horsehide. They make sails from their shirts and oars from juniper trunks.

By this point forty are gone from disease and starvation and arrows. They have eaten all of their horses. The five barges they have built can barely hold those still alive, the water less than a foot below the gunwales.

Another glass of rum, and for a month they sail west along the shoreline. Their food runs out and their canteens rot. Another hurricane, and they run to land, are welcomed and then ambushed by natives. An escape and further attacks and further escapes and the current of the Mississippi drives them into the gulf. One morning Cabeza de Vaca wakes to find two of the five barges disappeared. A third, Narváez’s, stocked with the strongest men, rows away and will not be seen again. The fourth is lost in yet another storm.

Cabeza de Vaca and his men row for the shore, row and row but the current is too strong. At last only he and his navigator have the strength to stand. At dawn he hears breakers. Waves throw the barge onto shore. The Spaniards rest, find pockets of rainwater, parch corn. A scout is sent out, returns with the news that they are on an inhabited island.

He is sent out again, and this time is trailed back. Half an hour later the Spaniards are surrounded, a hundred bowmen or more, lengths of cane through the dark men’s ears and just now I heard a sound. It was a soft sound, or very far away—something like the sound of cloth tearing. I stand and listen, hear nothing, not even rain. I wait. Still nothing, then the quietest of grunts.

As quietly as I am able through the dark, to the dining room and looking out the window at the back yard: a crack in the clouds, the moon halved but bright, the almond tree, the wall. I hunch down, watch the man extend his legs and drop to the grass. It is not easy to keep my smile from becoming laughter.

There is what appears to be a torn rice sack draped over the shards of glass that pointlessly line my wall. The man is short and stout. There is a faint glimmer about his face, perhaps whiskers gone white. It is only a matter of waiting for him to come.

A moment more, both of us listening. He walks to my patio and opens my door. He waits, steps inside, another step and I stand and flip on the light. His hands rise and he turns, blinded, feels his way along the wall as if guided by his whiskers and I catch the back of his shirt, slam him against the wall, sling him around and lift and now he sees.

It will require no great effort to beat him to death. He swings at me and I crush him and lift him again and he begs and tries to turn, says a half-sentence prayer to the Virgin and I crush him again and lift. He begs. I shake my head and he is holding something up, says that he will give it back if I let him go, throws a handful of bills into the air, and this money, from where could it have come? It falls to the floor and he twists and lunges, his shirt rips off in my hand and he runs, he jumps and clambers and there is a moment when I can follow and have him again but this money, I understand nothing, and he is at the top of the wall, squeals as he scrapes across and is gone.

I feel lucky that he prayed to the Virgin rather than to Sarita Colonia, then foolish for having felt lucky. I gather the bills from the floor, look closely, laugh. They are not soles but intis, the previous Peruvian currency—worthless, but a sound tool for escape and a particularly fine souvenir.

I look in on Mariángel, and she has slept through it all. Out to the yard, and I realize I am still carrying the man’s shirt. It reeks of onions stewed in sweat. I toss it and the torn rice sack into the garbage, look again at the garden wall. The glass is not pointless after all. I hose the man’s blood away.

I take the bills to my bedroom and arrange them on the nightstand. Another rum. Cabeza de Vaca once again, and the bowmen have not attacked. Instead they have given the Spaniards an arrow as a token of friendship, have promised to come soon with food, and this is the sort of thing that gives one hope even when one knows what must come next.

The river began to fall, then rose once more when rains came again in the foothills, and none of the roads leading out of Piura have yet been wholly repaired. This would be a larger problem if I had immediate reason to leave and somewhere to go. As it is, my only urgent trip is a month away, or will be once I am done here.

The regional director and I greet one another elaborately. I present the tejas and TOEFL materials that he loves, and he claps me slowly on the shoulder. We speak of Russia and other places that he has been and I have not. He asks me questions about the Middle East that I have trouble imagining ever being able to answer, and I respond with knowing nods, with the joke about the frog and the scorpion, and I am sure he has heard it before.

Tejas were first made in Ica: a fig or lemon or prune stuffed with pecans and manjar blanco. The ones I have brought are chocotejas from Arequipa, pecans and manjar blanco wrapped in chocolate, a marvelous thing. He offers me one, takes one himself, and we eat slowly. Now it is time to begin.

We speak in euphemisms and look up at the ceiling as if there were something to see: he is willing to pretend not to know that I am working without a work visa, but is uncomfortable doing so. He takes my passport and the requisite number of twenty-dollar bills to clear three months’ worth of visa extensions and fines. He calls his secretary in, gives them to her, whispers with great gentleness. She leaves, and he asks to which country my extended travels are likely to take me next.

- Ecuador, I say. I have heard that Loja is very nice.

- A wonderful place. But there is of course the problem.

There are so many problems that in response I squint. He nods and unwraps another teja.

- With luck the peace treaty will be signed as planned, but, well, were you here when they came over the border in 1995?

- Right in the middle of Fujimori’s first re-election bid, as I remember.

- And dozens were killed, hundreds wounded—you remember that too, I trust. Three of the four main issues have been settled, and yet there have been movements of troops. The focus is well inland—Tiwinza, the Cordillera del Condor—but all the same you will need to be careful. If shooting begins anywhere along the border, stay where you are until it stops.

I nod, and wish that he would offer me another teja: manjar blanco is something like caramel but softer and sweeter still. When the fighting was done and the Ecuadorian troops had retreated back across the border, we were made to march happily in the streets and hold large heavy banners. The secretary enters with my passport and hands me forms to sign. I thank her, thank him, wish them both a pleasant afternoon, wish them only the best in any and all future endeavors.

Almost daylight. Karina, naked beside me in bed. I have been awake and unmoving for almost an hour. She is lying on her side along the edge and if I move she will spill to the floor.

If I could move I would run my fingertips the length of her arm. Last night, the cinema, now three instead of two, Mariángel and Karina and me. At the counter I learned that Mariángel will not count as a paying customer for seven more months. All this time we could have gone to the cinema on any day we wished.

If I could move I would draw Karina’s hair back from her face. It was not raining outside, but it was raining inside, water trapped between ceiling and roof dripping through. We waited for the dripping to lessen and it did not. I told her a minimal version of the burglar, and she was minimally impressed. When it became clear that the projector was not going to function, that
The Devil’s Own
was not going to be seen, we stood, sidled, walked out. Other moviegoers had preceded us, and several were gathered at the door to the manager’s office. I suspect it was not long before they understood that refunds are under no circumstances ever given.

If I could move I would kiss the back of Karina’s neck and she accompanied us home, and stayed, and Mariángel slept, and Karina stayed. The rain came briefly, kindly. Karina asked again, and somehow the answer had changed, had become that she must, couldn’t, must.

If I could move and she turns onto her back and I shift tight against the wall to let her. Her lips parted. One breast loose above the sheet. At last and I reach but there is a far shriek and Karina flinches awake, the shrieking louder and of course: Mariángel.

Karina says that she will go to get her if I want. I say that she will not, that I will, please. I say this much louder than necessary.

- Sorry I asked, she says.

- It is not that, I say. But please stay here until I call you.

- What?

It is faster to act than to explain and so I go, take Mariángel up, lock her door with both of us inside. Then I call to Karina. I address her as Socorro, ask her to go home at her earliest convenience. She comes to the door, asks what I am doing. I do not answer. She knocks, tries the doorknob, asks again. I stay silent, and now there is the noise of her footsteps, and nothing for a time, and the slamming of my front door.

By the time the echo has died I know how preposterous I have been but do not know what form amends should take and Mariángel pulls at my ears. To the kitchen. For her there is a bottle of milk but for me there is nothing. When she is done drinking I load her into the carrier and the telephone rings. I spin in slow circles as I talk to keep her entertained, and it is my mother calling.