Pacazo (6 page)

Jenny is not her real name. I am glad I do not know her real name. Her face seems thinner than before, her hair dyed blonder. There is embroidery down the front of her robe—the Nazca lines, monkey and hummingbird and extraterrestrial. She takes my arm, walks me upstairs and into the closest bedroom, says that this time we’ll have to hurry just a little.

I say that it is nice to see her, and she smiles. I sit down on the bed. Remove one shoe, have trouble with the other and she comes to help. She turns the lamp down, asks what I would like this time, and I say we will do what is usually done. She nods, takes off her robe and hangs it on a chair, and the camisole underneath has the same embroidered figures.

- Monkeys, I say.

- Music?

- No. But sing if you want. Sing me something.

- I’m not a very good singer.

- I love that about you.

I let myself fall back onto the bed. It seems to take a very long time to reach it, and the sound of my head landing on the mattress deafens me. I open my eyes, and Jenny is straddling my hips. I reach, lift her camisole as high as I can, and she raises her arms, pulls it up and off. She swishes her hair back and forth and lowers to me, brings her breasts one after the other to my mouth.

After a moment I push her softly back, say that I want to see it.

- Already?

- Now please.

- Okay.

She stands on the bed, looms and wavers, draws down her panties and there it is, the hair shaved in the form of an exclamation point. And I laugh. And she laughs, and says she’s glad I like it.

She goes to work on my clothes, socks first, then my tie, slow on the buttons of my shirt, a struggle with the belt. I lift to help her remove my pants and boxers. She turns to fetch a condom from the vanity and I catch a glimpse in the mirrored closet door, the great white mass of myself.

From there everything is fast. Jenny takes hold of my beard, tugs my face left and right as she bounces and groans above me. I grab her arms, squeeze and explode and subside but do not let go. Squeeze harder and harder. Then a sound around me, Jenny asking please and I breathe, let go of her, apologize.

She kisses my cheek, says it’s all right, but fifty extra soles for make-up to cover the bruises. I nod, wipe my face, try to tell her about Pilar. Jenny says she is sorry but there isn’t time.

I nod again. She rubs her arms, nudges me. I get up and look for my clothes.

- I like you, I say.

- I like you too. Next time make a reservation, and you can tell me anything you want.

I stop by the kitchen to thank Ms. Alina, ignore the men in the plastic chairs, step to the street. The night, hotter, more humid. Will do penance tomorrow, yes, the worst of the search.

I walk and Atahualpa, Atahualpa in his cell. Still the women come. A cloak made from the wings of vampire bats, the softest cloak ever known and now a tiny owl in the air in front of me. Piercing call. Flies ahead, one block at a time, always one block ahead.

The sight of my street surprises me. I stop on the sidewalk, look at my house, the strangeness of it, swaying. Up the steps to my door. Push it open, and the streetlight glow flows past me, illuminates a swath of the floor, the polished stone gone liquid, bottomless, still and then roiling before me.

I could throw rocks at the light until luck does its work, but the last time I did this my neighbors called the police. Tonight I try something new: I stand as tall as I am able in the doorway, block the light with my bulk, jump at an angle toward shadow but one foot catches on the frame and I twist as I fall, land hard on my hip.

Something about owls—Chavín or maybe Moche. Casualidad surely heard the noise and will come. I wait. No one comes. I work to my feet, limp forward, my shirt stuck wet to my chest. Quietly through the dark to Mariángel’s bedroom, find her stretched tight along the side of her crib, tugging on her ear in her sleep. I lean down to kiss her and she turns, reaches for me, rolls away from my smell.

To the kitchen, dark here too but Casualidad awake and sitting at the table. I ask why she didn’t come, and she asks what I mean. I say it doesn’t matter. She nods, asks if I want her to boil water for the morning. I say yes, then no, that I will do it myself.

Casualidad lets herself out. I limp to the window, open it, sniff around the stove. Propane leaks are common, my lights are badly wired, and I have seen disconcerting pictures of blackened remains. I turn on the light. Gnats and mosquitoes flit around the naked bulb. I stand perfectly still, try to remember what comes next.

A gecko moves onto the ceiling. Its skin is nearly transparent. I don’t know where this one goes during the day, but at night it appears here whenever the light comes on. There are other geckos too, many others. At times there is one in each room.

I watch the gecko, and at first its movements are too slow to see. Do the mosquitoes notice it at all? How good is their vision? Now the gecko is close enough and its movements are too quick to see. A mosquito is gone, swallowed, dead. There is so much to learn in this world.

THE BUS PULLS ONTO THE FOURTH BRIDGE, and beneath us the causeway, thirty feet deep and fifty yards wide, almost empty because it is spring: the river is now a sordid thread. Clustered in the riverbed tight against the far bank are half a dozen shanties. Gaunt chickens skitter through scattered trash. The only green of any kind is a line of points in the loam, melons or maybe gourds.

My head and hip ache and my stomach roils and farther down the bank something moves along the top edge. It is long and black or dark gray, too thick for a snake and now out of sight, the bus jolting off the bridge onto the roadway. Mariángel climbs into my lap, points out the window at a speck in the sky. It is either a hawk or litter lifted by wind.

In two or three months the summer rains will start. The shanty owners will harvest their crops, move up onto the banks as the causeway fills. For a time it will be beautiful here along the river. People will come to the edge to watch the water move and to be calmed.

Then I remember the physicist and his prediction. I was not here in 1983 when El Niño last came, have heard that calm was no part of it, that instead of calm there was dengue and drownings, that flooding destroyed highways in all directions, that there were shortages, no kerosene or gasoline for sale, no bread, no canned milk or bottled water, no rice or sugar, no candles, no plastic sheeting, no concrete or tar or lumber. There was beer, however, for a time. It was brought by army helicopters which were scheduled to return but never did.

South now, through Miraflores and Castilla and down into the Sechura, a strip of desert that holds the Pacific and the Andes apart for twelve hundred miles. Two tiny patches of it are my central texts. Marks in the sand are the sentences, their meanings unstable, altered daily by wind or rain, by footsteps including my own. I read looking for patterns, the better to see what does not fit them—traces of what was written one night ten months ago.

Of course I do not know if any traces still exist. Stunted algarrobo, thorny scrub, a single candelabra cactus spread-armed in a clearing. The coastal plain is Peru’s cholo present, and the mountains are its indio past, and the ocean its future: this is something I have been told many times, usually by drunks in bars. To the extent it is intelligible, it is as much false as true, but there is rarely any point in disagreeing.

Mariángel stands in my lap, plays with the barrettes of the girl sitting in front of us, pulls her hair. The girl turns and smiles. I fight off a wave of nausea, and smile back.

A pacazo on the bank—I will have to remember to tell Reynaldo. I think about the odds of walking beneath one just as it began to defecate, about coincidence. It does not take long to pull up another, the taxi’s license plate starting with the first letter of Pilar’s name and ending with her age, and when mistaken for causes they can waste years of your life. Even worse, yes, the unrecorded cause that distorts a chain of events like buried ore misleading a compass, and still worse that despotic distance between lacunal source and referential past, between evidence and the act itself, and Mariángel grabs my beard, pulls my face down, forces me to look at her, and at the string of mucus she has extracted from her nose.

The barrette girl has seen and laughs. I catch Mariángel’s hand. I hold her finger up to the light. I acknowledge that as mucus goes this is an excellent specimen, wipe it from her finger onto my own, lower the window and flick.

Still half an hour away. No need for sunscreen yet but once I remembered too late and it was two bad days and nights. I take the tube from my knapsack, cover her face and neck. She does not like the smell of coconut, smears as much as she can on my pants. My own face and neck, my arms, more pointing and looking at things in the sky. She cries for a moment, the reason unclear. Then she settles, closes her eyes.

Often Reynaldo accompanies us into the desert. He hopes to find an unknown species of plant or bush or tree, has never yet found one but sometimes finds other things of interest. This weekend he is reforesting somewhere to the east. The university’s Outreach Office runs several such programs—solar panels, health clinics, rural education for the poorest. Most weekends they invite me along. I always agree to participate and no one is surprised when I do not.

The foothills are not far away but cannot be seen though the gray-brown haze. In a sense this haze ensured Pilar’s death. If the air had been clear she would have seen the Andes and known she was walking the wrong direction.

Here the highway parallels Pizarro’s route to Cajamarca. One hundred sixty-eight soldiers, hundreds of enslaved porters, a few interpreters, a few guides. In my first years here I was certain that what was needed to finish my thesis could be found in Cajamarca. Later it was simply a location where work could be done. My last visit, a few months before the wedding, and as we check into our hotel Pilar tells me she has never seen the Ransom Chamber.

The tourist board calls it the city’s sole remaining Inca structure: a chaos of old ashlar blocks and new cement. I have already been twice and it is small and bare and today I need other places but Pilar does not want to go alone and so we walk out and along, across and down, then up stairs cut in a gray stone base to the door. We buy tickets, receive brochures. While she looks at the entrance paintings–Atahualpa captured by the Spaniards, imprisoned, proposing terms for his ransom and release—I take out a pen, correct the brochure’s facts and phrasing, hand it to a guard.

The guard nods but does not understand, returns the brochure to its stack. Pilar slips in among the other tourists and gazes with them at trapezoidal niches. I follow, push only when necessary, my bulk unwelcome and stared at. Pilar is sad but delighted. I tell her that the actual ransom chamber no longer exists and was not located in this building. Now she glares, turns away.

Mariángel twists in my lap and I interrupt the nearest guide, Atahualpa a hostage yes but also a collaborator, looting his empire to save himsel—eleven tons of gold, tooled masks and statuettes, jeweled pitchers and jars, irreplaceable and vanished. But of course he was also hoping for escape or rescue, says the guide, and perhaps believed the Spaniards when they promised him a throne in Quito. How could he have believed them? I say. Yes, says the guide, but desperate men will believe anything.

He nods to me, turns back to his group, my stomach now weak again. I lower the window further, lean my head against the frame and squint into the wind. It is rumored that Rumiñavi is on his way in answer to Atahualpa’s call, leads two hundred thousand Inca warriors and thirty thousand Caribs. If this is true then by Spanish lights Atahualpa is guilty of treason, and his execution is thus necessary, justified. Soto is sent to find out, has not yet returned when Pizarro offers Atahualpa a choice of deaths: burned at the stake, or baptized and garroted. Friar Valverde leads the Spaniards in prayer as the cordel tightens at Atahualpa’s throat. When it is done Pizarro simulates a state funeral, and already the execution works backward in time, causality reversed, the Inca not a criminal but a fallen king.

The haze thins slightly, the foothills visible but blurred, my headache sharper and then fading and Pilar is missing. I push through a group of Swedes, see her at the door, not leaving, just standing, waiting. I call to her, ask for a few minutes more. She looks away and I find the guide, take his arm. Rumiñavi’s army? I ask. Perhaps en route, the guide says, but still distant, or Soto would have seen them. All right, I say, and Soto’s lead scout, did he fall off the cliff, or was he pushed? The guide nods. One of many unknowables, he says. Like slivers under our fingernails, I say, and he nods again.

Pilar still waits and I lift Mariángel as she turns, ease her head back down to my knee, wipe the sweat from her temple, from her cheek. I crook my hand above her face to shade her eyes. Blackbirds on a powerline, dunes into the distance. Occasional patches of satuyo lace. A burro pulling a cart loaded with firewood, and competing teleologies, tectonic plates of blame shifting in the historiography. At first Pizarro is the only villain. A decade later he is innocent and fault is split, half for the natives who first spoke of Rumiñavi and half for the interpreters who questioned them. Forty years further along Garcilaso names eleven Spaniards, says they spoke up to stop the execution but few of them were truly in Cajamarca at the time and perhaps Porras is right and Garcilaso brought the story in from Valera who invented it to make Herrada not the knave who murdered Pizarro but the hero who avenged Atahualpa and there is a stench.

I lift slightly, look out the window and back at something dead on the road, a deer, and the guide leads his group out the door. For a moment the room is empty. I sit on the rough stone floor. Atahualpa, that leather cloak, the skins of vampire bats, in his hands a chalice made from the head of Atoc, his half-brother’s general, Atahualpa’s captor and torturer but then the escape, the civil war, Atoc falling and later beheaded, the skin dried tight to the skull, a golden bowl mounted and filled, the chicha de jora draining out through a silver spout clenched in his teeth. The guards laugh from their posts at the door of the cell. Atahualpa will never be freed and now knows it. He drinks deeply, offers the chalice to me and someone steps on my hand. Apologizes. I stand, and the man apologizes more thoroughly. I wave it away, should know better than to try to be alone in such places and Pilar, I look, she is gone and I go to the door, out to the sidewalk, and she is nowhere.