Pacazo (10 page)

Something else, Woody Woodpecker, a gathering noise, and I wake as Romeo barricades the doors to the cross-filled crypt. He walks to where Juliet lies. Her hand twitches. He doesn’t notice. His grief rends him and he speaks of everlasting rest. He takes out the vial of poison, and it is unclear why he needed it as he already had a gun.

One by one those around me begin to suspect that in this version too, Juliet will not wake soon enough. They watch Romeo open the vial. Oh no! they shout. This is actually what they shout, the very words.

THE DAYS PASS BY LIKE CATTLE. They stare at you, drawclose ifthey think you will feed them. They smell of grass and sweat, and bring flies.

MARIÁNGEL SITS IN THE FLOWERBED AT THE BASE OF THE GARDEN WALL. She clears leaves from a spot in front of her. She pats the mud smooth, molds it into hills, takes up a stick and cuts tiny terraces as if hoping to grow tiny corn.

Now she stands, stomps the hills flat and from the street comes a blaring of car horns. I wait, know the next sound to come and it comes: the hoarse chorus of strays in the streets. My neighbors’ dogs answer, rage from rooftops, strain at chains in front yards. On bad days the dogs bark at every child, every maid, each car and bus and bike. Today one by one they fall quiet, and because it is a Sunday what comes next is not silence but vendors.

An hour ago it was men selling tanks of propane from the bed of a truck. The men called loon-like, echoing each other sadly through the neighborhood. Then a knife grinder, and the screech of his stone wheel against steel. Now fruit vendors. At least three, maybe four. They circle through the streets, their microphones rigged to speakers hanging from the tarpaulin roofs of their carts. Buenos pepinos! they shout, and the windows of my house begin to rattle. Buenos melones pepinos melones, hay limas hay piña hay plátanos de seda, pepinos plátanos naranjas, plátanos pepinos buenos plátanos.

More barking. The conquistadors brought dogs with them, wolfhounds and mastiffs bred for war, and found other kinds of dogs already here. One native species is hairless and thin and rat-tailed. It is blotched pinkish and gray in the winter as if diseased, and dark brown or black in the summer. In Tallán it is called viringo, in Quechua ccala, in Spanish among other possibilities calato. All of these words mean naked. The Chavín and Moche and Wari and Chimú put its likeness on their jewelry and ceramics. The Huanca offered its meat to their gods. The Incas kept them as pets, believed in their magical ability to calm stomach pain.

Mariángel scratches her face, leaves a stripe of mud down one cheek. Curanderos still prescribe drinking the dogs’ blood fresh to calm asthma, applying its saliva to cuts and its urine to freckles, embracing its warm cadaver to cure typhoid and pneumonia, the powdered ash of its skull as cure for gangrene, its brains raw to repair stroke damage, and one such dog wanders past my house from time to time. It fights often and poorly. It bleeds at the mouth, limps from corner to corner, sleeps in the shade of the Virgin. When I first moved here I thought it was the ugliest dog in the world. In fact it is not even the ugliest dog on my block.

I go to my daughter, wipe the mud from her face. Then there is movement at the back door. Fermín is waiting just inside. I welcome him into the yard, ask why he didn’t come yesterday with Casualidad as usual, ask if perhaps he had a soccer match, and if so, did it go well? Fermín stares at the ground. There is no point but I repeat the question. Fermín murmurs unintelligibly, and from the street a fruit vendor sings Plátanos piña pepinos, hay limas pepinos papayas, hay plátanos de seda.

I return to my chair. Fermín takes up the rake, tears at the lawn’s skin of dead leaves, and Mariángel begins another set of terraces. She finishes well before he does, takes hold of his pantleg as he passes by, points to the hose. He smiles, tells her that he cannot water yet, that it is not time, that first all the leaves must be gathered and borne away. Mariángel pulls herself to her feet, points at the hose again. Fermín shakes his head but she will not have it, squeals, and finally I suggest a new sequence for today: water this one flowerbed, finish with the leaves, water the rest of the yard.

Fermín first hesitates to let me know that this seems wrong to him. Mariángel watches as he covers the terraces with water, claps when they collapse and Fermín laughs, says they were the best terraces he has ever seen. I listen for the fruit vendors. Instead I hear an ice cream cart, the bicycle horn worked ceaselessly and the dogs start up again.

Now the newspaper. Page by page and as always there is nothing of use. Then Mariángel is at the radio, reaching with her muddy hands and I stretch, too late, the radio on, salsa flaring from the speakers. I turn it off and wipe the mud from the console. I explain to Mariángel that Piura is already so much louder than a city its size should be.

She starts to cry. I pick her up and she pushes at my face, cries louder. I surrender though I know I should not, turn the radio back on, dance with her tight against my chest, take her by the wrists and swing her back and forth.

The next song is merengue. I bring her again in close, and we spin madly. Finally I am sweaty and she is tired and Fermín is done. The lawn is a leafless lake. He stands at the spigot, coils the hose sadly: watering is his favorite activity. I offer him a sandwich and some orange juice, and he nods without looking up, waits on the patio, eats and drinks in silence, murmurs what is most likely thanks.

I give him twenty soles and he smiles at the tree. Mariángel and I walk him to the front door, thank him, wave goodbye. Mariángel waves goodbye to me as well, and I watch as she toddles toward her bedroom. Hay pepinos hay piña, pepinos y piña y plátanos. I wait for the vendor to call out that he has mangos as well, but of course he does not. Mango season does not begin for another month.

I start the bathwater and go to Mariángel’s room but she is not there. Now I hear splashing outside. I run to the patio. She stands in the corner of the flooded lawn, the water above her ankles. She is holding a doll not quite her own size—a plastic Inca princess, golden-skinned, bald and naked, her hair and clothing lost to a stove burner weeks ago.

Mariángel ignores me when I call to her. She ignores me again when I curse and step toward her, throws the doll as I lift her. She screams all the way to the bathroom, quiets when she sees the water running, laughs as she plays with the small bright water rings, screams again when I lift her from the tub, and I finish drenched and bitching. Then I remember to sing, Chabuca Granda, softly. At last Mariángel calms. I set her in the crib, bring her bottle. I watch until she closes her eyes, and return to the patio.

The sun strikes the water, the glare hits me full in the face, but there is something near the far wall, something shining, a tiny figure. And of course—the doll somehow upright in the shallow water. But in the instant before I knew this, it was something else: Punchao.

The doorbell rings. Whoever it is will leave soon enough if I make no sound but Sundays are bad days for doorbells. Punchao, Quechua for daybreak, the sun’s first ray striking in through Andean peaks. Punchao, God of Day. Punchao, a gold statue, the form of a ten-year-old boy but the size of Mariángel.

Again the doorbell and perhaps it is the man who collects empty bottles. He comes most Sundays and is at times insistent. Pachacutec expands the empire, revives the sun cult, claims a dream or vision: a shining child, Punchao. The statue’s sandals and circlet also gold. Sits within a silver pavilion. From the pavilion extends a cloud of gold medallions. When the sun strikes the medallions, the reflections are so bright that the figure can barely be seen.

Statue and pavilion rest on a cloth of iridescent feathers, this cloth on a golden disc six feet across, and the statue’s chest is hinged. Inside the chest cavity is a gold chalice. Inside the chalice are the rough-ground hearts of past emperors and again the motherfucking doorbell.

I go, look out the peephole, see no one. This means it is either children or Hugo, a deaf midget who holds a piece of paper saying, “I have nothing to eat, and one sol would be fine, or ten soles if you wish.” I open the door half an inch. The stoop is empty and I walk back to the patio.

For one hundred and thirty years each Inca seeks the Punchao’s guidance, claims to hear it speak. It is carried on a litter for all ceremonies. It sleeps in the company of princesses. Spread out before its altar are gold and silver vessels filled daily with maize and meat and chicha de jora and one morning the conquistadors arrive at the gates of the Coricancha. They push the Inca priests aside. They walk through the temple to the central garden: silver cornstalks, and the corn ears solid gold. Beyond is another room, the altar tended by mamaconas and here the cloud of medallions, the silver pavilion, Punchao.

The Spaniards post guards but somehow the statue is slipped out past them, borne first toward Chachapoyas and then to Vilcabamba. This final Inca fortress so distant, so nearly inaccessible, and the Spaniards come all the same. In the end it is Hurtado de Arbieto leading two-hundred fifty mounted soldiers, two thousand native auxiliaries. Battle at Coyao-chaca, battle at Huayna Pucará. Túpac Amaru and his retinue chased down into the Amazon basin. His son captured. His brothers, daughters, and now the Punchao is taken. Túpac Amaru and his wife still uncaught. Deeper and deeper into the jungle, they run and run but his wife, and a dog barks once, again, quiets.

Others who have not yet come but surely will: those seeking donations to help street-children return to school; to help the French Alliance arrange more and better concerts; to help feed the men and women at the Centro de Reposo San Juan de Dios, a lunatic asylum up the street whose acronym for unclear reasons is CREMPT. Some who come sell bittersweet candy at twice its true price. Some only hold out their hands.

The medallions are cut off, and the statue is shipped to the king as a gift for the Pope. It might still exist, hidden in some Vatican storeroom or palace vault. Hay limas hay papayas, plátanos piña naranjas, hay limas pepinos y plátanos. I dream the vendor on his three-wheeled cart, his water bottle in a dirty plastic bag suspended from the handlebars, the tarp stretched taut across the bamboo frame. The papayas here can grow to the size of watermelons. The sun now behind a cloud, the doll only a doll. My garden wall, smooth and white and fifteen feet tall, lined with broken glass and useless.

Behind the wall is a warehouse of some sort. It appears to be and perhaps is abandoned—it has been years since I’ve heard the sounds of storage. I suspect that the burglars come through or along it, climb ladders, lay empty rice sacks over the broken glass, vault across into my yard.

The cloud slips east. The shards of glass go bright with sunlight caught and colored. In truth the burglars do little damage: my few appliances were bought secondhand and cheap, there is a roving market where they can be recovered still more cheaply, and I do not keep much cash in the house. All the same it pleases me to think of them seeing me on the street, noting the color of my skin and imagining me rich, following me home and breaking in only to discover that Mariángel and I possess mainly books and plush toys.

Even if I wished to, I could not hate them as much as I hate the huaqeros. Like me the huaqeros read the desert as text, but they are searching for clues to a far simpler narrative. They come with shovels, iron rods, kerosene lamps. They dig into each dirt mound, prod at the sides of the tunnels. If they have read correctly the mound is a burial site and the rod slides cleanly into the cache. The archaeologists arrive days or months later. They preserve the scraps, study the fouled context, the fouling itself now part of history and how I would enjoy gathering the world’s huaqueros and beating them to death with a mattock, one by one.

At times there is little or nothing for them to sell. Farmhands search for fresh pasture near Laguna de los Cóndores, glance up at limestone cliffs, see a row of Chachapoya tombs. In a week Pilar will be murdered. They climb, secure themselves, draw their machetes and slash at the bundled remains. No precious metals, no gems. The farmhands shrug and climb back down. Later a museum will be built in Leymebamba to house the mutilated skeletons, textiles, quipus. I have not yet gone, hope to at some point, have not yet decided if I must.

At other times there is a great deal to be sold. Early 1987 outside Sipán, a slumping set of pyramids thought to be Chimú. A tunnel into the smallest pyramid advances down through two layers of guardians: one of canine skeletons, another of humans with their feet amputated to forestall abandon. The huaqeros hit a vein of ceramic pots once filled with food and drink for the dead. Then a first tomb, four skeletons covered with semiprecious jewelry.

Still deeper, and lateral tunnels branching. A layer of stonework, another of soil blended with cinnabar. Ernil Bernal, the lead huaqero, sees an unlikely textural variation in the tunnel wall. He prods at it, and the wall collapses, and he is buried in dirt, silver, gold.

His brother pulls him out. The others reinforce and extend, begin filling their sacks, are crazed by their sudden fortune. Night after night they return. But Sipán is too small for such a secret, and other rumors start as well—betrayal, kidnapping, murder. A week later the police raid the Bernal house and find a single sack of artifacts. The rest is gone, on its way to the private collections of rich men here and elsewhere.

Midnight. The police look through what they have found. They call an archaeologist, the director of a local museum. He has bronchitis, has not slept in three days. He tells them that whatever it is can wait until morning.

The officers say, No, no, we do not believe that it can. They describe the objects they hold and the archaeologist is out of bed and dressing. Arrives at the police station. Lifts the pieces, one and then another. Not Chimú but Moche, seventeen hundred years old, a discovery like none since the Conquest and impossible, the Spaniards and yanaconas so thorough in their scouring, impossible but here the pieces are.