Pacazo (11 page)

Hay limas pepinos melones hay manzanas. I shift in my chair, my own breath loud from my chest. The police lead the archaeologist to the site and word has spread: huaqeros swarm the pyramids. The police have machine guns. The huaqeros run, stop, turn back. The archaeologist watches and knows there is no time for proper channels. He must simply start digging.

I have not yet finished my coursework, lack the proper background, watch my colleagues devour the discovery and the police raid the Bernal house a second time. Ernil runs, is gunned down, or so the story is told. Smell of sewage, of jasmine, keen of a hawk that circles too high to be seen. Half of Sipán is camped around the site. The villagers claim all artifacts as ancestral inheritance. They claim Bernal as martyred saint. They threaten to kill the archaeologist if he continues.

The archaeologist knows this calculus. He hires the loudest villagers as guards. In the main chamber he finds another body, and beneath it another chamber, a copper-banded coffin, the royal tomb. A gold death mask. A gold headdress. Pectorals and necklaces of scarlet chaquiras and gold.

The doorbell rings and I twist, cough, and already the plan is failing: more villagers each day. One morning they surge, are barely driven back by tear gas. The archaeologist walks to the edge of the dig, cuts a hole in the barb-wire fence. He calls one of the villagers forward. He grabs the man by the lapels, drags him in through the hole, tells him to go get his inheritance.

The man does not move. The hundreds lean in toward them. Smell of dust and heat and the archaeologist takes hold of him again, drags him to the very pit. Puts a shovel in the man’s hands. Dares him to dig.

The man drops the shovel, steps back. The hundreds fall quiet, but soon they will begin stoning the archaeologist and his team as they arrive each day. Limas naranjas pepinos papayas, plátanos limas pepinos and of course a new museum is worth little when one’s village has no school and the roads are mainly unpaved. Broken glass glints at the top of the wall. I hear a slight sound, something soft brushing against something softer. I wait. Nothing more comes, and it was my imagination or else the curtains moving in the breeze of a fan, and now a flash of color in the tree.

It is a putilla, lovely bird, tiny bright point of red. I see them often on campus, always in pairs. I wait for this one’s mate to come. Nothing moves. The putilla rests on a low branch. It looks at me, then flies away.

The closest city to Sipán is Chiclayo: the city where Pilar was born and raised. From Piura it is an easy bus ride south. Two years ago she took me to meet her family. Her three brothers all teach English at local institutes, and during lunch that first day we discussed methodology and technique, but there was an oddness to their talk, a straining after sentences.

Pilar and her mother left for Mass, and the rest of us went to the living room—the father and I in overstuffed chairs, the three brothers on the couch in descending order of height. There it was made clear that an interrogation was forthcoming, that all would be made known and judgment rendered, but there had been pisco sours before lunch, and beer with lunch, and now there was whiskey. Before the first question had been clearly phrased, all five of us were asleep.

We woke when the women returned. The oldest brother then said, I hope, John, that everything is perfectly clear between us. I assured him that it was and the next morning we went to Sipán. The father drove slowly in their ancient sedan. Pilar sat beside him, me beside her, the mother and brothers mountained in the back seat.

At first it was absurd. The mother gasped at each piece. The brothers pulled at my elbows. But the work: the paired necklaces of goldplated copper, one of joyful faces and one of faces caught in death; the high priest’s crown and its owl, the wings spread wide; the earspools, deer of turquoise with antlers and hooves of gold; and over and through it all the degollador, the executioner, his fangs, degollar, to rip out someone’s throat.

Back to the car, and to the dig. The archaeologist himself at work. I send my letter of introduction in with a guard and the archaeologist does not come but lends us an assistant. We all walk together. Pilar and her family suffused with good pride and the owl, yes, another Moche executioner. I have since seen a ceramic pot bearing scenes of human sacrifice and the coming rain, the sacrifice causing the rain or else celebrating it, and the owl presiding, god of warriors, displaced later by condor and vulture but now in the night air before me and Jenny, her exclamation point, the owl and I open my eyes.

Silence. Broken glass, arrozeros, silence. Then plátanos piña pepinos, hay limas hay pepinos hay plátanos de seda. When the voice quiets I hear something from inside the house, not soft but sharp and flat, not curtains or my imagination so I go.

Mariángel is sitting on the floor beside a bookcase. It is not clear how she has gotten out of her crib without hurting herself, or why she has come here instead of seeking me. She is chewing on the corner of Basadre’s
Perú: Problema y Posibilidad.
Perhaps it is a matter of teething and this book is the perfect size.

The teethmarks would bother me more if the text had better weathered time. She yawns, was likely only feigning sleep before. I walk her back to her room, and lower the crib mattress to its final setting. I check her gums and see no swelling; I take her up, turn in slow circles and sing, Mercedes Sosa this time, “Si se calla el cantor.” When Mariángel appears wholly asleep I poke her to make sure, then lay her down, work the book out of her hands and a stuffed alpaca into them.

I gather the other books she has dislodged, put them back in place. Domingo Angulo, Rostworowski, Ginzburg, Pérez de Tudela and my father’s lie working: not a popular child, fatter and fatter each year but also stronger and stronger, not unagile, no longer afraid. I believe I did not lose another fight, and once or twice even sought them. My parents heard me tell other children of my ancestor the conquistador and said nothing. I think that at first they saw the lie as doing too much good and too little harm to correct, and surely my needs would wither.

Instead they grew, branched, became beautiful. In the Berkeley stacks it was no longer the Spaniards but their allies—Huanca, Cañari, Chachapoya. To this day there are regions in Peru that celebrate not the Incas but the local culture they destroyed, and there is a final book to put away, Prescott’s flawed classic. It was among the many my mother mailed down when I said I was staying. One box had a letter taped to the top, the house so empty now, but the flowers in the garden and the ducks by the lake, and sitting on the bookcase is the old rubber heel I found last week in the desert.

I do not know why it is here. It should not be here, should be boxed with the rest. There is no reason for me to have left it here but I cannot simply store it now: it has been too long since I did the right work.

For the moment Piura is silent. If Mariángel wakes before I am done I will not have the strength to sing her back to sleep. I get the key from its hook in the kitchen and go to the linen closet. I open the padlock, turn the knob, step forward as the stack of boxes tilts.

I ease the top box to the floor, bring the second one down, the third and fourth, spread them around the doorway. I lift the fifth, carry it to the center of the room. If I still had all I have found, I would need another closet, another padlock, but in the early months I took what appeared most salient to the police. They thanked me on each occasion, and smiled. I took them less and less over time. When they closed the investigation last month, I went to reclaim what I had given. They said they had no idea.

The oldest box first. I take its objects one after another. I hold and observe each for a moment, then set it on the floor. Slowly the grid is formed. Working down through the box in this way comes always to feel archaeological, the mattocks of my hands digging from one soil horizon to the next, but of course it is not, can never be, the artifacts’ stratigraphic context here not that of their proper events but of my finding them and therefore nearly useless.

For a time I gathered fewer artifacts than specimens. There were many labeled bags in my freezer: hair, bloody bandage, used toilet paper, a fingernail clipping found on a bar counter. A month ago my freezer failed as all things fail and the evidence turned to rot.

I am left with twigs broken at unlikely angles. Paper towels blotted with motor oil. Shreds of cloth, lengths of thread. Filthy combs and brushes. Wads of aluminum foil filled with dirt of unnatural colors. Bits of plastic that I cannot readily identify—three dozen from the first box alone.

The doorbell rings, rings, another box and another, through to the fifth, and in addition to the artifacts there are photographs. Shots of streaks of yellow paint on trees and fence posts and the sides of buildings. Shots of yellow taxis missing streaks of paint. Shots, often blurred, of men who in some way resemble the driver whose face I believe I remember.

Now, finally, the new heel. I hold it and close my eyes and ask impossible things of it: a superstition, stupid, and nothing comes. I look more closely. The rubber is hard and scarred, cracked and flaking. Small holes where nails once were. Bits of failed glue. The heel is worn thin on the outside, indicating that the wearer supenates. The rubber is darkest black deep in the cracks, indicating nothing at all.

I count across the floor. This is the ninth black rubber heel I have found. I place it in the farthest corner. I climb onto the table and scan the grid for pattern or path the way a police officer might, a detective or judge. I look for anything that might cohere or correspond to a truth from that night. For some remnant of the tissue that once connected anything to anything else.

And nothing. As always, as every time I have done this, once a month since Pilar’s death and every single time there is nothing. I close my eyes. The table creaks. Limas pepinos melones plátanos, hay manzanas y mangos but there is no vendor, I listen and there is no vendor.

I look again at the grid, stare until my eyes ache. The room laid out like this in squares, the colors shifting and now the floor is plots of pasture as seen from the air. Autumn or winter or spring; early morning or late afternoon. Cloudless sky, approach from the south. Oblique angle to the ground, shooting and looking for soilmark, cropmark, shadowmark, frostmark, and for a moment it is there, the pattern, it fades but then returns, and an intimation of something, something opening as the legs snap and the table collapses, throws me to the floor, the evidence scattered, twig and cloth and comb, the same goddamned hip as before and Mariángel screams from her crib.

THIS MORNING ARANTXA'S OFFICE SMELLS ONLY OF SWEAT AND TALCUM, and the talcum is visible, a faint blur in her cleavage. I hand her the exams I have prepared for the upcoming midterms. She drops them in a drawer, tells me to close the door and sit down, asks about the Pórticos Hotel.

I am tempted to ask for her sources and to argue for their epistemological instability, for the impossibility of uniting outside of time a fact and its documentation, of mapping a memory to the instantiation of its content, but the chair she has set out for me is unpadded and narrow and this is not unintentional. I explain about bruising. I exchange the chair for a wider one from the far side of her office and sit gently. Then I tell her three truths among dozens: the archaeologist’s idiocy, my boredom, a drink or two too many.

- Sooner or later, she says, the rector will find out, and you will be fired. I won’t be able to protect you. It will be out of my hands.

Arantxa is nearly always right, and her use of idiomatic expressions is in general impeccable. Impeccable: an odd word in English, but not in Spanish. Pecado is Spanish for sin. There must be some relation.

- And if you ever do it again, she says, I’ll fire you myself.

Arantxa does not threaten often or idly. I tell her that I will try to be more careful.

- It’s not a question of being careful. Why would you do a thing like that?

I tell her that I am not sure, and that it does not matter, as my story was more amusing than any of the archaeologist’s anecdotes. She asks if I wish to speak with a doctor or counselor or priest. I say that I have nothing against doctors or counselors or priests, and also no desire to speak to them. She says nothing. I stand. She shakes her head and I sit back down.

- Also, two weeks ago you gave an essay assignment that could be understood as an attack on Catholic doctrine and university principles.

- Yes. And given the students’ level of English, it was also far too long. Has your diarrhea cleared up?

- Please don’t do it again, she says.

- It was really more a case of lesson plan confusion than—

- Don’t do it again.

I thank her, say pointlessly that I need to get back to my office. She turns to her paperwork and I stand again and go. There are only twenty minutes before my next class, but here, within limits, if one is not at the lectern one is expected to be in one’s office, to be perpetually welcoming. Arantxa chastised me when I first attempted to block off specific hours for student appointments. I pointed out that it is only the relatively fixed positions of stars that allow us to navigate, however poorly. She began a sentence, smiled and walked away. I have since learned what she nearly said: assigning specific hours has no bearing whatsoever on what time students arrive.

My students come often and rarely wish to discuss class. They come to ask for donations to help their department buy the flower arrangements they wish to present to the Virgin on the days such things are done. They ask me to aid with the transcription and translation of the songs on the tapes their cousins send them from Los Angeles or Trenton. They ask for my assistance in filling out applications for scholarships and graduate study in the United States or Europe, and do not understand how little I can help, and are frequently successful in spite of me.

To fill the hours when no student happens to come, I first put my name on the waiting list to use the one computer in our office that is connected to the internet. Then I write quizzes and take-home exercises. I correct essays and read the newspaper. I imagine ways to enrich the Resource Bank, and once a week I visit the deer pen.