Pacazo (12 page)

This is a remnant of a custom from before Pilar and I were engaged but after we had begun. She would be waiting, and I would come to stand beside her, unbearably, and she would smile. One day there I told her of the last great Inca hunt. Manco Inca and Pizarro allied for the moment, Quisquis routed and fleeing for Quito, and to celebrate Manco brings ten thousand warriors, sets them in a circle ten miles wide, and in the course of eight days they draw inward toward a single valley. The enclosure tightens and tightens until the warriors can join hands. Manco invites Pizarro and fifty other Spaniards to watch or join in, and they do so but mounted and in battle gear, afraid they are meant as prey.

Inside the circle are thousands of deer and hares, vizcachas and chinchillas, vicuñas and guanacos, foxes and pumas and bears. The Incas kill and skin the predators. They shear and release the vicuñas and guanacos. Of the rest they begin with the sick and weak and old, supplement these with healthy animals as needed for meat or fur, eleven thousand head of game in all, beat them to death and free the rest.

I told Pilar all this and she was intrigued or pretended to be. Then I asked her to marry me. She asked me why she should. I said that she probably shouldn’t. She said she knew and would regardless.

These deer are the size of goats and no more or less friendly than penned deer elsewhere. I feed them handfuls of random grass, which they seem to enjoy more than the algarrobo pods piled in the corners. The pods are being tested as fodder, and the seeds like so much in this world are indigestible, pass cleanly through the deer, are ready for screening and scarification. It is the best way to obtain them, says Reynaldo. Running the pods through grinders can damage the seeds, he says, and waiting for the pods to rot takes unreasonably long.

When the deer are satiated or bored I walk back to the office, read in silence. In early years I occasionally rereadchronicles of the conquistadors to make sure I had missed nothing. I disguised some of them in unrelated bookcovers, as Peruvians have long memories if only in certain respects. Reynaldo is not my only friend to own and wear a t-shirt bearing a filthy Spaniard in sixteenth-century armor, waves of stink emanating as he says, My culture for your gold?

Reynaldo does not wear this shirt to the university, of course, and Arantxa is among his closest friends, and before I read little that was recommended by others. Now I read little that is not. The next book on my desktop stack was brought to me for unclear reasons by Armando: the poems of Carlos Oquendo de Amat. Oquendo wrote only one book,
5 Metros de Poemas
. It is a single page that unfolds accordion-like to a length that I assume to be five meters, though I have not measured and do not intend to.

Arantxa’s secretary comes looking for me, and for a moment I think I am in for new and difficult questions, but Eugenia only wishes to remind me that my current visa extension expires in two weeks. She is very good about reminding me of these things. She has had four years of practice.

I should have begun residency paperwork as soon as Pilar and I were married. After her death, the clerks at Immigrations told me that I had waited too long. They said this sadly, as though wishing they could do something to help. Eugenia later told me that this was not wholly true, but by that point it was easier to apply for a regular work visa. Seven months ago I sent in my papers. I ask Eugenia how much longer I will have to wait.

- Not much longer, she says. Everything will be ready soon.

- How soon?

This is a question one must never ask most Peruvians, and before she can answer I tell her that it doesn’t matter, that I am grateful for her help. I gather my materials and head to the cafeteria for a hurried coffee. Reynaldo is there, asks me to join him. I order and sit down at his table. He is drinking an Inca Kola.

Inca Kola is the national soft drink of Peru. Nearly all Peruvians believe it is the perfect accompaniment for Chinese food, and for many other kinds of food as well. It is the color of urine and tastes like bubble gum.

His order is however only marginally worse than mine. Here in Piura most coffee is either instant or made from esencia. Esencia freshly prepared is what many would call strong coffee, but is not drunk as such, not here. Instead it is poured into tiny pitchers and left out to cool, to be mixed with hot water and sugar at some point hours or days later. I have tried to explain the unnecessarily unpleasant results of this system to my students, my colleagues, the men and women who work in so many of Piura’s restaurants. I have pointed out the high quality of the coffee grown in the highlands of this very region, the ease with which this coffee could be served properly here in town, and my students, my colleagues, the men and women of the restaurants, they all nod, and pass me the tiny pitcher.

I smooth the tablecloth with my hands and smile briefly. Only professors are allowed to sit at the tables with tablecloths—it is one of our several privileges. Reynaldo stares out at the desert, asks again what Berkeley was like when I was a student. I have told him many times that I was there a decade too late for the stories he hopes to hear. In the early Eighties we were all between one thing and another. We didn’t know whether to wear our hair long or short, so we wore it medium, and had medium-sized combs in our pockets. We took drugs when we could, but it was hard to know which drugs were the right ones, and we lived in fear of being wrong or perhaps it was only me.

- Free love! says Reynaldo.

He knows that if he says this I will tell him that no love is free, though some loves cost less than others.

Out the gates, and the street names near the university are mainly those of saints—Miguel, Felipe, Cristóbal, Ramón. Elsewhere in the city they have the names of trees or foreign countries. There are also sections where the streets are labeled by letter or number, and in the center they are named after departments: Cuzco, Ayacucho, Arequipa.

By department Peruvians mean what others mean when they say province, and by province they mean something like county; there is a rumor that soon departments will be called regions and no other change will be made. Departmental capitals often share the name of their department—again Cuzco, again Ayacucho and Arequipa—but this is not always the case. The department of Junín has a province called Junín whose capital is the city of Junín, but the departmental capital is Huancayo, which is the world capital of suicides caused by unrequited love.

In the park maids play with infants on blankets, take the infants up whenever dogs are seen. Junín the provincial capital was the site of the second-most-significant battle in the War of Independence, a late counterattack led by Suárez beating down Canterac’s royal troops. The city has since been of little importance to anyone who does not live in or very near it, but at least it has not been erased. There are towns nearby that have. Yungay was twenty thousand people in the Callejón de Huaylas, a valley that runs between the ice of the Cordillera Blanca and the dark shale of the Cordillera Negra. Ten miles southeast is El Huascarán: twenty-two thousand feet high, the tallest mountain in Peru.

May 31, 1970, mid-afternoon, and most of the town is home watching the opening match of the World Cup, Mexico against the Soviet Union, a dull tie but the first match ever broadcast in color. A few hundred children are instead attending a circus in the local stadium off to one side of town. There are flowers and small rodents painted on the children’s cheeks. There is cotton candy stuck in their hair. The older children have tied balloons around their wrists. Their baby brothers and sisters rub dirt in each others’ faces and smile at the trained bears insane in their cages.

Then the earthquake. When the ground is done shaking, Yungay is ruins: houses and stores collapsed, the Plaza de Armas split open, survivors stumbling into the streets. And they hear a sound. A roar. They turn.

The northwest face of El Huascarán, a chunk of rock and ice half a mile wide and more than a mile long, has broken off. The slide gathers speed, hits small lakes and reservoirs, adds their water and mud to its mass, is moving at more than a hundred miles an hour and this is what the people see: El Huascarán strange now to them, diminished, and below it the foothills beneath which they have ever lived, and leaping toward them a monstrous flood of ice and rock and mud. The children at the circus, they came running out of the stadium when the earthquake hit. They stand, their cheeks painted, their bright balloons, ice and mud and rock sweeping past and Yungay is gone from this earth.

Some adults survived as well—the few maids and parents at the circus, the few widows who had chosen that afternoon to visit the graveyard on the far side of town. The entire zone is now a national cemetery. The taller palms on the Plaza de Armas were buried not quite to their tops, and their fronds still somehow grow. The nation’s schools have earthquake drills yearly on the day.

There have of course been other earthquakes here in Peru, thousands, but none so lethal and only one as well known: the conquistadors built the Church of Santo Domingo directly on top of the Coricancha, and in 1950 an earthquake destroyed the church but left the temple foundation intact. Tourists love this and consider it symbolic. Most Peruvians learn of it in primary school and even at that age are unsure whether or not to be ambivalent.

In primary school I was taught to hide under my desk during earthquakes, and also during nuclear attacks. Doorways were a secondary option, and once an earthquake came while I was at the Fallash library. I stepped to the closest door, watched adults run in circles. The shelves tumbled. A man’s leg was broken, and a woman’s ribs. My picture was in the newspaper the next day.

At last home, and the only death now is a dustpan full of geckos on the kitchen counter. There is also a lack of noise. I find Mariángel asleep in her crib, and Casualidad in my bedroom sliding the curtains carefully open. She has not heard me enter, and when I speak she whirls and falls. I am not quick enough to catch her. She hits her head on the side of the bed, and there is a bit of blood.

I bring her a towel, and she tells me that there are geckos everywhere. I remind her that she does not have to kill them, that I do not want her to kill them, that I like them very much and want them in my house, alive.

- But the baby, she says.

By this she means that geckos are poisonous and evil, that they will climb onto the ceiling above the crib and drip venom onto Mariángel’s face. I do not know why she believes this, and have assured her many times that they have no reason or capability for doing so, that in fact they help by eating mosquitoes and flies. I have even told her that they bring good luck, though I have no proof of this. And she wants to believe me but cannot. She sees only the bulging yellow eyes, the heaving sides, the nearly transparent skin and the dark curl of entrails inside.

When the bleeding stops she goes to lie down on the couch. I serve myself a glass of papaya juice and the lunch she has prepared. It is a fine salad of avocado and tomato, and a plate of lomo saltado: strips of beef and potato and tomato and pepper sautéed. It is served with boiled white rice. Everything in this country is served with boiled white rice, and lomo saltado is one thing that can safely be eaten in most restaurants. So is roast guinea pig, which is tasty but unattractive on the plate. Most cooks do not remove the feet, which look like tiny human hands, or the head, which looks exactly as one would expect if one has had a guinea pig for a pet, except the mouth is open as if screaming.

Nearly all who come to Peru experience diarrhea for two or three weeks upon their arrival, regardless of what they eat. I was told repeatedly that this is not a concern. One set of beneficial microbial flora is simply being exchanged for another, I was told, and no given set of flora is better or worse than any other.

At the moment dessert is the only problem. It is cherry gelatin. Mariángel and I do not like gelatin of any flavor, and I have told Casualidad many times, but she forgets. Perhaps it is one of her favorite things. I have told her that she is welcome to buy it with the regular grocery money and make it for herself alone. I will have to tell her again but not today.

There is crying, Mariángel awake, and I go, lift her out and sing: Zambo Cavero, “Alma Traicionera.” She stops crying halfway through the first verse. I walk, living room entryway dining room patio yard. At the end of the chorus she puts her hands over my mouth though it is a very good song and I have not finished.

Cavero is a splendid singer and almost as fat as I am. I pretend to eat Mariángel’s hands and she laughs. She still has not spoken any proper words. Her first birthday is less than a month away and now Casualidad comes. Her head is bandaged, her eye clear. She offers to take Mariángel, and I say that she is welcome to rest for half an hour more instead, but first I need to know how old Fermín was when he first spoke clearly.

- Because of Mariángel?

- Yes.

- Ten months, or nearly so.

- And why did he stop?

- What do you mean?

I think uncharitable thoughts and she frowns, perhaps has sensed them.

There is a tremendous splattering of pacazo shit, white and gray and black on the sidewalk outside the library. I skirt it carefully, walking well out onto the grass on which one must not walk. I scan branches thoroughly but also quickly as I am late, and nearly trample Dr. Guardiola.

He is the Dean of Economics, is old and thin and always wears a hat. He has been here since the university’s founding thirty years ago, and in some ways he is the university, which he himself calls a cactus: surviving impossibly, flowering in absurdly bright colors. I ask if he has seen the pacazo, but he doesn’t hear. He takes me by the arm, asks if I wish to join him and several other professors for a prayer retreat over the weekend.

I explain to Dr. Guardiola that I am very busy this weekend, which is what I have explained to him every week since I arrived in Piura. As always he is disappointed and polite. Then I ask again if he has seen the pacazo. He says that he hasn’t, nods and backs away, says that he hopes I will be less busy next weekend, and never stops smiling.