Pacazo (18 page)

- The fine will be one hundred dollars, he says.

So this is now the starting point.

- I am so sorry, I say, but one hundred dollars is far too much. I could perhaps pay twenty.

- Twenty? Twenty is unreasonable, sir. It is insulting. You must pay the fine, and the fine is one hundred dollars. Though we could also possibly accept ninety.

It takes ten minutes for us to meet at sixty-eight. The men thank me for visiting Ecuador, and ask me to return soon, to stay longer next time, to enjoy their country, for it is a marvelous country, and they are right, and I say so.

Another colectivo, and this one has no windows, and though it is still very hot there is enough wind to make me pleased that I remembered to bring a sweater. It is a fine wool sweater, blue and thick, and living in Piura I have no need of it except for night trips back from Ecuador.

Tumbes, the bus station, the lines. Then the tiny damp dark bathroom, the fetid hole, footprints worn into the cement on either side. I am there much longer than I mean to be, am lightheaded coming out as the motor of the one waiting bus is started. Perhaps the fish in the ceviche was less than fresh. I pull myself on and the bus sways toward me. I push through, and find a small dark man pretending to be asleep in my window seat.

The overhead rack is full of bags. I stuff my knapsack in on top of them, and tap the man on the shoulder as lightly as I am able under the circumstances.

- It was you, wasn’t it, I say.

I say this only because it seems a likely means of success—this man’s ears protrude sharply from his head.

- What?

- If I’m not mistaken, you’re in my seat.

He does not contest this, and I am happy for him. He stands and moves so as not to impede my entrance. His shirt is thin and his sandals are old. One of his ankles is swollen oddly, bulging above the joint.

The lights are dimmed as I sit down; the bus lurches and turns and the man lands mostly in my lap. I pretend this has not happened. He apologizes, lifts and slides and stares out the far window.

We stop briefly in front of the Customs office but are waved through uninspected, and it does not take long for the driver to turn on the music: salsa, fine bus music. If Mariángel were here, she and I would dance in place. On through the dark. Out the window is the Southern Cross, and its lowest star can almost not be seen, but the constellation points in the direction we are heading. Perhaps this will help.

The ocean appears but cannot be heard, not with the music, not with the noise of the motor. Máncora. Perhaps sleep, and now Talara, the oil wells lit a blurry brown. The bus stops wherever people wait, and the aisle fills. At some point the salsa becomes merengue, even better, smoother, kinder—merengue is a sort of love—but in Peru the waxing crescent moon is a malevolent smile. I suspect this is not widely known.

A light cramp begins at the base of my stomach, fades, returns and fades again. My neighbor’s head begins to bob. At last he gives in, slumps, his head resting against my shoulder. For a time I attempt again to sleep, my cheek against the top of the man’s head, but it does not quite work, bruises my cheekbone and gums. I straighten and watch him as well as one can watch something so close to one’s eyes. One magnificent ear. His mouth, slightly open. His face twitches, he smiles and frowns in his sleep. I do not wish to know his dreams.

Again the cramp and fading. My neighbor starts to drool, and I consider waking him. The drooling continues, intensifies, and there is a voice, a woman’s voice, from the back of the bus. It is not clear what she is saying. I shrug to wake my neighbor.

- I am not your pillow, I say, but I say this kindly.

The man blinks and nods and shifts away. The cramp is now somewhere between present and not-present, seems to be biding time. The woman’s voice is slightly louder. We are not far from Sullana, and Sullana is not far from Piura—I will be home by three in the morning if all goes well, if the bus does not miss a turn and slide off the highway and come to rest not quite at its tipping point, not quite killing all of us.

Unfortunately my neighbor appears to be unnerved by the woman’s words or voice. Maybe he knows her, or someone like her. She goes quiet for a time, then starts up again. My neighbor takes out a knife and opens it. It has a fine blade.

The voice silences again. The man puts away his knife. The woman shrieks, he brings the knife back out, and the shrieking lessens to murmuring as if this were a kind of game. There is also something that might be begging, though it is not easy to hear, not with the motor and merengue and cramps that come in series. My neighbor stands, and if he goes there will be blood, and police, and I will not see Mariángel for many, many hours.

- I wouldn’t, I say. What if he’s got a gun? He could be a policeman, you know. Your knife is a good one, but you’d never get close enough to use it.

He considers, sits back down and fidgets. He checks his watch, fidgets some more. He curses and stands and I catch his arm.

- You’ll just get yourself in trouble. A few more minutes and we’re in Sullana. Maybe one of them will get off there.

I let go, shake my head, turn to look out the window, clutch at my stomach and am fortunate: the woman has gone quiet. My neighbor sits down and leans back. The knife is still open in his hand.

Dim light filters in: Sullana, its bus station, cement and dust. Passengers exit and enter. My neighbor and I, we wait. He appears to be holding his breath. A woman slides past us and off the bus, a woman with dyed-blonde hair, and she looks like the sort of woman who might become upset late at night on a bus and begin to shriek.

When she is gone the door closes and the bus pulls out of the parking lot.

- You see? I say. It’s better this way.

My neighbor closes his eyes. He looks very tired, and somewhat disappointed. Then we are unfortunate, the woman’s voice again, murmuring and moaning. My neighbor looks at me. I shrug and look away. And a thought: perhaps this was how it started for Pilar.

A scream, more begging, and I am up and grab for my neighbor’s knife but he holds it away from me, pushes at my chest, brings the blade to my throat, thin and cold against my skin.

- What the fuck are you doing? he says.

- I was wrong, I say. If you want him, go and get him. But if you do not, give the knife to me and I will take care of it.

He tells me to sit calmly back, and I do. He stands and limps down the aisle. He stops near the back, and I wait for the glint of metal, the sound of the knife plunging home not real but imagined and it will stay with me for months of bad nights but this is not what happens. The man has turned to the seat on the other side of the aisle. He appears to be chatting, and puts his knife away.

Then there are sirens and lights. The bus pulls off the highway and the motor and music die. The door opens and three customs officers board: apparently they have changed their mind about us. I take my knapsack and follow other passengers off the bus. My passport is checked, my knapsack searched.

I look up at the bus windows, and behind them are shadows, figures moving along the aisle, and now there is a scream. I wait for the officers to pull someone out onto the ground—the man, the woman, someone else. In the end only the officers themselves descend.

The stomach cramps are gone. Back in my seat I wait for my neighbor to reappear, but he does not. I close my eyes. As the motor starts I feel someone sit carefully beside me. I open my eyes. This man is carrying a briefcase, has a beard and glasses, is smiling triumphantly. He could surely tell me the story but I do not want to know. I feel that if I say anything he will start laughing, and I will not be responsible for that.

To escape from him I think of Pilar, that first trip to a beach, the day of the photograph on the flyer. Yacila is not far from Colán, and the water is most often too cold for stingrays but warm enough for swimming. There was an old woman in a long black dress waist-deep in the surf, netting sand lice; there were men digging under their stranded fishing boats, pushing logs beneath, rolling the boats forward into the waves; there were children paddling rafts beyond the break, and there was also a stingray, in spite of all we had been promised there was a stingray, and I learned too late the importance of scuffing one’s feet. Someone brought boiling water. Pilar put her mouth to the wound, sucked and spat for twenty minutes. The pain filled and erased me.

At the El Dorado station in Piura I grab my knapsack and push forward. Waiting outside are taxis and mototaxis and constant honking. I take the largest taxi though the driver asks twice the standard fare. He believes I am new to Piura and know nothing of the fares and distances here, and tonight I will let him persist in this belief.

We come to the Virgin, my street, my house. It is still very hot, and there is no wind, and my sweater has become a ridiculous thing. For some reason the dogs are quiet and the streetlight has not yet been repaired and these things are helpful but I think of tomorrow, of the following days, of what is waiting. Perhaps in Machala I should have taken a swim, and headed due west, and kept swimming.

I START FOR THE GATE, do not wish to buy candy but must and will and in two of three classes today I had to teach functional language. The sets were for restaurants and business meetings respectively. Many of the phrases involved are irrational and incoherent and I hate them.
Now, then.
Now? Then?

Because today is Criolla Song Day, a wooden platform was raised at the center of campus and filled with musicians. They played tondero and marinera, landó and festejo, all of it marvelous but I do not want it coming through my window as I teach. Because today is also Halloween, I expected my students to be giddy and loud and oddly dressed, to slip through my hands like eels. Instead they were magnificent.

True criolla means only a guitar and a cajón and at least one voice; occasionally there are also spoons and the jaw of a burro. The lyrics are patriotic, nostalgic, enamored, defiant, and what saved me today was my students’ overflowing joy at pretending to be what they are not. In my Intermediate class we drilled the hateful phrases chorally and individually, and then I assigned the roles: customer and manager and waiter or waitress. They wrote and memorized their lines, and recited them for me, five minutes scheduled per group but they went to ten and fifteen. They delighted in improvisation and would have continued for hours if I’d let them, serving each other plates of delicious imaginary fried chicken. They laughed at their mistakes and cheered each idiom well used, each cleverness, each deft performance. It was heartrending, yes, and restorative.

To the gate and out and through the robed and bearded Germans standing unhappily in front of the Texaco station. It pleases me to see them unhappy but the sun has set so there is no time to taunt. Across the Panamericana and into a corner store. The closest thing left to candy is individually wrapped Halls throat lozenges. There are half a dozen stores such as this nearby and in all of them this will be the case. I ask the man to load all that he has into plastic bags. He points me to a chair and begins counting.

I slump, and rest my head against the wall. Criolla Song Day, Halloween, the final rounds of the tondero and marinera dance competitions at Club Grau, All Saints’ Day, the Day of the Dead, and Mariángel’s birthday—all this in three days. One consolation is that each event is an opportunity to renew the search, and the card still hangs from my headboard but now not unproblematically: what if Sarita Colonia located and broke the taxista and I never found out?

What I have been told, and it may very well be true: her father was a carpenter, and she was born in a town called Belén, which is Spanish for Bethlehem. The shopkeeper is still at work counting lozenges and in the dust on his counter I rewrite less simply the prayer I do not pray, that instead Sarita deliver him to me, or that once having broken him she send me signs. There are still the matters of identity and assurance, the questions of how one might know wholly and know that one knows wholly. New and still longer sentences might be required but I am out of counter and dust and my ideas are not yet clear.

The bags of Halls at last ready, I pay and step outside and am assaulted: the streets are now full of unaccompanied children, most of them in unidentifiable costumes, and perhaps there is not a problem here with madmen who slip razors into apples, who dust candy corn with rat poison. Perhaps the insane—and there are many, riding buses, driving taxis, in CREMPT and shouting on the corners—perhaps each year on this day they all go suddenly benign.

I am not the only one under attack. The children demand candy of all passers-by, and all cars stopped at stop signs, and all drunks collapsed in alleys. One must give them the candy they ask for or they will say, Do not be evil.

They will not be smiling as they say this. Also, these children do not shout Trick or Treat! Instead they shout Halloween! I fight through them to my house and promise that their candy will soon be ready and slam the door in their ambiguously painted faces. I take up my daughter and hold her. I thank Casualidad for her good work today and every day, escort her to the entry, wish her a safe trip home.

It occurs to me that she has never told me where in Piura she lives, and I have never asked. Her sister lives in Catacaos, a small town ten minutes to the southwest though it cannot be reached in that amount of time, and I have the sister’s phone number written somewhere. I eat the dinner left ready on the table, bite after slow bite until the pounding and screaming can no longer be ignored. Then I put Mariángel in the new and elaborate baby carrier my mother sent early as part of a package for her birthday. It is an improvement on her shrinking sling, though I have not yet learned the purpose of all the straps.

It appears that Mariángel loves Halloween, or perhaps she loves only the spinning each time I turn to the door. In spite of the quantities I purchased it is not long before my Halls are gone, agotado, the same word one uses to express exhaustion, and there are only a few hours of third-round dancing left to be seen at Club Grau. I lock my front door, shift Mariángel around to my chest, fight through the children in the street and flag down a taxi near the park. The streetlights here are unbroken and shine just bright enough to show that the matacojudo trees are at last in bloom.