Pacazo (19 page)

The taxista is an excessively tall man. He hunches over the steering wheel, his head almost touching the windshield, and it is soon clear that he has only recently arrived in Piura: he has never heard of Club Grau, and asks what I am willing to pay to get there. The night smells of sugar and sweat. At Sánchez Cerro I tell him to continue straight ahead, then remember my plan and direct us first east.

Each year Boby’s hosts a Halloween party—black walls, blood-red light, all the draught beer one can drink for fifty soles. As regards that beer there is only one man serving from beside a single keg, and I am not unhappy to be unwelcome though there is a contest as well, with a plane ticket to New York as top prize for best costume. Reynaldo spends weeks designing clothes and appendages that will enable him to impersonate an alien from the year’s most popular science fiction movie. The precise alien involved is often a secret. He invests unreasonable sums in his materials, and loses annually to an engineering student from Trujillo who entered the university nine years ago and is at least three years from graduation.

Second prize in the contest is always an electric sandwich maker. Reynaldo has given me two. At some point the student will either graduate or be expelled, will move back to Trujillo, and then, Reynaldo says, the ticket to New York shall be his.

I ask the driver to work slowly up the block and back along it. I watch the costumed revelers that arrive and those that leave and those that are spilled in the parking lot. There is no Almagro in view tonight, no Soto or Orellana or Pizarro, no wooden swords whatsoever. This is surely for the best, and was my costume ever once correctly guessed by anyone holding a bowl of candy and leaning out into the light of his or her own front porch? It was not. Not even the second of the two consecutive years I wore precisely the same costume, with Pizarro’s initials written as a hint below the blurring coat of arms on my cardboard shield, not even when I held that shield up to the light and said I’m the same as last year! The men and women nodded and rubbed their chins and said, Sir Galahad? Then they said, King Arthur? Then they said, A robot? and gave up and smiled a little when I told them again and gave me less candy than they otherwise might have, and immediately gave me more, worried I would think they had stinted me because of my size, and immediately wished that for my own good they had stinted me because of my size.

And now I tell the driver that I have made a mistake, that this is not where I wish to be, that I will happily pay twice the fare we agreed upon. He shrugs and we pull away. I wonder what happened to all that armor. I would be unsurprised if my mother threw it out after my father’s death, and unsurprised if she did not, and as my father fell he must have landed on one of my old costumes: he had flecks of silver paint on his face when my mother found him. She said that she’d run upstairs to call the ambulance and then back downstairs to hold him and knew there was no point to an ambulance though his body was still warm. She sat on the damp cement floor and cried and took his head in her lap and cried and traced his face with her hands and cried and there were flecks of silver on her fingertips now and she looked, and there they were, tiny points of light scattered across his face, I remember her telling me this, am almost sure I remember.

There are hundreds of other spectators like Mariángel and me, so little right to be here, though we have been invited, we have all been invited. The small coliseum stepped in cement is full, but in Peru there is always room for one more, I have found, even one of my proportions. There are small twinkling lights strung across the open space above us; they are mostly red and green though Christmas is still two months away.

There is also gold and silver bunting, and the spectators have sorted themselves according to the city from which they come: Sullana, Chiclayo, Trujillo, even Lima. They all have cowbells and horns and tambourines. The noise as they cheer for their dancers is a gleeful abyss.

Dozens of vendors make their way through us. I request juice for Mariángel from one, a beer from another, a chicken sandwich from a third. I test the sandwich before paying for it. Elsewhere, uncommon meats are said to taste like chicken. Here, every so often the chicken will taste like fish. It is a question, I believe, of excess fishmeal in the feed, and can likewise affect eggs and anything made from them: once a lemon meringue pie that tasted of lemons and vanilla and sugar and day-old herring.

When we have eaten I begin a slow round. I look as carefully as I am able, and there are a hundred faces that are so nearly right. I also see many of my colleagues, and wave to each.

Mariángel pulls at my beard and the fifteen-to-eighteen-year-old tondero dancers begin as we retake our seats. The youngest dancers danced hours ago, and I am sorry to have missed them. Beside us sits one perhaps five years old, her mascara streaming from her eyes as she screams at her father that she is not at all tired and does not want to go home.

The dress for tondero is simple. Both the boys and the girls are barefoot. The boys are in loose white trousers tied with rope at the waist, loose white shirts and wide straw hats. The girls are also mostly in white, knee-length dresses with bits of color here and there. Some bear clay pots on their heads. I have never seen one fall.

The music begins, minor-toned, a military band filling space with horns and drums. The dancers start onto the floor, one pair after another until all six pairs are weaving a slow circle around the edge of the coliseum. As they draw close their mothers stand and block my view, cameras and cowbells and shouting and the only way to make them sit down is to throw relatively heavy objects.

There are important differences between tondero and marinera, and after four years of student essays and Club Grau competitions I know almost all of them. Mariángel struggles at my chest, and I turn her to face outward. The word tondero is not Spanish or Quechua but Malgache. And the three-part dance, glosa and canto and fuga, it is modeled on the movement of chickens. As Claudia wrote in as essay last semester, “The dance figures the wedding of the cock and hen; he chases and measures her until he is able to catch her by the neck.”

The dancers have taken their positions and the dance begins. Like the dress it is simple: all smile and hip, all beseech and coquette. The boys wave vast handkerchiefs and sweep the ground with their hats, inviting the girls to notice. The girls have their own handkerchiefs, equally vast, dipping and twirling. They lift their hemlines ever so slightly, mark the rhythm with their hips, scrape the outside of one foot back and forth across the ground, and this same movement, I have seen it in nearby villages, when a man or woman is embarrassed, or wishes to appear so.

The boys dance bent at the waist, spinning around their partners, hoping to catch their eyes, and the girls flee them, but slowly, slowly. Their gazes meet and fall away. They advance toward one another and retreat, her skirt lifted still higher, her bare ankles blurred in the dance, the handkerchiefs held aloft. A circle is made, him searching for the encounter, her keeping it not quite at bay. Both rasp the ground with their feet too quickly to be seen, and they spin together, spin tighter, gather into one another as the final drumbeat echoes off our sweaty faces.

That is only the first half of the dance. Mariángel holds my thumbs as if flying a plane. A drumroll ripples, rises and falls, and everything happens again, still faster or so it seems. I watch until the music ends and the cheering bears down on me, cuts at my side, takes my breath. When it calms there is a time of waiting. The winner is announced, and mothers rise up to block my view. I buy another chicken sandwich.

It is time now for marinera. Unless I am careful all the women turn into Pilar. She danced every year at this competition and never won or placed. It was here that I saw her for the first time though she was at that moment my student, three months in my classroom day after day and each day I had failed to see her. I watched as she danced, and she was too brusque for marinera, and still I could not look away. She would have been better dancing tondero. Did no one think to tell her? And when she came to class the following Monday—her pronunciation as always indecipherable, her random use of the past and present and future, her insistence on the continuous forms as if there were no other options, her avoidance of modal verbs as if there were something to fear in could and would and should and might and will—now I could see her, because I had seen her dance, and this is unforgivable.

The pacazo shat on my head and my students sat only in the farthest rows, all but Pilar, and yes, marinera is more strictly structured than tondero, more urban, prettier and less joyous. The dancers move straight-backed, smiling but formal. The night Mariángel was born, the nurse took her away to clean her, and the doctor told Pilar to rest; I slept for an hour on a bench in the lobby, woke and went to the viewing room, and Pilar was already there, had dragged herself along the floor from the recovery room, calling to no one, trailing blood, had pulled herself up to the rail to watch Mariángel sleep, and how could I not then have known?

The music progresses minor to major to minor. The women wear vastly colorful dresses, sapphire and teal and fuchsia with gold and silver braiding. The men are in something not quite like tuxedos, and I turn for a scan of those nearest. Nothing. Those slightly farther away, and still nothing. At the edge of the next circle sit the mayor and his wife. The mansion he is building with municipal funds meant for sewer systems and law enforcement is almost finished, or so I have heard. Last year he danced with his wife during the final evening’s intermission, and he is a fine dancer, as is she.

I see a young woman sitting thirty yards to my right, and I am uncertain, then sure, then uncertain again. I believe she is the putilla, the woman from the Pórticos Hotel. Brown hair neither long nor short and yes it must be her—the odd posed smile, and the slip.

What the movement of chickens is to tondero, the movement of Peruvian pace horses is to marinera. These are horses that move in ways I have not seen elsewhere: no bounce or surge but pure smooth forward movement. They seem docile until ridden and are then exuberant, and flick their hooves to the side with impossible speed, this motion the result of searing sands and four hundred years of careful breeding.

The dance builds, seduction and love, the smiles never faltering, the bodies held erect, all color all movement all grace, and the final flourish. The putilla—but she is not a putilla now, is wearing tan jeans, a cream-colored shirt, a brown jacket. I close my eyes and have it: she is a chilalo. These are the precise colors, and perhaps in the future she will be something else again. She stands and stretches. Her jacket is scuffed at the elbows, the colors faded in spots. She turns and looks at or near me but does not see me. If she saw me she would remember, and laugh.

She stretches again, longer, the position held. I smell perfume but it cannot be hers at this distance. She threads her way down through the crowd, turns at the gates and is gone.

Chilalos come often to my back yard, alight in my almond tree and sing poorly for hours. They screech, it is a fact, when they think they are singing. And there is a phrase: morir como un chilalo. To die like a chilalo, yes. It is believed that they are so nervous that if you were to catch one, to take it in your hand, its heart would stop from fright.

Mariángel begins to cry, wants simply to be home and I agree. I beg the pardon of everyone on my way down through the stands. I brush their shoulders and they turn but are too surprised to say anything—here my bulk is astonishing, even to people who know me well.

Past the mayor and his wife, the vendors, past dancers still waiting their turn, and these are the oldest ones, beyond the age for such things. Their make-up cannot hide what time has done to them. Perhaps they have been dancing since they could walk and still have never made the winner’s podium. I wish them well. They know the odds, and still they hope. How could that be anything but beautiful? I smile as I edge past, a smile for each of them, then out through the gates.

There is no one else at the taxi stand. I wait, watch, finally nod to a driver. It is a fast trip home, the streets nearly empty of children. I see only a skeleton standing on a corner and a ghoul hunched in an alley.

Just inside my front door there are several Halls scattered on the floor. I sing to Mariángel, set her in her crib, gather the lozenges and go to the back patio. The almond tree is nearly barren. There is a lechuza, silent and watching. I eat the lozenges, holding them at the back of my mouth, one after another until my throat is numb.

Saturday morning is not a comfortable time. Casualidad is disoriented, and bumps into furniture with some regularity. I ask how she is feeling, and she smiles but does not reply. I tell her she is welcome to take the day off. She nods, turns toward the kitchen and walks straight into the doorjamb.

I convince her to lie down for a moment, and have just gotten her comfortable on the couch when Mariángel wakes crying. She does not want her juice, and my singing, four straight splendid Susana Baca songs, has no effect. I put her in the carrier and twirl around the living room until I am dizzy. This also has no effect.

I check, and yes, there is swelling at the back of her gums. I find the necessary cream, daub and rub as indicated, and she bites me, draws blood, quiets slightly. It is time for San Teodoro. Casualidad is still asleep so we write her a note. Then out and past the Virgin in her case, turning and along the warehouse from which the burglars occasionally come, and also the rats that breed and breed. Rats do not see well in bright light or so it seems: more than once they have run from the patio into the house and straight toward where I stood in the kitchen. When this occurs, if I remain still they pass close alongside, and it requires no great effort to kick them against the wall and beat them to death with a skillet. Even when I miss, which is often, they are not hard to track down, as once indoors they most often run along the edge of the closest wall, guided unluckily by their whiskers.