Pacazo (4 page)

The surviving Spaniards regroup on a hillock and build camp. A sharp sound, metal striking stone, and I sit up. Nothing more comes. I settle back into the crater. A hospital room, a beautiful brunette flatlining, and a much older woman crying into a handkerchief. The hillock, surrounded. Half the Spaniards are wounded. I close my eyes and they know they will die in the morning. No one bothers to unsaddle the horses, and no one sleeps. I pick at the scabs on my forehead. My mother asks me to stop. Then a new sound. The Spaniards listen, unbelieving, but yes: a trumpet.

Almagro and thirty cavalry, says the narrator, sent ahead by Pizarro not to rescue Soto but to slow him down. The trumpeter in question is Pedro de Alconchel. He is not in fact calling to Soto, is unaware of the vanguard’s position, means only to halt his own party for the night. Soto’s trumpeter answers from the hillock. This is Juan de Segovia, says the narrator. It takes me a moment, but yes, of course yes, a form of my own name. I look back at my parents. My mother, expressionless. My father stares at his hands.

Soto and Almagro embrace. At dawn the Spaniards mount. The Incas stare. The Spaniards set their lances. The Incas whisper to one another. The Spaniards attack, and the warriors who hold their ground are ridden down, and those who run are saved by the fog that comes to hide them.

I open my eyes. A funeral, a chase, men beaten with bouquets. The battle is done and blood trickles bright down the side of Soto’s face. I twitch, shift in the crater, and my father clears his throat, tells me that conquistador blood runs in my veins.

It is not the kind of thing I would ever have imagined him saying. I ask him to repeat it and he nods. Juan de Segovia? he says. Your ancestor. We named you after him.

Unfeasible—my luck has never been that good—but needed. My mother will not look away from the set. My father, too, again focused on the program. I get up, sit on the couch between them, watch as the Spaniards take Cuzco and replace the Inca empire with their own. Neither of the trumpeters is ever mentioned again.

The beautiful blonde woman is now asleep in bed. The handsome man opens one eye, looks over at her, draws back the covers. To the best of anyone’s knowledge Juan de Segovia died before fathering any children, is thus the ancestor of no one and Mariángel wakes crying. She pauses for breath and I wait. She cries again and I go, find her arm caught between the mattress and the side of her crib. I free her, calm her, hold her until she sleeps. Then I go to the bathroom and masturbate to a memory of the woman and her knife.

Back to the couch. Find the remote, flick through the possibilities, stop at an old movie. Cantinflas rides his motorcycle in tight circles, spins to face backward, stands on the seat, on the handlebars, anything to impress the captain and win a spot on the motorized unit.

I have seen this movie before, do not remember what it is called, and this morning on my way to work I saw five people riding a single motorcycle. A baby about Mariángel’s age was sitting on the gas tank, a middle-aged man was steering, and behind him were a middle-aged woman, a thin young girl, and a boy about five years old. It was not a large motorcycle, but the people looked happy. I flip through the other channels. When I hear the bell of the garbage truck, and the grunts of the workers as they sling bags into the air, it will be time to go to bed.

MY PATIO CHAIRS ARE VAST, hemp and rebar, delightful, and there are small birds in my almond tree. The birds are mainly brown. I have seen them many times before but do not know what they are called.

Mariángel sits on the tiled floor beside me. She stares up at the awning, then out at the birds, points as they all take sudden flight. She looks at me to make sure I saw them too and I lift her onto my lap, say that of course I saw, that the birds were outstanding, and already they are back in the tree. Mariángel wriggles away, takes a seat again on the floor.

For a time I watch the birds and watch my daughter watch them. I love the attention she pays them, but do not understand the nature of the noises she makes—she is imitating or calling to them, or possibly giving orders. Then I take up the newspaper.

Most of the papers here devote themselves to sports and extraterrestrials and nearly naked women. Their headlines are scandalous, or would be if the editors were not so inventive. Ass, tits, pussy: new words for them are created each week and abandoned the next for other, newer words.

El Tiempo
should in theory be more useful. It is Piura’s non-tabloid newspaper, named for time and tense, yes, and also for weather. Today there are stories about the earthquake and the plane crash, a burglary at a paint store, a protest against rising gasoline prices. First page to last, and nothing. The photographs now, all faces foreground and background. Nothing. A third time to look for code-shift or tic, for any gap showing through to the unwritten or unpublished or both, and this is useless, is driving nails with a screwdriver, and of course again nothing, like yesterday, like all other days.

I am or was an above-average carpenter. Many people find this surprising.

Mariángel has made her way to the tree, sits in the dead leaves at the base of the trunk. She stares up and speaks to the birds, tips over backwards, rights herself slowly. The birds ignore her, flit to the top of the wall as Casualidad comes out the back door bearing a basket of laundry, return to the branches when she turns for the lavadero.

Casualidad sets some of the clothes to soak in the new galvanized tub at her feet. The rest she scrubs piece by piece and most often her eye patch is beige but today it is blue. She hums as she scrubs, a single note, sharpening and flattening from time to time but never enough to reach the next note up or down. She knows the names of most species of birds, hates all of them equally, chases them from the yard unless I am present and watching, and what little I know is inexplicable: thirty years ago a hummingbird flew straight into her face, and its beak plunged into her eye, almost deep enough to touch her brain.

I have never otherwise heard of a hummingbird doing such a thing, but I have no reason to doubt what she has told me, and her real name is not Casualidad. It is Pilar. The day I hired her away from the university cleaning staff, I told her that I needed something else to call her as my wife’s name was the same and I wished to avoid confusion. She said, Qué casualidad. I smiled and thanked her—in addition to Lady Diana I have had students named Conception and Welcome and Hitler, so Coincidence did not seem too strange a name. Then a few weeks ago her son, Fermín, who comes twice a month to tend the yard, asked why I called her that. She said that it made no difference and told him to watch where he was watering. For several days I tried calling her Pilar, but it was an impossible thing.

Fermín is twelve but looks ten except for his gaze. Casualidad lifts the patch to wash the sweat from her face, and I catch a glimpse: the iris and pupil are covered by a layer of tissue that glows opalescent. She turns off the water and dries her hands on her apron. I call to her, ask if she knows what these small brown birds are called.

- Arrozeros, she says. If they could choose, they would eat nothing but rice. They will even come into the kitchen if you leave a bowl uncovered. It is a mistake I will never make again.

I tell her that there is nothing to worry about, and ask about her meeting with Fermín’s teacher.

- It is not a serious problem, she says. Only that he will not speak in class.

In most senses she is the best maid I have ever had, though lately she is moving more slowly, and yesterday I found four clean plates stacked in the refrigerator. When I ask, which is not often, she says that she is happy working for me, would not want to work for anyone else. Reynaldo says that I pay her too much, that it will make her complacent and greedy. I do not know what to think about that. I also do not know how to repay her for the first months after Pilar’s death, and have not truly tried.

Dead leaves fall thickly now, but by summer the tree will again shade the yard, and the house of my adolescence also has an almond tree. No one has ever gathered the almonds, and the tree does not grow well, but my father dug drainage for it each fall, took space heaters out for each cold snap. My mother still lives in that house, not Daly City but Fallash three hours to the north, old brick fireplace and overgrown back yard. Of course Pilar and I did not buy this house for the almond tree alone, but it pleases me most days.

For a year my parents had talked of how the Bay Area exhausted them; we left a week after my eleventh birthday, and Fallash, eight thousand inhabitants on the shore of Clear Lake, I hate and then love its quietness. Duck flocks, dry hills, oak and manzanita. My mother teaches social studies at a school in Lakeport and my father starts an insurance company. Late on certain nights I walk to my parents’ room, see my mother twitching in her dreams and my father watching infomercials, tears slipping down his cheeks. One morning I ask. My father denies ever crying and my mother says the dreams were only grade books come alive and dancing, alive and dancing.

Here in Piura, saints are used instead of insurance policies. The plasticized images are carried in purses and wallets, given away to bring good luck. The arrozeros are gone. Mariángel stands with both hands against the tree and sways. In recent days Casualidad’s skin has gone still darker, and I have no idea why, and the telephone rings from the living room.

As I reach for the receiver my hand brushes a bookend and there is a cascade—Baudin and de la Riva Agüero and Porras Barrenechea across the floor. Casualidad comes in at the noise, stands quietly as I answer the phone. It is Arantxa, my boss, director of the Language Center and head of its English Section, a large woman from Bilbao. On days when she receives packages from home, her office smells of chorizo, and she is buoyant, receptive to new ideas, even bad ones.

- You are wanted, says Arantxa.

- No. You can’t. Not on the weekend.

- The archaeologist needs an interpreter for dinner with the rector. Jacket and tie, the Pórticos Hotel, in an hour.

- What archaeologist?

- You got the memo about the conference, says Arantxa. I saw you reading it, and you should have gone, you would have liked it, but the point is that I need you tonight.

- Why don’t you do it? You’re much—

- I did all of yesterday’s sessions and the dinner with the History department last night, but there was something wrong with the pork chops, I think, or the salad. I can’t get out of bed.

- Have you been vomiting? And the diarrhea, is it greenish or brownish? And is there any blood?

- John—

- Because if there is blood, that means your intestines are ulcerated. Amoebic dysentery, probably. You’ll need antibiotics, clean water, maybe antiparasitics, plus the—

- John.

- What?

- I just need you to be at the Pórticos Hotel in an hour.

Casualidad is gathering the fallen books. I cover the mouthpiece, ask if she can work late. She nods, says she can stay all night if necessary, but she’ll have to call Fermín to let him know.

- Sorry, I say to Arantxa, Casualidad is unavailable.

- I heard your question, John, and I heard her answer.

- You’ve got twenty other English professors on staff. Any of them could—

- You’re our only native speaker. Also, I already called them all, and no one else answered the phone. You owe me, John. Please be there in an hour.

I squeeze the receiver until the plastic starts to crack, then hang up, thank Casualidad, say she can call Fermín now. She asks if I would mind making the call myself. I nod and dial. She was born and raised in a mountain village called Frías, and her house had no running water, no electricity, no telephone; she still occasionally forgets that the receiver must be placed on the table, not back in its cradle, before alerting whomever the call is for.

Fermín answers, and under the sofa I see a book Casualidad has missed. I pass on the message and wish Fermín well, then slide the book out—the Means translation of Pedro Pizarro’s
Relación
. I open it at random and the page is thick with underline. Pizarro at the Inca storehouses, the hundreds of leather trunks, and he asks what is in them. Everything Atahualpa ever touched, he is told. Every piece of clothing the emperor ever wore and every reed mat he knelt on and every corncob and meatbone he held, all here, saved so that at the proper time it might be burned to ash and scattered in the air that no one else might touch it.

At history conferences in the United States, overlong and unrelated papers are read hurriedly, prepared comments are vague, unprepared comments are off-topic, and when the panel concludes everyone hurries to the cash bar where graduate students strive to chat up funding agency appointees who strive to chat up publishing stars who strive to chat up members of the graduate student subset with whom they hope to sleep.

I was never part of any such subset, and the conferences here in Piura are leisurely and thoughtful. Until Pilar was killed I went to all of them. Once I even offered to organize a symposium, and the dean was polite and appreciative but did not think the timing was right. This is the same thing he said at my interview four years ago. On both occasions he meant, Why is your thesis unfinished?

There are important methodological differences between translation and interpretation, distinct means by which the two processes attempt to palliate their tendencies to pervert already unstable meanings beyond recognition, and I have learned that no one cares. People just want to know what was said, believe that such a thing can be known. I arrive ten minutes late and find everyone already seated at a long table in the middle of the hotel restaurant. The rector and the archaeologist are face to face at the center, with other university administrators spread out to either side.

The archaeologist is a small thin man with a neatly trimmed goatee and a Yale pin on his lapel. I am introduced in English as the American interpreter. I shake hands, sit down, rearrange my silverware. The first time I referred to myself here as American, Reynaldo held up one hand policeman-style: Stop. We are all Americans, he said, from Ellesmere to Tierra del Fuego. He told me to use norteamericano, and I pointed out that this too was imprecise. Estadounidense, then, said Reynaldo. A rough-edged word, I said, and ugly in the mouth. Reynaldo agreed but said it wasn’t his fault.