Pacazo (41 page)

- What time is it there? she asks. Did I wake you up? I couldn’t sleep but I think I counted wrong again.

- Don’t worry, Mom, we were awake.

- You’re sure?

- Very.

- So what do you think about June? Or else July?

- I like them both. What are you talking about?

- It’s been two years, Johnny. I could come with your Aunt Claire.

- Walking or driving?

- Smart mouth you have. I did it once, I can do it again.

This is the sort of thing we all believe about ourselves in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

- That sounds terrific. And how is Aunt Claire?

- Not so great. But she’s thinking of moving out.

- Out where?

- Fallash. We’d do the trip before then just to see.

- To see what?

- So many questions! She has no one there since your Uncle Mickey died, I have no one here since your father, so she would maybe move into the house. Your old room? Okay?

- Wow.

- I know! So. What about late June for a visit? Or early July if that’s better. And Claire doesn’t have to come if you don’t want her.

- No, bring her. And June or July, they’re both fine. That’s the middle of winter here, but—

- I always forget that! You’d think I wouldn’t, but every single time I do.

The conversation could go on hours like this but Mariángel is ripping hair out of the sides of my neck. I tell my mother what she surely called to hear: that we love and miss her, and that if for whatever reason her trip down is cancelled I will start working on our next trip up. At last we walk out to buy eggs, sausage, whatever the nearest store has in stock.

In the street there is a crowd: my neighbors, gathered around the Virgin. It looks to be a debate about overgrowth, but their expressions are wrong for that or anything similar. I ask, and am told that the statue is crying.

People part to allow us closer, and we peer. Tears spring from her sculpted eyes. It is either miraculous or condensation.

- As if the First Rebellion had succeeded, I say. As if Sunturhuasi were burning even now, and El Triunfo would never be built.

My neighbors nod and squint. To the store, and home as Socorro walks up. I ask how Casualidad is doing, and she smiles and does not answer. Mariángel and I eat toast and listen to Brahms. I wonder if there is any chance my mother will actually come to visit. I wonder how long it will take for Karina to forgive me.

There is a quiver in the ground or air, something like an explosion but distant, muffled, unlike the night of the ammunition depot though in the same direction. It is a strange enough sensation that I turn on the television to see. There is no news there so I turn on the radio as well. For a moment the talk is only of rain and the river, the crests coming toward Piura, but then the bulletin interrupts: an accident at the Air Force base, a plane that overshot the runway and no one yet knows why. There are a few dozen dead. The passengers were flood victims rescued an hour before from the roofs of houses somewhere to the northeast.

The radio speaks of those who have gathered to look, and there is no reason for them to have done so, as everything is easily seen from anywhere, even here, this very room. The smoke, thinner and bluer than expected. The great black furrow. The smells of charcoal and oil and sweat. The twisted black metal scraps, the screams of those still alive and Mariángel comes to me with a plastic shovel. It is a magnificent yellow. She uses it to dig into my stomach, and yes, I say, and yes.

Socorro redirects her into the kitchen and I take up the telephone, call Karina, tell her that I am so very sorry and ask if she will please come. She will not, she says. I will not act anything like that ever again, I say. She says not to make promises. I wait for her to add, That you can’t keep. She adds nothing and there is a shirring noise: the rain once again, thicker and thicker now.

I ask Karina if it is raining at her house as well. She asks if I am damaged and the doorbell rings and Reynaldo shouts for me to open. I ask Karina how long I should leave him outside. She says to go, that she will call me tonight, that perhaps she will visit tomorrow.

Reynaldo, drenched, and I have no idea why he is here, then remember our lesson. He says that he forgot it too, that he came across the river only to buy paint for his aunt’s dresser and then remembered and regardless now is stuck. Stuck how, I ask. He looks at me. The bridges are closed, he says, all of them, even to pedestrians.

I ask if he wants to stay with us for a few days. He says that he gladly would, but his aunt is alone in the house, and he is in fact less stuck than he seems. There is a bridge still open twenty minutes south of Piura though it cannot be reached in that amount of time.

We have a quick hour of class all the same. I teach him to say pawn and rook and several times I nearly begin jokes involving earthquakes and urine. I teach him to say, May I have your telephone number? His hair is cut in the same style as mine though he denies this when I point it out, and his vocabulary has grown quickly but I am not sure anyone will ever understand the words.

A knock at my window and I turn and hope, it can only be Karina, and it is. Almost daylight again. This was my idea. I did not think she would agree or come but here she is.

I run to the door, lead her in by the hand, tell her that I will go start coffee. She does not want coffee, she says. She leads me back to my bed. We lie down. I wait. Together we are waiting. Then I start. I apologize again. I speak of Mariángel and psychological scars, stop speaking when Karina lifts her arm, points at something I failed to notice yesterday: a livid trapezoid.

Her father threw an iron just unplugged, she says. I nod. There is more to discuss, she says, and soon we will. I nod again. She tells me to roll over on my stomach, traces a shape on my back and tells me to guess. I have no idea, and guess a dolphin. She tells me not to be so ridiculous and sentimental, asks me to pay greater attention, draws again, again, again.

When Mariángel wakes, Karina goes to get her. I go to the kitchen, start breakfast, sweat and tremble. Karina carries Mariángel in. There is no shrieking and there are no tears. She holds Mariángel out so that she can kiss me on the cheek, a full loud slobbery smack, and as far as I can tell, my daughter has noticed nothing new whatsoever.

The long slow beautiful morning slows further when for the first time Mariángel manages to turn on the television. In celebration we all sit on the couch and watch. The rains in the foothills have calmed and the crests have passed and the bridges are open again, but the pilings cannot be properly reinforced until the river is a fifth its current size. Two hanging walkways are to be built, one where the Old Bridge was, another between the Fourth and Sánchez Cerro.

After the news the day’s soccer coverage begins and Mariángel brings us pebbles from the yard. The first match is minutes away—Alianza Lima versus Unión Minas. Karina still does not want coffee and I make some nonetheless. By the time I return the match has started. I suggest that we watch with the sound turned off, because nearly all of what is said during soccer matches here is as tragically stupid as nearly all of what is said during sporting events of every kind everywhere else in this world, and Karina barely agrees.

For a time there are mainly exchanges of fouls and mud. Karina says that she has been an Alianza fan since birth. I have spent the past four years rooting for Unión Minas, but only out of pity, as they are obliged to live in Cerro de Pasco, a place that is not easy to believe even when one is there. I passed through it once on a trip I took to visit archives in the central Andes. The high plains were magnificent: vast gold grasslands, endless unmarked sky. But Cerro de Pasco sits at fourteen thousand feet, and the surrounding peaks are of naked stone and snow, and the air is too cold and thin to breathe. It is the site of the world’s highest open-pit mine, and also the world’s highest golf course. These are not reasons to go.

Huánuco, Pasco, Junín, Huancavelica: four departmental archives that may well be rich beyond measure but as they have no catalogues and produce no bulletins it is impossible to know. I found very little of use, hope nonetheless to make the trip again, and Karina reaches for her purse. She brings out a new rubber pig. She hands it to Mariángel, who laughs, bangs it against the floor, attacks it with her teeth—a matter of molars, perhaps, or of primordial rage.

I bring the proper cream from the bathroom cabinet. Mariángel bites my finger with more force than can be imagined given her size. In Cerro de Pasco the children play in the tailings and look unwell, their eyes never quite focusing at any given distance. There are daily detonations at eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon. The air fills with the stench of rubber burning and all the houses tremble.

Unión Minas generally win or tie their home games because they alone are accustomed to the altitude, and generally lose or tie their away games because they are ungifted. Today they are playing in Lima. In the stands are ten or fifteen thousand Alianza fans and ten or fifteen Unión Minas fans. As long as Alianza wins there will likely be no violence and finally a flurry, four touch passes and a break down the sideline, a cross, a sharp header beating the goalkeeper to the upper-right corner and Alianza Lima is ahead.

This causes Karina to scream, and I do not blame her—it was a lovely goal. Halftime comes, and Karina says that because her team is winning, she will be the one to make the sandwiches. She goes to the kitchen, and I check Mariángel’s diaper. I flip through the other channels, stop short: it is the Green Man, orange now and naked except for a necktie, also orange, very long and placed strategically. It appears that he is a guest on some sort of talk or variety program.

I call to Karina, and she comes. I point, and she nods.

- This man, I say.

- Yes?

- Today he’s orange, but the last time I saw him he was purple, and before that he was green.

- He has been many colors.

- Why?

- Because he’s insane, perhaps, or wishes us to think so.

- Who is he?

- I don’t remember the whole story, but he used to be a psychiatrist. Then something happened in his brain and he killed one of his patients.

- Why isn’t he in jail?

- I don’t know. I think he was, for a time.

- We should turn the sound up—he might be discussing the event even now.

- The world is not strange enough already? Also, you don’t have any bread or cheese or meat. The match will be on at El Torno as well. Where are your shoes?

She turns off the television, takes Mariángel up, walks to the door. I follow them out and down and right and left and down and along. The restaurant seems to have suffered less than the rest of Piura, the paint holding well to the outside walls, dark red. Inside is a wide sheltered patio giving onto a children’s playground, and beyond the playground is a zoo. The zoo is larger than it appears and many of the playground structures are sufficiently secure and standing up from their table are two young women. One I don’t recognize. The other is Jenny.

I look from her to Karina far too obviously. Karina looks at Jenny, and I look at Jenny, and Jenny looks at both of us. She is wearing white cotton trousers so thin and tight the exclamation point is I believe visible and a tight white blouse knotted above her bare midriff and far too much makeup for this time of day and is walking toward us. I look around as if searching for a free table when in fact all of the tables are now free. Jenny and her friend are almost to us and I open my mouth but there are no right words and she says a quiet but friendly hello to me, another to Karina, tweaks Mariángel’s cheek and is gone. I look down, and Karina laughs.

- You professors, she says. You are all the same.

I choose a table and signal the waiter for a menu and have no interest whatsoever in knowing what she means. The conversation is crippled for a time but heals when the food is brought, magnificent anticuchos and tacu-tacu. We eat and watch the scoreless second half. Karina celebrates and I mourn and Mariángel chews her plastic pig. This pig is of higher quality than the previous one or so it appears: it has not yet lost any limbs, may well last until we lose it. The waiter changes the channel, and the match between Universitario and Sporting Cristal is just beginning, and I call for the check.

I once saw these teams play live—two years ago, another research trip, a Sunday in Lima before my flight on to Arequipa. I had not intended to watch that match or any other, had had no particular plans, the archives and institutes all closed and so I asked the taxista to take me to whatever he considered the site of the city’s most significant historical event. The traffic grew thicker and thicker. Tens and then hundreds of pedestrians streamed past us in the streets. Finally the driver stopped the meter and said that I should follow everyone else as they shared my interest in history. I asked for the name of the site. He pointed at his shirt. It was a Sporting Cristal jersey. Champions! he shouted. Two years in a row we are the champions and this year will be the third!

The check is brought. Karina and Mariángel go to play and I wait for my change. My seat was on the center line, and the fans around me were excitable and sweating and normal, but the fans at both ends of the stadium were insane, a mass of light blue to the north, a mass of pale yellow to the south, both held in by cyclone fencing and riot police. The match went well until nearly the end, Cristal up three to two with a minute left. There was vicious play back and forth, and a Cristal player went down. Glass bottles were broken and flung at the field; the two teams charged, and the two sets of fans, the fencing collapsed and the police were overwhelmed. I fought up toward the exit. A man beside me was stabbed in the arm, his blood sprayed across my shirt and the man and his attacker were swept away.

The change comes and I walk to where Karina and Mariángel play. Slide, then trampoline, then racetrack for plastic cars. Mariángel narrates or discusses these activities with sounds that are surely proto-words of some sort, which pleases me until I count. Eighteen months. Time for a specialist, perhaps.