Pacazo (50 page)

I have not been able to determine if the other men Karina loves are as large as I am. I do however have reason to believe that they are slowly diminishing in number, if such a thing may be measured in terms of the strength and variety of unfamiliar colognes. At some point I hope to be the only one left.

I fetch the six remaining Advanced exams, a red pen, a calculator. Forty-five minutes later two of them are done. Like the rest I have graded they were fine, somewhat better than fine, not quite as good as I expected and I do not know why and the doorbell rings.

Karina goes to answer, brings Arantxa out onto the patio. She is wearing a Werder Bremen jersey that I am quite sure she does not own. I hold up the four ungraded midterms and tell her that they are the last. She shrugs, kisses me hello as if the two of us have come to some sort of peace.

Ten minutes later Reynaldo and Mireille arrive looking dehydrated and dizzy and very pleased with themselves. We insult their hair for a time. Then Günther comes with the van, which smells of cilantro and bad brakes but is otherwise perfect.

Groceries and gasoline and across the Fourth Bridge, the water quiet and well down the banks. Through Castilla and out along the Panamericana. Günther handles the many detours with focused ease. At each fording I wonder if I will be asked to step from the vehicle so that it might pass more easily, but I never am, which is in itself a sort of love, and perhaps the undercarriage will not be unrepairable.

Mariángel starts to whine and so I invent a game. I pull a pretend needle bloodlessly but painfully through each of my fingers, then plunge it through my palm and pull it out the back of my hand. By tugging on the imaginary thread I can make my hand move amusingly. This terrifies Mariángel, and Karina shudders, and so do I: the back porch of my house in Daly City, my father’s hand moving identically. I have invented nothing whatsoever. The feeling in my chest is half warmth and half disquiet.

I attempt to explain this to Reynaldo as we edge out of the deepest ravine thus far. We pull back onto the highway and I have a sudden sense of where we are—the desert is still rich and often green but even so I know this stretch of road too well. I sit up, crane forward. Half a mile ahead are the three algarrobos. Karina leans back against me and I look at her but she has done it for no reason, is chatting with Mireille about cherimoyas.

Mariángel lifts my chin, wants me to thread through my fingers again and so I do. She loves the terror of it, the fake pain, squeals and I watch out the window. We slow as we near the three trees, and I cannot look away.

My shoulder is squeezed, Reynaldo, and he has seen me see. Just past the algarrobos we turn west onto a dirt road, and I look back, knowing that it would be stupid and pointless to go, that I cannot possibly go. I say nothing, and Reynaldo says nothing, and Karina is staring at nothing ahead of us and probably knows as well.

Günther calls and points, but it is not La Niña, not yet. Instead it is a porotillo in full flower, the spines unseen at this distance, the long slender blooms so bright, as if the tree were growing its own putillas. We stop to look more closely, and the tips of the blossoms are still closed. When they open the huayruros will be plucked, turned into jewelry and Pilar, how she stood, letting me see, but now Reynaldo is talking, points to a hole halfway up the trunk, talks of what might live in that hole until Mireille makes him stop.

There is an abundance of wild mustard, goats and their goatherds, and suddenly the lake, bluish silver, impossible here, too vast to see across. There are a dozen children splashing in the shallows. Farther out there are windsurfers and a pair of catamarans. We park, and Arantxa and Karina are overly kind to one another as we unpack. When I take off my shirt the bruise on my shoulder is noted and explained and mocked heartily. We walk to the edge, step down into the water, except for Karina who instead stretches out, and the things Mariángel says are so very nearly words.

Scurling now around us are freshwater prawns. This too seems impossible, the lake itself only three months old and how could they have found their way here? Mireille says they were born from eggs laid not during this El Niño but the last one: fifteen years of dry silence, and then life at last. They have already laid their own eggs to hatch in the next El Niño, she says. And tomorrow or the next day the prawns will be netted and eaten.

Arantxa dislikes this so Günther offers another scenario: the prawns survive for a year, and the lake has all but vanished, and the seagulls come to feast, and the caracaras. At least they had their year, says Arantxa. Mireille leans down to the water, rinses her face, says that she will be leaving at the end of the semester. This it would seem is news to all of us but Reynaldo. She adds that we will always be welcome to visit her in Bern, and we tell her how much we hope we will be able.

Out of the water, and in addition to the snacks we bought, Arantxa has arranged proper food in tupperware. Stuffed tomatoes, stuffed potatoes, rice. Afterwards Mariángel and I walk to the dunes. We explore and roll down them. There are wildflowers, and dragonflies, and at one point the quickest of glimpses, something long and gray moving in the thick grass, the whipping tip of its tail.

A rest, and a last long swim. Arantxa holds Günther underwater, brings him up only to kiss. As we walk back to the van there are thorns in places along the trail but no tearing of skin or cloth, no pain, not now, just the colors of sunset reflected in the unlikely water, and the colors, the colors, they are a sudden slow surprise each time we look.

We climb in, and I close my eyes, keep them closed all along the dirt road. Mariángel pries at my eyelids and shouts for milk. When I can feel that we are back on the highway and well and safely past, I join in the shouting and drinking. There is even some singing, Los Morochucos, and I sing quietly, wishing no one to feel inferior.

Mariángel starts to cry when the singing ends, does not stop when it recommences, and there is general agreement that I should be dropped off first. As we pull in past the Virgin, Karina proposes a group trip to Cajamarca for next weekend. The others all have plans. It is too far away for a weekend trip but I promise her that yes we will go, and she smiles, says she will make arrangements, says she has ideas.

I bounce Mariángel up and down, create a sort of Doppler effect within her wails, and remind Karina that it will be my turn to plan. She shrugs, looks at me, and I wait, and wait, finally realize, ask if she would like to come over for a bit. She climbs down, takes up her knapsack. I look at Arantxa, who is staring out the windshield and does not look back.

Karina’s annoyance fades in the course of her shower, disappears when I offer her a t-shirt to serve as pajamas and it reaches her knees. I give Mariángel a quick bath, and she falls asleep halfway through her yams. Karina too is asleep in her chair, her head down on the table. I rouse them as little as possible, only enough to get them into bed. I turn on the fans and turn off the lights, lie down beside Karina and secure the netting around us.

I trace a pacazo across Karina’s back, ask her to name the species, and already she is back asleep. I trace the department of Junín, and invent outlines for the province and district and city limits of Jauja. Let us say that the will is real, is that of Juan de Segovia, was copied truly by the notary who took it down in the small register he happened to have at hand. Relations, relations: say the notary moves from job to job, carries his registers with him, is obligated to hand all protocols over to the Crown but for whatever reason the small register is never sent. Then the notary dies. Son also a notary, now owns the small register. Son dies. Grandson a priest, carries the register from one parish assignation to another. Final post is Jauja. Small register ownerless when he dies, bound with other orphans into the next available large register to keep them from being lost for good.

All right, perhaps just barely possible. But the contents! Segovia’s share of the largest ransom in history, his entire fortune to an Inca woman and their children: unprecedented, spectacularly improbable for the epoch. The original will lost, and how? Destroyed or hidden by someone who thought the money wasted? Who wanted it for himself? Who wanted it to go to the Crown, as it eventually did?

Less and less plausible the more it is considered and I edge into and out of sleep. A moment later hours have passed and I am awake to the sound of news. It is an uncomfortable thing. Blue light shivers obliquely on the walls. I have been brought from a dream where there were white beetles the size of dinner plates flying faster and faster, shattering against tile walls and there were others in the dream but I don’t remember whom or what they were doing, don’t remember having turned the television on, and perhaps Karina did at some point. I would ask but she is sleeping, one hand curled under her chin.

The sky has only begun to lighten. The newscaster’s voice insists. I have another hour at least before Mariángel wakes, but will not be able to sleep through the sounds of this man. I stand and walk and stop.

Another young woman has been raped, murdered, tossed into the desert. Isabel Teresa Otero Manrique, says the newscaster. She was found last night, a hundred yards from the road leading west to Paita. There is footage of her bruised and naked body as the police draw the tarp across.

She was last seen getting into a taxi yesterday evening, says the onsite reporter, though no one knows where she was headed. Eyewitnesses have been interviewed, and their stories conflict: one says the taxi was yellow and one says it was orange. Then another image fills the screen, a snapshot of the young woman at a party of some sort, her undiluted happiness, her hair long and black and straight and it is oh god it is Jenny, Jenny with black hair, Jenny before she dyed her hair blonde and she looks so very much and how am I seeing this only now impossible and oh very much like Pilar.

There is a sound, and I step to the television, turn it off. Karina asks me why I am awake. I say that I wanted juice, and ask if she turned the television on at some point. She looks at me as if she has not understood the question. She asks me what I was watching and I tell her the only possible truth:

- Nothing. It was nothing. The news. Nothing at all.

She rubs her eyes. I tell her to go back to bed and she nods again, asks me to bring her something to drink as well, turns and goes. In the refrigerator I find mango juice. I take her a glass, set it on the nightstand. I turn the television back on but the news has changed, something about Malaysia. There is nothing on the other channels and I walk, living room to dining room to living room to dining room, out into the back yard, the almond tree, around and around. Pilar and then Jenny: it is someone who knows and hates me, wishes to punish me, wishes to render me insane. I think place by place, Daly City Fallash Berkeley Irvine Piura. Around and around and surely I am disliked by many people but this makes no sense. Around. Around, around, stopping. Pilar then Jenny then Karina, and I run into the house up the hallway to my room and Karina is there in my bed, asleep.

I wait, listen to her breathing. I shut and lock the window, make sure the front door is locked, close and lock the rest of the doors and windows. The house, stifling, and the young woman killed last month, who was she?

Back out, around, back in. Nothing. To Mariángel’s room and she is sleeping and to my room and Karina is sleeping and something is missing: the headboard, Sarita Colonia, gone.

I look under the bed, and there is nothing. I run my hand between the wall and the side of the bed, and nothing. I place my palm flat on Karina’s chest softly enough not to wake her. The clock says six a.m.

To the telephone. Marucha answers, does not sound tired, says that her mother is getting dressed to come to my house. I say that I know, that I need to speak with her nonetheless.

- Yes? says Socorro.

- The picture of Sarita Colonia. Where is it?

- What?

- It was on my bed. Hanging from my headboard. A plastic card with Sarita Colonia’s face. It is important and now it is gone.

Silence. Then a sigh, or something rubbing against something else.

- It was under the bed, she says. It was covered with dirt and dust. And there were teeth-marks, as though—

- What did you do with it?

- I’m sorry. I threw it out.

- When?

- Last week. Wednesday? Maybe Tuesday.

I thank her, hang up, go to the trashcan out by the lavadero. If it was Wednesday, the picture might still be here. The can is close to overflowing. I breathe through my mouth and root through rotten fruit, dead geckos, used toilet paper.

Nothing. I stand back, breathe deeply. I carry the can to the center of the yard. I empty it, spread the trash evenly across the grass and work the lawn as if it were a grid, imaginary square to imaginary square.

Still nothing. I start through the trash again, diagonally this time. Then Mariángel cries from her crib. I wait. The crying does not end. I begin gathering, refilling the can. A new picture is only a matter of returning to the market and this is all only superstition, preposterous thing, mummified father carried into the jungle but the old prayer comes to me entire, known somehow by heart.

OUT OF THE TREES, INTO THE SUN, across the grass to a bench Out of the trees, into the sun, across the grass to a bench in sifting shade. I let my weight settle and place my briefcase beside me. My next class does not begin for twenty minutes. I take out a handkerchief, daub at the sweat on my face, have no business sitting, stand instead and walk.

Along the Administration building, and the river continues to fall: the wreckage of the Old Bridge is stark. In a week or two the water will be low enough to remove it and reinforce the other bridges. Vultures land on the banks, and there is greenery around them, and a trip to the Huaringas and skulls, gasoline or dagger or black bees, and how many stings would it take?

To the cafeteria, and turning toward the chapel. Zapote, charán, their leaves quivering in the light wind. Behind the chapel a trellis and bougainvillea blossoms falling around me, bright red, and the blossoms hiss as they slide along the cement.