Pacazo (54 page)

Fifty yards farther on are two more police cars, and a section of highway shoulder that is now a parking lot. It has been four days since Beatriz Silvana Cordero Huarcay entered a given taxi. I had thought the scene would be empty or nearly so, thought it a plenitude of caution to dress the way reporters dress on television, to have brought a clipboard, but all these cars and beyond them dozens of persons, some uniformed and others not. My knapsack, my camera, a pen tucked into each pocket. I make my way up the aisle and ask the driver to stop. He asks why. I look at him. The bus stops. It is a quarter of a mile back to the relevant patch of desert. By the time I reach it my clothes are thick with sweat.

A slow first circle. Oreja de león, the tracks of a chanto, and if I approach the police here they will send me away. Angolo, palo verde, and no shreds of cloth. No paper scraps, no bloodstains. Nothing, and nothing.

I approach the shortest reporter, lift my clipboard, ask if he has heard anything new. The man looks at me. He scratches the side of his face, tells me he’s too busy for chitchat. I apologize, edge away and on to the next. This man is old and stooped, and I stoop as well. He asks which paper I am with.

- El Mercurio
, I say, and do my best to look Chilean.

He tilts his head to one side.

- Santiago or Valparaíso?

- Santiago.

- I was just talking to Yáñez. How come they sent two of you?

- Who?

The man’s eyes scan my shirt, and then he smiles.

- Okay, friend, he says. Okay.

He walks away. In the middle distance another man looks up. Yáñez, surely Yáñez. Already a failure, and many-colored: the credentials I lack, the information, my shoddy attempt at the accent.

Another circle, wider. No flecks of paint, no plastic shards, no tooled wood in any form. Perhaps it is only that I am out of practice but nothing and nothing and the pointless clarity of the air, the sharp gray lines of the Andes, they would have saved Pilar but were no help to Beatriz.

Back toward the highway, and another reporter. I smile, ask if she has come across anything of interest. She looks at me and walks away.

- Stupid bitch, says someone behind me.

I turn. Yet another reporter. He does not look abnormal, shakes his head, and so do I.

- I fucking hate that fucking bitch, he says.

- No shit, I say. She’s the stupidest fucking cunt I ever met.

I go and stand beside him. He is staring at a candelabra, sketching its thorns. I nod and jot what will seem to him to be notes.

- Too bad about those footprints, he says.

I agree, say that I wish it had been otherwise.

- So it goes, he says. Maybe they’ll get lucky, find some more.

- Here’s hoping, I say.

He looks at me, keeps looking, the wrong amount. I frown at the candelabra thorns, squint at his drawing, shrug. He is still looking at me. I frown again, ask if he has heard any projections as regards the perpetrator’s mindset.

- Who are you? he says.

I do not know the names of any more newspapers in Chile and am on the verge of telling him the truth but even to me it would sound unlikely and suddenly I am sure: he believes that I am the murderer, here to revisit the scene. I nod, turn, walk away. Ten steps along I look back and he is approaching the nearest policeman. I step into a thicket of some plant whose name Reynaldo never taught me, the thorns pull and I hear footsteps, push through the bracken and the thorns catch and hold and I push harder, into a clearing and beyond it is a wall of apuntia through which they will not follow, the heavy swaying around me and the spines scratch and tear but do not drive in except one and another and now I stand and hear nothing. Blood drips from my forehead into my eyes. The spines in the flesh of my arm and they ache and I squeeze at them and prod and they will not come out but at home there are pliers and knives.

Then a thought. It may be a time before I can search here unhindered, but I know somewhere else. The clues there will be old but unsullied. Abominable thought, horrific, possible though I do not yet know how, and help will be needed. I crouch, find five stones, set the four largest in a tight square and the fifth on top: if nothing else a cairn for Beatriz Silvana Cordero Huarcay.

Lunch done and salve on my scrapes and I kiss Mariángel and go but Fermín is on the front steps. His bicycle is cleaner than seems feasible. He is already speaking of Casualidad, of a telephone call and further healing but this is not a day for Fermín. I tell him that I am very pleased for whatever the news might be and give him fifty soles.

The walk, and nothing, and nothing, and Arantxa is waiting. There are so many reasons why she might be but I do not ask, instead follow to her office. I sit down and she looks at the top of her desk and moves several papers from one side of it to the other and frowns and moves them back. She opens her mouth and then closes it, twice. She says that in an hour there will be an emergency staff meeting, that I am in charge of finding a free classroom and gathering all available professors.

Under other circumstances I would ask for additional details. Today I comply, or attempt to. Only a third of the evening-shift professors can be bullied into coming in early, but the coordinators agree to go, and the room Eugenia assigns me is small enough to seem full even with these pallid numbers.

The emergency meeting begins. Its topic is film. Arantxa has brought guidance sheets and photocopies. Beginning today, she says, all professors intending to teach lessons entailing the use of film must hand in their Video Lesson Plan Objective Sheet and three Video Lesson Exercise Templates no fewer than twenty-four hours in advance. She does not look at me as she says this. Instead she hands out a Sample Video Lesson Plan Objective Sheet and three Sample Video Lesson Exercise Templates for our future reference. Then she asks if there are any questions and does not wait to hear them.

Furthermore, she says. Furthermore, every video in the video library has been assigned a level corresponding to one of our course levels, and no video may be used at any level other than its own. Furthermore, when checking out a video, one must first sign the Video Registry. Furthermore, videos may be kept out for a maximum of forty-eight hours. Furthermore, Spanish subtitles may no longer be used at any point in any capacity. Furthermore, all illegally copied videos have been removed from the video library, and no illegally copied videos may henceforth be introduced.

It is unlike Arantxa to lean so heavily on any given conjunctive adverb. She stares at us as if about to ask for questions once again, but asks for nothing. Furthermore, she says. But there is nothing more to say. She tells us to get back to work and walks out the door.

This meeting might instead have been a confrontation, was thus a gift of sorts from Arantxa to me. To the cafeteria, and a slow coffee. Out and along the path but then quick movement underfoot and the crunch of small bones crushed.

I lift my foot. Underneath is a lizard, dead. It is three inches long, with thin brown and black stripes down its sides—the smallest species on campus and harmless to the best of my knowledge. I have never been so close to one before and there is nothing less likely than this death, not given their speed and agility, so there is hope, always hope, always.

Into class. My students ask why I am smiling but telling them would not help. The new video policies can have no bearing on a lesson planned before they existed and so I feed the cassette into the VCR. I stand back and wait. The video does not play. The cassette has snagged somehow.

I fiddle and nudge and nothing and now there is knocking at the door: Dr. Macalupú, head of the chemistry department. I ask him to what I should attribute this interruption. He looks at my students, at the floor, asks if I know Reynaldo’s address in Lima. I tell him that I know nothing. My students smile at the phrase. Dr. Macalupú stares at me, thanks me, thanks my students, apologizes and exits.

The cassette will not play or eject regardless of the buttons I push or the order in which I push them. I turn the VCR off and tell my students to write an essay on the failings of technology, an essay of any length and style. My students are no longer smiling but nod or appear to.

The Cup, begun. Shouting from everywhere, at times joyful and at times less so. My friends now root for South American teams they hated months ago, cheer Brazil’s victory over Scotland and Chile’s tie with Italy and tonight Karina has come to my house to talk but there is another, more urgent need: the fair, I say.

Karina had not heard that the fair was in town. I tell her that it opens tonight, that it will have all the foods one expects at a fair, and the rides one expects, and the games of skill and chance. Many or most of the taxis in Piura will at some point pass the entrance, and I do not add this information.

She sits down beside me on the couch, says she does not wish to go. I tell her that the candied apples and corndogs of the Lake County Fair were the highest of high points each summer in Fallash. She does not believe me though it is nearly true. I tell her that taking one’s girlfriend to the fair is simply what is done and she laughs too sharply, somehow knows that I never took anyone. She pats my hand, speaks of dust and noise, of crowds and sweat. I stand and tell her that it will be very enjoyable and that I would welcome her company and that I am leaving.

I go to the kitchen. Socorro is gathering her belongings. I remind her that she agreed to stay late. She pauses, sets her purse down, walks to Mariángel’s room without looking back.

I wait for a moment at the front door, but hear nothing. I step to the street and stop the first taxi that comes by. The driver is young and broad-shouldered. Then Karina is beside me, looks at me and shrugs, takes my arm.

It is a moment before I understand that she has guessed what I mean to do, has decided to come regardless, is now part of the search. A great sad angry evil happiness surges in my chest. I was not aware of wanting this but oh how I clearly did and do.

In ten minutes she knows as little as I can usefully tell her and the traffic is no longer moving though we are still three blocks away. We walk, and the final block is packed four deep with taxis. We check all likely plates and I scan each face. The honking, it never ceases, becomes symphonic.

As we near the entrance, Karina stumbles. I help her to stand. The exhaust fumes, so thick here, the heat, and I carry her to the gates. She laughs as I set her down, thanks me, says that she is fine and she is lying and there is work to be done inside.

The crowds are very thick as is the dust. I buy candied apples and again we stand, we eat and watch, we eat. Karina smiles at the taste, nods. Again we walk, and there are many rides, far more than I had thought. We walk from one to the next and I scan the faces of all the men in line.

When the first circle is complete we start another. Then a face almost perfectly right. The man is in line for the Ferris Wheel. I come closer, closer. He has his arm around a young woman’s waist. Now he sees me, steps toward me, asks why I am staring. His voice is impossibly high-pitched. I nod, thank him, pull Karina past him and away.

A moment later her hand goes limp in mine. I turn, and she is looking at the ground. It is not sickness but sadness, I believe. I check the rides around us, and there is one, an immense metal disk, that appears to be sufficiently solid for someone of my height and weight.

I buy our tickets, and the line is not long. When our turn comes we climb the stairs to the platform, step onto the disk, sit down and hold to the railing though there is not yet any movement beneath us. Others climb on as well. They are mostly young girls talking very loudly.

When the railing is half-lined with people the door closes, becomes simply more railing, and the ride begins slowly, accelerating, spinning and the young girls laugh and shout. The disk tilts as it spins and I do what I can to hold on and the air is edged with laughter that slips toward shrieks, toward screams. There is faster spinning and faster and no laughter now, the tilting and spinning and shaking, and a girl across the disk is the first to fail, let go, tumble to the center of the disk and there one might stand if one were young and agile and strong but she is only young, strives to her feet and falls and rolls back into her friends, hits their legs and they fall as well, are swept to the center and the disk spins still harder, the twisting and spinning and tilting now violent and I think of nothing but holding to the rail, willing it not to break. The screams spin and twist and tilt and there is only the need to hold, to hold, and at last the disk begins to slow.

For a time we must sit on a bench, Karina and I. It is difficult to believe that the railing held in spite of me. When we can stand and walk we buy more candied apples, and then cannot eat them, want to but cannot.

Another circle. No faces I need to check twice. Little or no difference in smell between this fair and that of Lake County. A third circle, and there are no other rides I trust so instead at Karina’s urging we try the games: three of skill, two of chance.

I work through twenty soles attempting to win a stuffed animal of any type or size. At last she takes the squirt gun from my hand. She wins the next horse race, chooses a Tasmanian Devil and looks at me, hoping. I lift it happily. I say that it is time.

She nods, looks down and perhaps I am losing her. I put my arm around her heavily. She accepts it and perhaps I am not losing her. Outside the fair again we stand and look together, the taxis, the license plates, there are hundreds, they come and go and we watch, each one, carefully.

BLACK.

A slithering of armor down a hill.

Now slowly black again.

ALONG THE DARK PATH AND GERMAN DEFEATED THE UNITED STATES. I was forced to feign sadness and rage and this was a very simple thing to do and the bird god must be taken into greater account. She knew, after all. I ask her about certainty and clarity, about their aspect and appearance, and she has answers but will not share them.