Pacazo (7 page)

I walk quickly down Amalia Puga, a block, two, still nowhere. More quickly still, back up and past the Ransom Chamber and on toward the Plaza de Armas. Dense blue sunlight, thin dry air and I am wheezing, light-headed. I slow, cross the street, and in the shade it is twenty degrees cooler, cold.

Pilar sits on a bench and stares at the Cathedral. I join her. She does not look at me. I wait, lean forward, say that there is time for one more site before lunch, a convent archive on Jirón Ancash, closed the last several times I came and she can help me, or can do something else, whichever she prefers. She still does not look at me. I wait. I say that there is also the Departmental archive in the Belén complex. The earliest files in their Causa Ordinaria subset are from the 1590s and I have worked through most of them already but was hurried and perhaps missed something of importance. The complex is splendid, I say, a seventeenth-century hospital and church, stone carvings, and she holds up her hand. I have been to the Belén complex, she says. You sent me there last time, she says.

There are many small groups of people walking slowly through the plaza, circling the fine fountain in the center. A few palms, and stretches of grass edged with shrubs I recognize but cannot name. A very long and very steep staircase rises up the front of Santa Apolonia to the south. Halfway up the hill is an old blue and white chapel. On the summit is the stone throne from which the Inca observed his massed troops and the view is superb and I will never climb those stairs again.

I look at Pilar, wonder if that is what she wants, to climb. Wonder if I should tell her that she is sitting on or near the spot where Atahualpa was strangled. Wonder who Amalia Puga was, and what she accomplished, and Pilar says that she wants to go to Mass. I think about this. I say that we can exchange our current suite for separate rooms, if she prefers. She looks at me. I ask who Amalia Puga was. A writer, says Pilar. I wait for more. Nothing comes. So, I say. Not everyone has to know everything, she says. It’s okay to just come and look. There’s nothing wrong with just coming and looking. I say that I am sorry and she says that she knows but that I need to stop.

She is right and I love her for this. A light breeze rises, stirs her hair, and we begin to arrive. I wipe my face, put on my knapsack, lift Mariángel to my shoulder. I do not remember ever asking Pilar about Amalia Puga, and Friar Valverde repents his role, protects the natives as best he can, flees Peru after the second Almagrist coup, is eaten by cannibals on Puná. I get to my feet and wince. I limp forward, and the barrette girl reaches out to touch Mariángel’s shoes as we pass.

We come to stand beside the driver. He is not one I have seen before. Mariángel points at the burn scars on his arms and I lower her hand, ask him to stop at the stand of algarrobos ahead. The man looks at the trees, asks if I am sure. I say that I am. The man says that there is nothing in any direction for some distance. I tell him that he is wrong. The man says that getting back to Piura won’t be easy. I lower my face to his. I tell him that we will do what we have always done, flag down the first car or truck or bus that passes by. The driver shrugs, slows the bus, stops just past the algarrobos.

Nausea rises again as I step down onto the asphalt shoulder. I take three quick steps, set Mariángel on the ground, turn and vomit into the sand. Wait. Vomit again. A third time. Wait. Mariángel is crying. I spit and wipe my mouth, take her up, whisper until she stops crying.

The day’s heat is only beginning, and there are certain clouds. I put on a sling months too small for Mariángel, work her slowly into it, arrange the sunshade over her head and tuck her bottles into their straps. I check my camera’s batteries and film. I take a drink from my canteen and start walking.

The path through this mile of desert was faint at first, used only by occasional goatherds. They are the ones who found Pilar. On each trip I clarify the trail to the best of my abilities: I cut notches in cacti, stack rocks, plant crosses.

Along and along through shallow dunes, scattered scrub and grasses. The noise of highway traffic fades. A cabuya low to the ground but eight feet wide, sawtoothed and fleshy, sharp at the tips. More dunes, and the ache in my hip lessens, disappears. Then sudden movement to my right, a lizard five inches long, thin and fast, dark stripes down its side, the head a bright red. It stops, raises up, looks back. A patch of blue on its chest, and I once choked on a lizard of similar size. It was a Western fence lizard. I caught it with a long grass noose and Joel dared me to eat it. Joel was my best and for certain long stretches only friend in Fallash and I can still feel those small claws digging into the sides of my throat. My father administered the Heimlich maneuver and the lizard popped out and ran.

Immense silence now. Scattered low palo santo, ghost gray and leafless, the smell of myrrh thick in the hot air, and I remember the curandero at Huancabamba fanning the smoke in my face, hoping to heal, hoping to cleanse. Tracks here and there—goat, squirrel, ground-dwelling bird. A thicket of faique, the thorns as long as my fingers.

Mariángel starts to cry, and I bring out her juice, but that is not it, and her milk, and that is not it either. Then I check her diaper. I change her in the unsteady shade, put my knapsack back on, push forward. The dust is thick in my eyelashes. More dunes, more scrub, and a hualtaco tree explodes as we pass by, shrieking and wingbeats, the caracara lifting off, black body and mottled chest, white at the throat and wingtips, naked red on the face. Mariángel crying again and the bird arcing back toward us. I hunch down, cover her head with my hands, look around for a nest but do not see one anywhere.

Thirty feet away the bird flares, lands on an outcropping. It rolls its head and snaps it forward, rattles at us. I stand, rattle back, and Mariángel quiets. I rattle again and she smiles. We bluff a charge, Mariángel laughing as she bounces against my chest, and the caracara lifts, shrieks, flies toward the highway.

- They will eat anything, I say, my voice thin and hoarse, strange to me.

Mariángel does not look up.

- Anything, and alive or dead. I have seen them dig for turtle eggs, dig for worms, have seen them attack pelicans over and over until the catch is disgorged.

Now she looks, smiles, reaches back to take hold of my beard.

- They will even chase vultures off of roadkill.

She squints and I fall quiet. The algarrobo grove is a hundred yards away. I slow down, step carefully, search the dunes to either side. Smell of heat, sweat, sand. Smell of rotting meat that fades too quickly to have been real, was some sort of olfactory mirage.

Still slower. Look again. Thirty yards. The trees are threadbare, sparse and thin. Twenty yards, ten. The path widens as it enters the grove. The sand here is no longer stained, no longer bears witness to the night my wife was raped and beaten and left for dead.

Sweat gathers in my beard, on my chest, down the center of my back. I take another drink. Then I weave through the trees, scanning the ground as I go. To the cairn I have built at the far end of the grove. I look out along another trail I have clarified to the best of my abilities. This is the path Pilar walked the next day, walked until she fell and could not rise.

Back to where I entered the grove. Begin a circle. Mariángel twists against my chest, whines, and I put a hand across her forehead, sidestep a columnar and its spines. Again to the starting point, and another circle, this one slightly larger. I must find something, anything, before we can leave. That is the arrangement.

A third circle. Into the densest part of the grove, and now more vegetation underfoot—strands of bichayo, withered borrachera. Halfway around there is a small overo, the broad leaves covered with dust. Mariángel is crying yet again and I squat in the shade, bring out her juice, bring out raisins and crackers, wait as she eats and drinks.

The sand at the base of the trunk is oddly patterned, rivulets as seen from a mile in the air, beautiful. I stand, smooth the rivulets with my boot. My hip has stiffened but does not hurt. Mariángel points, a huerequeque, sprinting away.

Farther and farther out. Mariángel pulls again at my beard and I push her hands away. Deer tracks. A low gray maze of some woody plant, and Reynaldo once told me the name but I have forgotten. I pick my way through. On the far side I find a hard patch of ground three feet across, almost perfectly round, a glittering disc of sand and dried mud.

I walk past it, turn back, step closer. Mariángel whines and I sweat and she whines and I threaten and she whines. The disc is nearly gold from this angle—another sun. Mariángel whines again and I curse her, curse myself, whisper.

The search, curling in on itself as well. I wipe the sweat from my face, neck, hands. Turn away from the disc and walk. Walk and look. Only bushes, grass, only sand and heat. I am so very tired, and there are so many good reasons not to have brought Mariángel. In the future I will come only when I can leave her with Casualidad.

In front of me now is a wide ravine. There is loam in the bed, smooth and dry, and for a few months each year water must come fast from the mountains. I have never yet walked it and not found tracks. At times the species that made them is clear to me and at times it is not. When it is not, if it is early enough in the day, I sketch the tracks as well as I am able and research them the next day at work. Along and along and perhaps today will be the day there are no tracks but then ahead I see the loam disturbed, the thin bands of darker soil. Closer, and it feels as if I already know. Closer and there is no question, dog tracks, a dozen sets or more, intermingled, down and across and disappearing.

I want to move, to walk, but don’t, can’t, my fault wholly and inexcusably and the dogs found Pilar three miles east of here. She was dead by then, the mortician promised me this, but late at night I have seen it otherwise, Pilar too weak to move, and she can hear the dogs as they come, the lead dog loping up and others and they snap at the backs of her legs. She tries to fight them off but the lead dog seizes her wrist in its jaws, pulls her flat and another sinks its teeth into her face and I scream, gasp, Mariángel screaming too.

I am on all fours in the sand, Mariángel hanging beneath me, fighting at the cords of her sling. I breathe, deeper, slower. Push myself upright. Mariángel cries and I stand, hold her, whisper to her, only sounds. I turn away from the ravine and walk, gather it all around me, the old guilt and the new as well, my fading, my emptying, I gather it and bear it.

The heat stronger, this expanse, the haze. I walk and stare and stop and walk. Nothing. Mariángel still crying and I walk, whisper, walk. Then a copse of palo verde. The trees are twenty feet tall and at least as wide, their green trunks dust-stained brown, their lowest branches reaching almost to the sand, the copse a dense interlocked mass. I know those thorns, have come too close before. I stare, and the mass flattens into latticework, a myth of geometry, of structure, intricate and beautiful and pointless but then a flaw, a crack in the surface at last: half-buried in the sand at the base of one of the trees is a small smooth chunk of black, its curves wrong for natural stone.

I hunch down, gauge the distance, won’t be able to reach it from here. I pull Mariángel out of the sling and set her in the wispy shade. I take off my knapsack, go onto my stomach, the sand burning my chest as I crawl forward. The branches bend, strain against me, catch at the sling and my clothes, hold me. I reach and a thorn scrapes down my forearm, draws blood. Mariángel screams and I reach again, stretch, one finger, have it, pull back and take her up.

I whisper to my daughter as I look at what I have found: a flat rubber heel. It could be from either a man’s or woman’s shoe, is old and worn and weathered, seems unlikely to be relevant but it is something and therefore sufficient. I tuck it into my knapsack and walk back to the algarrobo grove. I search for a loose stone, find one the size of my fist, carry it to the cairn. I set it in place on top, and turn for the highway.

THE SHEEP RUN TO THE MIDDLE OF THE PASTURE AND STOP. Dog or coyote or mountain lion or nothing. I am a hundred yards away but the moon is full and I can see them clearly.

NAKED AND DAMP AND IMMENSE AND MANY-COLORED, I towel dry and survey the damage. The scrape is infected. I run a bead of cream along it as if caulking a seam. The sunburn is minimal, a single parallelogram on my left arm. The bruise on my hip has eased from purpled black to a blend of browns and greens and the pain is almost gone.

Trousers, collared shirt, tie: the growing heat is irrelevant to the university dress code. Then to the kitchen, where Casualidad has prepared my breakfast and Mariángel’s bottle. I take my daughter, hold her in one arm as I eat. As always she drinks quickly, perhaps more quickly than she should. I ask Casualidad if she seems dehydrated or otherwise unwell, and Casualidad looks, shrugs, says some babies simply drink fast.

When Mariángel is done I set her in her chair and twirl her hair around my fingers. She pulls away and I nod, bring my face in close. She hits me in the head with the empty bottle, throws it and laughs and I think of calling in sick today, every day, waiting to hear that laugh again but now she reaches for Casualidad. I kiss her, pick up my briefcase, turn back, then go.

On the far side of the street, a neighbor is finishing the second floor of her house. Barefoot men carry square metal cans of wet cement. They climb bamboo ladders with the cans balanced on their shoulders, never waver as they climb, never fall. There is a tense sweaty peace about them, and the loose mesh of rebar above has been in place for years. Many houses here are left unfinished in this way, most often to avoid certain taxes.

To the corner and across. A glass-encased statue of the Virgin waits as ever on the overgrown traffic divider. Her peace too is tense though it has nothing to do with builders or with roofs except of course the First Rebellion.