Pacazo (8 page)

The puppet ruler Manco Inca Yupanqui finally understands that the pillaging and torture and rape will never end unless he ends them. When the rains cease, he sends messengers. By Easter the army is too large to conceal. Most of the Spaniards are off inspecting their lands or on new expeditions. Hernando Pizarro sends out seventy mounted soldiers, Manco harries them back and the siege begins: Cuzco surrounded, the Sacsayhuamán citadel occupied, canals destroyed to flood fields, holes dug and camouflaged to cripple horses. I pull out my handkerchief, wipe my neck and hands. There are the smells of roses and brine and if Manco attacks in force—but instead he waits for more warriors, gives the Spaniards time to prepare defenses and supplies. In May at last the Incas come. They load their slings with heated stones and set fire to the thatch roofs of the city. The wind rises. Soon all of Cuzco is aflame, all except the enclosure where half the Spaniards hide, and this is the legend, the Virgin on the roof of Sunturhuasi, putting out the flames.

Stench of the open drain, and no eyewitness mentions her. Titu Cusi writes instead of slaves with buckets, but Garcilaso gives her as fact, and Guaman Poma de Ayala draws her riding a cherubim, water spraying from her palms, the Incas falling back in terror. A cloud now, and easier walking. The siege weathered three more months. Fish and lizards from Piura dried underground by the Tallán and paid years before in tribute, stored against famine in mountain caches, now spirited into Cuzco. The Spaniards counterattack, retake Sacsayhuamán, Manco’s honor guard slaughtered, the natives swimming out into Chincheros Lake to escape and lanced there in the water or captured, the women’s breasts and the men’s hands cut off.

When the Spaniards are reinforced, Manco runs. The Chachapoya offer refuge, but something is not quite right. They had welcomed Alvarado, fought often on the Spanish side, are perhaps still aligned. Manco turns, spins, settles finally in Vilcabamba and a taxi honks and slows.

The license plate starts with P but ends with 81 and the driver is an old man. Behind it is a garbage truck, two boys hanging off the back, bandanas across their faces. Then a mototaxi, the front half that of a motorcycle and the rear a sort of chariot, plastic and vinyl stretched over a metal frame, and the mototaxi too honks and slows. They are slightly cheaper than regular taxis, slightly slower and much louder. I shake my head and the matacojudo ending is among the finest I have imagined, but now here at the park I look at the empty vines and they seem too thin, too fragile for that sort of work.

Additional means of transportation: combis, which are vans, and colectivos, which are old sedans converted to diesel and often missing several windows. Unless the distance is unreasonable I walk so that taxis will stop, and I have heard that there are restaurants here where small lizards are still on the menu. Ceviche de lagartija. With luck pacazos are sometimes used instead.

Along the edge of the park, and on the far side teenage girls are gathering on the grass for their walk to school. They are dark and bright and lovely, wear the uniform chosen thirty years ago by General Velasco. Few schools still use it. White blouse and black shoes, charcoal skirt and socks, it is the perfect uniform and the girls surely detest it.

Velasco also seized the vastest encomiendas here, gave the land and equipment to cooperatives of the local poor. This was the center of his attempt to redress the past four hundred and sixty years. It failed in most ways but not everyone is sad that he tried, and there is movement far down the street, someone thin and dark and waving perhaps at me.

Closer, and yes, Armando, assistant professor of History, expert on eighteenth- century patterns of inheritance. He is sitting at a table on the patio of Neuquén, a restaurant I have sometimes found useful for beer and grilled meats in the evening. He was helpful in my first years here, had a good sense of what was to be found in each Peruvian archive, was rarely wholly wrong in any respect. He waves each time he sees me, is ebullient in regard to most things.

- Juan de Segovia! he says.

Somehow it still amuses him to call me this. The first time he did so was years ago. He had not known of the conquistador, had transliterated my name for the simple pleasure of hearing it in his language, and the waitress brings his breakfast—a plate of cold cuts, a basket of bread.

- Hello, Armando. Ceviche de lagartija?

- But we would never have ceviche for breakfast!

- I know.

- A joke!

- Of sorts, yes.

- How is your thesis progressing?

- Fine, I say.

This is what I always say. If I am not mistaken, Armando has already had today’s first drink. I tell him that I will see him on campus, and he waves again.

A bit faster now—my first class does not begin until nine, but I am required to be present in my office by eight-thirty. Nothing urgent or important has ever occurred in the course of that first half hour; none of the Peruvians in the English Section have their own offices, and none are paid as highly as me though most are better professors. I wonder why they do not resent me more than they do, and when I first came to Peru I had not planned to stay in Piura for any length of time, meant only to visit the ruins in Morropón, but as I waited for my bus to Cajamarca there was a tug at my arm and I turned, turned back, and my backpack was gone.

Smell of balsam, smell of sweat, and how I would love to find those thieves and squeeze their heads until they burst but then another man, large and clean-cut and friendly: Reynaldo. He was waiting for a bus to Trujillo, saw me spinning, has come to ask if he can be of help. I say that he cannot. He stays regardless and together we confirm that I am here because Peruvian history interests me, that I am from the United States and have been robbed. He speaks slowly and clearly so that I will not misunderstand, requests a phone book at the counter, and while we wait for one to be located he asks me multipart hypotheticals about Michael Jordan and the future of the NBA.

The phone book is brought. Reynaldo copies down for me the address of the police station. Then his bus arrives. He asks what I plan to do. I tell him that I do not know. He looks at me, gives me his card, says that he can promise nothing but the university where he works is often looking for more English professors. I ask about the History department and he shrugs, says that perhaps it is also a possibility. We shake hands. I watch his bus pull away. I possess nothing but my passport and a little money, and my research trip is otherwise over. I walk to the sidewalk, and hand Reynaldo’s card to the driver of the first taxi in line.

The smell of turned earth. I thank the History dean for his time, walk out of his office and ask, follow along the white building and across a parking lot and up a path, am led to Arantxa. I ask if she is in need of professors. She says that God has sent me. Not God, I say, but a man at the bus station. Arantxa insists, a dog barks, sun sharp again in my eyes, and I see no reason not to agree. I give her the answers required: native English speaker, M.A., teaching experience, not a felon. She does not care that I do not have a TEFL certificate as long as I plan to get one at some point. I say that I have just been contemplating that very option. She tells me that the summer term starts in two weeks, that she can give me a full load, will pay me hourly for now but switch to a monthly salary in the fall if things work out. I agree though all this makes no sense to me, and won’t until I learn that the week before she had to fire her only native speaker, an Uzbek-Canadian named Shukhrat. I will later hear about Shukhrat from many at the university. The things I hear will be meant as warnings. He was polite and smart and pleasant and stole office supplies, smoked marijuana on the roof of the water tower, wrote a weekly underground newsletter comparing the Pope to Stalin.

The work was and is simple. The students are lively and kind. Then Pilar, and three years move past, and perhaps I will see the taxista pull up to the pump at the Texaco station, will approach quietly, strike a match.

Unlikely, ungraceful. I will have to come up with something better, and Sancho’s chronicle, Atuahualpa standing in the square, asks Pizarro to watch over his children, and Pizarro promises, steps back, signals the executioner. Months later he sends Atahualpa’s brother Quilliscacha to fetch the children from Rumiñavi in Quito. Quilliscacha and his men arrive bearing Atahualpa’s body. Rumiñavi welcomes them. The wake begins. He feeds them, bids them drink. Bids them drink more. Bids them drink more and murders them, these collaborators, these rivals. Quilliscacha’s bones are crushed and a single incision made, the bone shards extracted, head and hands and feet embalmed as if he’d been a criminal, his body made into a drum and perhaps the process can begin while the victim is still alive.

Two more taxis pass. One of the drivers is too young and the other’s face is not dark enough. I turn onto Ucchuracay, and here the sides of many buildings have been left unfinished: broken brick-ends, rough mortar. There are a few finer structures with completed sides, red bricks painted red, whitewashed cement spacers at regular intervals. It is a means of differing.

Across the Panamericana to the Texaco station, check my watch, have only thirty seconds to allot. Taxistas in Piura can rarely afford more than a small amount of gas at a time and so circle the stations like moths. It is not the case that I despise them all. Of course I do not. It is only the one. The others work hard and earn little, like so many here. Most were once shop owners, teachers, engineers. The last taxi I took was driven by a former architect. He told me of a partner who absconded, of bankruptcy, of months of rice and water for him and his wife and their son, of two years selling off-brand soft drinks at stoplights. The weight of the cooler, the rope cutting into his back, fifteen hours a day under this fat despotic sun. Then the move up to brand-name soft drinks—a wonderful day, the man said. Another year, and enough saved to rent a taxi from someone else’s fleet. Two years of driving it and then that very week his own taxi, second-hand but solid, a decade of debt but a means now up and out, and he smiled at me, swept his hand from window to window as if showing me a ballroom in a palace.

This morning all the taxis are clearly wrong. I wait thirty more seconds, forty, forty-five. Then past the Río Azul Hotel, across the street, and another hundred yards of heat and pavement along a wall bearing a mural: the establishment of Piura, first Spanish city on the Pacific coast, Francisco Pizarro, his drawn sword.

The mural has faded, the paint flaking in places. The figures are drawn simply, childlike, cardboard armor, plastic sword, a basement full of these things, my old Halloween costumes and my father walking among them, walking and falling, that great heart beating as ever, then ceasing to beat. My mother sees the door left open. Calls down the narrow staircase, knows already, must have known. I drive up from Berkeley. He was still warm when I found him, she says, collapses against my chest. Bearing the coffin. I’d thought it would be lighter. Aunts and uncles, cousins. Grief like whitecaps.

My final night I ask my mother why he had gone down to the basement, what he had intended to do or hoped to find. She says she isn’t sure. She asks why it matters and I say that of course it does not.

The drive back to Berkeley, empty. My room, empty. Another week of nothing, then classes and that wild whipping powerline, certainty of the absence of certainty and Juan de Segovia is listed among the founding citizens of Cuzco in March of 1534, returns to Jauja with many of the other conquistadors, and Pizarro parcels out the right to extract tribute from the native populations. Segovia receives no such grant, and here the fog lowers. Has he fallen from favor? Is he planning on returning to Spain with his fortune and health intact? Is he already dead, and if so, how? Disease, battle, accident, so many ways and by the end of the year his death is fact. He has left no will, appears to have left no progeny. He disappears from history and I think of my father’s small and absurd lie of love. Perhaps he forgot ever telling it. I wish I had told him: a useful narrative. Carried me at times. Also made me preposterous in new ways and I am now five minutes late.

I check the trees quickly on my way to the Language Center, squat to untie and retie my shoe in front of Arantxa’s open door, wave to her, enter my office. I set down my briefcase and lean for a moment against my desk. I scratch the scrape on my forearm. Then I clutch my stomach, murmur loudly about intestinal difficulties, walk out and past the bathrooms, past the deer pen, across toward the chemistry laboratory and Juan had an uncle, Diego, also a trumpeter. Diego arrives from Spain, lives for a time with Pedro de Alconchel, attempts to claim Juan’s fortune and is unsuccessful—the Crown’s fist once closed does not open. Stays in Lima. Dies there. His widow sells his trumpets to natives brought from Mexico to play at festivals and Reynaldo is standing outside, his hands covered with wet soil. He is looking at a newly planted tree. If I am not mistaken, it is a lucuma.

- Hello, Reynaldo. From the Tarma Valley?

Reynaldo squints.

- Or the Mantaro—

- They grow anywhere warm these days. I got this one from the tree people down at the market.

There is a line of mud across Reynaldo’s forehead, dark circles under his eyes, and perhaps his aunt’s health is worse than usual.

- It is a fine tree, I say.

He nods. Lucuma fruit is not often eaten fresh. Instead it is sold powdered and used in desserts. It is most Peruvians’ favorite flavor, something like maple syrup, and in the branches of an algarrobo not far away there is a bird, white and brilliant yellow across the breast, black wings and tail and face. Its song flutes up and down the scale. I ask Reynaldo what it is called.

- Chiroca, he says. I think it is some kind of wren.

I have seen many wrens, and none of them looked like this.

- Perhaps you should stick to trees.

The bird flies away. Reynaldo walks to the algarrobo, runs his hand along the lowest branch. This tree is one of the first whose genes he helped design, and each generation grows straighter, faster, with smaller spines, larger pods, more of the seeds that will become flour or oil or a liqueur that women like better than men do. He has explained his research processes several times. I do not yet understand the chemistry as such but the processes themselves involve old women and small children, scarification and sifting screens, a gravimetric separator, an immense refrigerator and the eight deer in the pen.