by Roy Kesey
- Who scored it? I ask.
- Waldir Sáenz, says a student named Milton. Beautiful, he says.
I ask him to come to the board, to diagram the goal and label its parts in English. Milton takes the chalk. He shows chaos at midfield, a pass to Muchotrigo on the wing, a cross in to Sáenz and the shot, straight at the goalkeeper, the ball seeming to slip through the man’s body. Only the final label gives Milton trouble.
- Por la huacha, he says. Between the legs, and beautiful.
- Huacha, yes. In English we say nutmeg.
As good a warm-up as any. I put the word on the board, have the students drill it as if it will be of value. I describe the spice as well, and Milton asks for the historical connection. The students are focused now, stare at me, and I smile.
- I have no idea. But speaking of history.
The students moan. I nod, shrug, walk them through preparatory vocabulary. Next the text, Daniel Boone, skim and scan. Comprehension questions, and finally the writing assignment, a national hero and his or her flaws.
The students’ heads lower. I shuffle through the folder. For any time left over I have a crossword about vegetables. I lean on the lectern, stare at the back wall, and here is what will happen tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that:
I am walking home from work. The sky catches soft fire in the west, and the smells of jasmine and offal settle over the city. As I pass the park not far from my house, a taxi slows beside me. The driver honks and I do not look up: looking up only encourages them. He honks again, pulls closer to the sidewalk, says, Oye colorado, taxi?
I shake my head, but as the cab glides away I glance at the license plate. It begins with P and ends with 22. I freeze, then shout and wave. The old yellow Tico pulls over beneath a matacojudo tree. I step slowly toward it, look in through the window on the passenger’s side, and the driver’s face is almost familiar.
- It was you, wasn’t it? I say.
- Mister? he says.
And I believe I know that voice. I wipe my hands on the front of my shirt, put my handkerchief on the door handle, open the door and drag him through and out of his taxi. I slam him face-down against the hot hood. He twists and swings at me and misses, blood streaming from his nose, spattering my hands and face and clothes. I reach up, grab one low matacojudo, strike the man’s head but the fruit is overripe and breaks. I reach up again and rip a vine loose, garrote the taxista, the vine tighter and tighter, the man’s body at last still.
No other cars have passed, but my neighbors may well have heard or seen from their open windows. I let the body fall, walk to my house. I hear Casualidad and Mariángel in the kitchen, slip past them to my room, shower and dress.
Back to the kitchen, and Casualidad smiles, asks how I entered the house without her hearing. The elastic band of her eye patch is askew, a sharp diagonal across her forehead, holds a shock of black hair vertical above one ear. I tell her that I am tired of instant coffee, that from now on I will only drink real coffee, and send her to the supermarket. I kiss Mariángel, turn on cartoons for her to watch. Out in the back yard, I spray the bloodstained clothes with lighter fluid, burn them in my new galvanized tub, and bury the ashes in the flowerbed.
Then I remember the police lieutenant, his catalog of uncertainties. We have only part of a license plate. The taxi was a private car, like most taxis here, and there are thousands of possible matches throughout the country. No way to know where or even if it is registered. The plate could have been false or stolen, the car itself stolen. These cars are constantly resold. There are thousands of dark-skinned black-haired brown-eyed men in this city alone. My poor eyes do not always see the differences.
I walk back into the house, am washing my hands when the doorbell rings. My skin comes alive with sweat. Silence. Then a voice calls hello. Reynaldo, only Reynaldo.
He sits and watches as I help Mariángel with mashed yams. He looks in my eyes, and he knows. He asks anyway.
- What happened?
- I killed him.
- The taxi driver?
- I think so.
- You’re not sure?
- It is hard to be sure. I think so.
- Did anyone see you?
- I don’t know.
- I have friends in Bolivia.
- What would I do there?
- From there you could fly back to California.
- And there? What would I do?
- I don’t understand. If it was him, you are free.
- And if it wasn’t?
Reynaldo nods.
- And so?
- If no one comes, I’ll see you at work tomorrow.
- Would you like me to stay with you?
- No. Thank you, but no.
- All right, Reynaldo says. Until tomorrow.
- Until tomorrow.
He leaves, and is back twenty minutes later with the painting of the Sacred Heart from his aunt’s house. He hangs it on an empty nail and plugs the red light into a socket.
- This may help, he says.
I don’t answer. He shrugs, turns to go, turns back.
- Come by the laboratory tomorrow. I’ve planted a new tree beside the walkway. A lucuma, from the Tarma Valley in Junín.
I say that I will, watch as he walks out the door, and Milton is staring at me. I know what has happened. Some shudder or wince and Milton saw it, knows he was not meant to, is afraid. Once I twitched so hard as I broke the man’s neck that I pulled a muscle, and the whole class noticed, and the students discussed it for days.
I walk to Milton’s desk. He has misunderstood the assignment, has written about his mother. I praise his paragraph structure, explain the difference between moreover and however, have imagined the encounter in many ways—many places, many weapons, many angles of light. It is only recently that the fantasies have curled in on themselves in this way. Reynaldo has begun hinting that perhaps it is time to give up. An odd phrase, to give, and up. My wife has been dead for three hundred days. The police have ended their search, and I am emptying, yes, but I fight it and do not always fail.
2.
OUT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY GATE, and the smells of jasmine and offal are settling over the city. The sky catches soft fire in the west and my thesis advisor looks up as I walk into his office. He swivels in his chair, leans back, says that he’s just had a call from Dr. Williamson. I say nothing. He asks me if he’s heard right, if I truly intend to switch topics and frameworks yet again. I nod. So! he says. All hail the new Todorov! Incas instead of Aztecs, Pizarro instead of Cortés…
I say nothing, and he nods. Then again, he says, given that the old Todorov is still alive and writing, I guess technically speaking we don’t need a new one just yet. Plus he had the codices to work with. You’ve got knotted string.
Again I say nothing. He has been generous with his time and hypotheses, particularly after I embraced his hermeneutics, and with luck at some point his anger will become frustration and then detachment. He chews his lower lip. Right, he says. Okay, he says, look: you’ve only been working the yanacona subaltern line for a few months, and naturally—
They cannot be considered subalterns, I say. He guffaws and says, What the hell kind of skeptic are you? Anything can be considered anything! And if you really are going to abandon the yanaconas, well and good, but why not return to the Chachapoya? You were already so far along, did well on the LASA panel, even landed that article in The Americas.
I tell him that I have finally figured out what I want to do, which is precisely what I have said at each previous switch. He does not point this out. Instead he says that if I go through with it, the department won’t be able to give me any more funding, not even for the October trip I planned months ago. I say that I will fund it myself. Well okay! he says. And if it doesn’t work out, I’m sure you’ll make a terrific junior high teacher!
I wait for him to remember that my mother has been a junior high teacher for decades. Finally he does, shrugs, apologizes, says that soon
er or later I’ll have to start finishing the things I begin. Then he tells me that the dean has my letter ready, and wishes me luck, however it turns out.
I nod, shake hands, walk to Dr. Williamson’s office. He has been less than easy on me at certain points—So you’re going to essentialize Barthes? Which one? Early Barthes? Late? Mid-early, mid-late?—but does not trouble me now. He gives me a generic letter of introduction, warns that it may not always work, says that he hopes he will see me again.
Another nod and handshake, an hour at Financial Aid arranging deferrals, and I am freed from Irvine. Out to an old white sedan in the parking lot, my father’s car, always and ever my father’s though he died nine years ago and a taxi slows beside me. The driver honks and I glance at the license plate. It begins with C and ends with 46. He honks again, pulls closer to the sidewalk. I shake my head and now the colored wisps in the sky are more feather or tendril than flame.
Casualidad waits at the front door, Mariángel in her arms and reaching out. I nod hello to Casualidad, take Mariángel and kiss her. Casualidad says that my dinner is waiting, that she must leave early for a meeting with her son’s teacher, that she will wash all of the dishes in the morning.
The band of her eye patch divides her forehead perfectly in half, and she is rarely this talkative. Perhaps something good or bad has happened. I hold Mariángel out so that Casualidad can tweak her chin, then close the door and carry my daughter to the bathroom. I hold her in one arm, rinse the sweat from my face and neck. To my bedroom, set her on my bed and strip down, put on a pair of shorts.
Now to the dining room. I put Mariángel in her high chair and work quickly through dinner, offering her a bite from each layer of the causa—mashed potato, avocado, tomato, shredded chicken. As always she spits out all but the mashed potato.
Afterwards we traverse the house. Mariángel, eleven months old, and she is learning to walk but does not like to fall. She holds to my leg as we bisect each room, and takes things up, invents sounds to name them, Hegelian analogue or Spitzerian mimesis or Barthesian disassociated code, and I propose each in turn, then shift to the words themselves: saucepan, telephone, pillow. She repeats her own inventions. I ask when she plans to begin using words I recognize. She shakes the objects, drops or throws them. I ask her to pick the objects up and put them back in place but she is not interested in this.
She finds my briefcase, pulls at the latch and I remember the zapote leaf. It is no longer perfect, has gone limp, but is still a beautiful green. I hold it out. She is not impressed. I agree that it is only a leaf but in ten or a hundred years someone working from photograph or chronicle will type “John picked a zapote leaf” and it will become both leaf and leaf. Mariángel frowns. Semiological apparatus and linguistic performance, I say. She does not believe me. I tell her that I would never lie about such a thing: history a meditation not on the past as alleged but on present trace and sublimation, its form a mediated portrayal, a damming of time’s destructive might, change frozen into tableaux, leaf now allegory, partisan teleology, plausibility defined as truce between conscience and libido, as ethical horizon, as determinant paradigm and certification of praxis, as means by which ruling interests define what can reasonably be desired, contemporary society and its moral strictures thus united as guarantors of our integrity, challenged only at our peril.
Mariángel tears the leaf in half, drops the pieces, claps twice, yawns. I warm her bottle, take her to the living room and turn on the television. The first few minutes are commercials, and she makes her way up and down the double-stack of crates that lines the near wall—dozens of notebooks, dozens of folders, a shoebox full of computer disks. One half is historical research, and the other half documents my search for the taxista.
Now she comes for her milk, and I lift her, set her on the couch beside me. She hums to herself as the Foreign Ministers of Peru and Ecuador exchange threats about border incursions. She curls up and quiets during a montage from Lady Diana’s funeral last month, rouses herself only to point at the bouquets still mountained at the palace gates. A moment later she is asleep on my chest. I ease the bottle out of her hands and set it on the end table.
The footage switches to an earthquake from earlier today, ten people killed in Assisi, the Basilica of St. Francis in ruins. Then a live report on an airplane crash in Sumatra. Two hundred and thirty presumed dead. Mariángel flinches and wakes when the reporter’s voice goes sharp to describe the smoke in the air, not the result of the crash but its likely cause: this is burning season for the farmers there. I turn the volume all the way down and sing her a lullaby medley of Nat King Cole and Aerosmith. She is asleep before the first chorus. I have a wonderful voice.
I look again at the television and now there is a green man running naked through a fountain. He has a kind and thoughtful face. At the base of the fountain are pigeons that flutter up each time he passes by. Around and around and who is this man, and why has he has painted himself, and why green? Then I remember that I do not really care.
I work my weight forward and reach for the remote and the green man falls face-down into the water, does not rise. I wait. The man is unmoving. I hold my breath and the image goes dark. The newscasters return and smile and shake their heads. Then they are sad, and show pictures of a bus crash in Sullana, the pavement stained, blankets over two bodies.
More commercials: Cristal beer, Hamilton cigarettes, Always tampons. A dog barks outside and Mariángel wakes again.
- It’s okay, I say.
She yawns, looks at me.
- Really. Everything’s fine.
I trace her eyebrows. Pilar’s eyebrows. Pilar’s brown skin, brown eyes, black hair. Only the contours are mine, the broad forehead and strong chin. I place my palm flat across Mariángel’s stomach and she wraps one hand around my thumb, another around my forefinger.
More silent national news—an aquarium at a hotel in Lima, and the dolphins do not look well. I begin another song and Mariángel frowns so I tell her a story instead, keep talking even after she falls asleep:
- Once upon a time there was a prince, a Malaysian prince, who had lots of money and beautiful clothes and a hundred hats. His only problem was that he had no real home anymore, had to travel from place to place without ever stopping anywhere for too long. One day he got on an airplane to fly from Cape Town to Khartoum—hour after hour of bad food and worse films, and his seatback wouldn’t recline. Finally he changed seats, and this one went all the way back. He was just about to fall asleep, but then there was a storm, a huge storm, lightning and thunder and all of a sudden the plane dropped thirty thousand feet, straight into Lake Victoria. The locals got into their boats and headed out to search for survivors, but they didn’t expect to find any. Who could have survived a crash like that? Then they found one: the prince from Malaysia. A miracle! said the people in the boats. They brought him ashore and took him to the hospital, and the doctors and nurses were astounded to find that aside from a minor concussion, a black eye, and two long rows of cuts on one leg, the prince was fine. They bandaged him up, and protected him from the television crews for as long as they could, but on the second morning the reporters forced their way in. The doctors and nurses shouted that they were going to call the police, but the prince said to let the reporters stay, that he had a story to tell. They set up their cameras and he began: the flight, the storm, losing consciousness as the plane fell, waking while still in the air, unconscious again as the plane slammed into the water. He woke a second time, was lying across some floating bit of wreckage, was terrified, had never learned to swim, and he felt something pull at his leg. He turned and saw a crocodile, was ripped into the water, and then for no reason the crocodile flipped him back up to the surface and let him go. All the world watched this interview on television, all the world marveling at the prince’s extraordinary good luck, all the world except for a middle-aged woman sitting in a small dim office in Kuala Lumpur. This woman recognized the man from pictures in her files and knew h
im for what he was, guilty of fraud and embezzlement, convicted in absentia years before. Two months later the prince was in jail back in Malaysia where he belonged, and that, that, that is why we watch television. Because you never know who you will see. We stay vigilant, you and me, we scan the faces in the background of every shot, and then some day we see the taxista. And go find him. And when we have found and cornered him we draw our swords and cut off his hands and feet. Then we sheath our swords. We draw our daggers. We put the tips of the blades softly against his eyes, and plunge them in.
Mariángel shifts, lets go of my hand, wraps her fists in my beard. I lift her higher on my chest. The news ends with what looks like a new coach for the soccer team in Arequipa. Still more commercials, and Woody Woodpecker. Here he is called El Pájaro Loco. I am not sorry the sound is turned down. I do not miss that laugh.
The man had not been royalty, may not even have been Malaysian though it sounded right when I said it. Most nights are like this one, and the taxista has almost surely left Piura. There will be a prayer said at campus Mass for those who died in the Basilica. Another prayer, perhaps, for the dead in Sumatra, or a single prayer for the tragedies combined. I have no opinion either way and smooth my daughter’s hair as El Pájaro Loco turns his beak into a staple gun, staples a Wanted poster onto a telephone pole, the escaped convict heavy-set and bearded.
My first year here I had a Pre-Intermediate student named Lady Diana. I saw her on the street last week, expressed my condolences. She said that it didn’t matter to her but that her parents were distraught. I complimented her on her progress, on her use of that word, distraught—a good word.
The escaped convict tiptoes across someone’s yard and El Pájaro Loco turns his beak into a sledgehammer, beats the man to the ground. Mariángel shifts, whines. It is most likely the heat and I carry her to her bedroom, set her down on the cool sheets of her crib. Draw the mosquito netting across the top. Point the fan away, turn it on, close the curtain. Whisper to her, not words, just the sound of whispering. Pull her door nearly shut behind me.