by Roy Kesey
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.
5.
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.
6.
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.
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 mototax
i, 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 hundre
d 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.