by Roy Kesey
Instead they grew, branched, became beautiful. In the Berkeley stacks it was no longer the Spaniards but their allies—Huanca, Cañari, Chachapoya. To this day there are regions in Peru that celebrate not the Incas but the local culture they destroyed, and there is a final book to put away, Prescott’s flawed classic. It was among the many my mother mailed down when I said I was staying. One box had a letter taped to the top, the house so empty now, but the flowers in the garden and the ducks by the lake, and sitting on the bookcase is the old rubber heel I found last week in the desert.
I do not know why it is here. It should not be here, should be boxed with the rest. There is no reason for me to have left it here but I cannot simply store it now: it has been too long since I did the right work.
For the moment Piura is silent. If Mariángel wakes before I am done I will not have the strength to sing her back to sleep. I get the key from its hook in the kitchen and go to the linen closet. I open the padlock, turn the knob, step forward as the stack of boxes tilts.
I ease the top box to the floor, bring the second one down, the third and fourth, spread them around the doorway. I lift the fifth, carry it to the center of the room. If I still had all I have found, I would need another closet, another padlock, but in the early months I took what appeared most salient to the police. They thanked me on each occasion, and smiled. I took them less and less over time. When they closed the investigation last month, I went to reclaim what I had given. They said they had no idea.
The oldest box first. I take its objects one after another. I hold and observe each for a moment, then set it on the floor. Slowly the grid is formed. Working down through the box in this way comes always to feel archaeological, the mattocks of my hands digging from one soil horizon to the next, but of course it is not, can never be, the artifacts’ stratigraphic context here not that of their proper events but of my finding them and therefore nearly useless.
For a time I gathered fewer artifacts than specimens. There were many labeled bags in my freezer: hair, bloody bandage, used toilet paper, a fingernail clipping found on a bar counter. A month ago my freezer failed as all things fail and the evidence turned to rot.
I am left with twigs broken at unlikely angles. Paper towels blotted with motor oil. Shreds of cloth, lengths of thread. Filthy combs and brushes. Wads of aluminum foil filled with dirt of unnatural colors. Bits of plastic that I cannot readily identify—three dozen from the first box alone.
The doorbell rings, rings, another box and another, through to the fifth, and in addition to the artifacts there are photographs. Shots of streaks of yellow paint on trees and fence posts and the sides of buildings. Shots of yellow taxis missing streaks of paint. Shots, often blurred, of men who in some way resemble the driver whose face I believe I remember.
Now, finally, the new heel. I hold it and close my eyes and ask impossible things of it: a superstition, stupid, and nothing comes. I look more closely. The rubber is hard and scarred, cracked and flaking. Small holes where nails once were. Bits of failed glue. The heel is worn thin on the outside, indicating that the wearer supenates. The rubber is darkest black deep in the cracks, indicating nothing at all.
I count across the floor. This is the ninth black rubber heel I have found. I place it in the farthest corner. I climb onto the table and scan the grid for pattern or path the way a police officer might, a detective or judge. I look for anything that might cohere or correspond to a truth from that night. For some remnant of the tissue that once connected anything to anything else.
And nothing. As always, as every time I have done this, once a month since Pilar’s death and every single time there is nothing. I close my eyes. The table creaks. Limas pepinos melones plátanos, hay manzanas y mangos but there is no vendor, I listen and there is no vendor.
I look again at the grid, stare until my eyes ache. The room laid out like this in squares, the colors shifting and now the floor is plots of pasture as seen from the air. Autumn or winter or spring; early morning or late afternoon. Cloudless sky, approach from the south. Oblique angle to the ground, shooting and looking for soilmark, cropmark, shadowmark, frostmark, and for a moment it is there, the pattern, it fades but then returns, and an intimation of something, something opening as the legs snap and the table collapses, throws me to the floor, the evidence scattered, twig and cloth and comb, the same goddamned hip as before and Mariángel screams from her crib.
10.
THIS MORNING ARANTXA'S OFFICE SMELLS ONLY OF SWEAT AND TALCUM, and the talcum is visible, a faint blur in her cleavage. I hand her the exams I have prepared for the upcoming midterms. She drops them in a drawer, tells me to close the door and sit down, asks about the Pórticos Hotel.
I am tempted to ask for her sources and to argue for their epistemological instability, for the impossibility of uniting outside of time a fact and its documentation, of mapping a memory to the instantiation of its content, but the chair she has set out for me is unpadded and narrow and this is not unintentional. I explain about bruising. I exchange the chair for a wider one from the far side of her office and sit gently. Then I tell her three truths among dozens: the archaeologist’s idiocy, my boredom, a drink or two too many.
- Sooner or later, she says, the rector will find out, and you will be fired. I won’t be able to protect you. It will be out of my hands.
Arantxa is nearly always right, and her use of idiomatic expressions is in general impeccable. Impeccable: an odd word in English, but not in Spanish. Pecado is Spanish for sin. There must be some relation.
- And if you ever do it again, she says, I’ll fire you myself.
Arantxa does not threaten often or idly. I tell her that I will try to be more careful.
- It’s not a question of being careful. Why would you do a thing like that?
I tell her that I am not sure, and that it does not matter, as my story was more amusing than any of the archaeologist’s anecdotes. She asks if I wish to speak with a doctor or counselor or priest. I say that I have nothing against doctors or counselors or priests, and also no desire to speak to them. She says nothing. I stand. She shakes her head and I sit back down.
- Also, two weeks ago you gave an essay assignment that could be understood as an attack on Catholic doctrine and university principles.
- Yes. And given the students’ level of English, it was also far too long. Has your diarrhea cleared up?
- Please don’t do it again, she says.
- It was really more a case of lesson plan confusion than—
- Don’t do it again.
I thank her, say pointlessly that I need to get back to my office. She turns to her paperwork and I stand again and go. There are only twenty minutes before my next class, but here, within limits, if one is not at the lectern one is expected to be in one’s office, to be perpetually welcoming. Arantxa chastised me when I first attempted to block off specific hours for student appointments. I pointed out that it is only the relatively fixed positions of stars that allow us to navigate, however poorly. She began a sentence, smiled and walked away. I have since learned what she nearly said: assigning specific hours has no bearing whatsoever on what time students arrive.
My students come often and rarely wish to discuss class. They come to ask for donations to help their department buy the flower arrangements they wish to present to the Virgin on the days such things are done. They ask me to aid with the transcription and translation of the songs on the tapes their cousins send them from Los Angeles or Trenton. They ask for my assistance in filling out applications for scholarships and graduate study in the United States or Europe, and do not understand how little I can help, and are frequently successful in spite of me.
To fill the hours when no student happens to come, I first put my name on the waiting list to use the one computer in our office that is connected to the internet. Then I write quizzes and take-home exercises. I correct essays and read the newspaper. I imagine ways to enrich the Resource Bank, and once a week I visit the deer pe
n.
This is a remnant of a custom from before Pilar and I were engaged but after we had begun. She would be waiting, and I would come to stand beside her, unbearably, and she would smile. One day there I told her of the last great Inca hunt. Manco Inca and Pizarro allied for the moment, Quisquis routed and fleeing for Quito, and to celebrate Manco brings ten thousand warriors, sets them in a circle ten miles wide, and in the course of eight days they draw inward toward a single valley. The enclosure tightens and tightens until the warriors can join hands. Manco invites Pizarro and fifty other Spaniards to watch or join in, and they do so but mounted and in battle gear, afraid they are meant as prey.
Inside the circle are thousands of deer and hares, vizcachas and chinchillas, vicuñas and guanacos, foxes and pumas and bears. The Incas kill and skin the predators. They shear and release the vicuñas and guanacos. Of the rest they begin with the sick and weak and old, supplement these with healthy animals as needed for meat or fur, eleven thousand head of game in all, beat them to death and free the rest.
I told Pilar all this and she was intrigued or pretended to be. Then I asked her to marry me. She asked me why she should. I said that she probably shouldn’t. She said she knew and would regardless.
These deer are the size of goats and no more or less friendly than penned deer elsewhere. I feed them handfuls of random grass, which they seem to enjoy more than the algarrobo pods piled in the corners. The pods are being tested as fodder, and the seeds like so much in this world are indigestible, pass cleanly through the deer, are ready for screening and scarification. It is the best way to obtain them, says Reynaldo. Running the pods through grinders can damage the seeds, he says, and waiting for the pods to rot takes unreasonably long.
When the deer are satiated or bored I walk back to the office, read in silence. In early years I occasionally rereadchronicles of the conquistadors to make sure I had missed nothing. I disguised some of them in unrelated bookcovers, as Peruvians have long memories if only in certain respects. Reynaldo is not my only friend to own and wear a t-shirt bearing a filthy Spaniard in sixteenth-century armor, waves of stink emanating as he says, My culture for your gold?
Reynaldo does not wear this shirt to the university, of course, and Arantxa is among his closest friends, and before I read little that was recommended by others. Now I read little that is not. The next book on my desktop stack was brought to me for unclear reasons by Armando: the poems of Carlos Oquendo de Amat. Oquendo wrote only one book, 5 Metros de Poemas. It is a single page that unfolds accordion-like to a length that I assume to be five meters, though I have not measured and do not intend to.
Arantxa’s secretary comes looking for me, and for a moment I think I am in for new and difficult questions, but Eugenia only wishes to remind me that my current visa extension expires in two weeks. She is very good about reminding me of these things. She has had four years of practice.
I should have begun residency paperwork as soon as Pilar and I were married. After her death, the clerks at Immigrations told me that I had waited too long. They said this sadly, as though wishing they could do something to help. Eugenia later told me that this was not wholly true, but by that point it was easier to apply for a regular work visa. Seven months ago I sent in my papers. I ask Eugenia how much longer I will have to wait.
- Not much longer, she says. Everything will be ready soon.
- How soon?
This is a question one must never ask most Peruvians, and before she can answer I tell her that it doesn’t matter, that I am grateful for her help. I gather my materials and head to the cafeteria for a hurried coffee. Reynaldo is there, asks me to join him. I order and sit down at his table. He is drinking an Inca Kola.
Inca Kola is the national soft drink of Peru. Nearly all Peruvians believe it is the perfect accompaniment for Chinese food, and for many other kinds of food as well. It is the color of urine and tastes like bubble gum.
His order is however only marginally worse than mine. Here in Piura most coffee is either instant or made from esencia. Esencia freshly prepared is what many would call strong coffee, but is not drunk as such, not here. Instead it is poured into tiny pitchers and left out to cool, to be mixed with hot water and sugar at some point hours or days later. I have tried to explain the unnecessarily unpleasant results of this system to my students, my colleagues, the men and women who work in so many of Piura’s restaurants. I have pointed out the high quality of the coffee grown in the highlands of this very region, the ease with which this coffee could be served properly here in town, and my students, my colleagues, the men and women of the restaurants, they all nod, and pass me the tiny pitcher.
I smooth the tablecloth with my hands and smile briefly. Only professors are allowed to sit at the tables with tablecloths—it is one of our several privileges. Reynaldo stares out at the desert, asks again what Berkeley was like when I was a student. I have told him many times that I was there a decade too late for the stories he hopes to hear. In the early Eighties we were all between one thing and another. We didn’t know whether to wear our hair long or short, so we wore it medium, and had medium-sized combs in our pockets. We took drugs when we could, but it was hard to know which drugs were the right ones, and we lived in fear of being wrong or perhaps it was only me.
- Free love! says Reynaldo.
He knows that if he says this I will tell him that no love is free, though some loves cost less than others.
Out the gates, and the street names near the university are mainly those of saints—Miguel, Felipe, Cristóbal, Ramón. Elsewhere in the city they have the names of trees or foreign countries. There are also sections where the streets are labeled by letter or number, and in the center they are named after departments: Cuzco, Ayacucho, Arequipa.
By department Peruvians mean what others mean when they say province, and by province they mean something like county; there is a rumor that soon departments will be called regions and no other change will be made. Departmental capitals often share the name of their department—again Cuzco, again Ayacucho and Arequipa—but this is not always the case. The department of Junín has a province called Junín whose capital is the city of Junín, but the departmental capital is Huancayo, which is the world capital of suicides caused by unrequited love.
In the park maids play with infants on blankets, take the infants up whenever dogs are seen. Junín the provincial capital was the site of the second-most-significant battle in the War of Independence, a late counterattack led by Suárez beating down Canterac’s royal troops. The city has since been of little importance to anyone who does not live in or very near it, but at least it has not been erased. There are towns nearby that have. Yungay was twenty thousand people in the Callejón de Huaylas, a valley that runs between the ice of the Cordillera Blanca and the dark shale of the Cordillera Negra. Ten miles southeast is El Huascarán: twenty-two thousand feet high, the tallest mountain in Peru.
May 31, 1970, mid-afternoon, and most of the town is home watching the opening match of the World Cup, Mexico against the Soviet Union, a dull tie but the first match ever broadcast in color. A few hundred children are instead attending a circus in the local stadium off to one side of town. There are flowers and small rodents painted on the children’s cheeks. There is cotton candy stuck in their hair. The older children have tied balloons around their wrists. Their baby brothers and sisters rub dirt in each others’ faces and smile at the trained bears insane in their cages.
Then the earthquake. When the ground is done shaking, Yungay is ruins: houses and stores collapsed, the Plaza de Armas split open, survivors stumbling into the streets. And they hear a sound. A roar. They turn.
The northwest face of El Huascarán, a chunk of rock and ice half a mile wide and more than a mile long, has broken off. The slide gathers speed, hits small lakes and reservoirs, adds their water and mud to its mass, is moving at more than a hundred miles an hour and this is what the people see: El Huascarán strange now to them, diminished, and below it the foot
hills beneath which they have ever lived, and leaping toward them a monstrous flood of ice and rock and mud. The children at the circus, they came running out of the stadium when the earthquake hit. They stand, their cheeks painted, their bright balloons, ice and mud and rock sweeping past and Yungay is gone from this earth.
Some adults survived as well—the few maids and parents at the circus, the few widows who had chosen that afternoon to visit the graveyard on the far side of town. The entire zone is now a national cemetery. The taller palms on the Plaza de Armas were buried not quite to their tops, and their fronds still somehow grow. The nation’s schools have earthquake drills yearly on the day.
There have of course been other earthquakes here in Peru, thousands, but none so lethal and only one as well known: the conquistadors built the Church of Santo Domingo directly on top of the Coricancha, and in 1950 an earthquake destroyed the church but left the temple foundation intact. Tourists love this and consider it symbolic. Most Peruvians learn of it in primary school and even at that age are unsure whether or not to be ambivalent.
In primary school I was taught to hide under my desk during earthquakes, and also during nuclear attacks. Doorways were a secondary option, and once an earthquake came while I was at the Fallash library. I stepped to the closest door, watched adults run in circles. The shelves tumbled. A man’s leg was broken, and a woman’s ribs. My picture was in the newspaper the next day.
At last home, and the only death now is a dustpan full of geckos on the kitchen counter. There is also a lack of noise. I find Mariángel asleep in her crib, and Casualidad in my bedroom sliding the curtains carefully open. She has not heard me enter, and when I speak she whirls and falls. I am not quick enough to catch her. She hits her head on the side of the bed, and there is a bit of blood.