Pacazo

by Roy Kesey

  - Your store is beautiful, she says to the old man who waits for me to decide what I need.

  He thanks her and brings down the diapers and rum to which I finally point.

  - I wish I had a store this beautiful, says the girl.

  And this is also the world, this is also where we live.

  Mariángel and I sit at the dining room table. Breakfast noises come from the kitchen, and she bangs her silverware against her high chair’s tray. The route I am planning for this evening is as always unsimple. The taxistas here gather at so many different bars, present so many possibilities.

  Socorro brings Mariángel a cup of granadilla juice, sees my maps and tracings, asks what they are for. For a game my students will play, I say. She smiles, says that the eggs will soon be ready. I smile back though they will look and taste like scouring pads: Socorro is very good with Mariángel, and cleans even more thoroughly than Casualidad, but her work at the stove is unfortunate.

  Halfway through the process of raising the cup to her lips, Mariángel loses concentration and pours a few drops down her cheek. I take a napkin, wipe her dry, help the spout toward her mouth. Socorro comes with the eggs. I ask about Casualidad, and Socorro nods.

  - Yesterday she went to the Huaringas to be cured.

  - The Huaringas.

  - Yes. She will live in Frías with our parents until she has recovered wholly, and then she will come back to work for you.

  I am unable to keep my expression neutral.

  - Yes, Socorro says, I know. But nothing else has worked either.

  - Why didn’t you tell me before?

  - She asked me not to.

  - So why are you telling me now?

  Socorro shrugs, returns to the kitchen. The Huaringas. I went, once: three months since Pilar’s body had been discovered, and the police had found nothing, caught no one. It was Casualidad herself who told me of the fourteen lakes and their powers. Reynaldo said that going would be ridiculous and stupid but might still be worth trying. Dr. Guardiola begged me not to and I went all the same, eight hours east up into the Andes, Piura to Chulucanas, to Carrasquillo, to Canchaque and Quispampa, to Huancabamba.

  An office as if any travel agency, and there I am asked to explain and pay. When this is done a guide takes me beyond to Salalá. The eggs, yes, scouring pads or worse. What I see when I arrive is not what I heard Casualidad describe, but perhaps I did not listen well enough.

  The sun begins to set and I am led to a dirt field behind the curandero’s house. At the center of the field is a long wooden table, and standing on the far side are the eighteen other clients. They have come from many places—Trujillo and Cajamarca, Lima, Cuzco and Arequipa. There is even one from Argentina.

  There is another group as well: tourists who have come to pay less and only watch. They sit on dirty mattresses a short distance away and Mariángel gathers scrambled egg in a spoon, flicks it all the way to the kitchen door. For a moment I cannot decide between scolding and joining her. In the end I do neither, call instead to Socorro and together we clean up the mess.

  The curandero arrives with four assistants, receives the bottles of perfume, the bags of sugar and limes that we were all instructed to bring. He bears them away, and for a time we speak among ourselves. Some have come for help with health, others with love, others with luck or work, and now an assistant asks if he might talk privately with me.

  He leads me to the edge of the field, says that sadly a miscommunication has occurred. For vengeance, he says, one must visit not a curandero or a shaman but a warlock. The warlocks, he says, live mainly farther out. I am welcome to go and visit one, but curanderos do not give refunds. Alternatively I am welcome to change my request and continue with the ceremony here.

  I protest for a time, make accusations of malfeasance, and they are useless; I reconsider, settle on justice, am led back to my place as the curandero returns. When the moon has risen fully he begins his chant. It is mostly in Quechua with occasional bits in Spanish, appears to be part invocation, part history, part love song.

  Toast, cold, and reasonable coffee. I tell Socorro she can have the toast for herself. She says that she has already eaten, takes Mariángel for a bath, and the curandero chants for an hour as he arranges and rearranges the bottles and sticks and shells and daggers and stones and herbs on the table. The sugar and limes and perfume are brought, are arranged and rearranged as well. Then he stops, and pours each of us a glass of San Pedro. Some of the other clients waver after drinking. I feel only a slight pleasant dizziness, nothing like the ayahuasca in the jungle.

  The curandero drinks too, builds a fire of palo santo, begins his trance. The assistants call us forward one by one so that the curandero might ask us questions. One by one we answer. He fans smoke in our faces, speaks of the means by which our problems will cease to exist. Some clients are asked to ingest a sort of snuff but I am not among them and the curandero sends us one by one away.

  My maps and tracing, my route for tonight, and I do not remember the questions he asked me, do not remember my answers or his explanation, had already forgotten all this as I reached my place in the field and now those to either side of me are vomiting and the assistants pass among us, praise those who are sickest. The curandero comes, and we are made to shake our limbs and shout and be purified. He strikes us lightly with metal bars and quince branches. He calls for us to shout more loudly, to shake our limbs more strongly, says that we are flowering, that he can see it, and this goes on for hours in that high thin air. The moon sets, and there are only stars. The tourists at their distance try not to fall asleep and mainly succeed.

  At dawn the table is cleared, the implements gathered in cloth bags, and it is time for us to walk four hard cold hours up and along and through to the chosen lake itself. I remember fog, mud, great beauty, I remember fields of wheat and potatoes, oca and olluca. The surrounding peaks rise and rise. We walk, walk, at last arrive.

  The curandero says that this is Shimbe, the lake nearest to Salalá, and also the best of the fourteen for the purposes of this group in his opinion. It is larger than I had imagined, and more beautiful, though the shore is thick with abandoned underpants. The reason for this is unclear, then too clear: as epilogue or prologue we are made to strip off our outer clothes, and walk into the lake, and submerge, and remove one item of innerwear, and leave it behind. Underpants, says the curandero, are the item most commonly chosen, and this is as it should be.

  He leads us to the edge, arranges his implements on a large flat rock, bids us enter. The water is very, very cold. The mud is velvety underfoot. We come mainly naked out of the lake and are met with towels, are led in more shouting, more shaking of our limbs. There is a warmth rising in my chest that I cannot explain, a fullness of energy and my shouting is happier, purified, flowered, the beauty of those mountains and ridiculous, stupid, pointless, changed nothing and the curanderos do not work cheap—if Casualidad had enough money to pay them, it was barely enough, and all that she had left of what I have given her.

  By now she will be on her way to Frías. There she will die, and the only questions are when it will happen and how much she will suffer first. I owe her too much not to say goodbye in person.

  I lift Mariángel from her high chair and set her on my lap. Over the years Casualidad spoke of Frías now and again, but always in fragments. I know only that it is very small, and somewhere northeast of Piura, and not easy to reach even under the best of circumstances. I ask Socorro about the roads. She says that they are for the most part safe except when it rains heavily. We look out the window together. It is raining, lightly. I ask her if I might leave Mariángel with her tomorrow and the following day, and she nods.

  - Casualidad will be very happy to see you, she says.

  - And I may be able to help in some way.

  - I am sure that you will.

  - Are there hotels?

  - Two of them.

  I nod. Mariángel has finished her juice. I imagine Casualidad
walking down into the freezing water, coming out, her body blurred.

  I will have to answer for this, that there was no scan of bars last night. Instead I packed my knapsack. Then Mariángel and I played a series of Peruvian baby-games involving spicy roast chicken which unfortunately has burned, and woodsmen from San Juan to whom no one will give bread or cheese though they will give them chili peppers. Then I reordered my books with the help of rum. Now it is six in the morning and I am standing on an empty street corner in Chulucanas.

  If my daughter is awake she has already called for me. Chulucanas is the first and only town of significant size on the way to Frías. I have been here many times, always on Saturday afternoons and in the interest of ceramics. It is an easy eighty minutes from Piura, and the flower pots and owls are gorgeous and mainly a glowing rust-red and come in many sizes. There is also a profusion of perfectly round men and women, sold in pairs and kissing or dancing marinera.

  The best known potters work outside of town in a flat dusty space called La Encantada. One is welcome to watch them. Many have won pottery competitions here and on other continents, and the trophies are displayed on shelves in houses with dirt floors and immense televisions. According to Socorro, if I wait long enough on this corner, sooner or later a van will pass by, and the van will probably be going to Frías, and there is no other way to get there.

  In Peru it is considered lucky to receive a ceramic owl as a gift. I have received dozens and have noticed no effect. There is the smell of lemons in either the air or my imagination, and I once came to Chulucanas not for pottery but for the Feria del Limón. The quantities of fruit were remarkable.

  Mosquitoes bite but not unduly. I wait an hour. I wait another hour. I wait ten more minutes, and three vans come at once, and all three are going to Frías. They will leave one by one as they fill, the drivers say. Each driver tries to convince me that the first van to fill will not be his. I stand off to one side and curse them and sweat and wait.

  It takes a third hour for the forward-most van to fill halfway. The drivers do not seem discouraged. I consider walking to the nearest shop for Christmas gifts, but carrying them to Frías and back would guarantee that they be given broken and glued.

  A fourth hour, and four more customers take their places in the van. I climb in as well, and it is a long process, this climbing: there is not enough room between the bench seats for me to sit or move easily. I lean forward to the driver, pay three fares, one each for myself and the small empty spaces to either side of me. The other passengers—six men, two women, a small number of small children—they look at me as if such wealth and luxury were mysterious and shameful, and they are surely right.

  The road is unpaved but smooth and the orchards appear empty. The road turns and cuts and climbs and the temperature holds, the day warming and the air thinning simultaneously and in equal measure. The sky bears no clouds. There are villages with the usual animals, goats and pigs and chickens and dogs and burros in the streets. Children watch the van pass, but not with undue curiosity, perhaps because I am not clearly visible given the glare off the windows.

  The road gets steeper and worse, tightens in switchbacks, and the van strains at the pitch. Creeks are crossed. Sleeping is not easy, but I am occasionally briefly triumphant.

  I wake yet again, and now there are egg-shaped rocks three stories high to both sides of the road. Gatherings of houses have been built around them, and the road weaves tighter. Banana trees, cypress and palms, swollen ceibos and their wooly fruit. A river below, and small fields of sugar cane. I had forgotten it could grow at such altitudes.

  Early afternoon, a last set of switchbacks, and a town in the lap of the mountains: Frías. There are peaks to all sides but no higher level ground. The plaza is plain, almost treeless.

  The town hall is blue, its upper balcony crowded and trembling. The adjacent church is wholly white. The van stops between them, and the other passengers walk quickly away, leaving me to my slow squeezing out.

  The driver confirms what Socorro told me, that there is no way back to Chulucanas except in these same vans, and none will be leaving until tomorrow morning. I show him Casualidad’s address. He points up the widest street—small cypresses to the left and right, and the roadway strewn with manure.

  The street steepens as I walk. Low adobe houses, their mud plaster smoothed and painted. I ask again at a small shop, am told to turn right at the corner. I do, and thirty yards ahead there is a group of people, and even from here I can hear the moans and sobbing.

  I walk halfway to the group, then stop. I check the address. I count the number of houses between me and them and yes: I have arrived too late, and Casualidad is gone, and the world is unbearably wrong.

  I set down my knapsack, pull out the jacket and tie I brought against the possibility of this moment. Four tries to get the tie tied. I walk and stop again. Those gathered are all men, all stumbling, and there are many unlabeled bottles empty and slumped in the mud. The men wear field-stained ponchos, field-torn pants, sandals. They stare at my clothes. The tie in particular feels like a poor decision.

  Casualidad’s house has a weathered pink door with a small iron ring in its center. A length of old twine hangs from the ring. Now the door opens. A figure appears. It is Casualidad.

  She waves to me. I stand and stare. She beckons. I step back. She beckons again, and I take a seat in the middle of the road. I rest my eyes for a moment.

  Now Fermín is standing beside me, is thanking me for coming, is calling to the men. Two of the drunkest come. They try to pull me to my feet, are unsuccessful. I tell them that I am pleased to be precisely where I am, and Casualidad walks toward me. No one else seems to notice her. When she is four or five feet away, she stops and whispers:

  - Would you like some coffee?

  I attempt to answer, fail.

  - You don’t feel well. Would you prefer tea? There is also Sprite, and Fanta, not here but at the store.

  I look at the mumbling mourners.

  - A hundred years, says Casualidad.

  - What?

  - Our neighbor. Doña Silvana. She lived to be a hundred years old.

  I stand, and we smile at each other for a moment. Casualidad is thin and pale and looks not well but better than the last time I saw her. A very old couple joins us, the man leaning lightly on the woman’s arm. Casualidad introduces me to them: her parents. Both are short and kind. Their living room is a single step down from the street, and I duck to avoid the doorjamb.

  The living room is cold, obliquely dark and pleasant. The walls are a foot thick at their thinnest, set for siege. There is only one chair, and Casualidad’s father carries it over to me. It is barely sufficiently strong.

  Two square windows look out onto the street, show passersby from the waist down, and the sills are full of empty bottles. In one corner are an oil lamp and a lantern, neither lit. Casualidad and her parents seat themselves on one of the low wooden benches that line all walls.

  Fermín is sent to the store, returns with Fanta, and Casualidad’s mother serves me. There is a rosary pegged to a wall, and beside it a roll of toilet paper hung on a nail. A small picture of the Virgin, an unmade bed, a gray blanket hiding an unidentifiable mass. The interior doorways lack doors, and through one there are other rooms that cannot be well discerned, and through the other is the kitchen, roofless.

  I tell Casualidad that according to Hollywood, Martians hate small birds even more than she does. She appears to find this neither troubling nor amusing. I ask her about the Huaringas, the curandero, his bottles and herbs, the flowering and shouting, the underpants. She says that they were fine.

  Her father asks me if the Fanta is cold enough, and I say that it is the perfect temperature. This makes him very happy. Casualidad’s mother gesticulates in circles for a moment, points at two maroon ponchos that hang by the front door. Between them is a plastic bag full of nails, and above is a lasso. I make noises to indicate that I agree with whatever she means.
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  Casualidad asks about Mariángel, and I say that she is well: walking well, applauding well. She smiles. She moves the blanket-covered mass slowly to one side, lies down, closes her eyes. I look to the kitchen, see cooking pots suspended, stacks of mud bricks, a sleeping cat. Occasional chickens walk into the living room and are kicked back.

  The overhead beams are skinned but rough, forking in places. I am asked to describe the trip from Piura, and do so uninterestingly. The ceiling above the beams is bamboo poles and then clay shingles, each layer seen partially. The packed dirt of the floor is nearly even.

  When he sees that I am done observing, Casualidad’s father says that we should all go to Doña Silvana’s house. He looks at Casualidad where she sleeps. I intimate and then suggest and then say and then insist that it would be better if instead I went and arranged for my hotel room, but it seems that I have been named a guest of honor by the drunk men outside and there is no escape.

  Doña Silvana’s house is much the same as that of Casualidad’s parents, though here the doorways are covered partially by empty grain sacks slit and hung. There are several chairs, and one small table. In the middle of the room is a pair of sawhorses, and on the sawhorses is a coffin, and in the coffin is Doña Silvana.

  Her blouse is embroidered blue, green, red at the cuffs and breast. She is very thin, and her skin looks lightly oiled. Of course her eyes are closed but they do not always appear to be. Guttering candles burn at each corner of the coffin, and what would it take to live a hundred years?

  Something is explained to me about a son who works in the jungle near Jaén and has not arrived. People walk in and out. There is a toddler in fur-lined overalls who wanders top-heavily, grabs at the white handles of the coffin, is pulled away. I ask Casualidad’s father about the fur. Rabbit, he says, and I nod with more enthusiasm than is appropriate.