by Roy Kesey
According to the tradition that will reign in those homes, gifts will not be opened until just after midnight. First will come champagne, and best wishes, and a dinner of turkey and Arabic rice and applesauce and salad with spinach and bacon and croutons. There will also be panetón and hot chocolate. At the moment the clock strikes twelve each person will hug everyone in their vicinity, and I wonder if all this happens in each Peruvian household, or only in that of Pilar’s family.
The head comes off of the pig. Mariángel hands it to me, begins work on the legs, and panetón is light airy fruitcake originally from Italy. Toasted and buttered it is a splendid thing. Arabic rice is regular rice mixed with toasted noodles and parmesan cheese, and is likewise very fine. Also, the hot chocolate in Peru is nothing like the drink of the same name in the United States. Instead it is steaming liquid fudge that smells of butter and cinnamon. It is not something one forgets.
Another tradition is the evening-long lighting of firecrackers shipped in from Lima. The most popular variety is a stick of dynamite cut in fourths called white rats. I do not know where fireworks are warehoused here, but in Lima they are stored in ancient houses of bamboo and adobe in dense neighborhoods downtown, are sold from the hundreds of stands set up each December in front of these same houses. Each year there are televised warnings and newspaper exposés—no business licenses or permits, no working fire hydrants, no extinguishers—and each year nothing happens but we all know what is to come. There will be a dropped cigarette or careless demonstration, and the stand next door will catch fire. The explosions will begin, small at first. Whole blocks will burn down and hundreds of people will die.
In Piura we have already heard the sounds and seen the lights though they were unrelated to Christmas. It was May or June, not fireworks but a blaze at the Air Force base outside of town. The wind pushed the flames toward the ammunition depot, and the firefighters were unwilling to close in. The fireball could be seen from anywhere in Piura. The shockwave shattered windows at great distances. I remember, we all remember, the sky suddenly orange, the jolt to our chest, something gone desperately wrong and the column of rising smoke.
The pig is now bipedal and Mariángel continues to chew. All the boxes are wrapped and labeled or addressed. I lean back. It is time for the writing and enveloping of Christmas cards and I do not believe I have the strength, though the cards themselves are beautiful, handmade, sold door to door by the men and women of CREMPT, and those men and women, were they therapists or patients or boosters? They came calmly to my door and unlike the many others, the newspaper recyclers and bottle collectors and candy vendors, those from CREMPT rang and rang and rang until I answered. Their patience was not to be questioned.
I take up the stapler, spin it on its end. Hold it to the light. Go to my desk, and yes, a few dozen flyers left over from last time. Outside the rain is light, and there is time, and this will require perhaps more strength than writing Christmas cards, but of an easier sort to access or so I think. I put away the stapler and bring out my staple gun.
It does not go well. The rain stays light and is even so too strong. To keep the flyers from soaking through and tearing I would have to coat them in plastic. Perhaps at some point I will but for now I continue, and the sight, Pilar’s torn face, I want to stop but will not, must not. We leave halves of her all over the neighborhood.
The sound is wrong. I open my eyes. It is not yet dawn. I wait, and there is the music of water, yes, that dripping into dishes whose sound is correct. There is also another dripping, similarly water into water but less echoed.
I roll over, stand, and my feet are submerged. A moment before I understand. I slosh to Mariángel, carry her in her playpen to the dining room table and sing her back to sleep, Robert Johnson, my voice as rich as ever. I call Socorro, tell her what has happened, say I will pay her triple to come in today. Then I call a number Reynaldo gave me weeks ago, emergency construction supplies, and while waiting for delivery I go from room to room.
Most of what is wet can be cleaned and dried. Pots and dishes, clothes and shoes: I lift them, and set them higher. The boxes from Chulucanas will all need to be replaced, but the ceramics they hold are unruined except for the ones I drop.
Room to room to room. The food can only be thrown away. Some of the books can be dried out but all those on the bottom shelves are unsalvageable—perhaps a third of my library. And my research. All of the lowermost crates. The computer disks, useless now. Some of the work is stored on hard drives at the university or back in Fallash but the notebooks, so much I never typed up, working so hard and so well and so fast but Pilar’s death and also ruined are the journals I have kept in regard to my trips into the desert, my evenings on bridges, everything I have done since I realized the police would fail and if I consider any of this carefully I will likewise be ruined. I stack the waterlogged books and crates beside the front door. I gather the rest of what has been made garbage in plastic bags, and Socorro arrives, sloshes in to say that most of the houses on my street are in similar conditions. The river too, she says. I ask what she means. She says that it is no longer a pathetic thing, is a true river now, deep and fast and dark. I say that I believe her, that I cannot wait to see.
Mariángel wakes crying and Socorro goes to her, sees the scratches, asks how they happened. I wait, and it is as I’d hoped, the question meant not for me to answer, meant simply to show concern. She takes Mariángel from the playpen, turns and says that she almost forgot: a truck is waiting out front.
I go, and the truck holds my supplies, lumber and nails and bags of cement at twelve times their pre-rain prices. The work begins, and one by one the makeshift dikes rise. I build those for the outer doors first, a foot high such that no more water can enter. Next I build one half as tall in each inner doorway. It is not a fast thing taken wholly, and there is no rest. Framing and mixing and pouring, again and again.
By early afternoon it is a matter of bailing, Socorro helping when Mariángel lets her, towels soaked and wrung into buckets over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Then the telephone rings. It is my mother. She begins the conversation the way she does every year, saying that she hopes this will be our best Christmas ever.
I look at the mudbanks in the corners of the room, at the scratches on my daughter’s face, and say that we are fine. And the rain? she asks. The El Niño? I explain to her the lack of need for any additional definite article in such a construction, and say that surely the press is exaggerating any problem that may or may not have arisen.
This comforts her, I think. She asks how Mariángel and I are enjoying our gifts. I tell her that they are outstanding, particularly the book about dogs and hats. I ask how she is enjoying her gift from us, and she says that the gift has not yet arrived, and I sit beside the vase to rest, and say, How strange, I sent it weeks ago. If my father were still alive, he would make a joke about clerks and burros. Then she says, You’ll never guess what I found in the attic!
I give up pre-emptively.
- Your armor! she says. Remember how much fun you used to have wearing all that armor?
- Who moved it to the attic?
- That’s where it’s always been, honey. We—
- No, it used to be down in the basement.
- I don’t think so. With how damp it gets? Anyway, I was going to throw it out, but I thought maybe I should ask you first.
- Yes, please, throw it out.
- Are you sure? All those Halloweens! I looked for the spaceman suit too, but it wasn’t there. Did you give it away?
- I never dressed up as an astronaut.
- Of course you did. The year your father told you he’d been joking about that Spanish guy, remember? And you—
- Dad never—
- Johnny, I was there. You were so angry!
A pause, and then she knows I do not believe her and is talking again, more and more details, and I remember none of them. Finally she says that it doesn’t matter, that everyone r
ecalls everything differently, that she will leave the armor out on the curb as long as I’m sure. I say that I am. We exchange expressions of love and longing, and hopes that the other will visit soon, and that is our Christmas conversation.
So her memory has shifted, or mine has, or both. Regardless, it can only have occurred for the commonest of reasons, and my mother has not been to Peru since my wedding. I do not expect her to visit again. She reacts to the interior of airplanes the way others react to being thrown off of cliffs and a second call comes as we are finishing the clean-up—Reynaldo. He says that he heard our street was under water, says he would have called sooner but he’s been on the coast all week shoring up his aunt’s house. We talk of floods and repairs. He asks about my plans for tonight, and I repeat Socorro’s words about the river.
He says that it is true, that it is not only the Piura that has risen, that where the Chira meets the ocean near Colán the mouth is wider than he has ever seen it. I ask if he would like to join me for a look at the bridges. He says that he does not have much time, that he needs to finish purchasing supplies for his return to the coast tomorrow. I wait. He mutters. I wait and he says yes, fine, all right, he can meet me at the Mobil station for a beer or two.
The walk, light rain, then slightly heavier, then nothing, and from a distance I hear or else feel it: the Fourth Bridge has begun to hum, the water strong and steady against its piers. Closer, and now a sort of marketplace. It is much the same crowd as gathers outside the cemetery for the Day of the Dead, and others have joined in, palm readers and pickpockets, vendors of hangers and cotton swabs. There are hundreds, and they pack in tightly, pull at the sleeves of my shirt.
I push through and across, and here is the station. There are outdoor tables set up; Reynaldo is sitting at one of them, waves when he sees me. Along the near bank is a new breakwater of boulders the size of houses, and drinking and smoking there are perhaps a hundred people, many of them students from the university.
Some of the students have brought deck chairs, and some are whooping and calling from atop the boulders. I ask and am answered: the game is to spot the corpses swept down from the mountains, to guess the species and hit them with rocks. The ones that look like hippos are horses, say the students, and the ones that look like rhinos are cows. Dogs look like goats and goats look a bit like thin children.
I take a seat beside Reynaldo.
- What happened to the people who lived down there?
- Down where?
- In the riverbed.
- No one lived in the riverbed.
- There were five or six families in shanties along the near wall. They had chickens, and plants.
Reynaldo shrugs, says he never saw them but imagines they moved in time. He buys two beers from a vendor and hands one to me. Taxis pass, the wrong age or the wrong make or the wrong color. I tell him that I would be happy to join him in Colán if there is any need.
- No, he says, but thank you. The workers have all been hired and tomorrow they will have their materials. Even I am there for supervisory purposes only.
- So you think all will be well?
- The ocean has risen and continues to rise. Smaller homes to either side have begun to shift on their foundations. We will be lucky not to lose the house.
He asks how Mariángel is dealing with the weather. I tell him the story of the scissors, and he smiles at our eventual relative good luck. He stares at the water and at me. I nod, watch the bridge, and a line of taxis comes slowly across it. The first two pull into the gas station, stop beside the pumps. The second of the two is the right make and color and age. I stand and Reynaldo stands with me, looks.
The license plate begins with P, and the rest is obscured by mud. I walk and Reynaldo walks with me. I run as the driver stands from his car, a thin dark man and I am reaching but he is so very fast, slips to the side and I lunge and miss and his fist cracks against my cheek. I fall and slide, come to rest in a puddle of rainwater and gasoline and the man is on top of me, pounds at the back of my head and neck and I try to twist but he is so much stronger than he appeared. He forces my face down toward the water, I arch and wrench left and right, down to the water and into it, then a lifting, a release, and I can breathe and turn and see.
Reynaldo pushes the man back. The man yells and points. Reynaldo nods, says that he knows, turns and shouts at me, shouts for me to look, to look at the man’s face, to see that he is in no way the man I have so often described.
I look. The man’s face is fuller than it seemed, and he is taller, broader, younger. I stand and walk to his taxi, wipe the license plate clean with my hand. It ends with 14. Reynaldo talks to the man about stress, about pisco, about getting me home. The man shakes his head. Reynaldo offers him twenty soles, forty, fifty. Students have begun to gather. There is more pointing, more yelling, but finally the man accepts a hundred, gets into his taxi, drives away.
The students are silent until a shout rises from the riverbank. A cadaver has been spotted, and they run, ready their stones. Someone calls that it looks like a horse, and everyone throws. We hear the sound of stones plunking off distended flesh, and a vast cheer spreads.
Reynaldo takes my elbow, pulls me down the closest street. The streetlights are on but dark with insect clouds. We are walking faster than necessary, and now he speaks quietly but with great urgency.
- Does this happen all the time? Or only when you are with me?
- Not only with you, though lately—
- I am tired of it, John. So tired.
- As tired as I am?
- Of course not. But that’s all the more reason.
- For what?
He stops me, turns, faces me.
- John. It’s been long enough.
I pat him on the shoulder and tell him to shut the fuck up. He nods and looks away. Then he shakes his head.
- I think that I won’t. It has been long enough. You can stop. You need to stop.
I tilt my head, open my mouth and close it. We look at one another. He shakes his head. He wipes the rain and sweat from his face, says that he has no idea, that he is sorry, that he is not sorry. I nod, whatever that might mean. He says that he has to go, that he does not want to go but has to. I say that he should, and he does.
New Year’s Day, and Mariángel and I tend to one another lazily: I put new cream and bandages on her face, and she pokes at the bruise on my cheek, kisses the scrape on my nose. We are reasonably rested, as party-going was not out of the question but we never quite left the house. Instead we walked with excitement from room to room, and took the tops off of bottles and put them back on, and became frustrated for no clear reason, and banged our heads against the wall, and listened to fireworks and mosquitoes for hours, and at some point slept.
The mosquitoes are no longer what they once were in terms of number or kind. There is a species that can bite through clothing, and another that can be heard through closed windows. Screens and fans and netting and toxic green coils are no longer sufficient. For each room I have purchased a small electric apparatus into which blue tablets are fitted. These tablets cause the mosquitoes to become disoriented, send them spiraling, and the mosquitoes collapse onto desktops and floors and die.
When there is no electricity, I use the apparati as paperweights and light a green coil in each corner. On television, ditches are being dug and tarps laid to protect Chan Chan from the rain. I think of Jenny and her camisoles, Minchacaman and his riches, Jenny.
While Mariángel and I walked and listened and slept, elsewhere people were throwing scrap paper out of office windows, and walking around blocks carrying empty luggage, and eating twelve grapes or raisins under tables, and burning effigies made from old clothes, and wearing yellow underwear, and these are only the traditions of which I know. There was also a fire in downtown Lima, the result not of fireworks but of oil left on a stove. The weather kept it small, and there were no deaths.
Scratch paper: a phrase that makes no sense and yet that
is what I called scrap paper as a child. Chan Chan will melt if not protected, and the news switches to Piura. Hard rain in the mountains, says the newscaster. Coming swells, and all four bridges will close, and Mariángel does not appear to believe him.
Socorro arrives as agreed at lunchtime, asks what happened to me, nods when I say that I fell. Everyone is falling, she says. You must be very careful, she says.
She has brought majado de yuca in tupperware, makes salad and rice and we eat. After lunch she tries to clean but Mariángel is bored with me and I do not blame her. They go together to the kitchen table, and Socorro arranges crayons.
I walk to the entryway, stand for a moment among the stacks of sodden texts and notes. I had not worked with any of it in so long, and thus my anger is a form of nostalgia but nonetheless real and yes my thesis is dead: it would take more work to reconstruct and organize what I have lost than to begin something new. Then I open the front door and look out. The world is built of mounds of garbage, the usual scattering of litter overlaid by what was thrown out last night. Rags and cardboard, calendars and scrap paper. In spite of the rain there are children picking through the piles. I watch them, their sorting, and think of my own. It has been nearly two months. A sudden shiver. I run to the closet, open the padlock and the door.
The boxes holding all these months of evidence have rotted and collapsed. The pile is three feet high, a mass of mold and mud. Everything is covered in a filth of itself.
I dig down in, search for what might be salvaged. There seems to be nothing. I stand and stare, stand and look down, stare. There is no longer any reason to be here, and no reason to be anywhere else. I gather muck in my fists, walk to the front door, throw it as far as I can. Back to the closet, and more gathering. Running now, armfuls when I can, and my hands and chest and face are covered with this sludge of what I thought would lead me to him.