by Roy Kesey
It is late. The slaughter is done, and tonight there is electricity: fan, lights, music. Ginzburg’s essays are very good if often far from my field, and he would smile at the use of those words in this context, far and field.
I finish “Idols and Likenesses,” glance through “Style,” start “Distance and Perspective.” It begins with a retelling of Sokal’s parody of people like me, and I am unsure how offended to be. Mariángel wakes and whimpers. I go to her, hold her and suddenly remember: chickenpox, her vaccination, scheduled for today and forgotten. There is further whimpering, and my forgetting, unforgivable, but then a quieting, and it may have been only a return to the night-waking of many months ago.
I lay her down, sing her to sleep and return to Ginzburg. He says, Here I shall insist on a different and even opposite theme: the irreducibility of memory to history. I wipe sweat from my hands, my face. In any culture, he says, collective memory conveyed through rituals, ceremonies, and similar events reinforces a link with the past of a kind that involves no explicit reflection on the distance that separates us from it and the power goes out.
I bring five candles from the dining room, set them on the coffee table, light them, can now just barely read. The past, Ginzburg says, must be understood both on its own terms and as a link in the chain that in the last analysis leads up to ourselves. I lower the book, lean back. I stand, walk to my room, and yes, in the drawer of my nightstand: a notebook, empty, clean. There is no reason to take it from the drawer, no reason not to, and finally I do.
A pen from the kitchen and back to the dining room, sitting down on the couch, rebeginning the essay. Slow notes on half a dozen thoughts. Reading further, and there is movement near my head and away: a moth the size of a sparrow has flown into the living room.
It circles the couch where I sit, circles again and lands on the floor. I do not know how it survived the pots and pans and cans. I could easily crush it, perhaps would if we were in the dining room, but we are not, and there has been enough death. I go to the kitchen, return with a glass of lemonade, step too close and it flutters up, lands again a few feet away.
I have no answer to this question, says Ginzburg, and the moth lifts again though I have not moved; it circles and goes for the candles. Three of them are extinguished in various passes. The moth flails against the tabletop, strikes me twice in the mouth. I set down the Ginzburg and watch.
This moth, too, appears black, though flickers of color come from its body each time it catches the light. With time its passes through the candles grow ragged, almost desperate. Then it collapses on top of the stereo.
I watch it a bit longer, unmoving, both of us unmoving. I go to it and look. I touch its abdomen, and the moth flops back into the air. It circles the table and the remaining candles once more, lands again on the floor, very near the wall this time, its head against the base of a ceramic owl, its body heaving tinily.
Its wings are not solid black, I now see, but striated with varying grays. Its body is still segmented like that of the caterpillar it once was, and high on its abdomen are small quadrilaterals of metallic orange-gold that can only be seen like this, the body at rest. A moment later the heaving stops.
The lights blare, Charly García sings suddenly of love and strange new haircuts, the fan spins and blows the last candles out. Again the moth flies, flame-singed wings, invisible striations and quadrilaterals, falls spiraling. In a good world it would find its way out of my house, would fly into the wet night and away, and instead it is dead on my floor.
26.
THE FILM HAS ALREADY BEGUN. The houses, the flowerpots,the houses are flowerpots, the countryside bright as lemon rind and Pilar wants to play golf with him. We ring the doorbell. Piura becomes Vilcashuamán. Men and women arrive on bicycles, bring out images and sell them cheaply, ever more cheaply. The view has unfolded. We are dwarves, all of us. The cities must have been built on the tips of umbrellas and now life seems better because it is higher up and the film is half-over, the borrowed film, half-over.
27.
DOWNRIVER THE PIURA BROKE ITS LEFT BANK, flooded a dozen villages, washed most of Chato Chico away. This was ten days ago. Now there are something like refugee camps tucked into small spaces throughout the city. The shelters have walls of straw matting, and plastic tarps for roofs. In some cases livestock was saved and the camps are thus louder than one might expect.
Those same rains continued, and bridges all over the region slumped and closed or fell: Talara, Paita, Tumbes. On most Piuran streets one less walked than waded. Also there was thunder and lightning, rarities here, and the dogs howled for hours.
Lately however there has been a sort of lull. The pools of standing water have grown shallower. The clouds are still battleships, and the humidity and temperature are still appropriate only in jungles, and the epidemics have begun, malaria and cholera, dengue and yellow fever, three cases of bubonic plague confirmed in Cajamarca, but no rain fell the day before yesterday, none fell yesterday, none is scheduled for today and I am suddenly very late.
I cinch my tie, take up my briefcase, and it will be too small so I dump its contents into my daypack. Stumbling over the dike in the doorway, remembering my wallet on my nightstand, turning and stumbling again and there will be scrapes if not bruises. Quickly to the kitchen, and I do not know why it took me so long to decide. I load the three bottles in, zip the daypack barely closed, hurry to the entryway where I thank Socorro for breakfast, kiss Mariángel goodbye, open the front door and very nearly step on the hairless dog curled on the stoop.
I retreat into the house and pull the door closed, then nudge it back open. Broken tail, scarred haunches. The dog has lifted its head half an inch off the cement to look at me. I wait for it to do something, anything, to growl or snarl or leap. It lays its head back down and closes its eyes. I tell it loudly to go away. Its eyes do not open.
Again I wait. Then I call to Socorro, ask her to bring last night’s leftovers. She comes, has brought nothing, wants to know what I need them for. I glare at and show her. She says that if I feed the dog it will never leave. I say that it does not look inclined to leave regardless.
She goes to the kitchen, returns not with food but with a mop. I ask her to stop. I tell her that I will deal with the dog, that all I need are the leftovers, that she should not worry herself. She does not believe me but brings a bowl of stiff cold boiled white rice, and when I fling the rice to the far corner of the yard, the dog stands, goes, eats, lies down there on what is left of the grass.
Thus with luck a custom has been formed, an arrangement, bad food at irregular intervals in exchange for sleeping anywhere but my stoop. I run down the walk and to the corner. Today is Friday the Thirteenth, which means nothing in Peru—here it is Tuesday the Thirteenth that is thought to bring bad luck. The first taxi I see is full but the second is available, and whiskey has always seemed to me improbable in regard to the status it confers among my Piuran acquaintances. At Cossto each given bottle costs twice what it should, and whenever offered will be accepted, will be emptied before anything else is touched.
Past the park, and in the center is a group of small children filling water balloons from a spigot. This is a matter of Carnaval, which in Piura is nothing like what occurs elsewhere and on television. We do not have the intricate masks of Venice, do not have the towering feathered floats and full brown breasts of Río. Instead we have these children filling their balloons with water and occasionally much worse.
We also have their older brothers and sisters armed with tins of shoe polish and small sacks of flour and plastic bags filled with paint. Last year there was an evening when a group of adolescents swarmed me. I came so very near to catching one of them, the tallest, but sweat had slickened his wrist. It took an hour to get the shoe polish out of my eyebrows.
In theory Carnaval begins a month before Easter. I do not know why the children have started so early this year. We round the corner and here they are already emplaced. One balloon is throw
n too perfectly, enters through my window and exits through the window on the far side, as if a heavy wet thought now forgotten. Another arrives as I am rolling my window up, and it bursts against the frame, drenches one shoulder of my shirt and the top half of my tie.
Thus despite the absence of rain I arrive to work damp and smelling faintly of sewage. Quickly across campus, and Arantxa’s bottle is first. I knock, enter without waiting, set it on her desk. She is talking on the telephone. She covers the mouthpiece as if to speak to me but says nothing. I apologize for interrupting, point to the bottle. She looks at it, at me, at my shirt and tie. I nod and shrug. She looks at the bottle again, seems very slightly more tired but less sad, and I wave and back out of her office.
Next is Armando. I go to the library, find him at his cubicle in the research room upstairs. I sneak up behind him to the extent that I am able, but in that still air he hears me coming. He turns, smiles as I set his bottle on top of Suárez’s Comercio y fraude en el Perú colonial, sits up straight that I might better clap him on the shoulder. I whisper thanks to him for thinking of me in the course of that last order, and he nods. I say that I will soon begin a regular poker night with friends, that he will be invited, that I plan to take all of his money.
Across campus to the chemistry laboratory, and the regular poker night, it is not something I have thought about a great deal, is not something I have ever done, is the sort of thing managed best by persons very little like me but also does not seem impossible now that I have said it out loud. Reynaldo is washing his hands in a vast sink of stainless steel. To judge from his expression as I walk up, he does not want to talk to me but also does not want not to talk to me. I set the bottle beside the soap. He asks if I would mind bringing it to his office instead.
I follow him perhaps too closely. He pulls a chair in front of his desk, adjusts it minutely. He does not seem angry or sad, seems only to be waiting.
- This bottle, I say, is a very small thank you for a very, very large favor.
Reynaldo nods, scratches the back of his neck.
- But it is not the whole thank you, I say. There is also a letter of reference, the most extraordinarily perfect letter of reference that has ever been written for anyone.
He tilts his head to one side, smiles slightly.
- I do not mean to be difficult, he says. You’re welcome, of course you are welcome. But that feels wrong, doesn’t it.
- You will never have to save me again.
- Your shirt, he says. Carnaval?
- Yes. Better than last year, anyway.
- And how did it go with the rector?
- I did not realize he was capable of that sort of anger.
Reynaldo nods, looks down at the top of his desk.
- So, I say. Soon there will be a weekly poker match taking place at my house. Will you join us?
He pauses and says that he will. I had hoped for but not expected better. I thank him again, trot down and out and along and one might believe that three daily consecutive hours of class would result in greater educational intensity. In fact this is only the case in regard to the games of Hangman that I use to fill each group’s final minutes.
In my Elementary class I nearly always win, though I allow my students many extra letters, permit them to put hands, feet, clothes and extravagant facial hair on the man to be hung. When despair is evident I redraw him such that the chair has been kicked away, and his eyes have been replaced with histrionic crosses, and urine spills from his pant-legs. My students sometimes smile and in my Upper Intermediate course the stakes rise ever higher. This is not often to my advantage, but I do not begrudge the hand-drawn certificates for free gum and drinks and lunches that I award. My only regret is that they go so exclusively to the strongest students, the ones now aware of my finest Hangman tactic: myth, lynx, syzygy.
Mariángel and I sit on the patio and watch the thick late sunlight. It feels like a permanent thing though surely it is not. She invents unlikely combinations of vowels and consonants, and I nod and nod and nod.
I was still damp as of my afternoon class, requested volunteers for dialogue and role play, received none, accomplished little, ended ten minutes short. There was another balloon thrown successfully as my taxi pulled out of the university gate. In it was not water but rotten milk.
As compensation, once Socorro had gone I threw the dinner she had prepared into the far corner of the front yard and ordered takeout from a nearby restaurant called El Torno. Magnificent: seco de chabelo, a dish of cooked blood spiced with mint called rachi-rachi, carambola juice and cherimoya mousse and Mariángel lifts the forefinger of my right hand, bites it as hard as she can. She has not forgiven me for the chickenpox vaccination. She screamed, how she screamed, not in pain but in indignation.
She opens her mouth perhaps to imitate that scream and instead the doorbell rings, frightens both of us. When our hearts have settled, we laugh, and I relax back into my chair. Mariángel grabs my wrist and pulls, and then Reynaldo’s voice and so we go.
He shakes my hand, kisses Mariángel, strides in as if today were a month ago. He sits at the dining room table, undoes his tie. Mariángel pounds her fists on his knee, reaches for the tie, and he lets her pull it from around his neck.
- I have come to help you celebrate this pause in the rain, he says.
I have no idea what this means, and we look at one another. He opens his briefcase, brings out the bottle I gave him this morning. Much of the whiskey remains. I pour, and he toasts the belt Mariángel has made of his tie, and we drink. He asks if I know what day tomorrow will be.
- Saturday the fourteenth.
- Yes, he says. Of February.
- Oh. Yes.
- I have a special plan.
- Involving me?
- Yes. That does not make you my valentine, however. There is nothing we can do about the date.
- All right.
- The plan is a surprise.
- Okay.
- You will need to be ready at nine o’clock in the morning. If you are not ready I will go alone, and that is something you would regret.
- Nine o’clock in the morning.
- Yes.
- So we are not going to watch the drunk soccer in Catacaos again.
- Of course not. By halftime we were covered with flour and paint.
- Perhaps we were rooting for the wrong team.
- Perhaps. Did you enjoy it?
- From an anthropological persp—
- Neither did I, which is why that is not what we are doing this year. I repeat: our activity will be a surprise.
He waits for me to beg for further details. When I do not, he opens his briefcase again and brings out a small wooden chess set. We have never before discussed chess in any context.
He sets the board up and says that we still have a certain amount of time before poker season. He pours the following round, and we discuss openings. We agree to discuss them again once we have learned something about them. We trade pawns and knights and bishops at nearly random intervals.
By the time I pour the third round we have learned that I am slightly less terrible than he is. Mariángel ignores us, instead answers the telephone, though it has not rung. She paces as she whispers syllables into the receiver, gesticulates as she explains whatever she is explaining to whomever she imagines on the other end of the line.
This is her new favorite activity. I bought a toy phone to encourage it, and she showed no interest though it beeps and buzzes and has something of a dial tone of its own. Now she sighs, tired of the ignorance or stupidity of her pretend interlocutor. She hangs up and comes to watch, steals a rook, puts it in her mouth.
I look at her, and she looks at me. I ask for the rook and she shakes her head. I am just able to continue smiling and breathing as I take hold of her, and she opens her mouth and laughs. There is no rook inside. We check the immediate area, and no rook, no rook. Mariángel is back on the phone. I go to the kitchen, look for something with which t
o make do, and this is the worst of all phrases.
At nine forty-five Reynaldo arrives in a pick-up truck he does not own. The sky is a bright tense blue. Socorro is playing with Mariángel on the patio and I am ready in the sense that I am open to possibility.
I ask Reynaldo from whom and why he borrowed the truck. He says that it belongs to the university gardening staff but can be rented for a small fee, and that with the roads as they are, his aunt’s station wagon is not an option. He asks if I have packed my things. I remind him that last night he said nothing about things.
- Lunch, he says, and beer. Also a bathing suit, and a towel, and old tennis shoes.
- Where are we going swimming?
- Everywhere. We will observe the results of the rains, and we will swim, first in other places and then at my aunt’s house in Colán.
- And the stingrays?
- There are no rays, not now.
- What about currents?
- The currents will be strong, yes, and we will stay close to shore. Where is your bathing suit?
This is a question that has not been asked by anyone in a very long time. Reynaldo and Socorro arrange sandwiches while I search. When all things are readied, Socorro tells me to enjoy myself and not drown. I ask her to please smile when saying things like that.
Reynaldo and I chat as we edge through the broken streets. We chat at the Texaco station, chat heading east past a small cemetery, a school, a flooded factory. As we leave the city we fall silent.
The landscape. It is wholly new. We look at one another, look out again. It is as if the known horizon were a painting on cloth, and we have torn through to a place neither of us has ever been. El Niño has restored to us the color green, has filled what was empty desert with thickets of bright bushes grown head-high.
North onto the Panamericana, farther and farther, again new, and still stranger—for the first time in my Piuran years, the Andes can be seen from this highway. Their sharp lines rise and rise and rise, gray and black and white against the sky. I had no idea they were so close though I have driven through them many times, and after a moment I understand: the rain rinsing all dust from the air, giving us fresh vision.