by Roy Kesey
I thank him, and we review yesterday’s vocabulary: double dribble and luciferase, You have the most captivating smile I’ve ever seen! and Do you often come to places such as this? Reynaldo is a dedicated student but it may well be too late for his pronunciation. This is unfortunately a common circumstance among adults.
We shift to work on prepositions of place, and this pleases him: all structural work is immediately accessible to his mind, as if syntax were cousin to chemistry. Stand beside, stand near, stand in front of—he moves around the living room to give me good examples of each. Stand in, stand on, stand below and now I feel slightly nauseous. Perhaps that third bowl of mazamorra was unwisely eaten but no that is not quite it. I wave Reynaldo to a stop. I look out the window, see nothing, see only my reflection and it quivers, trembles, cracks and yes an earthquake.
I jump to the nearest doorway, brace myself in the frame. There is a series of soft jolts, then one that is much stronger, and one again softer. I wait, and there is nothing more. I laugh, look around for Reynaldo. He is lying on the floor surrounded by broken puppy figurines. He stands slowly, sadly. I look away very quickly, but not quickly enough not to see that he has wet himself.
He stands behind the couch, shouts to his aunt in her bedroom, and she shouts back that she is fine. I say that I need to call my home to make sure that Mariángel is all right. Staring at the ground, Reynaldo says that I might as well go, that he has had enough English for one day. I gather my books, make a note to discuss the prevalence of earthquakes in California at our next session, how they seem a constant threat though in fact here they are more common and do more damage, and immediately scratch the note out. In the event Reynaldo gets his visa, he will find out soon enough.
The Fourth Bridge is still open and so I am quickly home. Mariángel appears not to have noticed that the ground was ever shaking, is pleased to see me but perhaps more subdued than usual. I bring out the Cabeza de Vaca, take my daughter to the couch and arrange her on my lap, open the book and begin. She fidgets throughout the strange address to the king, calms briefly for the beginning of the hurricane. The two ships go down, and in the very midst of the roaring wind and rain there are voices and bells and flutes and tambourines and Mariángel grabs the book from my hand, runs to the extent she can.
I catch her in the kitchen and she throws herself to the ground, starts to wail. She laughs as I release her, stands and runs again. I return to the living room and take out a book I know will bring her to me: the Immortality-Jinotega volume of the 1973 Encyclopædia Britannica.
It is not the whole volume she likes, but the pictures in the entry on insects. It does not matter to her that most of our collection has been eaten by invisible mites. I read aloud of sexual dimorphism in twisted-wing insects, of parthenogenesis and mycetomes, and she comes slowly to the doorway. I read silently of oöthecas and Malphigian tubules, think aloud about what it means to know that there are four million insects living in any given moist acre, and now she is at the edge of the couch, holds Naufragios behind her back.
I read to her of polyembryony. The encyclopedia says that a single egg “will spit up in the course of development and give rise to hundreds of larvae.” Spit up? This is what it says, and I ask Mariángel which would be more disheartening, eggs spitting up larvae, or a typographical error in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
She nods and laughs, slides Naufragios under the couch and comes to sit beside me. Paedogenesis is not something she needs to know about just yet, though it occurs in all species to some extent, and we are in the process of skipping that part altogether when the doorbell rings. We determine not to answer it. Then we hear Karina’s voice.
After greeting us Karina says that her mother would hate my house given the dikes between each room and the next. I promise to remove them if the rain ever stops and her mother plans to visit. Karina and Mariángel play with the telephone while I make coffee. When I return, Mariángel is draped asleep across Karina’s lap. She wakes as I lift her, and Karina comes to sit beside me as I sing in the darkness of Mariángel’s bedroom.
Back out to the living room, and I learn more of what is easily learned. Karina studied accounting at the university, graduated the year I arrived, stayed in Piura because this is where her sisters and brother might best live for reasons she does not make clear. She works at the knickknack store hustling, and that is her word, one of her few words in English, all of them not quite expected, hustling only the best of their goods: ceramic pots and statuettes, parrots and dancers and helicopters in silver filigree, carved hardwood boxes. She knows that the moonlight jobs—Gillette Girl, Pilsen Girl, Marlboro Girl—will not be available to her for much longer. Her dream of Italy is vague and touching as are her plans to open a bookstore.
- Here in Piura?
- I would have no competition.
- Perhaps there’s a reason.
- Yes. But people might begin to read, if the books were good and cheap.
- They might. How could you sell them cheap?
- I’m going to smuggle them in to avoid the book tax.
- And I will be ever and always your best customer.
An hour, two. Then, on the patio, a very light, yes a very delicate, yes and oh good christ it has been so long. And rain falls. We do not move from my loveseat, and the name jolts in my brain but this is what it must be called, I realize this only now, designed as it is for precisely two persons at once. With me there is little room for her and she fits all the same, and we could move, could leave here, but we don’t, and the rain stops and she says she has to go.
Sunday morning, Mariángel cries and my face is stuck to the pillow with dried pus. It feels as though someone has ground salty sand into my eyes. I peel my cheek away, stand and stumble to my daughter. As far as I can tell she is only hungry: unearned, a bit of grace.
I call Socorro’s house in Catacaos, and no one answers. I wash my hands and eyes, stumble to the kitchen, put on rubber gloves and strain granadilla for juice, mix creamed wheat, attempt not to whimper each time my eyes refocus. While Mariángel eats I call Karina. Exactly, she says. Conjunctivitis, she says. My eyes are the same as yours, she says, and she will come as soon as she can.
I turn the television on to what sounds like cartoons, feel Mariángel settle on the couch beside me. I lay back and wince perpetually and yesterday was magnificent. No rain, few clouds, and Karina had a surprise for us: the swimming pool at the Río Azul Hotel. Mariángel delighted on my back, we passed through the lobby without looking to either side, took a table out on the terrace. We ordered carambola juice, watched four young Swedish or Norwegian women swim, agreed that they were splendid.
When Karina pulled off her top and shorts, the Scandinavians slipped out of the water, dried themselves and left. It was just as well, as my eyes have only a given capacity. I removed my shirt, applied sunscreen, and waited for Karina to react to the sight, this quantity of me, these colors. She only smiled, even when my entry drove waves up over the edge of the pool.
Standing now, inching along the wall to the bathroom, a shower that lasts thirty seconds. With this rinsing I can see slightly but the pain has not lessened and in fact Karina did not intend to swim as such. She does not much like swimming, prefers instead to dive a single time and then sit in or beside the water. I mainly waded with Mariángel on my shoulders. It was her first time in a swimming pool of any size, and the bright blue of the water astounded her.
Later there was a dragonfly, its colors more vivid than could be expected, orange and green like enamel. It came to rest on the edge of the pool inches from my arm. I tried but could not see its eyes, could not focus on them precisely even at that distance, and remembered reading of this, the thousands of facets breaking up the light, a gridded blurring on the surface of the eye past which cannot be seen.
To my bedroom, clean clothes, lying down on the couch again. Exiting the pool did not please Mariángel, but I have come to know this sun, the way it has of burning me even thr
ough sunscreen and palm umbrellas, and if I had stayed out any longer all the skin would now be gone from my body. We ate a lunch of shrimp and avocado. Karina kissed us and left with unnamed plans.
Commercials come. Mariángel climbs on top of me and coos. Back at our house, soccer was watched and dolls were carried and sung to. In the evening I called Günther, and we complained to one another about the amount of noise in Peru. It was not that yesterday was any louder than any other day, but I have often read of the importance of regular complaining to the mental health and balance of all expatriates.
On and on, the two of us trying to remember still louder things, the loudest. My eyes began to itch, then to burn. I rubbed them, and my fingertips came away smeared with yellow. I told Günther that we had complained sufficiently, hung up and went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror. My eyes were a surprising red and finally Karina arrives.
She is wearing sunglasses, is led by Alejandra, the elder twin by a minute. They have brought eye drops and ointment. The eye drops stop the infection, Alejandra says, and the ointment kills the pain.
Killing as such is not the word, but the pain lessens, and the itching. Alejandra takes Mariángel to the yard to look at grass. Karina and I soak washcloths in cold tea and lay down on my bed and place the washcloths over our eyes. It is a further comfort, and lasts until one of us is needed—a diaper to be changed, vegetables to be boiled and mashed. We take turns. I have not taken turns like this at anything with anyone since Pilar died. It is disconcerting and the only possible option.
Clouds come, elide, and rain starts, grows, and there is thunder, lightning, and Alejandra trembles. We turn on the television and listen to what it says: hard rain in the foothills, predictions of a peak, the Fourth Bridge to be closed even to pedestrians. They both want to leave, and I help by saying that I do not want them to but they should, and Alejandra looks at Karina and says they won’t.
Karina accuses Alejandra of being unsuitably nice to me as a form of revenge against Karina herself for not having invited Alejandra to join the rest of us at the pool. Alejandra denies this and looks to me for support. I look from one to the other and say that in retrospect missing the pool was a blessing, and this angers both of them.
The rain thins. Mariángel is angry as well, and it is not clear why. She begins tearing pages from the first book she finds, a guide to Argentina. The rest of us watch her tear and tear. With luck I will never need to visit Argentina. The rain stops, and there is a sudden rift in the clouds, sunlight spilling into my yard. Alejandra takes Mariángel up and says the two of them are going to the park.
Karina and I repeat the cycle, eye drops and ointment and washcloths soaked in tea. For a time we play at being blind. It is more difficult than I might have anticipated: I have lived years in this house and do not know its distances at all. Inanimate things move darkly. The dikes are all higher than I built them. Brushing against a doorframe levers me twice to the floor. Embarrassment too has a smell, almost the smell of copper.
Karina has a thought of music, and so we listen, classical in deference to her idea of Italy. Blindness helps or that is my impression. Even so it is four or five times through each movement in each piece before things clarify: at last the different lines of harmony can be heard, and each individual instrument, or this is what we pretend. The play between lines is what I have always missed, the way the keeping of time shifts from one instrument to another, and a note played at octaves in sequence or echo is more than simple doubling, and Karina and I, yes, the music and blindness, a finding, until Alejandra arrives with Mariángel asleep on her shoulder and we pull our clothes back on as quickly as we can.
I carry my daughter to her crib, come back to the living room, and here it is very quiet. Alejandra is looking at Karina. Karina’s shirt is inside out. Alejandra blushes, turns and walks to the front door. Karina asks if I would like her to stay, and the answer is that she can’t, and must, and can’t.
32.
LATE OR VERY EARLY, MARIÁNGEL ASLEEP, rain falling but lightly now. A third glass of rum. Back to my bed and stretching out again: no electricity since nightfall but my eyes have healed enough to read by candlelight and far fewer insects and Naufragios at last. I had forgotten what a good and strange book it is. If only Cabeza de Vaca had come to Peru instead.
The Spaniards who survive the hurricane spend the winter in Cuba, then sail for Florida, make land near Sarasota. Narváez leads three hundred inland and north before the ships have found safe harbor. They are aided by some local tribes, attacked by others. By the time they reach the mouth of the Apalachicola they are starving, have little idea where they are, and a third are malarial, too sick to walk any more. They decide to continue by water, though they have no boats. They also have no tools, and no boat-building experience, and no navigational skills.
They steal a hundred bushels of corn from the nearest tribe and kill a horse every third day to feed the workers. They construct bellows out of saplings and deerskin, melt down armor and stirrups and crossbows. They make oakum and rigging from palmettos, and pitch from pine resin, and canteens from horsehide. They make sails from their shirts and oars from juniper trunks.
By this point forty are gone from disease and starvation and arrows. They have eaten all of their horses. The five barges they have built can barely hold those still alive, the water less than a foot below the gunwales.
Another glass of rum, and for a month they sail west along the shoreline. Their food runs out and their canteens rot. Another hurricane, and they run to land, are welcomed and then ambushed by natives. An escape and further attacks and further escapes and the current of the Mississippi drives them into the gulf. One morning Cabeza de Vaca wakes to find two of the five barges disappeared. A third, Narváez’s, stocked with the strongest men, rows away and will not be seen again. The fourth is lost in yet another storm.
Cabeza de Vaca and his men row for the shore, row and row but the current is too strong. At last only he and his navigator have the strength to stand. At dawn he hears breakers. Waves throw the barge onto shore. The Spaniards rest, find pockets of rainwater, parch corn. A scout is sent out, returns with the news that they are on an inhabited island.
He is sent out again, and this time is trailed back. Half an hour later the Spaniards are surrounded, a hundred bowmen or more, lengths of cane through the dark men’s ears and just now I heard a sound. It was a soft sound, or very far away—something like the sound of cloth tearing. I stand and listen, hear nothing, not even rain. I wait. Still nothing, then the quietest of grunts.
As quietly as I am able through the dark, to the dining room and looking out the window at the back yard: a crack in the clouds, the moon halved but bright, the almond tree, the wall. I hunch down, watch the man extend his legs and drop to the grass. It is not easy to keep my smile from becoming laughter.
There is what appears to be a torn rice sack draped over the shards of glass that pointlessly line my wall. The man is short and stout. There is a faint glimmer about his face, perhaps whiskers gone white. It is only a matter of waiting for him to come.
A moment more, both of us listening. He walks to my patio and opens my door. He waits, steps inside, another step and I stand and flip on the light. His hands rise and he turns, blinded, feels his way along the wall as if guided by his whiskers and I catch the back of his shirt, slam him against the wall, sling him around and lift and now he sees.
It will require no great effort to beat him to death. He swings at me and I crush him and lift him again and he begs and tries to turn, says a half-sentence prayer to the Virgin and I crush him again and lift. He begs. I shake my head and he is holding something up, says that he will give it back if I let him go, throws a handful of bills into the air, and this money, from where could it have come? It falls to the floor and he twists and lunges, his shirt rips off in my hand and he runs, he jumps and clambers and there is a moment when I can follow and have him again but this money, I understand nothing, and he is at
the top of the wall, squeals as he scrapes across and is gone.
I feel lucky that he prayed to the Virgin rather than to Sarita Colonia, then foolish for having felt lucky. I gather the bills from the floor, look closely, laugh. They are not soles but intis, the previous Peruvian currency—worthless, but a sound tool for escape and a particularly fine souvenir.
I look in on Mariángel, and she has slept through it all. Out to the yard, and I realize I am still carrying the man’s shirt. It reeks of onions stewed in sweat. I toss it and the torn rice sack into the garbage, look again at the garden wall. The glass is not pointless after all. I hose the man’s blood away.
I take the bills to my bedroom and arrange them on the nightstand. Another rum. Cabeza de Vaca once again, and the bowmen have not attacked. Instead they have given the Spaniards an arrow as a token of friendship, have promised to come soon with food, and this is the sort of thing that gives one hope even when one knows what must come next.
The river began to fall, then rose once more when rains came again in the foothills, and none of the roads leading out of Piura have yet been wholly repaired. This would be a larger problem if I had immediate reason to leave and somewhere to go. As it is, my only urgent trip is a month away, or will be once I am done here.
The regional director and I greet one another elaborately. I present the tejas and TOEFL materials that he loves, and he claps me slowly on the shoulder. We speak of Russia and other places that he has been and I have not. He asks me questions about the Middle East that I have trouble imagining ever being able to answer, and I respond with knowing nods, with the joke about the frog and the scorpion, and I am sure he has heard it before.
Tejas were first made in Ica: a fig or lemon or prune stuffed with pecans and manjar blanco. The ones I have brought are chocotejas from Arequipa, pecans and manjar blanco wrapped in chocolate, a marvelous thing. He offers me one, takes one himself, and we eat slowly. Now it is time to begin.