by Roy Kesey
I hoist the bags and thank the old man and his store is indeed beautiful. I tell him so and he thanks me, unsurprised. Out and along and classes with Reynaldo continue. His beard is as long as mine was when I first arrived here. He regularly looks at me as though he has asked a question and I am about to answer though the reverse is more often the case.
We conclude each class by watching the news and discussing it briefly in English. This is not easy given his pronunciation. Also, most of the news is in no sense news, as the network owners have long since been bought off or exiled by Fujimori and Montesinos. Many of the newspapers, too, have been corrupted, and the radio stations as well. There are still moments of integrity and good courage, but they have not yet made any substantial difference: it is clear that Fujimori will run for a third term regardless of what the Constitution might say, and that he will win regardless of how actual votes are cast. He and Montesinos are adept at controlling the present. Five years into the future we will see how well they control the past.
Along the edge of the park and almost to the corner when there is a sudden dull jolt to the top of my left shoulder, not strong enough to knock me down but enough to make me drop the bags in that hand and how lucky that the rum was in my right. This is what happens when one ceases to be vigilant. If the pain is an adequate guide I would guess that the matacojudo fell from the top of the tree and the bruise will last for days.
I kick the matacojudo to the far side of the street and feel very slightly better. The soft drinks can be salvaged with careful work around the caps. Even broken chifles are delicious and it took nine calls to the one store on the Plaza de Armas in Frías, but at last it was confirmed: the tumor dropping through and spat out in pieces, Casualidad beginning very slowly to gain weight, her breath coming easier with each passing day and here now is the Dry-eyed Virgin.
I look at her in passing, stop and look closer. She is as she ever was if slightly darker, perhaps from some species of mold. I set down my bags, pull a flowered strand of bougainvillea from a neighbor’s wall, wind it into a violet wreath, hang it from a corner of the glass case and feel ridiculous but not entirely wrong.
The hairless dog watches from the sidewalk as I fight with the doorknob. Finally into my house and Mariángel and Karina and such delicate delight. Karina believes that tonight will go poorly but has pledged her best attempt. She and Mariángel bring bowls for the chifles and tall glasses for drinks and two large boxes of wooden matches to use as poker chips. Then there is singing, and some small amount of dancing, and Mariángel is asleep before the doorbell rings.
Correct positioning is crucial and with luck the transparency of my manipulations will work in their favor. I seat Arantxa across from me, place Karina to her left and Günther to her right. I deal and encourage banter. The early cards are unfriendly to Günther and hateful to me which makes Karina and Arantxa very pleased.
We are unable to argue about the relative strength of hands as Karina has posted a list, so instead we argue about the correct plural form of Cuba libre, and drink several pitchers’ worth. Arantxa and Karina do not immediately become friends but are more civil to one another than might have been the case. Arantxa and Günther do not immediately fall in love but there is something that might possibly be a species of flirtation exhibited from time to time.
I had thought that the later hours would bring a seriousness of purpose to the game and instead everyone but me stops caring and the discussion turns to politics. Here Karina and Arantxa have common ground. Together they bait me with talk of the United States and its imperialistic abuses. They wait for me to rise up in anger, and instead I agree neither happily nor unhappily, and tell them what they surely already know, that in the teeming cage of simians that is the world there is generally one gorilla per epoch, and this gorilla does whatever it pleases but never imagines itself as evil, in fact imagines itself as benevolent, even helpful, even a shining light, and sometimes actually is benevolent, and occasionally actually is helpful, and once in a great while actually is a shining light, but always the main concern: enough bananas for the gorilla itself.
Another pitcher, the sixth or eighth. I attempt to bring attention back to the cards. Günther wins three straight hands and initiates a second pause, this one consisting of anecdotes involving monkeys in zoos in Germany and Spain and Peru. A pot for Karina, a pot for Arantxa. I gather the cards to deal the next hand, but as I shuffle, reminiscences begin as regards El Niño: the storms and flooding and insects and mess and our small occasional triumphs.
- Also there is La Niña! says Günther.
This is the name of many things, and one is a sort of resort that exists for a year each few decades. Where before there were two ponds far apart with only desert between, the rains have created a lake that covers a hundred square miles and is several feet deep. Karina says that a few of her friends have been to this temporary shore, that it is beautiful, that we should all go together tomorrow. Günther and I nod and look at Arantxa. She says she will call the university first thing in the morning, that she is quite sure a van can be borrowed. Günther says he would be happy to drive it. Karina hands me the phone, says that Reynaldo and Mireille should come too. I call, and Reynaldo sounds no more or less sober than anyone here and agrees on the spot: my house, ten o’clock tomorrow morning.
Once this is settled I suggest that we return our focus to the game, and ask Arantxa to cut the deck. Instead she pushes her matches over into my pile. Günther does the same, and Karina, and there will I suspect be no more poker tonight or ever.
Arantxa says she had best leave, and Günther stretches and nods. We all say our goodbyes, and they are warm, kind, drunk goodbyes, perhaps my favorite kind. Karina and I walk them to the door. As they enter the darkness they take one another’s hand and laugh.
I am pulling the door shut when I hear a shout from the opposite direction: Armando, walking lines less than straight. Karina kisses him hello and goodbye and goes to sleep. I serve us the remains of the current pitcher. He lifts his glass to me and brings it forward, clinks too strongly against mine, both break and Cuba libre rains down.
He apologizes, tries and fails to help me sweep up the shards, says he has news I will not believe. I tell him that in the interest of time I have already begun to doubt it, that in a few seconds I hope to reach complete aporia. He puts his hands on my shoulders. Then very loudly he says:
- Juan de Segovia!
- Yes?
- Not you! Not John Segovia. Juan de Segovia!
- Armando—
- No no no! You have no idea. Junín? Junín!
- The department or the province or the district or the city?
- City of Jauja, district of Jauja, province of Jauja.
- Department of Junín.
- Yes. We need to talk.
- We are talking at this very moment.
- Alexis Ñaupara?
- I remember him well.
- To the best of my vast and ever-increasing knowledge you have never met him. My student back at the Católica, years ago. If he ever tells you he found Hayden White on his own, you call him a liar to his face.
- Nothing would please me more.
Armando takes a deep breath, seems to sober suddenly if incompletely.
- So Alexis is in Jauja, the cathedral archives, patterns of criminality in the 1740s. And he knows that right now I’m working on inheritance structures in the same region from more or less the same time frame. When he runs into something that might interest me, he gives a call.
- Very kind.
- Very. And last night he calls again. We talk for half an hour about a mason from Yauyos. Then right at the end he asks if I’ve ever heard of a Conquest-era Spaniard named Juan de Segovia. I say that in fact I have. He says that he’s just run across a copy of Segovia’s will, and he’s only mentioning it because of how odd it is to find—
- Impossible. There aren’t any wills that old still here.
- Or so we thought.
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- Seriously, Armando. Impossible. Not even the AG in Lima—
- Originals, maybe. But there he was paging through a notarial register looking for a set of judicial proceedings, and he finds a couple of smaller registers bound up inside. Most are from the same period but one is from the 1530s. And one of the protocols is a will. Juan de Segovia.
I hold up a hand. I prepare another pitcher—the last of the lemons, the last of the ice. I bring new glasses and pour.
- Armando, this was very good of your friend and very good of you, and I thank you both. But he must have misread. The date, the name, the—
- Alexis does not misread. I trained him myself. May I proceed to the even stranger part?
I shrug and raise my glass. Armando nods, tilts his glass softly against mine, drains his drink and wipes his mouth and smiles.
- Segovia left everything to an Inca woman and their baby twins.
- Okay look. Every new thing you say makes the whole story less plausible. There’s no evidence that he ever married, ever had children, ever left a will.
- There is now.
- Armando! And to leave everything to—
- I know, all right? I know. But Alexis told me he’ll copy out the will as soon as he finishes what he’s working on. A week or two, three at the most. And he’ll mail it to me. And you’ll see. And you’ll be sorry. And you’ll owe me.
- Armando, I’m grateful. I truly am. I just don’t believe it’s possible. And even if it’s true, I haven’t worked on anything along those lines, so—
- Along which lines have you worked, then?
- What?
- Since Pilar died, what work have you done? And even before that! What have you published, and where? You don’t go to conferences any more, you don’t—
- It’s time for you to leave.
- Didn’t you just go to Ecuador? Five days? Almost a week in the field and you did no work. Are you a historian or a tourist?
And I move him to the door. His feet touch the floor occasionally and already I am regretting this but I cannot have him here any longer. We reach the threshold and I set him down and he keeps walking. I call to him. He does not turn around. I thank him again. He does not respond. I call out that we are going to La Niña tomorrow, that he is welcome to join us, and already he cannot be seen.
We sit on the patio, Mariángel and Karina and I. It is ten minutes past ten and no one has yet come. They have until eleven, Karina says, and then we will hire a taxi on our own.
She goes inside for more coffee and Mariángel chases a grasshopper across the yard. The grasshopper seems small but is in fact precisely the size it should be. Our insect populations and variety are also normal for this part of the world. Most of the toads are gone, mainly flattened and swept into gutters. And each morning’s newspaper informs us of other things changing for the better: today’s front page is primarily concerned with a lack of new cases of malaria.
There are also however articles about the Ecuadorian border, and there have never been more fighter jets ripping through the sky than this morning. Another comes just now, its shriek rattling my windows. Like many of the others it is low enough for the pilot to see that I am giving him the finger though I doubt he is looking in the necessary direction.
Mariángel catches and immediately releases the grasshopper, and it flies up and over the wall. I take the phone, call Armando and apologize. He pretends not to know why. I thank him, apologize again, say that I look forward to seeing the copy of the will. I reiterate that he is welcome to join us this morning, and he thanks me but says that today must be reserved for recovery.
Karina comes back to the patio, sets down her mug and takes up the newspaper. I have tried to tell her about Pilar, but each time I start Karina says that she already knows. She fits differently against my mind than Pilar, again with sharper if not uncomfortable angles and during sex with Karina I have called Pilar’s name only once. I did not know that I had done it until Karina pushed me away. I said that I was sorry. She said that being sorry was insufficient and I agreed. From other discussions I know that her father often said and says that he is sorry. He lives in Lima but not with her mother, and wrote a book but it was apparently an insane book published in purple ink and did not help at all.
I have not been able to determine if the other men Karina loves are as large as I am. I do however have reason to believe that they are slowly diminishing in number, if such a thing may be measured in terms of the strength and variety of unfamiliar colognes. At some point I hope to be the only one left.
I fetch the six remaining Advanced exams, a red pen, a calculator. Forty-five minutes later two of them are done. Like the rest I have graded they were fine, somewhat better than fine, not quite as good as I expected and I do not know why and the doorbell rings.
Karina goes to answer, brings Arantxa out onto the patio. She is wearing a Werder Bremen jersey that I am quite sure she does not own. I hold up the four ungraded midterms and tell her that they are the last. She shrugs, kisses me hello as if the two of us have come to some sort of peace.
Ten minutes later Reynaldo and Mireille arrive looking dehydrated and dizzy and very pleased with themselves. We insult their hair for a time. Then Günther comes with the van, which smells of cilantro and bad brakes but is otherwise perfect.
Groceries and gasoline and across the Fourth Bridge, the water quiet and well down the banks. Through Castilla and out along the Panamericana. Günther handles the many detours with focused ease. At each fording I wonder if I will be asked to step from the vehicle so that it might pass more easily, but I never am, which is in itself a sort of love, and perhaps the undercarriage will not be unrepairable.
Mariángel starts to whine and so I invent a game. I pull a pretend needle bloodlessly but painfully through each of my fingers, then plunge it through my palm and pull it out the back of my hand. By tugging on the imaginary thread I can make my hand move amusingly. This terrifies Mariángel, and Karina shudders, and so do I: the back porch of my house in Daly City, my father’s hand moving identically. I have invented nothing whatsoever. The feeling in my chest is half warmth and half disquiet.
I attempt to explain this to Reynaldo as we edge out of the deepest ravine thus far. We pull back onto the highway and I have a sudden sense of where we are—the desert is still rich and often green but even so I know this stretch of road too well. I sit up, crane forward. Half a mile ahead are the three algarrobos. Karina leans back against me and I look at her but she has done it for no reason, is chatting with Mireille about cherimoyas.
Mariángel lifts my chin, wants me to thread through my fingers again and so I do. She loves the terror of it, the fake pain, squeals and I watch out the window. We slow as we near the three trees, and I cannot look away.
My shoulder is squeezed, Reynaldo, and he has seen me see. Just past the algarrobos we turn west onto a dirt road, and I look back, knowing that it would be stupid and pointless to go, that I cannot possibly go. I say nothing, and Reynaldo says nothing, and Karina is staring at nothing ahead of us and probably knows as well.
Günther calls and points, but it is not La Niña, not yet. Instead it is a porotillo in full flower, the spines unseen at this distance, the long slender blooms so bright, as if the tree were growing its own putillas. We stop to look more closely, and the tips of the blossoms are still closed. When they open the huayruros will be plucked, turned into jewelry and Pilar, how she stood, letting me see, but now Reynaldo is talking, points to a hole halfway up the trunk, talks of what might live in that hole until Mireille makes him stop.
There is an abundance of wild mustard, goats and their goatherds, and suddenly the lake, bluish silver, impossible here, too vast to see across. There are a dozen children splashing in the shallows. Farther out there are windsurfers and a pair of catamarans. We park, and Arantxa and Karina are overly kind to one another as we unpack. When I take off my shirt the bruise on my shoulder is noted and explained and mocked heartily. We walk
to the edge, step down into the water, except for Karina who instead stretches out, and the things Mariángel says are so very nearly words.
Scurling now around us are freshwater prawns. This too seems impossible, the lake itself only three months old and how could they have found their way here? Mireille says they were born from eggs laid not during this El Niño but the last one: fifteen years of dry silence, and then life at last. They have already laid their own eggs to hatch in the next El Niño, she says. And tomorrow or the next day the prawns will be netted and eaten.
Arantxa dislikes this so Günther offers another scenario: the prawns survive for a year, and the lake has all but vanished, and the seagulls come to feast, and the caracaras. At least they had their year, says Arantxa. Mireille leans down to the water, rinses her face, says that she will be leaving at the end of the semester. This it would seem is news to all of us but Reynaldo. She adds that we will always be welcome to visit her in Bern, and we tell her how much we hope we will be able.
Out of the water, and in addition to the snacks we bought, Arantxa has arranged proper food in tupperware. Stuffed tomatoes, stuffed potatoes, rice. Afterwards Mariángel and I walk to the dunes. We explore and roll down them. There are wildflowers, and dragonflies, and at one point the quickest of glimpses, something long and gray moving in the thick grass, the whipping tip of its tail.
A rest, and a last long swim. Arantxa holds Günther underwater, brings him up only to kiss. As we walk back to the van there are thorns in places along the trail but no tearing of skin or cloth, no pain, not now, just the colors of sunset reflected in the unlikely water, and the colors, the colors, they are a sudden slow surprise each time we look.
We climb in, and I close my eyes, keep them closed all along the dirt road. Mariángel pries at my eyelids and shouts for milk. When I can feel that we are back on the highway and well and safely past, I join in the shouting and drinking. There is even some singing, Los Morochucos, and I sing quietly, wishing no one to feel inferior.