Pacazo (28 page)

The Martians hate birds, seem invincible, but Slim Whitman yodeling “Indian Love Call” causes their heads to explode, and now Tom Jones appears as himself, sings not for the first time of how not unusual it is to see him cry. The curtain falls. Mariángel and I slide along the row away from the drip, up the aisle and out. I will have to remember to tell Casualidad about the Martians’ hatred. Perhaps it will help in some way.

It is drizzling harder than before. We squint through the raucous honks and step to the curb. At the moment there are only mototaxis, and choosing one is difficult as the majority are wrong—misbalanced, weak motor, hairline axle fracture. Then someone chucks my shoulder, and it is Reynaldo.

- How did you like it? I ask.

He tweaks Mariángel’s cheek, wins a smile.

- Very much, he says. The effects were very special.

- The projector broke only once.

- And the whistling was minimal, yes.

A pause. We listen to the drizzle.

- Have there been any advances to your plans? I ask.

- The dean offered to help me obtain a fellowship to study in Spain.

- The dean does not know you very well.

- No. But you do. Could you write a letter of reference for me to give to the American consul?

- Of course. When will you need it?

- I will be reapplying in two months—any time before that would be fine. And do you think it will help?

I do not.

- I do.

- Good. Excellent. Thank you.

We say our goodbyes and he walks to his motorcycle, gets on, kicks again and again. Twelve times, sixteen, twenty. He dismounts and shrugs.

- It worked perfectly on the way over here.

I nod and shake my head.

- Why don’t you believe me?

- Because you are lying.

- Yes. It died halfway here and I had to push it. But until that moment, perfectly.

I wave and he waves back; he walks his motorcycle away, and I select a mototaxi. The seat is well padded, the bearings smooth, the shock absorbers healthy. It seems outstanding, yes, but there is also something of a noise, a random knocking sound from below, at times sharp, at times soft. When we arrive, not to our house but to the nearest store, as we step out I see what I’d missed before. It is a woman’s shoe, its strap caught in the spokes.

I pay and now it comes: at the cinema I failed to search. It is not that I had no time but that I forgot. The mototaxista drives off and the shoe is slammed again and again into the mud and this is the world, this is where we live. I have not searched worthily in weeks, have not searched at all in days, and there is no excuse nor any suitable punishment, no faces around worth scanning and no taxis pass.

The store, its filthy floor, its cobwebbed corners, its flickering light. Also there is a girl. From her eyes I would guess that she is eight, and from her size I would guess that she is five. She is holding a toddler, probably her brother, slightly bigger than Mariángel, and the girl stares not at me but at the counter and the dusty things behind it.

- 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.