Pacazo (30 page)

Finally the lid is managed. The coffin is carried, two men on one side and three on the other, and they do not walk straight lines. We work uphill. As we pass storefronts the owners come out to join us, and we grow. All of the women are wearing only black. The cemetery is not far away.

Most of the plots are set in the ground, old and ornate and untended; there is only one whitewashed cluster of niches, recently begun. There is no priest, no reading. The niche intended for Doña Silvana has not yet been cleaned, and we wait as the rocks and dirt and dust are removed. There is more wailing. The coffin is slid into the niche and each bearer touches it, palm flat against the wood. The hole is plugged with bricks and plaster and the women begin to lose consciousness. They are lowered carefully, and water is called for, and they are revived in the order they fell.

People begin to shout at one another in Spanish and Quechua. I search the crowd for Casualidad, and now Fermín runs to me, offers a tour of the cemetery. I tell him that no tour will be necessary, that I need only to speak with his mother, that I must hurry so as not to miss my van. He points out the drivers, who are among the shouters. I ask how long and he says perhaps an hour. I ask if there is any other way. He says yes, horses, a two-day trip, and also his mother just went home to take a nap.

And so we tour the cemetery, Fermín and I and a mute named Teobaldo who cackles and burps. On one side is a brick wall, and the children sitting on it watch us walk. One of the tombs has something like a ten-foot church built above it. I observe it for a time, until Teobaldo comes and stands directly in front of me. He stares at the church. I look at the back of his head. It has a normal shape. I move on to the next tomb, and so does he, again precisely in front of me.

There are palm trees planted in many places and Fermín begins to speak. First he says it is a shame that the son from Jaén did not arrive in time. Then he tells me about the English classes he had before moving to Piura, and the karate classes, and the two American doctors who were here for a day five years ago. At the next tomb we stop to observe, he pushes Teobaldo out of the way.

- The man buried here ran off to Lima with his girlfriend, he says. His wife tracked them down. There was blood all over the floor.

I nod as thoughtfully as I am able. The next tomb too holds a man killed by his wife for unfaithfulness, and the next as well. Casualidad has never mentioned Fermín’s father in any context. All things are possible. At some point I will have to decide whether or not to ask.

Fermín points to the closest peak, tells me of climbing it, of looking for the spot where a tomb full of gold was once found. I ask if he is sure, and he insists. The story is somewhat confused in the telling, has something to do with two brothers and a storm and the Chiclayo police, and now I remember not a fact but a phrase: the Venus of Frías.

- It was not a simple climb, Fermín says. It was a complicated climb.

Casualidad’s father comes to us and says the vans will be leaving soon. We stop by the house. Casualidad lies sleeping and her breathing is not easy. Her parents thank me for coming. I say that it was a pleasure, and the old man shakes his head. Fermín says that if he had been the one to find the gold, he would have buried it forever there on the mountain. I say that that would have been a fairly good plan, that there are things I need to tell his mother, things I want her to know. Casualidad’s father says that she already knows them. I have no idea what he means and rain starts falling, lightly.

I do not want to stay another day. It is absurd for me to have come all this way only to say goodbye by letter. But there is no third option, and I ask Casualidad’s mother for paper, a pen, an envelope.

Teobaldo shuffles up just as I finish, burps, takes my knapsack and turns as if to flee. I grab him by the back of the shirt, and he goes limp and falls. I pull my knapsack away. He stretches for a stick, and draws a picture in the dirt. The picture involves unnecessary curlicues but is clearly of a van leaving a cow or a fat man behind. I lift him, thank him, and he sticks a finger up my nose. Then he runs and everyone waves and I follow.

MARIÁNGEL SITTING ON MY SHOULDERS, her hands tight but open across my eyes as I veer from one room to the next and there is no longer a question to be asked: El Niño has come. The true rain began a week ago as the van arrived in Chulucanas. My slow climb out and down, the rain so thick that mist rose beneath it, and the far side of the street could not be seen. There were no taxis waiting. I ran to the closest shop, sat on a stool and counted owls, hoped to outwait the worst.

Kitchen to dining room to patio to dining room to bedroom to bathroom and back. When I was done counting I went and stood at the window. I waited, sat and waited, stood and waited. Then I chose and bought Christmas ceramics for Socorro, for Arantxa, for Reynaldo and Günther, for all the other university professors and authorities with whom I am on friendly terms.

The rain fell so hard for so long that I even bought a vase for my mother; the shipping costs make the clerks giddy and the vase will surely break on the way and Mariángel lets her hands slip from my eyes, grabs my ears, steers. There was no one left for whom to buy, and a single taxi passed, the water up to its rims. Slowly away from the shop, slowly and expensively to the bus station, and there another complex of downpour and puddle and unpleasantness. The ride home was much longer than eighty minutes. In a tree beside the highway I saw, I thought I saw, was quite sure but then no, it was only a dead branch five feet long, a small piece of bark rising something like a crest.

There have since been no days without rain. At first it was easily absorbed or ran into drains and away, but this is no longer the case. Water stands, rises, stands. The streets are creeks and my yard is a pond and tonight is Christmas Eve.

Patio to dining room to patio to dining room to living room. At last she tires or appears to and we rest for a moment on the couch. Tinsel hangs from each protrusion on our walls. It does not look particularly festive but seemed necessary as this year we have no tree. Real conifers are not to be found at reasonable prices in Piura, and when yesterday I brought out our plastic pine, I found it dense with mold. Mariángel and I hung ornaments on the almond tree instead and in an hour the rain had felled them all.

Now we hear new dripping. This means it is time for the Game of Leaks. At the birth of each I place a dish to catch the drips, and use the shape and size and texture of other ceiling stains to guess the location of the next leak to appear. I have not yet guessed successfully, but there is always hope.

I put a pot in a corner of the living room, a salad bowl in the center of Mariángel’s bedroom, and the clock says it is lunchtime. Socorro is spending Christmas with her family in Catacaos so our lunch is leftovers: broccoli and mashed potatoes and roast beef. We eat at the kitchen table because of its proximity to the refrigerator, and also because the dining room table is full of gifts, some received, some yet to give.

When we are done I stack the dishes, gather wrapping paper and tape, and it is too humid for tape, I know this already, put it back and bring out a stapler. Mercedes Sosa sings of love and justice intermittently as the electricity comes and goes. I wrap the first present precisely, staple a bow to the top, and give it to Mariángel.

She bangs it on the ground, grows bored, and I help her free the gift from its paper. The rubber pig delights her. She chews on its head, and I wrap the present I have gotten for her to give me: a short monograph by an amateur historian from Chiclayo on the tomb Fermín described. Then I unwrap it and thank her and she chews her pig and smiles.

I read the monograph last night. It is not badly handled. 1956, September, the police stop a nervous stranger in the Plaza de Armas, and in his suitcase there is an unlikely amount of gold. The director of the Brüning Museum traces it to Frías, to the base of a peak called Cedrillo, to a tomb sixteen hundred years old that had been opened by violent rain. The pieces are in some ways stylistically improbable. There are links, perhaps, between the little-known local culture that produced them and the Moche or Vicús. Or perhaps the pieces are not local at all, were carried in from Ecuador or Colombia. Or perhaps the explanation is otherwise, and Frías floats free in history.

In other museums were pieces that had never quite settled into any collection—figurines and goblets, pendants and necklaces—and these were brought and compared. A few were clearly of the same lineage as the crown, the scepter, and the finest piece from this new find. The Venus of Frías is a hollow statuette only six inches tall, but no one who sees it can look away.

A young woman, naked except for the raindrop-shaped flecks of gold hanging from her ears, at her waist, and they flutter at any movement. Her figure built up of layer after layer of laminated gold. Immense eyes of inlaid platinum. Narrow hips, long neck, elongated skull. Her arms at her sides but her wrists bent sharply, her palms perpendicular to her thighs, as if stylized in dance, as if balancing on an unseen beam: beautiful in a wholly disturbing sense.

I did not take any notes as for me the text is of no professional use. It was nonetheless good to feel old muscles stretch, and Mariángel tears at the paper of more gifts recently arrived. I lean to help, and first is a box from my mother. It came inexplicably clean through customs, arrived at the university with no fees due, and in it are animal-oriented books for Mariángel—the bull, the ant and the elephant, the bears, the other elephant, the wild things and the dog who does not like all but one of another dog’s hats—and a packet of three fine dress shirts for me, white and beige and pale blue.

Next is a box from Pilar’s parents. Inside are shoes for Mariángel in many styles, all perfectly sized. Then box after box from friends at the university, all for Mariángel, mainly clothes and mainly lovely and she ignores them.

Now we are left only with gifts intended for others and meant to have been mailed last month or hand-delivered days ago. Each is already in its box and I wrap, a furious wrapping, paper swaths of no particular dimension around and around until only paper can be seen, and staples at every corner. For this process Mariángel is of precisely as much help as I would have guessed.

Slightly less than halfway done, and our wrapping paper is slightly more than halfway gone. I look for the scissors, and do not see them. I check the far corners of the table, check my back pockets, check the floor. Mariángel turns away, and I call to her; at the sound of my voice she runs, falls as I stand and she screams, I leap and lift her and the scissors fall away, there is blood on the tips, on Mariángel’s face, I wipe and wipe and the wounds on her cheeks are not deep, are in fact more scratches than cuts.

In the bathroom there is antiseptic cream, and there are bandages. Five minutes later she looks deformed but is chewing her pig happily again and I am exhausted. Also I am fortunate, in that I decided some time ago that I wished for the two of us to spend tonight alone together, and thus declined the invitations we received.

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.