Pacazo (34 page)

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 to 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.

Not quite to Sullana we leave the highway, push west on a paved but unstable road, try for Punta Pitos. The first four turnoffs end in washouts, the smallest twelve feet deep. A dump truck driver gathering gravel tells us that one route is still open, draws a map in the dirt, and when we go that route too is closed. We hit very large holes, and bang our heads on the metal ceiling.

Back to the paved road. Watching the bushes and trees, I imagine new and better ways to teach the present perfect. Five minutes of this and again turning, this time toward Punta Dorada. The trails here are also abysmal, but running ravines and up we arrive at a bluff.

The sunlight bounces off the white rock, hovers in the black, drenches us as we hike around the point. Below us penguins nest. They are an unexpected phenomenon each time I see them.

Farther along, a hundred sea lions on the sand, a flock of pelicans, and Reynaldo leads me to a ledge from which one might fall fifteen feet into the ocean if the wave below is cresting, or thirty if it gutters. He looks at me and jumps. For a moment I think I will be unable to follow but then I do. The surf drives us against mussel beds, pulls us away and drives us against them again. Our skin opens on the shells and for a time it seems there is no way out of the water, but at last we are lifted on the largest of waves, a savage and desperate happiness.

A second jump, a third, and that is sufficient. On our walk back to the bluff I pick a new path, lead us into a rising cloud of mosquitoes with bites like bee stings. We run to the truck, drive to the paved road and then southwest toward Colán. Along the way we eat our sandwiches and drink our beers and sing with Aterciopelados, toasting Miss Panela and Chica Difícil.

The toasts and singing end when we arrive at the crest. Reynaldo pulls the truck off the road, and points though there is no need: the ocean has broken through to either side of the town below, has formed an inner barrier of water, a moat, and Colán is the crumbling castle.

As always the massive cross is to our right, and to our left is San Lucas, an old church claimed to be far older. We edge down through the bluffs, come to the edge of the water. Reynaldo smiles and guns the engine. Two young boys wade in the channels alongside the roadbed, draw away from our splashing as we pass. We arc toward the town, and to our left is a broken-toothed smile: house intact, house destroyed, house inexistent.

At Reynaldo’s aunt’s house, crazed waves smash at the breakwater he has built, at what is left to either side. The surf pounds twelve feet deep up the walkway, and the water is thick with lumber. We watch. We count half an hour from the moment of our last bite of sandwich. Then we jump from the upper deck. The sea is feverish and fast and we swim for a very long time.

As we come out, Reynaldo invents a sport, running from one property to the next between waves, holding fast to whatever still stands as the water slams in. One house has benches set in concrete, and we sit on the benches and lock our arms and feet as the thick wild waves break over us. At one point I am dragged from the bench, wrenched and staggered and thrown back toward the house, see a rail-end rushing at me but ripple blindly past it, untouched.

Back to the house, and another beer, and then abrupt darkness. The rain begins as we run to the truck. It thickens as Reynaldo starts the engine, roars as we race out through the ruins of town.

Now Reynaldo points. A young woman is standing in the water off to one side, the rain cutting furrows around her, and she waves at me or us. Reynaldo stops the truck. She runs toward us, walks, runs, water rising at each footfall, rivulets down her arms. I open my window as she nears. She is of medium height, her hair is of medium length and she, yes, neither dark-skinned nor light, she half-smiles and it is her, the girl from the Pórticos Hotel, putilla, chilalo, though now she is a waterbird, an avocet or egret.

- Hello, she says.

- Hello, says Reynaldo.

- You are going to Piura?

- Yes, I say. Let me just—

- I would rather ride in back. May I?

Reynaldo punches me in the arm.

- No, I say. You ride in here and I’ll ride in back.

Reynaldo punches me again.

- Or the three of us could fit here inside if the seat is sufficiently—

Reynaldo punches me a third time, and I punch him back as hard as I am able given the spatial arrangements. He shakes his head and whispers:

- Jackass. In your lap.

- No thank you, she says. I would much rather ride in back.

She climbs up over the sidewall. I look at Reynaldo. He balls his fist.