Pacazo (37 page)

Water streams from our hair and faces. The music is thick in our blood, bats knock mosquitoes from the air, and weak lights weave on the pooled rain. Half an hour passes this way, but then an odd song is played, some wrong mixture of heavy-footed things, and we return to our part of the far table.

More drinks are ordered and we watch others dance. Most are sinuous as if this were television. The very drunkest spread their arms and hop. There is also an older couple dancing like they might die on the way home, and in all corners the young men’s hands trace down the bodies of their partners but always stop at the waist, even here, even now.

On the walls are peeling pictures of nearly naked women dancing with dolphins. There are also Victorian images of many kinds hung higher and lower than one would expect. In a break between songs Karina tells us that anything we might wish to buy can be found here. Reynaldo and I cannot think of anything but thank her for the information. She laughs and leaves for the restroom as the music rises again, and in her absence Reynaldo wags his eyebrows and shouts things that I cannot make out but are surely vulgar and amusing.

He leans back as the drinks come. It is hard for me to believe how beautiful mine is: the beads of condensation, the jeweled slice of lemon, the straw. I drain my glass, close my eyes, and in my head is a thought of old time, of previous dancing in other spaces and how it is that I learned. Karina returns and I thank and kiss her. I shake Reynaldo’s hand. I walk unsteadily to the door and flooded streets.

Monday and half an hour late to work. In my estimation this will not be a problem as there is so little to do. The fall semester begins the day after tomorrow and almost no one has signed up for English classes.

Most students at this university spend summers with their families in Sullana or Chiclayo or Trujillo. This year few have returned. The rector has assured us personally that it is only a matter of El Niño, that our classrooms will eventually be full. We suspect that he is wrong, but perhaps he is not and hundreds of students will indeed come to sign up immediately after sign-ups have ended.

Flooding has begun in other cities as well, even Lima itself—several of its outskirts went underwater when the Seco spread past its banks. The police had announced the flood three hours in advance, and it appears that no one listened. The mayor showed up half a day later with the National Guard, who spent their time preventing pillaging rather than filling sandbags. We in Piura find this amusing though we know that we should not.

Yesterday morning Mariángel called early from her crib. I went, and she screamed as I entered her bedroom, screamed and beat at my beardless face as I took her up, screamed in fear and then in anger as I began to sing. It was four complete Woody Guthrie songs before she was calm. I will never again shave my beard unless she is present.

My ceiling has been repainted a perfect white and the water table is again below the level of the ground and still there are open ditches cut through lawn, and many pumps at work. A lake has been created in unused acreage beyond the chemistry lab, and pipes run to it from the vicinities of most buildings. The scaffolding but not the planking remains in many places.

Here in the Language Center, the cleaning staff have done extraordinary work: there is still a waterline on the wall but the furniture has all been cleaned and the floor is tidy and dry. Arantxa comes in, pretends to notice nothing new about my face, hands me my preliminary student lists—Elementary, Intermediate, Advanced. All three are very short lists.

She asks if I will be attending the Commencement Address on Friday, says the rector has been working on his speech for weeks and it promises to be particularly good. I smile and say that it sounds as if it will be. I ask if my classrooms are ready. She shakes her head, says that they are, says that I should check them all the same.

When she is gone I read quickly through my lists. It appears that I have an Elementary student named Madeinusa. There is a movie by that name but I have not seen it. Broken into three parts it is an easy name to understand and makes me squint.

I stop by each of my classrooms to see that the chalkboards are clean, that the lights function, that the proper number of chairs has been emplaced. In fact none of this is the case in any of the rooms. One room is on the ground floor, and not even the wads of dead insects have been removed. I argue for ten minutes over the phone and an hour in person with the Director of Housekeeping, who says that all arrangements have been made except those that were unfeasible, and that classes do not begin for another sixty-four hours so there is still plenty of time, and that I as a professor have nothing about which to worry.

When all complaints have been registered I eat lunch alone in the cafeteria, return to my office and pretend to prepare. In fact my preparations were finished a week ago. When I am too bored to pretend any longer I promise Arantxa that tomorrow I will arrive an hour early, and ask if I might leave a corresponding hour early today. She assents but barely.

I have already called Karina: I am many inexcusable things but not a cad. I apologized and attempted to explain and she said that she already knew, which is not likely but her saying so was sufficient. I walk for the gate, and walking is much simpler, one foot and the other, again and again, and walking is only walking.

Then it is more than walking, then less than walking, then much harder. I will not have it. I scan a car that passes. Nothing. Over, finished, and I attempt to let this settle in my mind. It will not and is thus perhaps false. Now walking is almost impossible and I will fall if I do not think through each step.

A taxi instead from the gate to the house. Gathering Mariángel, and remembering: Reynaldo has invited us for dinner. A clean shirt, a bottle of wine, the baby carrier and its canopy. No taxis, and it would have been so easy to pay the previous one extra to wait.

Light rain lightens further, becomes mist. We walk to the Fourth Bridge, push through the crowds and hear the hum: the surface of the river skims only a few feet below the bottom of the deck. We step onto the bridgehead and start across. Now there is a swaying, the bridge or my brain or both. I cling for an instant to the rail and yes, the bridge itself, ten thousand tons of concrete swaying.

As quickly across as is practicable given how many are walking with and against us, sweat thick down my chest, Mariángel laughing as I jog but then angry, and even in the mototaxi angry. I talk to her and she cries and hits me. I talk more, and the crying becomes screaming, and I too raise my voice. There could be nothing stupider.

To Reynaldo’s house, a handshake and in, his aunt observing me from many angles before she decides that beardless is an improvement. A beer and another while he helps her load the table. The food is excellent, papa a la Huancaína and lomo saltado and crema volteada, but the aunt is ill with bronchitis or pneumonia, can barely speak without coughing. Also, Mariángel bites everything but her food and throws everything she can lift.

I apologize every few minutes, say to the room that she is never like this. The aunt shakes her head, coughs and shrugs and coughs. Reynaldo’s whiskers are too long to be a matter of laziness. I ask, and he says that he is growing a beard to replace mine.

- Mine was irreplaceable. How could you not know that?

- And why shave it off now after so many years?

- No reason.

- Is that what you plan to tell the Immigrations officials when they look at your passport and see a different face altogether?

Yet another element I had not considered. I ask Reynaldo about his plans for a third attempt at the visa. He looks down and his aunt glares and this was not the right question to ask. Mariángel screams, overturns the soup, starts to cry. I apologize once more. Reynaldo’s aunt nods and coughs and coughs and coughs.

When dessert is done Reynaldo and I attempt to sit and talk but neither Mariángel nor the aunt is interested or willing. Instead Reynaldo walks with us for a time. The mist has vanished, and something of a moon is visible. A hundred yards along Mariángel stops crying, and fifty yards farther on she is asleep.

- I want you to know, Reynaldo says, that nothing happened between me and Karina. Nothing untoward. Drinking and dancing and talking. I know of your feelings.

- You have no idea.

- Of course I do. And I told her.

- What?

- About you and Pilar, about what happened and how it affects other things.

- There are no other things.

- You are wrong. There are many. Karina said that she likes you, that you are a better dancer than you appear, that she hopes you will soon visit her house again.

- If this is a joke I will put out your eyes.

Reynaldo laughs.

- All right, I say. Thank you. And what about you? Have you tried again with the Swiss hydrologist?

- There is a tall blonde woman on a beach in California, and she wishes to meet me, wishes to know my name.

- Of course she does.

We are almost to the river. The bridge keens to us. Reynaldo rubs his arms though the night is still very warm. I thank him for dinner, and he nods, backs away, wishes us a pleasant walk home.

Eight in the morning and the taxi comes to a stop. I tell the driver that I will only be a moment, step out, push through to the edge. Shadows of a dinosaur skeleton can just be seen beneath the surface of the fast tarry water and thus the rumor is true and we know which bets have been lost and won: rain came hard in the mountains last night, and three hours ago the Old Bridge fell.

It was Socorro who told me, weeping as she came in through the front door. She begged me not to tell her sister, as the Old Bridge was Casualidad’s favorite of the four. I agreed, and would have even if it had been a difficult promise to keep. Pilar loved the bridge too, and so did I.

I stand, watch the water run, am jostled, jostle others in turn. There are dozens of folk songs that tell of Piura: its tondero, its seco de cabrito, the sun of Colán and the moon of Paita, and always the Old Bridge. The skeleton writhes in the current.

I turn and walk, find my taxi, thank the driver for stopping and tell him that there is another destination. He nods, waits for me to close the door. He turns on the radio as we pull into traffic, a local station, and they are discussing the very event.

One of the guests is an engineer who says that in previous years the river has on average run at only two cubic meters per second. I know what a cubic meter is, can picture two of them spread thin and passing in the space of a second: the turgid creek I have always known. Larger numbers are more difficult. When the runoff from last night’s rain hit Piura, says the engineer, the river peaked at four thousand cubic meters per second.

The Sánchez Cerro is closed. The Bolognesi is open, and the engineer is unconvinced that this is the best of our options. The Fourth will close to vehicles at every surge and rumor of surge, he says, and there are ropes laid from one end to the other for pedestrians to clutch as they walk.

The police are still looking for a corpse, says the host. There was a car on the Old Bridge when it fell, a husband and wife headed for the airport, and only the woman made it to the surface. Now the program cuts to what sounds like a live interview. There is confusion at first, shouting and static, and a reporter talking to the widow herself. Her anger is vast. There were people watching, she says. She wants to know why none of them dove in to save her husband, and why his body hasn’t been recovered, and why she was the one to live.

More shouting and static and if I were to guess I would say that the reporter is being dragged from the woman’s room in the hospital. Next there are advertisements—Inca Kola, Kirma Instant Coffee, Bimbo Bread. The program resumes but the taxi stops as already we are to the gate.

My stomach tightens as I pay the driver. Walking and rain and walking. A moment in my office to gather materials, and then to the classroom. Ground floor. Insects gone. Room swept clean. Twenty chairs set in rows. The bell rings and the semester has begun.

I look out across the students in this, my Elementary group. There are only four, and Madeinusa is not among them. I employ key methodologies all the same, speak only English, gesture generously. The first handout is a sheet of corrective annotations for written work. I illustrate each annotation with a chalkboard example: a flawed sentence and the corresponding correction. Though my students all show signs of being false beginners, the limited breadth of their passive vocabulary does not permit examples of sufficient clarity.

Three more students arrive, none of them on my list, and I restart. Still my examples of fragments and run-ons are unsuccessful; the students appear disposed to disbelieve that anything correctly formed in Spanish could be wrong when translated word for word, and their voices, are they inflected with disdain? It seems that they are, seems that they have seen into me and know that I have failed, have found me worthless and wanting.

We abandon corrections and proceed to rules. Again and again I ask whether my policies regarding attendance and plagiarism are sufficiently clear. My students stare out the window at the rain.

A final attempt, blank spaces in which they are to detail their major, hobbies, and previous English-learning experiences. I hand the sheets out, allow five minutes, permit mutterings in Spanish as they work. Two more unlisted students enter in the midst of the process, deforming it. When I collect the sheets I am met with excessive doodling.

I explain the sense in which lines exist to be drawn, and which individual line is involved in this case, and to which side of that line excessive doodling lies. The air is dense with indifference. Sweat gathers in my neck-folds.

I close my eyes, open them again, and a student raises her hand. She is short and has very long hair, works at the sentence she has in her head, and it comes out so slowly, a word, a pause, a correction, a pause, another word. I tell her that just this once she may speak in Spanish, but she shakes her head, perseveres. Finally she reaches the end of the sentence, a question, and it is only this: she wants to know if I am feeling all right.