Blood Lake (43 page)

“Yeah, there's a lot of mixing of Old World Spanish superstitions and native Ecuadorian animism. You ought to see the
tres reyes
parade on the Twelfth Night of Christmas, with Santiago on a leaping stallion holding a lightning bolt in his fist, looking a lot more like Illapa the Incan thunder god than the antiseptic statues of St. James in your local parish church up North.”

“Not
my
local parish church. We don't do that whole graven image thing.”

“You see, even pure Catholicism really is a mixture.”

“There's more to it than that, Filomena,” he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

“Yes, there is.”

Our arms intertwine, his pale-of-settlement white-boy skin glowing like a Torah scroll under the reading lamp next to my cinnamon-and-suntanned hide. I glide smoothly into massaging his neck and shoulders, watching as our tones blend.

“I'm a
mestiza
too, Stan,” I say, gently kneading his knots away. “A mixture of the natives and the conquerors. It's like swimming between two currents: one fiery and passionate and committed, the other conservative and sterile and repressive—boy, is it ever repressive. So sometimes I can rein it in and be the dedicated working mother, and other times—”

“The stiletto over there,” he says.

I lean close, my lips to his ear.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” he asks.

My hands stop, linger in the soft hairs of his neck, then continue to work their way down.

“I'm not sure,” I answer truthfully. “I've caused a lot of damage. And from a distance, it's hard to say who hits what. I never did—uh—the executions. I've broken bones, drawn blood, punctured rib cages. I've kicked uniformed cops out of moving trucks. But … Well, just a couple of days ago, a rural sergeant was about to run me down on horseback, and the only way to stop the guy with that knife there would have been to kill him. I whacked him in the head with a rifle butt instead, and he's probably out there looking for me right now.”

Stan, who has taken the Hippocratic oath, digests this.

After a while, he says, “Well, as long as I don't try to run you down on horseback or anything, I guess I'm safe from your wrath.”

I squeeze his hand, grateful for such understanding.

“Come here, you,” I say. “I feel another hot stream coming on.”

“Now I know why men have leg hair,” he says. “It's an early warning system to let you know when fleas are jumping on you.”

He pulls on his pants and shirt and goes out to get the paper, while I go to the bathroom. Then I crawl back into bed for five more minutes. When Stan comes back with the paper, I sit up and glance over the stories. President Pajizo met with the head of the Supreme Court and said, “I want General Arturo Vélez charged and found guilty of defaming my family name.” Yes, he actually said
I want him found guilty
. Who needs a judicial branch of government, anyway? Think of what we'd save on electricity alone.

But the big local news is that Senator Ricardo-of-the-Roman-Nose Faltorra is coming to Cuenca this afternoon, and the elusive
señor
Putamayo is supposed to be covering the rally. Something tells me it would be a good place to look for one or two other recognizable faces as well.

“Come on,” says Stan. “That museum with all the pre-Columbian artifacts is only open for a couple of hours.”

“If at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have irregular hours on Saturdays.”

“All the more reason. Get up.”

“Okay, I'm coming.” I get out of bed and walk naked to the bathroom. The cold floor has a predictable effect on my soft flesh, and Stan lets out an appreciative whistle.

I flip on the switch, but the lights aren't working. There's no water, either.

The same day the leading opposition candidate happens to be coming to town.

Nice touch.

That afternoon the sky clouds up with that rapid onrush so characteristic of the high
sierra
, startling in its suddenness. The sun fades behind a dark gray sheet that obscures the sky like a retractable steel dome for the rest of the day.

Two hours before Senator Faltorra is due to arrive in Cuenca the rain starts falling, and somebody in the National Electrical Company obviously decides that there will be bricks flying in the streets if the power isn't reconnected, and the dull yellow streetlights flicker back on just as dusk approaches and Faltorra's motorcade wends its way through the wet, cobblestoned streets clogged with
campesinos
who have ventured across peaks and valleys to hear this man speak. Trucks with crumbling wooden cargo beds follow in Senator Faltorra's wake. Gnarled hands grasp the dripping wet yellow-and-white banners emblazoned with the candidate's name that bedeck the trucks and undulate over their heads like shimmering water lilies floating on a human sea.

Stan and I huddle under an umbrella and scurry along, jumping over the gurgling storm drains to the Plaza Cívica, where the Neoliberal Party has set up a stage and hired a Cañari Indian folklore band to play. The square is filled with Incasic faces that I have seen in my dreams in far-off New York City, standing stonelike and unmoved by the whims
of the weather. Sun-to-sun laborers who expect little from government, something is keeping them here in the cold rain and gathering darkness: a sliver of hope.

A man crowds under the umbrella with us. There are dark gullies in his rain-washed face. He has an eagle's nose, haphazard teeth, and a thick felt hat stiffened with horse glue—which, when it gets wet, smells rather like a dead animal.

The rain pours down from the black sky, doubling in strength. More people squeeze under our umbrella. The crowd thins out a little, but the remaining diehards begin chanting with surprising strength and conviction, “
Se ve, se siente, ¡Faltorra presidente!
” See it, feel it, Faltorra will be president. It rhymes in Spanish.

I don't see Putamayo anywhere. Scared of a little rain? The lazy bum. I'm amazed that the metal microphones onstage haven't brought down the bright white fire from heaven yet. The chanting grows bolder, with a contagious energy that thickens around us when Ricardo-of-the-Roman-Nose Faltorra walks out onto the stage flanked by the local party leaders and gubernatorial candidate Juanita Estafa, whose normally big hairdo is so flat and stringy she looks like a wet cat after a two-hour motorcade in this deluge.

Faltorra advances to the microphones and raises both his arms up in a symbolic embrace of the people of Cuenca.

“Words do not exist—!” he proclaims “—to describe the stirring and impressive reception that Cuenca has given us!”

This is followed by an eruption of cheers that goes far beyond the weight of Faltorra's words. They're just glad he's finally here. I translate for Stan as Faltorra speaks:

“I beg the Ecuadorian people to give us the opportunity to repay with our services the immense debt of gratitude that I have for all the corners of the country!”

Another lengthy eruption. When it subsides, Faltorra continues, “In the first month of our administration, we will sign the contract for the construction of a road connecting Cuenca to Naranjal!”

The crowd roars as if he's promising to teach them the secret of transmuting base metals into gold.

“Our government will push through the paving of the road from Cuenca to Loja!”

Yeeaaaah!

“And we will do the same for the two hundred and seventy-five kilometers of road that connect Cuenca with Méndez in the
oriente
!”

Yeeaaaaaaah!

“And we will undertake plans to widen and improve the stretch of the Panamerican Highway that runs between Cuenca and Azogues!”

Yeeeeaaaaaaaaaah!

Stan turns to me and says, “This gives a whole new meaning to the expression, ‘middle-of-the-road' candidate.”

“I promise that under our administration, Cuenca will receive a budget sufficient to guarantee drinkable water for the next eight years!”

Faltorra then begs to be excused, saying that he can't ask the people of Cuenca to stand in the rain any longer, so he's going to ask their permission to leave. The crowd won't let him.

“That's it?” asks Stan. “Four roads and drinkable water?”

“This is a developing country. Those are the issues.”

That and undoing five hundred years of cultural genocide.

Faltorra leaves the stage amid sharp crackles of thunder and shouts for more. Then the Indian women take over the chanting, calling out, “
Juan-i-ta! Juan-i-ta! Juan-i-ta!
”

“She's more popular than he is,” says Stan, as a chill runs up my spine.

Juan-i-ta! gives in to the will of the people and steps up to the mike, gushing, “Greetings to the people of Guapondeleg!”— the old Cañari name for Cuenca, and I believe the clamor for her
is
greater than it was for Faltorra. “I thank you for your welcoming hearts, and your kind thoughts. ‘
Por eso, por eso, por eso te quiero Cuenca
.'” That's why I love you, Cuenca. The words of a local folksong, but you'd think she's just torn down
the property markers and given back the land that was plundered from them by the way the crowd goes wild.

Hmm. Maybe someone should think about doing that.

We're walking back to his hotel.

“I need a long, hot shower,” says Stan, shivering in the frosty air.

“No water, remember?”

“But the hotel people said the water would be back on by four o'clock in the afternoon.”

“They didn't say what day.”

“Aw, crap.”

“Welcome to my world.”

I'm beginning the arc of an expansive gesture when
thunk!
A knife splinters the wooden doorframe inches from my fingertips and stays pinned there. A millisecond before my feet get to react my brain registers the sight of an ivory-handled bowie knife with and
S
carved into the hilt. Pretty distinct. Not another one like it in the country.

“Sancho,” I say, turning towards him. He comes trotting across the dead-quiet street, laughing and waving at me as he steps through a faint circle of light.

Stan, meanwhile, has gone ghostly white. Now he begins to return to normal, which is more of a pale white.

“You're slower,” says Sancho.

“We'll see about that,” I answer.

He should talk. He's gained about thirty pounds since I last saw him and his round face has a week-old accumulation of greasy black-and-white stubble.

“Is that any way to greet an old friend?” he says cajolingly. So I introduce him to Stan, and he shakes hands and slaps backs all around.

But I smell fear-sweat.

“What's this about?”

Sancho's smile flattens like a death mask. He rubs the beard stubble on his cheek, but all that does is smear the
grease around. “Well,” he says, unable to look me in the eye, “It's like this …”

Two figures divide themselves from the darkness and pinion us. A long knife glints at me in the pale light. The other one points a beat-up handgun right at my heart.