- I know an hour a day sounds like a lot, she says, but it really is fun, and you’ll learn all about sheet metal, how to cut and shape it.
Further silence.
- Really? she says. Please? she says.
- I’ll do it, says Günther.
I do not remember Günther ever volunteering for anything before, but he has saved us now, stands to bow at scattered but rising applause, and we cheer for him, how we cheer.
QUICKLY AND SWEATING ACROSS CAMPUS AND OUT THROUGH THE GATES. My evening class was meant to end early, but a student had questions, good and interesting questions about the future continuous. It is a tense for which he has no need just yet. I tried to keep my impatience less than manifest, come now to the corner, lift my hand as a taxi approaches, but it already has a passenger. I scan beyond for another. The first one is to me and past, the right color the right make the right age and I did not see the driver’s face, cannot quite read the license plate at this distance but it began with P and ended with 22 or something like it.
I stand and sweat and stare, hope for brake lights, and there are none. I look in all directions for another taxi. By the time one comes, the first has long since disappeared.
My voice catches as I give the driver an address a block from where I wish to go. He seems confused by the fact that I do not try to talk him down on the fare. I hunch deeply into the seat and it is not a long ride.
I thank him as I pay, but he does not want my thanks. A breeze rises, dies. Again the two men and their plastic chairs, again the curtains and soft music; again the porcelain puppies on the mantel but briefly this time, and again the eyebrows.
- You remembered to make a reservation! says Ms. Alina. And you were almost on time for it!
There is no sarcasm in her tone: she is genuinely happy for me, unduly happy, so happy it makes me nervous. She takes me by the arm for the walk upstairs. She kisses me on the cheek at the threshold to Jenny’s room, gestures deftly to say that I may enter at will.
Jenny, still thinner, still blonder. Her current robe and camisole are decorated with the stylized pelicans and fish of the Chimú ruins at Chan Chan, and I wonder where she buys them. She is likewise surprised at my reservation-making and approximate punctuality. She says that she is pleased to see me so early in the evening, and so sober.
These seem for a time to be good things. I walk the room from corner to corner, something I have never done. Hanging from the corner of the mirror is an image of Sarita Colonia, and perhaps it is new, or perhaps I am capable of seeing it only now that I know who she is.
As I undress, I tell her of Minchacaman and his vast wealth, of the marvelous Chimú artisans, their metallurgical gifts, their ceramics and featherwork. Then comes the Inca army led by the future emperor Túpac Yupanqui. The war is not unbalanced until the Incas are reinforced. Minchacaman sues for terms, is imprisoned and taken to Cuzco for the victory rituals. With him go the riches and artisans that will transform the Inca capital into the extraordinary city of gold that in sixty years the Spaniards will sack.
I begin to contrast Garcilaso’s fanciful telling of the war with Rostworoski’s rigor, but Jenny is staring out the window.
- I did not mean to bore you, I say.
She smiles and says nothing. The smile, it troubles me. She removes her robe, comes toward me, the slow roll of her hips yes but that first taxi, the passenger in the front seat, long black hair. Jenny removes her camisole, arches her back, the exclamation point yes but if I had not been distracted there on the corner and what does it mean that I am here with penance already scheduled and suddenly I am incapable. For a time she tries various means. Soon it is clear there is no point.
- It’s all right, Jenny says.
This courtesy appears mainly professional. She sees that I wish to respond but cannot, and keeps talking, and the phrase blossoms slowly or seems to, becomes a moment wholly as she finds new and better ways to say over and over: It’s all right. This is a second share of humiliation but also needed. I weep beside her until my time is done.
Across town. Six hundred years ago Chan Chan had fifty thousand inhabitants, was the largest city anywhere in the Americas. Casualidad greets me, smiles, says nothing about what time she will now be getting home. She tells me that Mariángel had a good and active day, walked constantly at her side, ate well and is already asleep. She says that for my dessert there is a covered pan in the refrigerator, an attempt at tres leches, and she believes it turned out well.
A shower, and dinner. The tres leches is superb, perpetually almost too sweet, the soft thin layer of meringue dusted with cinnamon, the cake below so moist it is almost a form of pudding. Ten conjoined citadels each with a thousand adobe structures. Then television. I dab at the new sweat on my chest with a sock as I watch the least funny comedians of any time or place. I watch the goalless first half of a soccer match, doze through the second half of a movie. Then comes the news. It begins with two anchorpersons grinning so widely that I know I will not be able to bear whatever they have to report. I find the remote as quickly as I am able, get the sound turned down just in time.
Already I regret what I have done: bright on the screen is a man I haven’t seen in months. Today he is not green but purple. I lift the remote, and waver. It might be best not to know. I set the remote back down.
The purple man is posed on a cliff top, a jag of black rock pushing into the sea, and behind him is a large wooden building, a restaurant or hotel of some kind. He lifts a small ugly confusing piece of sculpture, appraises it and throws it off the cliff. The camera pans down, switching into and out of slow motion. There is a medium-sized splash. The naked man hefts another piece of sculpture.
Now standing beside him is a friar or someone dressed to look like one. He and the purple man have a brief and unamicable discussion. The friar sets down his staff and pushes back his hood. Then he jumps off the cliff, arcs into a dive, slashes into the water.
The purple man throws the second sculpture, and it does not miss the bobbing friar by much. The friar shouts and treads water strongly enough to raise and shake his fist. The purple man smiles and hefts a third sculpture. He throws, hefts and throws, hefts and throws, is shown mainly from the waist up but once the camera slips and his penis dangles like the head of a dead purple bird and how many bad sculptures has he brought?
Now the friar is again on the cliff top, water streaming from his tunic and hair. His sandals look handmade. There is a piece of seaweed caught in the rosary on his waistcord, and he has a cut on his forehead—he dove too deeply, or a bit of sculpture clipped him. He shouts at the purple man, and the purple man shouts back, throws another sculpture, shouts and hefts and throws.
The friar takes up his staff, bears it like a sword and the purple man bares his teeth. The friar drops the staff and tackles the purple man, and the two of them roll around in ovals there on the cliff top, roll and roll until they are scratched and exhausted. They separate, and glare at one another. Each shouts once more and the news turns to something bad or good that is happening to stocks in Brazil.
Seven in the morning and the sky is clouded over. There was a little rain very late last night. It will have erased certain clues, will have washed others clean.
Casualidad has come, will care for Mariángel, and now Reynaldo arrives, asks if I am ready. I kiss Mariángel, and Casualidad promises that the world’s finest cherimoya mousse will await our return. I tell her that dessert-oriented compensation is no longer necessary, has in fact never been. Reynaldo tells her to ignore me, to go ahead with the mousse, that if I can’t appreciate it properly he certainly can.
Again across the river, again a speck in the sky, again the highway reaching south into the desert. We spend the bus ride discussing the chemistry programs he is considering. In each case he is surprised and disappointed to discover how little I know.
Again debarking at the largest of the three algarrobos. The air moves in hot thick waves around us. Reynaldo has brought plastic bags for the preservation of specimens. He is wearing what he calls his botany helmet, has a magnifying glass in a sheath on his belt, bears a daypack full of other tools and instruments. I discourage him from observing anything for this first mile but he cannot help himself—Look, a gigantón! Do you have any idea how tall they grow? The books say five meters, but I once saw one that was almost eight—and so we advance more slowly than I would prefer.
The dunes, the cabuya, the palo santo. The caracara does not show, is surely off hunting. More dunes. At last the algarrobo grove. We pass the cairn, and it seems smaller than I remember. I count, and yes: almost two months since the last time I came. Before it had never been more than a month. Out of the grove and on slowly. The path is thinner here, harder to follow, and there are other paths splitting off to either side.
I find nothing, and Reynaldo finds many things but none new—guayacán, palo de vaca, higuerón. We walk and look and sweat. If only, if only: an entire school of History. The Arabs defeat Martel at Tours-Poitiers and take Constantinople at the end of the Second Siege, Balboa discovers Peru, no rain falls the night before Waterloo. If only if only, pointless and pointless and pointless.
I watch Reynaldo, watch him search, find, take samples. For a time it is only a distraction but then his way of searching seems the point: I have been wrong all along, have been looking wrongly. Here I should be not historian or detective but botanist. I should be looking not for narrative strands but for specimens, non-native subspecies, plastic or cloth or metal or rubber or clay and devolved from Pilar’s moment in and through this space as she walked, dragged herself, died and Reynaldo stops me, points to a fat leafless tree, its trunk covered in spines.
- Have I ever told you about the porotillo?
He has told me two or three times, but it is a relief to hear him talk and I shake my head.
- One of our most valuable trees. You don’t normally see them down so low. This one doesn’t have any nests, but most do, nests of all kinds, birds and squirrels and termites. Sometimes pericos carve holes in the trunk, and live there, and when they leave for whatever reason the bats move in.
I smile as we walk closer, knowing what is to come.
- Vampire bats, he says.
- Hence Atahualpa’s cape. And what are the flowers like?
This is his favorite part to tell.
- They are wonderful, he says, and bright red. They cover the tree, and when they fall they cover the ground, a carpet of red, so bright that they stain the soil itself.
We look, and he is right as I knew he would be, the dirt slightly redder here than elsewhere. I consider saving some. There would be no point.
- This kind of tree, it is also where huayruros come from. Surely you have seen them. Bright red seeds with black spots, very shiny and smooth, there are necklaces made of them, and bracelets. The next time we’re in the market I’ll show you.
I nod, thank him, suggest that we move on. Pilar loved huayruro necklaces. She had half a dozen of varying lengths and weaves—gifts from grandparents and cousins and one from a high school boyfriend. If I asked she would sometimes drape herself in them naked and stand before me. I left campus at lunch to buy her one more, three interwoven strands, bright silver clasp, beautiful. I brought it home that night to give her and she was just heading out and I caught her as she stepped to the curb, smelled the cypress of her, the sage.
Another mile, and another. I find and gather half a dozen scattered pages. They are from a car manual, surely just trash blown here from the highway. I tuck them away all the same to look at more carefully later not in peace but in quiet, and now we may return to Piura whenever we decide it is time.
Slightly farther along we come to a ravine in which Pilar walked for a time. It may or may not be the upper reach of the ravine nearer the algarrobo grove—I have never walked its whole length. Her footprints leading out were found well north of here.
The loam in the bottom is still damp from last night. We walk a few hundred yards along the edge. Reynaldo slides down the side, crouches, stands quickly, stiff-legged.
- Puma, he says, and points.
I join him, and the tracks are familiar, each one an open pair of petals.
- They’re goat tracks, I say. Look, the spread toes, you can see them clearly.
He clambers up the far side. I look again at the tracks, and a few feet away I see another, nearly round, five inches across, the wide pad-mark at the base and the four oval toes. Reynaldo looks at me, smiles. I consider, and smile back.
We continue along the ravine, silent for a time. Then he stops.
- Shouldn’t we have seen the cross by now?
- A little farther, I think.
We go a little farther, and a little farther still. I stop. The cross that marks the place where Pilar came out of the ravine is bright orange and five feet tall: it cannot be the case that we have missed it. I look at Reynaldo and he shrugs. A little farther still.
- You already found something, right? says Reynaldo.
- Yes. But where is the cross?
He adjusts his helmet, takes a drink from his canteen. Along and along. A maze of woody plant, low and gray. I ask Reynaldo to remind me of its name, and he says he isn’t sure. It takes fifteen minutes for him to get all the samples and data he needs. Along again, and we come to a stunted hualtaco. Reynaldo stops. I circle.
- Maybe something knocked it down, he says. The rain, for example. We could have walked right by it.
- I dug the hole three feet deep.
- So maybe someone stole it.
- An orange cross?
- Maybe someone just needed firewood, he says, and maybe it’s okay for you to stop doing this.
I look at him, and he raises his hands.
- Fine, he says. Come as often as you want.