I nod, shake hands, walk to Dr. Williamson’s office. He has been less than easy on me at certain points—So you’re going to essentialize Barthes? Which one? Early Barthes? Late? Mid-early, mid-late?—but does not trouble me now. He gives me a generic letter of introduction, warns that it may not always work, says that he hopes he will see me again.
Another nod and handshake, an hour at Financial Aid arranging deferrals, and I am freed from Irvine. Out to an old white sedan in the parking lot, my father’s car, always and ever my father’s though he died nine years ago and a taxi slows beside me. The driver honks and I glance at the license plate. It begins with C and ends with 46. He honks again, pulls closer to the sidewalk. I shake my head and now the colored wisps in the sky are more feather or tendril than flame.
Casualidad waits at the front door, Mariángel in her arms and reaching out. I nod hello to Casualidad, take Mariángel and kiss her. Casualidad says that my dinner is waiting, that she must leave early for a meeting with her son’s teacher, that she will wash all of the dishes in the morning.
The band of her eye patch divides her forehead perfectly in half, and she is rarely this talkative. Perhaps something good or bad has happened. I hold Mariángel out so that Casualidad can tweak her chin, then close the door and carry my daughter to the bathroom. I hold her in one arm, rinse the sweat from my face and neck. To my bedroom, set her on my bed and strip down, put on a pair of shorts.
Now to the dining room. I put Mariángel in her high chair and work quickly through dinner, offering her a bite from each layer of the causa—mashed potato, avocado, tomato, shredded chicken. As always she spits out all but the mashed potato.
Afterwards we traverse the house. Mariángel, eleven months old, and she is learning to walk but does not like to fall. She holds to my leg as we bisect each room, and takes things up, invents sounds to name them, Hegelian analogue or Spitzerian mimesis or Barthesian disassociated code, and I propose each in turn, then shift to the words themselves: saucepan, telephone, pillow. She repeats her own inventions. I ask when she plans to begin using words I recognize. She shakes the objects, drops or throws them. I ask her to pick the objects up and put them back in place but she is not interested in this.
She finds my briefcase, pulls at the latch and I remember the zapote leaf. It is no longer perfect, has gone limp, but is still a beautiful green. I hold it out. She is not impressed. I agree that it is only a leaf but in ten or a hundred years someone working from photograph or chronicle will type “John picked a zapote leaf” and it will become both leaf and
leaf
. Mariángel frowns. Semiological apparatus and linguistic performance, I say. She does not believe me. I tell her that I would never lie about such a thing: history a meditation not on the past as alleged but on present trace and sublimation, its form a mediated portrayal, a damming of time’s destructive might, change frozen into tableaux,
leaf
now allegory, partisan teleology, plausibility defined as truce between conscience and libido, as ethical horizon, as determinant paradigm and certification of praxis, as means by which ruling interests define what can reasonably be desired, contemporary society and its moral strictures thus united as guarantors of our integrity, challenged only at our peril.
Mariángel tears the leaf in half, drops the pieces, claps twice, yawns. I warm her bottle, take her to the living room and turn on the television. The first few minutes are commercials, and she makes her way up and down the double-stack of crates that lines the near wall—dozens of notebooks, dozens of folders, a shoebox full of computer disks. One half is historical research, and the other half documents my search for the taxista.
Now she comes for her milk, and I lift her, set her on the couch beside me. She hums to herself as the Foreign Ministers of Peru and Ecuador exchange threats about border incursions. She curls up and quiets during a montage from Lady Diana’s funeral last month, rouses herself only to point at the bouquets still mountained at the palace gates. A moment later she is asleep on my chest. I ease the bottle out of her hands and set it on the end table.
The footage switches to an earthquake from earlier today, ten people killed in Assisi, the Basilica of St. Francis in ruins. Then a live report on an airplane crash in Sumatra. Two hundred and thirty presumed dead. Mariángel flinches and wakes when the reporter’s voice goes sharp to describe the smoke in the air, not the result of the crash but its likely cause: this is burning season for the farmers there. I turn the volume all the way down and sing her a lullaby medley of Nat King Cole and Aerosmith. She is asleep before the first chorus. I have a wonderful voice.
I look again at the television and now there is a green man running naked through a fountain. He has a kind and thoughtful face. At the base of the fountain are pigeons that flutter up each time he passes by. Around and around and who is this man, and why has he has painted himself, and why green? Then I remember that I do not really care.
I work my weight forward and reach for the remote and the green man falls face-down into the water, does not rise. I wait. The man is unmoving. I hold my breath and the image goes dark. The newscasters return and smile and shake their heads. Then they are sad, and show pictures of a bus crash in Sullana, the pavement stained, blankets over two bodies.
More commercials: Cristal beer, Hamilton cigarettes, Always tampons. A dog barks outside and Mariángel wakes again.
- It’s okay, I say.
She yawns, looks at me.
- Really. Everything’s fine.
I trace her eyebrows. Pilar’s eyebrows. Pilar’s brown skin, brown eyes, black hair. Only the contours are mine, the broad forehead and strong chin. I place my palm flat across Mariángel’s stomach and she wraps one hand around my thumb, another around my forefinger.
More silent national news—an aquarium at a hotel in Lima, and the dolphins do not look well. I begin another song and Mariángel frowns so I tell her a story instead, keep talking even after she falls asleep:
- Once upon a time there was a prince, a Malaysian prince, who had lots of money and beautiful clothes and a hundred hats. His only problem was that he had no real home anymore, had to travel from place to place without ever stopping anywhere for too long. One day he got on an airplane to fly from Cape Town to Khartoum—hour after hour of bad food and worse films, and his seatback wouldn’t recline. Finally he changed seats, and this one went all the way back. He was just about to fall asleep, but then there was a storm, a huge storm, lightning and thunder and all of a sudden the plane dropped thirty thousand feet, straight into Lake Victoria. The locals got into their boats and headed out to search for survivors, but they didn’t expect to find any. Who could have survived a crash like that? Then they found one: the prince from Malaysia. A miracle! said the people in the boats. They brought him ashore and took him to the hospital, and the doctors and nurses were astounded to find that aside from a minor concussion, a black eye, and two long rows of cuts on one leg, the prince was fine. They bandaged him up, and protected him from the television crews for as long as they could, but on the second morning the reporters forced their way in. The doctors and nurses shouted that they were going to call the police, but the prince said to let the reporters stay, that he had a story to tell. They set up their cameras and he began: the flight, the storm, losing consciousness as the plane fell, waking while still in the air, unconscious again as the plane slammed into the water. He woke a second time, was lying across some floating bit of wreckage, was terrified, had never learned to swim, and he felt something pull at his leg. He turned and saw a crocodile, was ripped into the water, and then for no reason the crocodile flipped him back up to the surface and let him go. All the world watched this interview on television, all the world marveling at the prince’s extraordinary good luck, all the world except for a middle-aged woman sitting in a small dim office in Kuala Lumpur. This woman recognized the man from pictures in her files and knew him for what he was, guilty of fraud and embezzlement, convicted in absentia years before. Two months later the prince was in jail back in Malaysia where he belonged, and that, that, that is why we watch television. Because you never know who you will see. We stay vigilant, you and me, we scan the faces in the background of every shot, and then some day we see the taxista. And go find him. And when we have found and cornered him we draw our swords and cut off his hands and feet. Then we sheath our swords. We draw our daggers. We put the tips of the blades softly against his eyes, and plunge them in.
Mariángel shifts, lets go of my hand, wraps her fists in my beard. I lift her higher on my chest. The news ends with what looks like a new coach for the soccer team in Arequipa. Still more commercials, and Woody Woodpecker. Here he is called El Pájaro Loco. I am not sorry the sound is turned down. I do not miss that laugh.
The man had not been royalty, may not even have been Malaysian though it sounded right when I said it. Most nights are like this one, and the taxista has almost surely left Piura. There will be a prayer said at campus Mass for those who died in the Basilica. Another prayer, perhaps, for the dead in Sumatra, or a single prayer for the tragedies combined. I have no opinion either way and smooth my daughter’s hair as El Pájaro Loco turns his beak into a staple gun, staples a Wanted poster onto a telephone pole, the escaped convict heavy-set and bearded.
My first year here I had a Pre-Intermediate student named Lady Diana. I saw her on the street last week, expressed my condolences. She said that it didn’t matter to her but that her parents were distraught. I complimented her on her progress, on her use of that word, distraught—a good word.
The escaped convict tiptoes across someone’s yard and El Pájaro Loco turns his beak into a sledgehammer, beats the man to the ground. Mariángel shifts, whines. It is most likely the heat and I carry her to her bedroom, set her down on the cool sheets of her crib. Draw the mosquito netting across the top. Point the fan away, turn it on, close the curtain. Whisper to her, not words, just the sound of whispering. Pull her door nearly shut behind me.
A glass of carambola juice from the refrigerator, and back to the living room. Standing, and looking at the couch. The size of the impression my body has made is surprising even to me: the central two-thirds of the couch cratered deeply, the fabric discolored, nearly black in this bad light.
El Pájaro Loco is gone, replaced by a soap opera. I sit down in the crater, turn the sound up. A beautiful blonde woman is cutting carrots with a butcher knife. She starts to cry, turns away, stares out the window too long.
A handsome man comes into the kitchen. He and the woman begin to argue. The movements of their lips are not quite right for the words, the dialogue dubbed in Spanish but the program Brazilian and thus the mouths moving in Portuguese, the argument itself a thin hiss that rises and abruptly lowers as if perhaps there is a child asleep in the next room, and this hiss, its spectra of volume and tone, familiar to me though I do not know why and then yes. Daly City. Seven years old and sitting on the floor of my room, plastic dinosaurs, but then outside hours earlier and blood down the front of my shirt, dried stiff in my nostrils and on my cheeks.
The houses are identical except for the varied pastels. It is a subdivision where nothing could happen and thus where nothing has ever happened. The blonde woman raises the knife and lunges but the man catches her wrist, squeezes until the knife falls, pulls the woman close. She fights him at first, then slumps. My house, light blue. Across the lawn, in through the door, my mother already home and her smile twists but does not disappear when she sees the blood.
She leads me to the bathroom, paints the cuts with mercurochrome. I pull away, cry briefly. She blows on the cuts, brings down a tin of bandages, asks what happened. The other boy started it, standard gibes about my weight; he was thin and quick and vicious and unafraid and I tell her I fell off the monkey bars. The woman puts her finger to the man’s lips. My mother’s smile twists wider. She says to be more careful, knows I have no interest in monkey bars.
I nod, go to my room and here are the dinosaurs. An hour, two. My father home, quiet discussion in my parents’ bedroom. Dinner, homework. Hissing in the pantry, rising and lowering, the very same spectra and then television.
My parents sit on the sofa and I stand at the set. I click past news from Vietnam, past Mayberry, pause at a football game so this must have been a Monday. The woman’s head falls to the side as the man kisses her neck. My mother clears her throat. I click to the one remaining channel, the narrator just finishing his sentence, something about the thinness of the air and on the screen is a reenactment, men in armor trudging up a mountain path, leading their horses by the halter, the blonde unbuttons her blouse and this was, yes, this the very night:
The ascent at Vilcaconga. I lie on the floor, draw closer, am hauled back by the ankles and marvel at my father’s strength. Soto has the vanguard too far out in front, has ignored Pizarro’s orders in the hope of becoming sole conqueror of Cuzco, and his men and horses are exhausted, starving, drugged by the noon heat.
Already the slaughters at Cajamarca and Jauja. Already the slaughter at Vilcas, hundreds lanced, dozens of women taken, two daughters of Huayna Cápac himself, the old emperor already dead of smallpox or malaria spreading down from the Caribbean and I knew none of this then. The empire convulses, says the narrator, its celestial mandate in doubt, and we nod, the actor unnameable but known to us by his voice. Step by slow step, the Spaniards halfway up the mountain now. The man lies back across the bed. Soto glances up at the nearest ridge, then commercials, laundry, my father hurrying to the bathroom and back. The blonde whispers a name, and yes, the man says, yes. I scratch at the bandage on my cheek.
Lady Diana, lovely, both of them.
Soto now stares at the ridge. He goes pale as four thousand Inca warriors pour down the mountain toward him. They envelop the Spaniards, attack with maces and axes, split six skulls and Gaspar de Marquina, his will in the Harkness collection, the archivist watches over me, watches me, watches, turns away and I remove a glove, run a finger down a crumbling edge.