I gather my things, am reaching for the light switch when my phone rings. There is no reason for me to answer at this hour but I do in case it is Karina. In fact it is Armando. He asks if he said anything strange at Günther’s party. I say that he absolutely did not. He thanks me, says that he was afraid he had had too much to drink and become ridiculous. I say that he was anything but. He thanks me again, and I say that he is welcome. He laughs as if that were a joke, and is silent for another, longer moment. I tell him not to worry and we say our goodbyes.
As I hang up the phone rings again and answering is a simple and unfortunate reflex. This time the caller is Arantxa. She asks me to come to her office. She does not imply that the visit is optional.
She asks me to close the door behind me and I do. Instead of sitting as always at her desk, she takes one of the two chairs placed together near the window, and beckons me to the other. This is perhaps some sort of management technique. I sit down, and she asks me how I am.
I say that I am fine.
- No, she says. I want to know how you truly are.
- Yes. I understand, yes. And I am fine. I am wholly truly fine.
She leans forward, says that if there is anything I want to talk about, she is more than willing. I thank her. I nod. We stare at one another for a time and then hear screams.
We run, and are the first two of many to arrive. The person screaming is a student stranded in a shallow sea of toads come to feed beneath a lamp post in the parking lot. It does not take long for Arantxa and me to clear a path. The student thanks us less than one might imagine, and Arantxa goes to the bathroom to wash her hands.
Quickly to the gate, and how is it that the student failed to notice the toads until amidst them? A taxi home, its radio on, rumors of growing problems with Ecuador, and the present sharpens its knife on the whetstone of the past. These problems are fascinating and cease to interest me the moment I walk in through my door: Mariángel reaches for me, laughs, pulls me from one room to the next, hops over each dike for no reason except the pleasure of movement.
Dinner, and food is occasionally thrown but good-naturedly. Afterwards it is still not yet time so we go to the patio. Mariángel stands beneath the edge of the awning, reaches out to catch drops on her palms, laughs and laughs and turns to make sure I have seen. And I have. Each time I have.
Finally it is no longer too early to prepare: extra diapers, cologne, our finest waterproof windbreakers, bottles of milk and juice. We make our way to Karina’s house. She is happy and not surprised that I have brought Mariángel though I had not told her I would. She introduces us to her brother, who is in his third year at a technical institute on the far side of the river, and to her non-identical twin sisters, still in junior high.
All of them seem normal. The brother ignores us as he does his programming homework, and the sisters rearrange Mariángel’s barrettes. No father is present or mentioned, and the mother is in Lima working on unexplainable projects.
- She has trouble with distances, says Karina.
- I think all people do.
- I mean that she sees things too late—furniture, walls, stairs—and is always falling.
- Walls?
- Yes. The doctor says it is her vision or inner ear.
The aunt is no less worried than before, comes and goes with Inca Kola. I do not ask why she is so worried as I already have an idea. I do however ask Karina whether she and her aunt are related, as that is not necessarily the case in Peru, where all of one’s parents’ friends are also called aunt or uncle, and can be treated as such, asked for small favors and loans.
Karina says that her aunt is her mother’s sister, and all of us nod. I answer Karina’s questions about my mother and father, her life and his death, about my lack of brothers or sisters. I assure them that my mother loved Peru on her one visit, that we are even now in discussions as regards her next trip down, and this is partly true: her last two letters contained references to touristic sites she missed when she came for the wedding and hopes to live long enough to see.
Next there are questions from Karina’s aunt about Daly City and Fallash and Berkeley and Irvine, and I answer them as well. Finally there are questions about Cristóbal de Mena and Francisco de Xérez and Juan Ruíz de Arce and Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán. These are perhaps less questions as such than a vaguely expressed interest and I do what I can not to bore. We stay until Mariángel falls asleep, and a while longer, longer than I mean to, not nearly long enough.
Reynaldo’s aunt and I are friends again though neither of us has made any reference to the past or future. She comes to my side, removes the empty bowl from in front of me. I tell her how delicious the mazamorra morada was, and she smiles, nods, asks me for specifics.
- How flawlessly creamy the purple corn gelatin! How subtle the hints of cinnamon and quince!
- Yes, she says, it did turn out well tonight.
Reynaldo laughs, stands from the table, leads to the living room where our third English session will occur. Because we are starting late, he says, he will not oblige me to admire his motorcycle before we start, will not refuse to speak in English until I have nodded approvingly at its motor.
I thank him, and we review yesterday’s vocabulary: double dribble and luciferase, You have the most captivating smile I’ve ever seen! and Do you often come to places such as this? Reynaldo is a dedicated student but it may well be too late for his pronunciation. This is unfortunately a common circumstance among adults.
We shift to work on prepositions of place, and this pleases him: all structural work is immediately accessible to his mind, as if syntax were cousin to chemistry. Stand beside, stand near, stand in front of—he moves around the living room to give me good examples of each. Stand in, stand on, stand below and now I feel slightly nauseous. Perhaps that third bowl of mazamorra was unwisely eaten but no that is not quite it. I wave Reynaldo to a stop. I look out the window, see nothing, see only my reflection and it quivers, trembles, cracks and yes an earthquake.
I jump to the nearest doorway, brace myself in the frame. There is a series of soft jolts, then one that is much stronger, and one again softer. I wait, and there is nothing more. I laugh, look around for Reynaldo. He is lying on the floor surrounded by broken puppy figurines. He stands slowly, sadly. I look away very quickly, but not quickly enough not to see that he has wet himself.
He stands behind the couch, shouts to his aunt in her bedroom, and she shouts back that she is fine. I say that I need to call my home to make sure that Mariángel is all right. Staring at the ground, Reynaldo says that I might as well go, that he has had enough English for one day. I gather my books, make a note to discuss the prevalence of earthquakes in California at our next session, how they seem a constant threat though in fact here they are more common and do more damage, and immediately scratch the note out. In the event Reynaldo gets his visa, he will find out soon enough.
The Fourth Bridge is still open and so I am quickly home. Mariángel appears not to have noticed that the ground was ever shaking, is pleased to see me but perhaps more subdued than usual. I bring out the Cabeza de Vaca, take my daughter to the couch and arrange her on my lap, open the book and begin. She fidgets throughout the strange address to the king, calms briefly for the beginning of the hurricane. The two ships go down, and in the very midst of the roaring wind and rain there are voices and bells and flutes and tambourines and Mariángel grabs the book from my hand, runs to the extent she can.
I catch her in the kitchen and she throws herself to the ground, starts to wail. She laughs as I release her, stands and runs again. I return to the living room and take out a book I know will bring her to me: the Immortality-Jinotega volume of the 1973
Encyclopædia Britannica.
It is not the whole volume she likes, but the pictures in the entry on insects. It does not matter to her that most of our collection has been eaten by invisible mites. I read aloud of sexual dimorphism in twisted-wing insects, of parthenogenesis and mycetomes, and she comes slowly to the doorway. I read silently of oöthecas and Malphigian tubules, think aloud about what it means to know that there are four million insects living in any given moist acre, and now she is at the edge of the couch, holds
Naufragios
behind her back.
I read to her of polyembryony. The encyclopedia says that a single egg “will spit up in the course of development and give rise to hundreds of larvae.” Spit up? This is what it says, and I ask Mariángel which would be more disheartening, eggs spitting up larvae, or a typographical error in the
Encyclopædia Britannica.
She nods and laughs, slides
Naufragios
under the couch and comes to sit beside me. Paedogenesis is not something she needs to know about just yet, though it occurs in all species to some extent, and we are in the process of skipping that part altogether when the doorbell rings. We determine not to answer it. Then we hear Karina’s voice.
After greeting us Karina says that her mother would hate my house given the dikes between each room and the next. I promise to remove them if the rain ever stops and her mother plans to visit. Karina and Mariángel play with the telephone while I make coffee. When I return, Mariángel is draped asleep across Karina’s lap. She wakes as I lift her, and Karina comes to sit beside me as I sing in the darkness of Mariángel’s bedroom.
Back out to the living room, and I learn more of what is easily learned. Karina studied accounting at the university, graduated the year I arrived, stayed in Piura because this is where her sisters and brother might best live for reasons she does not make clear. She works at the knickknack store hustling, and that is her word, one of her few words in English, all of them not quite expected, hustling only the best of their goods: ceramic pots and statuettes, parrots and dancers and helicopters in silver filigree, carved hardwood boxes. She knows that the moonlight jobs—Gillette Girl, Pilsen Girl, Marlboro Girl—will not be available to her for much longer. Her dream of Italy is vague and touching as are her plans to open a bookstore.
- Here in Piura?
- I would have no competition.
- Perhaps there’s a reason.
- Yes. But people might begin to read, if the books were good and cheap.
- They might. How could you sell them cheap?
- I’m going to smuggle them in to avoid the book tax.
- And I will be ever and always your best customer.
An hour, two. Then, on the patio, a very light, yes a very delicate, yes and oh good christ it has been so long. And rain falls. We do not move from my loveseat, and the name jolts in my brain but this is what it must be called, I realize this only now, designed as it is for precisely two persons at once. With me there is little room for her and she fits all the same, and we could move, could leave here, but we don’t, and the rain stops and she says she has to go.
Sunday morning, Mariángel cries and my face is stuck to the pillow with dried pus. It feels as though someone has ground salty sand into my eyes. I peel my cheek away, stand and stumble to my daughter. As far as I can tell she is only hungry: unearned, a bit of grace.
I call Socorro’s house in Catacaos, and no one answers. I wash my hands and eyes, stumble to the kitchen, put on rubber gloves and strain granadilla for juice, mix creamed wheat, attempt not to whimper each time my eyes refocus. While Mariángel eats I call Karina. Exactly, she says. Conjunctivitis, she says. My eyes are the same as yours, she says, and she will come as soon as she can.
I turn the television on to what sounds like cartoons, feel Mariángel settle on the couch beside me. I lay back and wince perpetually and yesterday was magnificent. No rain, few clouds, and Karina had a surprise for us: the swimming pool at the Río Azul Hotel. Mariángel delighted on my back, we passed through the lobby without looking to either side, took a table out on the terrace. We ordered carambola juice, watched four young Swedish or Norwegian women swim, agreed that they were splendid.
When Karina pulled off her top and shorts, the Scandinavians slipped out of the water, dried themselves and left. It was just as well, as my eyes have only a given capacity. I removed my shirt, applied sunscreen, and waited for Karina to react to the sight, this quantity of me, these colors. She only smiled, even when my entry drove waves up over the edge of the pool.
Standing now, inching along the wall to the bathroom, a shower that lasts thirty seconds. With this rinsing I can see slightly but the pain has not lessened and in fact Karina did not intend to swim as such. She does not much like swimming, prefers instead to dive a single time and then sit in or beside the water. I mainly waded with Mariángel on my shoulders. It was her first time in a swimming pool of any size, and the bright blue of the water astounded her.
Later there was a dragonfly, its colors more vivid than could be expected, orange and green like enamel. It came to rest on the edge of the pool inches from my arm. I tried but could not see its eyes, could not focus on them precisely even at that distance, and remembered reading of this, the thousands of facets breaking up the light, a gridded blurring on the surface of the eye past which cannot be seen.
To my bedroom, clean clothes, lying down on the couch again. Exiting the pool did not please Mariángel, but I have come to know this sun, the way it has of burning me even through sunscreen and palm umbrellas, and if I had stayed out any longer all the skin would now be gone from my body. We ate a lunch of shrimp and avocado. Karina kissed us and left with unnamed plans.
Commercials come. Mariángel climbs on top of me and coos. Back at our house, soccer was watched and dolls were carried and sung to. In the evening I called Günther, and we complained to one another about the amount of noise in Peru. It was not that yesterday was any louder than any other day, but I have often read of the importance of regular complaining to the mental health and balance of all expatriates.