Reynaldo asks what I am doing after work. I say that I have no plans, and he says he will try to think of something for us to do. I know already that he will not be able to think of anything, and that this will not be a problem. I ask how his aunt is doing. He says that she is improving. I nod and ask if a matacojudo vine would be strong enough to garrote a full-grown man.
- I doubt it, Reynaldo says, but there is no harm in trying.
My class will begin late and because it is not my fault I do not care. I stand just outside the classroom door, my Pre-Intermediate students in loose groups around me. I stare in at my friend Günther, who is hunched over the lectern and is pleading, or so it seems from his intonation, pleading in Elementary German.
The bell rings and he continues to plead, his abnormally large hands clenching and unclenching. He is the coordinator for all of the German courses at the Language Center, and teaches them all as well. There are also French and Italian courses, one coordinating professor each. The Italian classes never have more than three or four students, and lose a good deal of money. This is not a problem, is what Arantxa says. It is all part of the university’s market share strategy, is what she says.
At last Günther gathers his books and snaps his briefcase shut. He smiles as he comes striding out, envelops my hand in his, walks away. Perhaps what I took to be pleading was something else entirely. I wait for his class to exit, step through to the lectern, fiddle with my notes, watch my students take their seats.
There are brief impromptu warm-up discussions regarding judicial systems and cheesecake. Then as per our coursebook schedule I introduce one possible relationship between the past simple and past continuous tenses when combined in a single sentence.
- It is easy, I say.
My students always believe me when I say this, even when it should be obvious that I am lying.
- The past continuous clause is for background, for context, for fundamental narrative. Then something, some event, interrupts that narrative. This event gets its own clause, past simple.
The students nod, and write in their notebooks. When they are all looking up again, I continue.
- Either clause can come first, as you will see in a moment. There is also the issue of the two relevant subordinating conjunctions, when and while.
I turn, jot two examples on the board, turn halfway back.
- Look here: “The phone rang while I was shaving.” Past simple, then
while
plus past continuous, you see?
More nodding, more writing.
- Good. And now with the clauses reversed. Past continuous, then
when
plus past simple. “Manco was playing horseshoes when Méndez stabbed him from behind.”
Still more writing, and Juan Carlos raises his hand. He is one of my best students. I nod to him, and smiling broadly he says, The past is never simple.
The students, they have such splendid smiles. I tell them to take out a clean piece of paper and write four hundred words on the disadvantages of happiness. Then I walk out of the classroom. Stand in the hallway. Limp to the nearest bathroom, the nearest stall and sooner or later Arantxa will hear of the essay topic. She will corner me, ask about its role in the curriculum, its immediate pedagogical purposes. My answers will not be good ones, though not as bad as when she asks about what happened at the Pórticos Hotel. She will know that a story of Gillette Girls and blood is not one an archaeologist is likely to tell under such circumstances. She is a smart woman, my boss. She feels sorry for me, and wishes I could be happy.
If my answers are bad enough, it is possible that she will consult with the rector and then fire me, but not probable, as on average my classes outscore all others in the English Section, and we are too close to midterm exams for her to replace me comfortably. More likely she will shout at and forgive me. What she said over the phone is true: I owe her nearly as much as I owe Casualidad. I sometimes regret being so much work for her but she often took hold of my hand before I started dating Pilar, and if I were less work for her she would now perhaps start taking my hand again. She would of course fire me instantly if she ever learned of Jenny but that will never be the case. Arantxa is as incapable of imagining her professors visiting brothels as the Incas were of imagining gunpowder.
I squeeze my stomach with both hands, knead at the rolls of fat. Diego Méndez. Sides with Almagro the Younger against the Crown, imprisoned but escapes, one of seven who beg Manco Inca for sanctuary, are taken in, his guests for nearly two years. Then a new Viceroy in Lima—a chance for the seven to work back into royal favor. Manco’s turn to throw and Méndez comes in behind, slides the dagger into his back. Titu Cusi, nine years old, watches his father fall. The seven surround him as well. They cut but fail to kill him, ride for Lima not quickly enough. I trace the scrape on my forearm, the warm red line; I knead again at my stomach, wait and hope. Twenty years later the seven heads still on display and I do not understand how it is that my students do so well. When other professors ask, which is not often, I tell them that it is surely not a matter of the late sixteenth century once again, not natives filling churches because they think Dios has conquered Viracocha, that my students were most probably the strongest to begin with, sought and seek me only for the accent.
This may or may not be true—I have not done the relevant regressions. My students study as if they believe that English will save them. I do not know why they would believe this. I have never implied such a thing.
ROMEO SAYS, Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still, should, without eyes, see pathways to his will! Where shall we dine? Oh me! What fray was here? Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all. Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. Why, then, o brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness! Serious vanity! Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead—Dost thou not laugh?
Then Benvolio says, No, cuz, I rather weep.
Piura has only one cinema. The cinema has only one screen. The screen offers three showings per day but all of the same film, that film being all that is shown for days or weeks and in some cases months.
We arrived an hour early as always. Mariángel drank her milk and I scanned license plates and failed. If I had seen and recognized the taxista, I would of course not have confronted him. We would simply have taken the next taxi to come along, followed for as long as was required to obtain all necessary details.
The woman who sells tickets at the window in front works rosary beads back and forth. Her lips continue to move even as she takes bills, makes change. The lobby is lined with posters but they are not necessarily for films that have come to Piura, or ever will. Mariángel leans back against me, and Capulet tells Paris that Juliet is too young to be married.
What he says is true, anyone could see it, though things may have been different in Verona, and Peruvian girls often marry at her age or younger. The manager who tears tickets carefully in half is as big around as I am but shorter by half a foot. I have never seen him smile. Perhaps this is because we always come on Wednesdays, when two persons enter for the price of one.
Here deeper inside I searched faces and failed and the air smells of ammonia and mildew and sweat. Mariángel yawns. My students have told me that this film is very good, so I assume it will be bad, though this is not always the case.
12 Monkeys,
for example, was a film they liked, and it was a fine film.
I believe that the ammoniac smell is the result of bats. The cinema is full of them. Mariángel and I do not mind. They eat the mosquitoes that also dwell here, and make horror movies more realistic.
Today was hotter than yesterday. Tomorrow will be hotter still. As is the case with all cinemas with which I am familiar, it is a few degrees cooler inside than out, and Benvolio attempts to convince Romeo to attend Capulet’s party. He leers as he tells of the women waiting there, and a bat flies across his forehead. This is a complicated coincidence: the Spanish word for bat is murciélago, and the word for womanizer is mujeriego. Their roots have nothing in common, but I once made the mistake of saying Womanizing Man when I meant to say Batman. Everyone smiled, and for weeks I repeated the mistake as a joke.
Lady Capulet speaks of delight writ with beauty’s pen. Mariángel turns, curls in toward my chest. Unless this film is unlike all others she will sleep through to the end, a remarkable thing given what is certain to come—our fellow spectators’ angry whistling every time the projector breaks down, their excited discussion of each unexpected shift in plot, their shrieks and screams at bats.
Mariángel and I arrive early not only to search and scan, but also to get the best seats. The films here start precisely on schedule. They are the only events in Piura that do.
Mercutio wears a curly white wig, a mirror-sequin miniskirt, speaks of Queen Mab and goes manic. Of all rows the eighth is the best. It is far enough from the front not to cause nausea, far enough from the back that the teenagers who sit in the balcony would need better aim to hit me with the things they throw. I am thankful that baseball is not popular in Peru.
This film was released in the United States a year ago and arrived in Piura last Thursday. Watching it is thus somewhat like reading the newspaper in a remote highland village. The newspapers arrive months late, and not always in chronological order. One walks to the store on the plaza—even the smallest village has a plaza, and even the smallest plaza has a store—and asks for whichever day’s newspaper has arrived. They contain not news but history, and perhaps the residents keep extensive diaries, check them against the horoscopes.
Let lips do what hands do and yes some hands pray lest faith turn to despair. Pilar and I came to the cinema monthly or nearly so. At first I thought that I would be fired if anyone learned I was dating a student, so Pilar and I would come each with a separate group of friends, would sit at the inside edges of our respective groups, as close as possible to one another such that during scenes of great dark intensity we could safely hold one another’s hands.
I believed we were hiding successfully but she knew that everyone knew, and now the balcony. Romeo uses the same words as in the play, though fewer of them. This should feel wrong but for some reason does not and there are of course Romeos and Juliets in all places and times. Even the Incas had them or seem to have: the end of
Miscelánea Antártica
, Cabello Balboa’s telling of Quilaco and Curicuillor, forbidden and unlikely love, families at war, corpses piling higher and again love.
The man sitting to my right has a camera in his lap. If at any point a naked or half-naked woman appears on the screen, he will start taking photographs. He will not be the only spectator to do so, an inexplicable thing given how easily pictures of nude women can be obtained from most newspapers here. It is not strictly speaking a problem, as Mariángel will sleep through the flashes and clicks as well.
12 Monkeys
was the last film Pilar and I saw together. We were hiding nothing by then, were married, Pilar seven months pregnant. We held hands throughout, held them even for the whore-and-dentist scene, and Father Lawrence says, O mighty is the powerful grace that lies in plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities: for nought so vile that on the earth doth live but to the earth some special good doth give, nor aught so good, but strain’d from that fair use revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse. Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied; and vice sometimes by action dignified, and the projector breaks down as Romeo arrives. Our fellow spectators whistle predictably loudly. Mariángel shifts but does not wake. I have yet to see a film here during which the projector did not break down and Father Lawrence is right—there was the ayahuasca.
There are perhaps as many fleas in the cinema as there are mosquitoes. It is a shame that bats do not eat fleas as well and the civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa has not yet begun. Quilaco is a handsome young officer, blood relation to both men. Atahualpa sends him as emissary to Huáscar and in the Queen Mother’s house he meets Curicuillor, most beautiful of Huáscar’s daughters, raised here in secret to keep jealous courtiers from poisoning her as they had her mother.
Quilaco and Curicuillor, instant love, of course, but Huáscar rejects the peace offering, murders most of Quilaco’s men. Quilaco promises to return as soon as he is able, and for four years Curicuillor waits, holds herself chaste. Then she dresses as a man, joins the army, goes to find Quilaco and the projector is repaired but the film has skipped forward: Romeo stands between Tybalt and Mercutio.
Mariángel flinches at each gunshot, nearly wakes, and before we entered the cinema tonight I was for a moment sure that I had seen Jenny. The bad light went momentarily bright in long blonde hair. The sharp curve of an eyebrow. A smile almost certainly hers but then a group of students, some mine and some otherwise.
I was obliged to greet them. When they were gone so was Jenny or the woman who resembled her and that is as it should be. Curicuillor finds Quilaco bleeding to death on a battlefield near Jauja, nurses him toward health and brings the news: Atahualpa victorious in the civil war but taken prisoner and murdered by foreigners, and one of them, Hernando de Soto, is lodged nearby.
She convinces Quilaco that there is no reasonable option except to seek Soto’s favor. Quilaco does, and it is granted; Soto even sponsors their baptism and marriage. Bliss, of course. Then two years later Quilaco dies, Curicuillor gives herself to Soto, and a daughter, Leonor, is born to them. All this Cabello Balboa gives as true story faithfully told and of course it is as false and true as what we watch, Romeo climbing in through Juliet’s window, and I am suddenly exhausted.
Camera flashes here and there as clothing sloughs off. Mariángel shifts and sweats, heavy against my shoulder, then wakes, unprecedented thing. She flails but I sing to her, Deep Purple. Slowly she calms and Cabello Balboa’s work is all but done, the Incas fitted in time and place and teleology as descendents of Noah. He has added the story of Curicuillor and Quilaco to complete the book with love, he says, but of course he also had a king to please, and the Conquest’s violence to reframe.