Another noise—Socorro arriving. I ask her often for news of Casualidad, and each time the news is the same: the name of a hospital, the name of a doctor, the name of a test. The list of conditions, diseases and syndromes for which she can be tested locally is dwindling. The doctors are intrigued, and speak of symposia.
The rain, the exams, my students, I walked among them and loved them and hoped they would succeed. They sweated and wrote and sweated and swiped at mosquitoes. I looked out the window and from time to time saw men moving past, though my exams were all in classrooms on the third floor of the main building, and there are no balconies on the windowed side. These are the ladder-men. They paint walls, clear gutters, wash windows. The slats of their ladders are thin, do not look like comfortable footing, but the men do not complain, and when it is time to alter their position, instead of descending to shift the ladder left or right they straddle the top of it and sidle, the ladder becoming fixed stilts.
Almost time. When my students finished their exams, they handed them in and thanked me, apologized for where their sweat had darkened the paper. They exited the classrooms and glided down the stairs and gathered beneath the first-floor awnings. There they smoked, watched the rain, established betting pools that require a great deal of paperwork and small sums of money.
Much of the gambling centers on which of the four bridges will fall, and which will fall first. The Sánchez Cerro, the Bolognesi, the Old and the Fourth: one named for a dictator, one for a hero, one for its age and one for its place in Piuran bridge-building chronology. I have been told that the betting is strong in favor of the Sánchez Cerro going first, given that it nearly falls every year, even when there is no rain at all. Few are willing to bet that the Old Bridge will fall. It figures on thousands of postcards, in many Peruvian songs, in all Piura-based documentaries and beer commercials. Its lamps are ornate and pleasing. The Old Bridge falling would be a puncture wound to the local soul.
Mariángel shouts, and Socorro goes to her. It will likely not rain today, did not rain yesterday or the day before or the day before that. Canned peaches are once again available in every store and the price of toilet paper has dropped to near-normal. Some of my neighbors contend that this El Niño will be relatively weak, a month or five weeks at most. Other neighbors say that there will be no end, and these are the neighbors who are gathering their belongings in plastic-lined boxes, stacking them in rented pick-ups, driving south. I have even seen cars on the Panamericana, their trunks tied open and filled with children looking back at the damp world of which I am a part.
And it is time. I push through the netting and dress. A quick breakfast, a gathering of pens and grade sheets, then out to the patio. Mariángel is already there. She sits in her playpen, coos to dolls stripped of their bowls, hats, jewelry. I do not know how she could have seen the dolls at the back of her top shelf, but last night she did, and wanted them immediately, and does not seem too distraught at their current poverty.
I position the chairs and table in the shade of the awning. I fetch a calculator, and the three stained manila folders that hold my exams. I arrange the exams in stacks around me, sit, and most of my colleagues hate this time of year more than any other—the extended weekend of Immaculate Conception lost to grading, stack after stack, exam after exam—but it all pleases me immeasurably.
I have spent each long day sweating here with Mariángel, watching birds and listening to Lorenzo Humberto Sotomayor as sung by other people and grading luxuriously: multiple choice and true-or-false, matching and short answer and sentence completion, tasks not found in nature. There is a sort of pleasure in the industrial repetition of that grading, and my questions were overly difficult but my students are so very smart and wise. They are undeserved by anyone.
That which remains to be done is half the essays of each group. These essays present a more thorough kind of pleasure. I begin with Pre-Intermediate work on household pets. First is Natalia writing well on her tarantula. Next is Alberto writing less well but more passionately and at greater length in regard to his Schnauzer, and already Mariángel is bored with the dolls.
We discuss her boredom briefly. Socorro comes, bears her off for milk and other games. Fortunato has written about a species of bird I suspect he has invented and it goes on and on in this way, short breaks each three exams to rest my eyes, and at last the Pre-Intermediate stack is done.
Sitting back for a moment, watching the arrozeros come and go, and the sky is no longer quite cloudless. Then Intermediate. Jhon on an earthquake in Trujillo. Estela on a hurricane hitting Cuba. Milton on a small lake south of Cajamarca, and I wait for his natural disaster to occur, and it does not, but his descriptions of the water’s varying shades are splendid.
It is one in the afternoon when I end this second stack. Socorro asks where I would like lunch served, but if I stop now I will not finish in time. Mariángel yells and I go to her, take her, sing briefly and dance. I attempt to explain: any day but today. I suggest to Socorro that she gather blankets and toys and take Mariángel to the park.
More clouds, and Upper Intermediate. Claudia, Hector, Lidia; Norma, Domitila, Ramiro; Gerardo, Wilfredo, Zaira, superb work on generational differences, on and on. And when I have finished grading, have tallied the points from the many exams’ many sections, have recorded the totals, have calculated final semester grades and listed them on their respective sheets, have replaced the exams in their stained manila folders, I then walk and run and walk to the university, along and through and across, arrive at the Language Center only nine minutes after final grades were due—my best yet.
I present the folders to Eugenia, and answer her questions as to how well my students have done. I bow as I hand my grade sheets to Arantxa, and thank her for another semester finely administered. I promise the two of them that I will attend the upcoming graduation ceremony, but pause first so that they will know the truth.
I say hello to the other professors present, and we reminisce hurriedly, a sentence or two with each. Then I walk out of the Language Center thinking
On this day
and unsure to what the phrase might best refer, and I am almost quick on my feet, am free, free for weeks, two of them and more, through Christmas and New Year’s but only that long, for there is summer school, always summer school, and on this day I stop by the pen to wish the deer pleasant holidays, and find Reynaldo there as well, exchange shoulder punches with him and listen to his worries that if El Niño has truly come, it may well complicate his extraction research in ways he cannot yet foresee. I shake my head and nod and hold grass out to the deer and he punches my shoulder again, much harder now, for corrupting his fodder research, and I apologize and we hug extremely briefly and plan to make plans at some point in the near future, and on this day I salute Dr. Guardiola from across the quad and hurry in the opposite direction to avoid being invited to a retreat, and on this day I wave to Don Teófilo where he kneels among the begonias, and he laughs, all those decades light on his shoulders, he pulls a weed, waves back and wishes me well.
The rain holds off, and the sky is a study in grays and blues, and the poinciana trees are in full rich orange bloom. As of tomorrow the university will be empty or nearly so, will be all but silent, much as it was my first few weeks here. I knew no one, and came daily to the campus to borrow books I hoped could teach me to do the job for which I had been hired. I lived in a boarding house a block from the university gate. All of the furniture was covered in clear plastic. My bed was not quite as large as my body. The owner reminded me daily that I was not to approach the kitchen under any circumstances.
As of my second night there I decided to eat elsewhere when possible. That was perhaps a week before Christmas. A telephone call to my mother, and then out, circling, walking and walking. At last a restaurant specializing in roast chicken—one of this city’s several dozen.
I sit down at a table in the center of the restaurant, and am the only client. The chair is hard plastic. The table is linoleum and the lights are very bright and the music is unpleasantly loud. There is a television mounted in the corner, a soap opera, and all the waiters are watching it.
During a commercial break one of the men comes over. He has a pea-sized mole growing from his eyebrow. We both shout to be heard, and I order a roast chicken, whole. To go? he asks. No, I say. The waiter looks at the ground, at the television, at me, and asks if I would like a bigger table.
I look around the restaurant. All the other tables are of precisely the same dimensions. I shake my head, and tell him that I am from California, and that today happens to be my birthday. I shout this with what I hope will sound like great confidence and joviality, as if eating alone in a chicken restaurant were a California birthday custom.
The waiter is too smart to believe me, smiles sadly and takes his leave, returns abruptly with a beer I have not ordered. He says that it is courtesy of the owner, and points to a small, closed door on the far side of the restaurant. I thank him. Ten minutes later the chicha is extinguished; the soap opera actors shout briefly, and are turned down as well.
All four of the waiters come walking in a line, and behind them is an aproned cook. The cook’s face is bright with grease and pleasure. He is holding a platter bearing a large amount of French fries, and a roast chicken from which protrudes a single candle, lit.
The waiters take up positions around me, the four cardinal points. The cook begs my pardon, says that the nearby bakeries have all just closed, that otherwise he would have treated me to a muffin, that the following year I will have to arrive earlier in the evening. I assure him that the chicken and candle and sentiment are more than enough.
The five men sing to me, both birthday songs, and they sing surprisingly well. The cook sets the platter on the table. I blow out the candle, wishing for happiness. The cook applauds. The waiters look at each other, at the cook, at me. I nod. The waiters and the cook nod back. The cook returns to his spits, and the waiters to their soap opera.
Wishes are not normal things, though we make them all the time. In through my front door, and Mariángel is again in her playpen on the patio, and Socorro is slapping at my bookshelves with a rag. I say that I endorse full-heartedly her disciplinary techniques, but that I am curious to know what my books have done this time, that they should deserve such punishment.
She doesn’t answer, and now she is weeping. I catch her wrist and take the rag from her hand. She sits at the dining room table. I bring glasses of water for us both, but she will not drink. She sits and looks out the window. There are no birds in the almond tree.
- Casualidad, she says. A tumor, she says.
- Where?
- Her brain.
- Oh no. No, no. I’m so sorry.
She nods. I let my hand rest on her shoulder, then leave her there staring at the tree. I go to my room, call the hospital. Yes, says the doctor who authorized and analyzed the scan. Down below, hard against the brainpan. Inoperable and malignant. She will last a month, perhaps two, and I smash the phone and its cradle.
OQUENDA SAYS THAT ONE'S GAZE IS A WAITER. I put Armando’s book away until such time as it might be needed again. We will leave in five minutes and these days rain falls often but with little force or volume. The river remains almost ridiculous and the cheaper newspapers roil: El Niño has faded, will not come at all, and money spent on bridges and drains was wasted the way so much is wasted here.
But this is not the view of most scientists. They measure the temperatures of oceans, say that bigger rains are biding their time, and this too is strange, to bide, and time. I call to Mariángel from the door, and she comes. I fit her into the carrier, and draw down the near-canopy I have built of plastic pipes and sheeting.
Out into the drizzle, past the Virgin, along and across and then through a park, not the one closest to our house but another, and in this other park, too, are matacojudo trees. Mariángel’s sounds are happy ones. The matacojudo fruit are tiny and green where they hang. The canopy protects us both to a limited extent.
Again we have a new telephone and for a week I phoned the doctor daily to ask him to reconsider Casualidad’s scan. He no longer takes my calls. Past San Teodoro and another two blocks. I have spoken with other doctors, sent them copies of the scan, and they concurred: malignant, inoperable. They have referred me to still other doctors, who have ideas regarding ways in which Casualidad’s end can be directed, her pain lessened, her comfort augmented in all possible ways.
The woman at the window works her beads as she makes my change. The short fat manager tears our tickets. Inside, the air is as ever slightly cooler and today the cinema is almost empty.
We take our seat, eighth row from the front and Mariángel in my lap. She closes her eyes, sleeps for nine or ten seconds, and then water starts dripping from the ceiling onto the top of my head and spatters down around her. We move five seats to the right, and here there is no leak, but the splatting of water on fabric continues, a preliminary soundtrack.
There are more bats than usual, and far more mosquitoes. It is of course absurd for us to have come. It would have been likewise absurd for us not to. I lift Mariángel higher on my lap and someone calls from just behind us, calls Oye Chino!
And again: the timbre and tone, nasality and rasp. Sweat swells from my pores, runs from my face. I wait. No more words come. I wait, wait, turn slowly as if only to look up the aisle, as if waiting for a friend and the friend will arrive at any moment.
The man sitting behind us is all but albino. He looks at me. I smile, turn back. I wipe my face with my handkerchief. The lights drop and
Mars Attacks!
begins, happens very quickly in my brain: cows on fire, donuts and prostitutes, nitrogen-breathing Martians with cheek wattles and orange eyeballs, kindhearted Muslim ex-World Champion boxer, stuffed cat.