The Dust Never Settles, page 3
Above all, my focus was on the sea where, far from the shore, blocking the horizon, my old friends, the islands of San Lorenzo and El Frontón, had always created the familiar shape of a whale. As a child, sleepy after a day at the beach, salt in my hair and sand between my toes, wedged into the back seat of Abue’s Cadillac between Mami and Leandro and too many of the cousins, I would watch the whale through the window and tell it about my day. It would give me an idle smile and sing me to sleep. But yesterday, I saw no whale – just two large rocks in the water, one now reserved for the exclusive use of the Peruvian navy, the other a graveyard for anti-colonial pirates and inmates of El Frontón penitentiary.
Now, standing on the balcony of my hotel suite, the drastic curve of the Limenian coastline and the lights of the city stretching out below me, the salt wind playing with my hair and tugging at my robe, I wait for the sunrise. With the sun will come the wake-up call. The valet will inform me that my taxi is booked. I will wash and dress and, after breakfast, let myself be driven to the yellow house on the hill, where I will be expected to sign it away.
But the little pink fish will not let me rest. In these tiny hours of the morning, before the light has returned, it has been speaking to me, asking me again and again: What happens to the past? Does it fade and fall like leaves in autumn? Does it nest in the highest nooks of our mind, out of sight, like a condor, waiting to swoop? Does it rot like a body underground?
I cannot answer the little fish because I do not know. I remember what the nuns of Santo Domingo told me – that the dead will not return until the Resurrection. I remember what the psychiatrists told me – that the subconscious mind is artful in wish fulfilment. I remember what my mother screamed at me in desperation – Enough with this obsessive mourning! But the things I have been told have never resonated with my experience of reality.
‘Whale!’ I whisper into the night sky. ‘Whale!’
Out in the sea, she appears, grumbling, and half-opens a big blue eye.
‘Were you sleeping?’ I ask.
Yes.
‘I’m sorry.’
What’s wrong with you?
‘I can’t sleep.’
So you wake me?
I shrug.
Pretty inconsiderate.
‘I know.’
Why can’t you sleep?
‘I was wondering.’
Wondering what?
‘What happens to the past?’
The whale groans and rolls over.
The seawater rushes over her back like a landslide.
‘What happens to the past?’ I insist.
The whale opens her eye again and fixes it on me.
It passes, the whale replies.
‘It passes?’
It passes through. It passes on. And, sometimes, it passes by.
Dos
For decades Mamabue’s house was the grandest of the baroque casonas of Miraflores, a testament to the taste and good fortune of the Echeverría family. It was imagined into being by Tatarabuelo Ignacio – whose father had made his wealth in bird shit – as he took his siesta one sweltering December afternoon in 1893 and, as soon as construction began in the new year, the house became the envy of fashionable Limenian families who decimated their fortunes in trying, and failing, to equal Ignacio’s masterpiece. Across the barren dust plain that then dominated the district, mansions sprang up. Each was more ostentatious than the last, with a rococo stucco here, a Moorish balcony there, until the district was a farrago of opulence, with houses of mismatched styles standing shoulder to shoulder, sprouting colonial balconies, baroque pediments, neoclassical columns. But none came close to the glory of la Casa Echeverría, which glittered like a crown on the brow of the hill known as the Mound of Defeat, though no one by then remembered how the Mound had gained that name.
The mansion was cool in summer, warm in winter and by some sorcery seemed to repel the stifling Limenian humidity. Even when the darkest fogs rolled in over the city from the Pacific, la Casa Echeverría glowed like a beacon in the gloom with its electric lighting and facade of lúcuma yellow. This colour was the only feature that had not resulted from the meticulous imaginings of Tatarabuelo Ignacio or the assiduous designs of his wife, Ari-ari-mamie Colombe Fantonbleu de Echeverría, the fiercely practical Frenchwoman who had saved her husband’s money from his careless spending by taking control of it and investing it, first in the railroads and later in the rubber boom. Still, she allowed herself one aesthetic indulgence in planning the house her husband had dreamed into being: she had ordered that it be painted primrose yellow, the same shade as her grandparents’ Alsace cottage. But with her halting Spanish she could not communicate with the painters and the house ended up the colour of the lúcuma instead, a shade she quickly realised so far better suited the vibrancy of the New World in which she now lived that neither she nor any of her descendants would countenance painting the house any other shade except, briefly, during a period that became known as the Olive Years. After Bisabuelo Eugenio was killed in an automobile accident on the Avenida Abancay when his Ford convertible coupé collided with a milk cart (killing a donkey, four men and a woman), his wife, Bisabuela Elena, went mad from the heartbreak and the house was turned a shameful and garish green and the shutters painted red. The reputation of the house plunged into ignominy on account of both its olive hue and the drunken lover Elena took to distract herself from mourning. Once Elena had composed herself again, the house was returned to its true colour and, because of the way it glimmered, it was referred to fancifully as Paititi, lost city of the Inkas. Later it became known simply as the yellow house on the hill.
The doorway of the mansion, modelled on the doors of the cathedral of Cajamarca, was intricately carved by a talented young cajamarquino, so homesick that his melancholy permeated deep into the stone. Forever after, that doorway afflicted all who passed there with a feeling of nostalgia that so gripped the throat they would succumb to bouts of severe retching that could only be cured with spoonfuls of orange-flower water. Many years later, Ignacio Echeverría’s great-great-granddaughter, Anaïs Rose Echeverría Gest, would stand on the threshold of that very doorway and vomit profusely, overpowered by her own gut-wrenching homesickness and the inexorable nausea inflicted by the child in her belly.
Suspended on the front facade at the west of the house were Moorish balconies of mahogany carved to resemble confessionals with scenes of the martyrdom of the saints – a collection of beheadings, Catherine wheels and crucifixions. When the balcony of Titi Toto’s bedroom fell during the earthquake of 1974, she refused an exact replica because she found the carved executions morbid and instead commissioned a replacement in the shape of a masquerade mask. She was not aware that her builders were admirers of the work of Antoni Gaudí and they drew for inspiration not, as she intended, on the Venetian carnivals of spring, but on Gaudí’s House of Bones. The moment the balcony was unveiled to the family, it was also revealed to a throng of journalists, architecture aficionados and busybodies. As the tarpaulin was pulled away, the crowd gasped in horror because the new installation had the appearance of a skull staring out from the house, keeping sinister watch over passers-by in the street below.
Occupying the entire eastern stretch of the house was the ballroom, where Ignacio had wanted to install a marble floor of pure white until Colombe had made him see sense, on account of the constant washing that would be needed, and changed his mind to parquet de Versailles instead, which would also be much kinder on the bare feet of the marinera dancers who performed every month at the renowned Echeverría dinner parties. The enormous chandelier, shipped from London, had five tiers of crystal icicles and holders for one hundred candles, despite being wired to the mains, so that the light it cast could be matched to the occasion – electric light for dancing, candlelight for dining. The entire ceiling was painted with a quadratura mural of the animals entering the ark of Noah, although alongside the identifiable species were several creatures produced entirely by the painter’s overenthusiasm for Peruvian cocaine, so that when one looked up the ballroom seemed to extend far into a landscape filled with turtle-skunks and lion-toads marching towards the ark, while in the distance, frolicking on blue hills that sprouted hands and feet, decadent masses engaged in orgies with swarms of scorpions and crabs, limbs mingling until leg was indistinguishable from pincer was indistinguishable from penis. While the mural’s whimsy enchanted Tatarabuelo Ignacio, Ari-ari-mamie Colombe was appalled, not by its obscenity but by its lack of realism, and, many years later, upon finding God, their granddaughter María Dolores would take a decade-long fast from looking upwards indoors so as to protect her eyes from the hellish vulgarity depicted on the ballroom ceiling. But there was never a question of painting over the mural: the ballroom was in constant use and the Echeverría family could not do without it for long enough to allow a new piece to be completed.
The library, however, was mostly idle. Ari-ari-mamie Colombe had been entirely against building it. She had no patience for reading fiction: she had had quite enough of the high-flung ideals of the Romantics and saw little point in realism either – what use had she for the mimetics of quotidian life when she could simply step out of bed and live it for herself? She explained to her husband that a copy of the tenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and subscriptions to the main newspapers from each of the world’s major cities would be sufficient to keep the family educated and could all be housed in a small study. Ignacio did not read fiction either, but he found the idea of reading romantic and his vision of a grand house was incomplete without a library, so it was built on the south-western corner of the house. The library was used for storing an enormous collection of books, for playing card games and hosting cocktail parties, but not for reading, except by Colombe’s elder brother Gustave, an aspiring historian, sent to Lima by his parents to learn from his sister how to be a man of action, a man with sense, instead of burying his head all the time in his books. He arrived by transatlantic liner in the winter of 1907, dropped his bags at the door and headed straight to the History section of the library, from which no one ever saw him emerge. Colombe’s children, grandchildren and even some guests claimed to have seen him there in the shadows, slipping in and out among the rolling stacks of periodicals, but Colombe dismissed these claims as fantasy and always maintained that her brother must have slipped away unnoticed and returned to France.
Upstairs were bedrooms upon bedrooms, enough for every family member for generations to be housed comfortably, connected to one another through internal doors that never seemed to open onto the same room twice, so that one day Anaïs’s bedroom might open onto the nursery and the next onto Tío Ernesto’s study until she could no longer be sure whether the bedrooms were undertaking a perpetual waltz or if she had forgotten her way. All of the bedrooms opened onto the Sevillian patio and cast kaleidoscopic shadows onto the waters of the central fountain around which, standing guard, were twelve legendary marble creatures – many-headed, long-tailed, sharp-toothed beasts – from whose mouths a stream of water gushed every hour on the hour so that the waters of the font were, whatever the weather, always turbulent. The patio had been modelled, according to Tatarabuelo Ignacio’s precise instructions, on the courtyard of the lions at the Alhambra palace, because it was in that very place that he had been struck by the conviction that he would one day make himself a great man. And he was not mistaken, because ten years later to the day he was arranging for the importation of seven hundred and fifty thousand Andalusian azulejo tiles while Ari-ari-mamie Colombe discussed with her architect how to direct the flow of water from the fountain through subterranean channels to irrigate the seventy orange trees that were being planted in the garden, which was to be constructed in tiers, like a wedding cake, in imitation of the gardens of the Palazzo Borromeo.
At the rear of the house, the garden terraces had been intended to descend all the way down the hill, but when the inheritance from the guano fund ran dry and the rubber boom deflated because of the rubber trees the British had planted across their Empire from stolen South American seeds, Tatarabuelo Ignacio could no longer afford to extend the garden to the bottom of the hill. Instead a border wall was built and the stretch of desert behind the mansion, still technically Echeverría property, was left empty. This empty plain was Los Polvos de Nadie y Nunca. And though Ari-ari-mamie Colombe had a fence constructed around it to keep out the land-grabbers, and though Bisabuela Elena wanted to turn it into a cemetery so that her husband could be buried nearby, and though Ignacio Segundo warned his brother Julio time and again that, unless they used the land, the Reds in the government would take it and give it to the undeserving, Los Polvos remained empty.
Until one winter in 1969, after General Velasco had completed his coup and issued Decree Law 17716 declaring land would be given to the tiller, Peruvian soil would be for the Peruvian… Then the people came. The people who would later be known as the Polvorinos. They came with their corrugated metal and straw matting and plywood boards and staked their claim over the dust. Among them would be a baby. A girl. A child with a mark on her cheek in the shape of a lopsided egg. And one day, not very many years later, this child would come to the door of the yellow house on the hill in search of employment and, at that house, from a window on the second floor, she would fall and die and her blood would stain the azulejo tiles. In her death she would become a ray of hope to the Polvorinos and she would return lost souls to their rightful places.
But that is not yet.
In the heyday of the Echeverría family at the start of the twentieth century, when Tatarabuelo Ignacio and Ari-ari-mamie Colombe slept in the master bedroom and their children were small, when the grouting between the tiles was still pristine and the majolica was uncracked and unstained by the blood of falling women, the house was immaculate and full of space. The bedrooms upon bedrooms were kept uninhabited but exquisitely furnished and ready for an army of guests, because foreign dignitaries and world-renowned artists had the habit of dropping in on the Echeverría household from across the oceans. During that era the only time the house had felt crowded was during three weeks in 1905 when the entire cast of Lakmé, along with all the orchestral musicians, sojourned at the mansion because – since the municipal theatre had burned down during the Chilean occupation of the city two decades earlier – the most suitable venue for their performance was the Echeverría ballroom and there was evidently nowhere more comfortable for such distinguished performers to rest their heads than the Echeverría bedrooms. Decades later, many of the singers and musicians would return to the casona, drifting disoriented through the bedrooms in search of a place of more permanent rest, drawn back to the house where they had been most comfortable, and their music would be heard faintly, as if from a great distance, by the Echeverría descendants.
But by the time Anaïs was first laid in her Moses basket in the shade of the orange trees, the house was rather more crowded and unruly. The cats were partly to blame. In Mamabue’s house one was never more than a few feet away from a cat, although most of the time one would not notice it. The cats looked down from the top of cabinets, peered up from under sofas and peeked out from inside cupboards with doors open just a crack. Outside, cats lounged on walls or crawled into bushes. The cat proliferation began with the second generation of Echeverrías, once Bisabuelo Eugenio had taken over the family business with all the practicality and iron will of his mother and then, with all the romanticism and whimsy of his father, had married a touring musical actress with a heart-rending sympathy for stray kittens. Colombe was scandalised: it would have been one thing for her son to marry a singer of the highbrow zarzuelas composed in the nineteenth century, but for him to choose a mere revue actress seemed an affront to good taste and family values. And Colombe would not hear it, though her son told her a thousand times, that the play in which he had watched his beloved perform had been hailed by critics as a return to the glory days of the zarzuela. But Eugenio married the girl – Elena, the soprano from Málaga – and hung above the doorway in the entrance hall the fan he had caught when she threw it into the audience at the end of her flamenco. It still hung there ninety years later when his great-granddaughter returned from Europe, reluctantly pregnant and fearful of the future.
Bisabuela Elena had a great compassion for strays and brought home all the orphaned kittens she found in the streets of Lima, a habit which to Colombe’s mind simply confirmed the girl’s lack of good judgement. Over the years, Elena’s sympathy grew and she returned with strays of all kinds: three-legged dogs and one-legged pigeons; guinea pigs sold at the market for food and chinchillas as pets; an Amazonian caiman discovered, emaciated and afraid, crouched behind packing crates in a consignment of rubber from Iquitos; and Salvador Dalí, an eight-limbed black-chinned emperor tamarin that had lost his way home, so named on account of his upturned white moustache. When the fad for wild pets reached Perú, Elena took in the misfits: a tigress blinded in transit from India, a koala suffering from alopecia, and a giraffe with vertigo. Bisabuelo Eugenio had a wing added to the rear of the casona to house Elena’s orphans. Once Elena died, the Echeverrías took scant care of the misfit menagerie so, by the end of the twentieth century, all that remained were a few geriatric creatures and generations upon generations of cats – cats that had bred so prolifically no one was sure exactly how many there were. But the cats were unobtrusive, languid and content to coexist with the family at a distance, rarely intervening in human affairs as long as they were fed.
Even more numerous than the cats were the ants. Unlike the cats, the ants were stubbornly intrusive. No one could say when the epoch of the ants had begun, but everyone agreed that the invasion had been prolonged and insidious. When the new millennium arrived, the occupation of the ants was complete and they were everywhere: they scuttled in and out of cracks in the tiling; they swarmed upon any food left uncovered and carried it entirely away, piece by tiny piece; they huddled around plugholes like witches around a cauldron. The one mercy was that they did not often bite. Still, every successive empleada waged an interminable war on the ants with potions, powders and boiling water, but the ants were persistent and not even Q’orianka, the longest-serving of the maids, had ever conquered them.
