The Dust Never Settles, page 33
In this way, for three years, as Hernando Echeverría’s troops wandered through the mountains and forests, sleeping under the stars, searching for the promised land of free-flowing gold, Hamet and Chimpu observed each other with wariness and admiration. Hernando, for his part, watched them both, for he had faith in neither. He suspected that the ñusta was mocking him, but he understood, too, that the compliance of the natives who parted before them like the Red Sea before Moses must be down to the influence of the Inka princess who travelled by his side. He did not dare to lay a hand on her, for there had been Indian uprisings already which had cost many Castilian lives, whereas his passage, though long and winding, had been thus far without battle. As pertained to the Morisco slave, Alfarraz was intelligent and capable and, what was more, knew the secret that Hernando’s claims of nobility were fabrications; there were several men, upstarts among Hernando’s troops, who might be tempted to mutiny if they discovered that the illustrious Hernando Echeverría y de Vargas was nothing more than a common interloper. No, he must keep them close, both the Morisco and the Indian. He must pretend to trust them while not trusting them at all, and he must treat them just well enough that they not be driven to open insurrection. His time would come – a time when he would be sufficiently powerful not to have to pander to inferiors. Until then, he would be wily, patiently bearing the indignity of his situation until the Lord in heaven should see fit to elevate him to his proper state.
It was five years after setting foot in the Americas that Hernando Echeverría sank his sword into the earth near Pisco and called it home. Chimpu Yupanqui had lost her energy to lead the endless march to nowhere: she was pregnant and unable to keep her insides from spewing out. Her mamacona said that the child inside her (spawn of the bearded dogman) was poisoning her and this was the reason for her inexorable fits of vomiting from sunrise to sunset. Chimpu did not have the strength to tell the mamacona that the child inside her was not the Spaniard’s but rather the child of the man who sang to the stars.
The father is not who we thought it was.
Atatay!
This family is more knotted than a khipu.
Or woven like a tapestry.
So many busy fingers weaving, hermanukunay!
In the morning, after Hamet had prayed in secret, the caravan of travellers packed their things onto their horses and moved away, leaving Julia alone. Despite having rested through the night, she could not find the energy to pick herself up and carry on her journey; she worried that perhaps she would have to remain in this exact spot forever, the monotony of eternity broken only by the occasional passing spectre.
This did not happen. Julia’s prayers had not gone unheard, for the mountains had watched her trajectory and conspired among themselves to help her on her way. All through the night, as Julia dozed in and out of dreams alongside the members of Hernando Echeverría’s camp, the apus conferred, whispering from mighty ear to mighty ear. And they agreed to help the girl. Sachamama had heard Julia’s cry for help, and she, mother of the jungle, rose now from her hiding place. Thick-limbed trees began to lift their dreadful feet out of the earth and, uprooted, slid this way, that way. Branches and trunks began to bend upon themselves, curving and undulating. Greenery was swelling, fragmenting, billowing somehow, leaves were stretching, exploding to five times their original size while the flowers were closing, tucking themselves away, receding into their buds. In the thick undergrowth, a dark green circle appeared, flickered, and opened to reveal an orange eye as large as a truck tyre with, at first, the thinnest blade of a pupil, which dilated, contracted, and dilated again.
It had all been an illusion – the trees, the fronds, the tangled vines were simply the markings on the scales of Sachamama who had lain there, hidden, watching, listening. It was on her very back that the campers had slept and into her ears Julia’s prayers had sunk the night before. Now she stirred, roused herself to help the maid-saint complete her journey and carried Julia on her back all the way to the summit where the sky stretches infinitely, vast and clear and blue, in that place where, on all sides, verdant mountains yawn, ancient titans, megaliths of stone and loam, inside them colossal hearts of ore pulsing slow, each thump interrupted by centuries in which generations of brief lives are spent and then swept on before the next beat of the mountain’s heart. Up there, time passes slowly. The apu lives on and on. Epochs are born and slain in the space of his breath. Eras elapse between the heaves of his mighty lungs, each one a puff of air, a speck, an insignificance. But the apus endure and endure.
She is getting sispapuni.
Arí, very near now.
We are almost there.
Up here, there was a clearing. Trees had been felled to make way for excavations under the management of the selfsame Professor Leonard Gest who had discovered strange patterns of stone, unnatural patterns that suggested there was an edifice buried beneath the loam. Upon digging deeper, it became clear that there was a tambo, a lodge or inn of some sort, and he became excited that it might be Paititi. But this tambo, sunk so deep into the earth, tangled up with the centuries-old tree roots, thick as boas, had to be extremely ancient – far more ancient than the legendary lost golden city of the Inkas.
Here, on the archaeological site managed by Professor Gest, Sachamama deposited Julia and slithered away. This was the place Julia had set out to reach and it was also the moment she had hoped to find because, down on the ground, rolling and writhing in the soil, are two bodies – one male, one female. The blanket the couple laid down has scrunched up and been pushed away by their restless limbs and now they are coated in silt and clay, bodies painted with stripes of reddish brown, flecks of dust, tiny stones pressed into their thighs and backs, leaves and dirt in their hair. All around, the sounds of the forest continue – chirping and croaking, the incessant hum of mosquitoes and cicadas, and the chainsaws of illegal logging. There are the graa-graa calls of macaws and the dinosauric growls of the toucan, the snarling of jaguars lying in wait, quien quien birds that laugh with a jajaja and click their tongues like jesting men while monkeys screech, endlessly amused, appalled, incensed by one another. In the distance, a rain shower rumbles with thunder. Close by, there is the munching of insectan pincers on leaf, the grunt of a beetle as it heaves itself onto a fallen log.
And then, above it all, there is a voice.
Suyarqayki, it says, and the voice stirs the magma.
He has been waiting.
He knew she would come.
‘How did you know?’ Julia asks, and he replies,
The apus have guarded your journey, Julicha. Whispers from ear to ear came to me. The grains of Lima, arí, the dust under your feet, guarded your steps. And the dust told the sand and the sand told the pebbles. The pebbles told the stones told the hillocks told the hills until the tayta mountains conversed from peak to peak about you. But it started with the dust. Uchuypuni uchuypuni – even the smallest particles can be great.
‘Imam sutiyki, taytay?’ Julia asks. ‘Father, what is your name?’
Yes, what was his name, this being whose knees were mountain summits and whose shoulders shadowed the clouds? Who was this king in whose palms rivers of lava flowed and around whose neck a chain of gold shone like suns?
Ayar Cachi kani.
Yes, this was Ayar Cachi, released from his mountain prison by the excavations of a foreign man scrabbling in the dust who even now was conceiving (and had already conceived and would conceive again many times to come) a child who already had been (and would again be) born with wide black eyes and a gift for seeing into kaylla pacha. She was the child whom Julia had come all this way to assist, the child whose spirit was trapped inside the hill under the yellow house, imprisoned there by a minor but disgruntled wamani with a grudge against the Echeverrías and all people like them.
On the shoulders of Ayar Cachi, Julia returned to Lima, but by the time they arrived at the yellow house on the hill, much time had passed in the realm of the living. Mamabue had died and Anaïs had long since left, gone to a place far across the sea, to the land of her father, a place beyond their reach.
Then Ayar Cachi was furious and he railed at the wamani, scattering the skeletal dancers with a swipe of his arm and tearing great chunks from the walls of the hill. But the wamani would not yield: this was his mountain (Mountain? This is barely even a hill!) and this girl was his ward, for she had been born on his land. Ayar Cachi replied with a roar that made the shutters of the yellow house tremble and opened a crack in the Avenida del Guanero large enough for bicycle tyres to become wedged in the cleft.
And so, compelled by the authority of Ayar Cachi, the wamani was forced for the first time in centuries to step out from the hill under the yellow house, stretch his muscles (cramped from crouching for so many years inside the Mound of Defeat) and set out across the ocean in search of the child whose soul he had stolen.
Will he return the animu to the girl, hermanukunay?
He will, but not as he was instructed.
Atatay! What will Ayar Cachi do?
Takanakunqaku.
They will battle?
They will. And their confrontation
will overturn the earth.
So a pachacuti comes…
Sixteen
The metronome tick-ticks by my head. I set it going. I needed an anchor to this world because I felt myself slipping again. My mind was going away, lifting above my body to the brightly lit place of watery voices. The barren place, I call it, full of people. I feel their presence. Voices. Echoic. I cannot see them because my eyes stay below, seeing what is down here but my mind lifts to another plane and yields to the slowness and numbness of apathy.
But no: focus on the metronome, on its reassuring clicks, reliable, constant. Each one is like a prod back into reality, a clack of knuckles on my skull saying, Don’t slip away. Don’t go towards the light. Stay here. Plic. Plic.
It could click into eternity, this metronome. I could stay here and let it run ad infinitum through night and day and another night, so on and so on, until the oceans evaporate, the sky turns amber and the house is eroded to dust, granule by granule, and still I would be here, lying with my cheek against the cool floor, and the metronome going tick tick tick.
The body breathes. Now and then the eyes blink. But I have receded – shrunk back, peeled away from my skin and bones, extracted myself from the hollow tubes of fingers, arms, legs, and left the body as a brittle shell. I am sunk into a deeper sphere, and all external stimuli are foghorns heard from a great distance, moving pictures watched through a succession of panes of glass, distorting, refracting. In here, there is light and thrumming stillness and I could stay here until the end of all endings.
Then the metronome clacks again and I am back. This is precarious. A plank in me is broken. A string was twanged too hard and snapped. Something is lost – I cannot get it back. My brain feels off somehow, curdled. Everything is tilted and my head wants to go with it. Lopsided, slanting. If I let my neck go, my mind will slide right off and splat onto the floor.
The intervals are too long. The blanks between each click are stretching too indefinitely and the intervening air has swollen. I am abandoned, utterly desolate. The tick will never come. The gadget has duped me – it wanted me to fall. My sanity scrambles for purchase but everything is slippery and I am going away to where indifference soothes me.
Come away, says the Tiffany lamp.
You cannot talk.
Everything talks when it has things to say.
And the ceramic doe watches me benevolently, intoning condescension to the alabaster owl.
It has happened.
She has finally lost her mind.
Ay, pobre, pobre.
It was the box.
The box?
The box of papers.
The ones that Gustave tore.
She came downstairs in her
mother’s nightgown and found the box was
open, empty, shreds of paper strewn about the floor.
What is to be done about such things, I ask you? She got to her knees (a scene full of pathos), sweeping up the fragments with trembling fingers, crying streams, trying to piece them together to decipher the message from her dead mother. ¡Ay! Can you imagine? Lost. Lost. And now, of course, she is berating herself for the stupidity of leaving the box in the library when she knew.
How could she not have known?
Of course she knew what would happen. Some might say she wished for it, but what kind of a daughter would that be, I ask you? What species of daughter wants to erase her mother from the earth?
Look at her now, crumpled on the floor. What can she do? There is nothing left. And the metronome keeps plic-plicking but can she even hear it any more? She has curled herself up inside a protective shell like an armadillo and rolled away under the sofa.
So close to reconciliation, to atonement and redemption. But it is over now. All gone. Nothing left. She has fallen inside herself, as they always said would happen. The inner world has won. There is no reason in fighting it any more.
And the metronome clicks on. It will click into eternity.
The house is dense with people. They line the walls and, as I drift from room to room, they cheer and shower me with rice, rose petals, shredded bits of paper. They wish me well – a lifetime of happiness – and tell me how beautiful I look, mouthing words like ‘radiant’ and ‘blooming’. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming. As I walk, my veil floats behind me, lifted by tiny, compliant bluebirds. I am a fairy-tale princess, the muse of a Pre-Raphaelite scene. ¡Qué bella estás! Thank you. Thank you.
All these people, here, just for me. Some have come from very far away. I can tell by their clothing: hobble skirts, cloche hats, coats of ermine fur, long strings of pearls and velvet stoles. Many have brought gifts and want to know where to put them. I don’t know, I tell them. Ask my mother: she will know. Where is she? Oh, I don’t know, somewhere around. I wave my hand vaguely. She’ll be here presently. I don’t want to speak about my mother. This is my day. My day. Inexplicably, some try to thrust wooden spoons towards me. I bat them away. This is no time for cooking! This is my day.
There are flowers everywhere. Their smell perfumes the air. I don’t like it. Cloying – a cloying stench. Oh, that word! Onomatopoeic, almost. I have to stop myself from saying it out loud. Cloying. Cloying. It sounds like clawing. Like how the flowers’ odours are clawing their way up the inside of my nose like tiny mountaineers armed with pickaxes. I have to keep covering my face with a handkerchief to block them out. I try to make it seem flirtatious and coy, but it’s hard to look coquettish with a white napkin pressed desperately against your face. The flowers seem to keep multiplying – festoons growing upwards, snaking around the banisters and door frames, coiling around the cornices, dropping on vines from balconies. Flowers with enormous heads and long limbs explode from pedestals placed in every corner and somehow the arrangements remind me of lions’ mouths, gaping mid-roar, wanting to swallow me up. Who brought all these flowers? Where did they come from?
Music is playing – two guitars, Spanish-style, one of them playing bordones, the other strumming out a waltz, and a deep, contralto voice singing about a memory of jasmines and roses in the hair of a beautiful woman. No more flowers, please. And a river – laughing under a whispering bridge. Something like that. But then the music changes. From room to room, it switches. Now a psychedelic chicha with pan pipes and synthesisers, wah-wahs on the electric guitar, bongos and a crybaby pedal. And there are hippies: daisies in long hair, baggy clothes, staggering in a ring, brincando to the huayno beat. In the next room: opera. A soprano, haunting, wailing like an attention-seeking ghost. I know the song. Oh, yes, I know that shrieking well. Delibes’s Lakmé. A song about bells. Or flowers. Or bells and flowers. Something like that, anyway. Jasmines and roses again. Why is it always jasmines and roses?
Oú va la jeune Hindoue, fille des parias?
Here she comes! Here comes la novia!
Qué bella está.
They contemplate me, all these people (most of them I don’t even recognise) with drooping, tender eyes. Melting eyes. No, not melting – crying. I know what they’re all thinking. They’re thinking She’s done it. They’re thinking how I’ve proved them all wrong. How I was going to be left on the shelf (on the shelf? Like an old tin of anchovies?) but then, when everyone had given up on me, I pulled it out of the bag. A rabbit from a top hat. Now here I am getting married, having a baby, and it’s all going to be fine. They used to ask me all the time, Do you have a boyfriend? Do you have a boyfriend? ¿Ya? ¿Por fin? And now I do, and I’m walking down the aisle in a long white gown (lace, sweetheart neckline) smiling and waving to all the guests and the choir are singing,
Arroz con leche,
me quiero casar
con una señorita
de la capital.
I will admit it is not the entrance music I would have chosen, but here we are, all these people in out-of-date fashions, all these ghosts, and me walking down the aisle to nasal voices singing: Rice pudding, rice pudding, I want to marry a girl from the capital. Que sepa coser, que sepa bordar, que sepa abrir la puerta para ir a bailar. But isn’t it tragic that marriage should have to be the happy ending, that the story always ends with a marriage and a kiss and then…then nothing more. We will live happily ever after until death do us part, forever and ever, amen. Except that death does not make people part. If anything, death makes them linger. I’ve never found the living to be very reliable, but the dead are always there when I need them and more often when I don’t.
