Corner of the Dead

Chapter 1

[ 77 ] C H A P T E R 1 L I M A . What has happened to you? There are no lights as far as we can see. Passengers from other buses are asleep on the steps. We hear reports of looting in the city center. There is no choice but to spend the night with them outside the terminal. We share two secrets: One man is dead. Not one of us did anything. The sun rises. There are no street vendors, no women in the outdoor market. Shop windows are broken and cars have been firebombed. A taxi takes us to the center of the city. The driver says, there has been no electricity for three days. He points to the destruction . Most is recent, within the past twenty-four hours. Water is intermittent. Many restaurants and businesses are closed. He drops us at a hotel near the Plaza de Armas that he knows is still open. Karl is tired and wants to rest. I am too nervous to sleep. Every sound makes me jump. He sleeps upright in a chair while I keep watch. When the sun goes down, curfew begins. [ 78 ] There are no people. Then from the darkness, waking Karl, we hear the echoing, the throbbing sound the women make with their pots and pans as they strike them against the pavement. Into the long night. The conquerors left the copper, taking the best of the silver and all of the gold. The gold and silver is in museums in Europe and government buildings in Spain and in homes with too many rooms to count. Some has been reconfigured to rococo and filigree. It doesn’t say where it came from, that it was mined by the Indians who once owned the land, who chewed coca leaves to stave off cold and hunger, not knowing when the mine might collapse. This sound of metal to stone cannot be mistaken for anything else. These women are the wives, the daughters and sisters , the mothers of the disappeared. It is in the eerie darkness of dusk, that time between living and dying, when their banging begins, summoning those who cannot come. The pots are not needed to prepare the evening meal. The missing go hungry . Those who wait do too. The refrain is the same, the howling of many children, and as the night goes on their cries grow louder against ringing copper, in this, a Latin American fugue. ...