Corner of the Dead

Chapter 1

[ 25 ] C H A P T E R 1 L I M A . Is this you? Still gray. I ask Karl if he sees gray or is it that I am still seeing what I remember from when I was here three years ago with Arye, even though I am here again and am no longer working off memory. It is gray, he says, and the buildings are soot-covered. Even the beautiful colonial ones that encircle the Plaza de Armas. There has been little upkeep, mostly bullets and tanks and soldiers. No one has been planting flowers. There are more beggar children than I remember, Indians from as far away as the jungle, wearing photographs attached to pieces of cord. Sometimes all they have is a name that dangles : a name, a photograph, this is who is missing. String them together and the names and pictures become stick figures, something like an x on a scorecard. But in saying the name the dead come alive, if only on the lips of the one reciting. A man, a woman, a child: you can tell. An ito or ita attached to the name says it was a child. Pablocito. Anita. Now there is also a curfew. I avoid the streets I once walked with Arye. He is still here but now travels without an itinerary. It is his protection. [ 26 ] I explained to Karl why I had to leave, that I could no longer be a witness, an excavator, a grave-digger. This time would be mortar and cement and iron, things that remain. An apple orchard , too. Not just soot and bones in bags. Karl bought two bicycles first thing. His belonged to an engineer , mine to the engineer’s son. They lived in the safe part of Lima but were going home to Nebraska. We did a trial run along perfectly clean streets, past wrought-iron gates and gardens full of flowers. I almost forgot where we were. In our village, five hours from Lima, we relied on those bikes to get us from place to place. We saw things always a bit higher from the ground, but not as high as if we were traveling by bus. It is from this vantage point I still see the Andes. But now the Andes come to me only in dreams. If it is a good day I’m on that bicycle again. The mountains are on my left and the jungle is on my right. Our barn was surrounded by carefully planted rows of wheat, barley and corn. You couldn’t see it from the dirt road, only from above. In the mornings we crooked our necks in order to see the mountains. They were not jagged but a series of the letter U upside down. They were our anchor. Karl spent days climbing . He learned where the streams began and the fastest way to reach the lake. He took a notebook with him. The same one the children used in school, with a map of Perú on front. It was when he allowed himself to make up stories, to collect wild flowers. He wasn’t like Arye. He could not live on facts alone. At first the rain didn’t bother us. Over time water dissolves everything. • • • [ 27 ] Here the asylum roof leaks into a metal pail. There we took turns dumping pots of leaking roof into fields saturated with standing water. These pools of ink grew larger, bottomless and black with a layer of pesticide residue on top. Sometimes I would see a rainbow there. It is the custodian’s job. He can’t rely on us to dump the water. If we don’t and it runs over, one of us might fall. Karl points to a river on the map. When his finger is at the mouth of the Amazon he says, this dot is your head and to the south—see right here—is mine. I say, the rain is killing me. It will end. That’s why they call it a season. But the water keeps falling on my papers. The black letters turn gray, then run, settling in and around the letter q. He buys a typewriter in the market the same day he brings the kitten. The one that dies that night. Before I am awake he has buried it in the valley below the water table, taking into consideration...