The bar was fairly crowded, but no one seemed to pay them any attention. They sat at the most isolated table and ordered two whiskeys with soda and ice.
“I still can’t believe we’re going to see Armida,” said Doña Lucrecia. “Can it be true?”
“It’s a strange feeling,” replied Don Rigoberto. “As if we were living a fantasy, a dream that may turn into a nightmare.”
“Josefita, what a common name, and what about her appearance,” she remarked. “To tell you the truth, my nerves are on edge. Suppose all of this is a trick by some crooks to get money out of you, Rigoberto?”
“They’ll be very disappointed,” he said with a laugh. “Because my wallet’s empty. But this Josefita hardly looked like a gangster, don’t you agree? And by the same token, on the phone Señor Yanaqué seemed the most inoffensive creature in the world.”
They finished their whiskeys, ordered two more, and finally walked into the restaurant. But neither of them felt like eating, so instead of sitting at a table, they went into the lounge near the entrance. They were there for close to an hour, consumed by impatience, never taking their eyes off the people entering and leaving the hotel.
At last Josefita arrived, with her bulging eyes, big earrings, and ample hips. She was dressed as she had been that morning. Her expression was very serious and her gestures conspiratorial. She came up to them only after checking behind her with darting eyes, and didn’t even open her mouth to say good evening, indicating with a gesture that they should go with her. They followed her to the Plaza de Armas. Don Rigoberto, who almost never drank, was slightly dizzy after the two whiskeys, and the light breeze on the street made him a little dizzier. Josefita had them walk around the square, pass close to the cathedral, and then turn onto Calle Arequipa. The stores were already closed, the display windows lit and gated, and there weren’t many pedestrians on the sidewalks. When they reached the second block, Josefita pointed at the entrance to an old house, its windows covered by curtains, and, still not saying a word, waved goodbye. They watched her walk away quickly, swinging her hips, not looking back. Don Rigoberto and Doña Lucrecia approached the large studded door, but before they could knock it opened, and a quiet, very respectful man’s voice murmured, “Come in, come in please.”
They went in. In a dimly lit vestibule, its one light moving in the breeze from the street, they were received by a small, sickly-looking man wearing a fitted jacket and vest. He bowed deeply as he extended a childlike hand.
“I’m happy to meet you, welcome to this house. Felícito Yanaqué, at your service. Come in, come in.”
He closed the street door and led them through the shadowy vestibule into a living room, also dimly lit, with a television and a small bookcase that held CDs. Don Rigoberto saw a feminine silhouette emerging from one of the armchairs and recognized Armida. Before he could greet her, Doña Lucrecia stepped forward and he saw his wife enfold Ismael Carrera’s widow in a close embrace. Both women began to cry, like two close friends meeting again after many years of being apart. When it was his turn to greet her, Armida offered Don Rigoberto her cheek for him to kiss. He did, murmuring, “How glad I am to see you safe and sound, Armida.” She thanked them for coming, God would reward them, and Ismael also thanked them from wherever he was.
“What an adventure, Armida,” said Rigoberto. “I suppose you know you’re the most searched-for woman in Peru. The most famous too. You’re on television morning, noon, and night, and everybody thinks you’ve been kidnapped.”
“I don’t have the words to thank you for taking the trouble to come to Piura.” She wiped away her tears. “I need you to help me. I couldn’t stay in Lima any longer. Appointments with lawyers and notaries and meetings with Ismael’s sons were driving me crazy. I needed a little calm to think. I don’t know what I would have done without Gertrudis and Felícito. This is my sister, and Felícito is my brother-in-law.”
A slightly misshapen figure emerged from the shadows in the room. The woman, wearing a tunic, extended a thick, sweaty hand and greeted them silently, with a slight nod. Beside her, the small man, who apparently was her husband, seemed even tinier, almost a gnome. She held a tray with glasses and bottles of soft drinks.
“I’ve prepared some refreshments for you. Help yourselves.”
“We have so much to talk about, Armida,” said Don Rigoberto, “I don’t know where to begin.”
“The best place would be the beginning,” said Armida. “But sit down, sit down. You must be hungry. Gertrudis and I have also prepared something for you to eat.”
XIX
When Felícito Yanaqué opened his eyes, dawn was breaking, and the birds hadn’t begun to sing yet. “Today’s the day,” he thought. The appointment was at ten; he had some five hours ahead of him. He didn’t feel nervous; he’d know how to maintain his self-control, he wouldn’t let himself be overwhelmed by anger, he’d speak calmly. The matter that had tormented him his whole life would be laid to rest forever; its memory would gradually fade until it disappeared from his recollection.
He got up, opened the curtains, and barefoot, wearing his child’s pajamas, spent half an hour doing qigong exercises with the slowness and concentration taught to him by Lau, the Chinese. He allowed the effort to achieve perfection in each of his movements to take possession of his consciousness. “I almost lost the center and still haven’t managed to get it back,” he thought. He struggled to keep demoralization from invading again. But of course he’d lost the center, considering the stress he’d been under since receiving the first spider letter. Of all the explanations the storekeeper Lau had given him about qigong, the art, gymnastics, religion, or whatever it was he’d taught him, and which Felícito had since incorporated into his life, the only one he’d fully understood had to do with “finding the center.” Lau repeated it each time he moved his hands to his head or stomach. At last Felícito understood: “the center” it was absolutely essential to find, the center he had to warm with a circular motion of his palms on his belly until he felt an invisible force that gave him the sensation of floating. It was the center not only of his body but of something more complex, a symbol of order and serenity, a navel of the spirit which, if he located and controlled it, marked his life with clear meaning and harmonious organization. Recently he’d had the feeling—the certainty—that his center had become unsettled and that his life was beginning to sink into chaos.
Poor Lau. They hadn’t exactly been friends, because to establish a friendship you had to understand each other, and Lau never learned to speak Spanish, though he understood almost everything. Instead he spoke a simulated language that made it necessary to guess three-fourths of what he said. Not to mention the Chinese woman who lived with him and helped him in the grocery. She seemed to understand the customers but rarely dared to say a word to them, aware that what she spoke was gibberish, which they understood even less than they understood Lau. For a long time Felícito thought they were husband and wife, but one day, when because of qigong they’d established the relationship that resembled friendship, Lau told him that in fact she was his sister.
Lau’s general store was on the edge of Piura back then, where the city and the sand tracts touched on the El Chipe side. It couldn’t have been poorer: a hut with poles made of carob wood and a corrugated metal roof held down by rocks, divided into two spaces, one for the shop, with a counter and some rough cupboards, and another where brother and sister lived, ate, and slept. They had a few chickens and goats, and at one time they also had a pig, but it was stolen. They survived because of the truck drivers who passed by on their way to Sullana or Paita and stopped to buy cigarettes, sodas, and crackers, or to drink a beer. Felícito had lived nearby, in a boardinghouse run by a widow, years before he moved to El Algarrobo. The first time he went to Lau’s store—it was very early in the morning—he’d seen him standing in the middle of the sand wearing only his trousers, his skeletal torso bare, doing strange exercises in slow motion. His curiosity aroused, he ask
ed him questions, and Lau, in his cartoon Spanish, attempted to explain what he was doing as he moved his arms slowly and at times stayed as still as a statue, eyes closed, and, one might say, holding his breath. From then on, in his free time, the truck driver would stop in the grocery to talk with Lau, if you could call what they did a conversation, communicating with gestures and grimaces that attempted to complement the words and sometimes, when there was a misunderstanding, made them burst into laughter.
Why didn’t Lau and his sister associate with the other Chinese in Piura? There were a good number, owners of restaurants, groceries, and other businesses, some very prosperous. Perhaps because all of them were in much better circumstances than Lau and they didn’t want to lose prestige by mixing with a pauper who lived like a primitive savage, never changing his greasy, ragged trousers; he had only two shirts that he generally wore open, displaying the bones of his chest. His sister was also a silent skeleton, though very active, for she was the one who fed the animals and went out to buy water and provisions from distributors in the vicinity. Felícito never could find out anything about their lives, about how and why they’d come to Piura from their distant country or why, unlike the other Chinese in the city, they hadn’t been able to get ahead, had remained, instead, in absolute poverty.
Their truest form of communication was qigong. At first Felícito began to imitate the movements as if he were playing, but Lau didn’t take it as a joke, encouraged him to persevere, and became his teacher—a patient, amiable, understanding teacher, who accompanied each of his movements and postures with explanations in rudimentary Spanish that Felícito could barely understand. But gradually he let himself be infected by Lau’s example and began to do sessions of qigong not only when he visited the grocery but also in the widow’s boardinghouse and during the stops he made on his trips. He liked it. It did him good. It calmed him when he was nervous and gave him the energy and control to undertake the challenges of the day. It helped him find his center.
One night, the widow woke Felícito saying that the half-crazy Chinese woman from Lau’s general store was shouting at the door and nobody understood what she was saying. Felícito went out in his underwear. Lau’s sister, her hair uncombed, was gesticulating, pointing toward the store and shrieking hysterically. He ran after her and found the grocer naked, writhing in pain on a mat, his fever soaring. It required tremendous effort to get a vehicle to take Lau to the closest Public Assistance. The nurse on duty there said they ought to move him to the hospital, at Assistance they handled only minor cases and this looked serious. It took close to half an hour to find a taxi to take Lau to the emergency room at the Hospital Obrero, where they left him lying on a bench until the next morning because there were no free beds. The next day, when a doctor finally saw him, Lau was moribund and died a few hours later. Nobody had money to pay for a funeral—Felícito earned just enough to eat—and they buried him in a common grave after receiving a certificate explaining that the cause of death was an intestinal infection.
The curious thing about the case is that Lau’s sister disappeared on the same night the storekeeper died. Felícito never saw her again or heard anything about her. The store was looted that same morning, and a short while later the sheets of corrugated metal and the poles were stolen, so that within a few weeks there was no trace left of the brother and sister. When time and the desert had swallowed up the last remnants of the hut, a cockpit was set up there, without much success. Now that part of El Chipe has been developed, and there are streets, electricity, water, sewers, and the houses of families entering the middle class.
The memory of the storekeeper Lau remained vivid for Felícito. After thirty years it was made real every morning, each time he did qigong exercises. After so much time he still wondered about the story of Lau and his sister, why they’d left China, what vicissitudes they’d suffered before they washed up in Piura, condemned to their sad, solitary existence. Lau repeated frequently that one always had to find the center, something he, apparently, had never achieved. Felícito told himself that perhaps today, when he did what he was going to do, he’d recover his lost center.
He felt somewhat tired when he finished, his heart beating a little faster. He showered calmly, polished his shoes, put on a clean shirt, and went to the kitchen to prepare his usual breakfast of goat’s milk, coffee, and a slice of black bread that he toasted and spread with butter and dark honey. It was six thirty in the morning when he went out to Calle Arequipa. Lucindo was already on his corner, as if waiting for him. He dropped a sol in his tin can, and the blind man immediately acknowledged him.
“Good morning, Don Felícito. You’re leaving earlier today.”
“It’s an important day for me and I have a lot to do. Wish me luck, Lucindo.”
There weren’t many people on the street. It was pleasant to walk along the sidewalk and not be pursued by reporters. And even more pleasant to know that in principle he’d inflicted a necessary defeat on those journalists, poor devils, who never found out that Armida, the supposed kidnapping victim, the person most sought after by the Peruvian press, had spent an entire week—seven days and nights!—hidden in his house, right under their noses, without their suspecting. What a shame they’d never know they’d missed the scoop of the century. Because Armida, at the packed press conference she gave in Lima, flanked by the minister of the interior and the chief of police, didn’t reveal to the press that she’d taken refuge in Piura with her sister, Gertrudis. She only indicated vaguely that she’d stayed with friends to escape the siege by the press that had brought her close to a nervous breakdown. Felícito and his wife watched the conference—crowded with reporters, flashbulbs, and cameras—on television. He was impressed by the confidence his sister-in-law showed responding to questions, never revealing confusion, never whimpering, speaking calmly, engagingly. Her humility and simplicity, everyone said afterward, had found favor with the public, which from then on was less likely to believe the image of a greedy, gold-digging opportunist that had been circulated by the sons of Don Ismael Carrera.
Armida’s secret departure from the city of Piura at midnight, in a Narihualá Transport car with his son Tiburcio at the wheel, was a perfectly planned and executed operation that no one, beginning with the police and ending with the reporters, found out about. At first Armida wanted to bring in from Lima someone named Narciso, her late husband’s driver, in whom she had a great deal of confidence, but Felícito and Gertrudis convinced her that Tiburcio, in whom they had blind faith, should drive the car. He was a magnificent driver, a discreet person, and after all, her nephew. Señor Rigoberto, who encouraged Armida to return to Lima immediately and appear in public, eventually convinced her.
Everything worked out as planned. Don Rigoberto, his wife, and his son returned to Lima by plane. A couple of days later, after midnight, Tiburcio, who was happy to collaborate, appeared at the house on Calle Arequipa at the agreed-upon hour. Armida took her leave with kisses, tears, and thanks. After twelve hours of uneventful driving she arrived at her house in San Isidro, in Lima, where her lawyer, bodyguards, and the authorities were waiting for her, happy to announce that the widow of Don Ismael Carrera had reappeared safe and sound after her weeklong mysterious disappearance.
When Felícito reached his office on Avenida Sánchez Cerro, the first buses, vans, and jitneys of the day were preparing to leave for all the provinces of Piura and the neighboring departments of Tumbes and Lambayeque. Narihualá Transport was gradually recovering its old customers. People who had avoided the company because of the spider episode, afraid they would fall victim to some kind of violence by the supposed kidnappers, were now forgetting about the matter and trusting once again in the good service offered by its drivers. He finally had settled with the insurance company, which had agreed to pay half the cost of reconstruction following the damage caused by the fire. Repair work would begin soon. Though it would be with an eyedropper, the banks would give him credit again. Day by day normalcy was being r
estored. He breathed with relief: Today he’d bring to an end that unfortunate matter.
He worked all morning on ordinary problems, spoke to mechanics and drivers, paid some bills, made a deposit, dictated letters to Josefita, had two cups of coffee, and at nine thirty, taking the portfolio prepared by Dr. Hildebrando Castro Pozo, went to the police station to pick up Sergeant Lituma, who was waiting for him at the entrance. A taxi took them to the men’s prison in Río Seco, outside the city.
“Are you nervous about this meeting, Don Felícito?” the sergeant asking during the trip.
“I don’t think I am,” he replied, hesitating. “We’ll see when I have him in front of me. You never know.”
In the prison, they had to go to the checkpoint, where guards searched Felícito’s clothes to verify that he wasn’t carrying weapons. The warden himself, a stooped, lugubrious man in shirtsleeves who dragged both his voice and his feet, led them to a small room that was protected by metal grating as well as a heavy wooden door. The walls were covered by scrawls, obscene drawings, vulgarities. As soon as he crossed the threshold, Felícito recognized Miguel standing in the center of the room.
Only a few weeks had passed since he’d last seen him, but the boy had undergone a remarkable transformation. He not only seemed thinner and older, perhaps because his blond hair was long and uncombed and a beard now dirtied his face, but his expression had changed too; previously juvenile and smiling, it was now taciturn, exhausted, the expression of someone who’s lost the drive and even the desire to live because he knows he’s defeated. But perhaps the greatest change was in his clothing. He used to be well-dressed and smart with the flashy coquetry of a neighborhood Don Juan, unlike Tiburcio who always wore the jeans and guayabera of the drivers and mechanics, but now his shirt, open over his chest, had no buttons, his trousers were wrinkled and stained, and his shoes were muddy and had no laces. He wasn’t wearing socks.