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 asked 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.