“Third, Señora.”
Andrés watched this exchange with practiced condescension. In his elegant suit, he was transformed, ready to be photographed for Lima’s society pages. He was taller than me, bathed at that moment in superiority, profound and harsh. I wore my work clothes, worn at the knees and splattered with paint.
“Andrés,” his mother said, “this is Oscar. This young man is a student at your school. He is friends with Sebastián Azcárate. Now shake his hand and introduce yourself like a gentleman.”
His eyes steeled, and his hand too. He held it out.
“Andrés,” he said.
“Oscar.”
We shook. No, you were right, I thought, Piraña concha tu madre. That’s my fucking name. I glared at him and held his hand, perhaps a moment too long. I squeezed.
“That’s enough, boys,” his mother said, and they both turned to leave.
“Good afternoon, Señora,” I called.
We played to passengers in Santa Anita, Villa Maria, and El Agustino. We rode through Comas, Los Olivos, and Carabayllo. Three days. Lima on display, in all her grandeur, the systems of the city becoming clear to me: her cells, her arteries, her multiple beating hearts. We collected laughs and coins until the money weighed heavy in my suit pocket. I was a secret agent. I saw six people I knew: among them, an ex-girlfriend, two old neighbors from San Juan, and a woman from the university. Even a colleague from the paper. Exactly zero recognized me. I was forgetting myself too, patrolling the city, spying on my own life. I’d never felt this way: on display, but protected from the intruding eyes of strangers and intimates.
I watched the ex-girlfriend chew the nail of her pinky. When we were together, she’d seemed to me the type that would flower, grow into herself, become more attractive each year. But she was twenty-seven now and still not beautiful. I looked her in the eye as she handed me a coin, felt a shock when her finger grazed my open palm. She had no idea who I was.
My old man had paid off the security guard. He’d given us a time and a day. The whole family was out of town. I’d been waiting six months for this. I was a good student and they hated me. I was a good soccer player and they mocked me. I didn’t understand a thing about them, or why they were the way they were.
We rode in Felipe’s windowless van. They tossed me over the wall. I opened the garage and they backed the van in. The rest was easy. The television, the VCR, the computer, the stereo — each was carried down and packed carefully into the van. We moved nimbly through the dark house, carrying the wares as if they were works of art. And they were. A sleek cordless phone meant thirty soles. A blender, fifteen, if you knew where to sell it. It was so ordered and efficient, it didn’t seem like stealing at all.
My father told me once that in Lima anything can be bought and sold. We were walking through the market in San Juan, past the fruit stalls, flies buzzing around the meat and fish. A woman sold clothes piled in high, disordered mounds. Fake Barcelona jerseys. Stolen car parts and bags and watches. An old man stood by his cart of hardware: hammers, pliers, and nails, bent, rusty, unmistakably used. My old man found it pathetic. “Used nails!” he cried out. “For the love of God, are we this poor?”
I did a last run through the house. We were almost done. It was my first time out, my old man’s way of saying he trusted me. I wanted in because I trusted him. We were going to be okay. I knew it. We would have money. We would finish the second story of our house, and my mother would be happy again. They would both be happy. I had no idea that he was preparing to leave us.
I lingered at the top of the stairs, looking at the room we’d built. It was really something, even with the gaping hole where the television had been. I was proud of my work. A few steps down the hall, along the tiles I’d laid myself, was Andrés’s room. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. We’d already taken his boom box and alarm clock. I turned on the lamp. In the closet there were half a dozen pairs of shoes and button-down shirts in white and blue. I touched them all. I ran my fingers along the rack and found it: his gray wool suit. I’d just pulled it from the closet when my father walked in.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed. “Turn that goddamn light off!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. We were in darkness again.
“We’re leaving. Put that back,” he said. “We can’t sell that.”
“We could.”
“We’re in a hurry, Chino. Let’s go.”
“It’s for me,” I said.
“This isn’t a department store. You don’t need that.”
He was right. I didn’t need it, wouldn’t need it. Not until I wore it for my interview at El Clarín seven years later. I knew it would take me a year or two to grow into it, if I grew into it at all. It was a dull, shapeless longing, but it was real. “I want this,” I said, “for my birthday.”
I could barely see him in the purple shadows.
“Your birthday?” my father said. He’d forgotten. “Well then, take it.”
I rode around the city in my green-and-white suit and thought about my mother. I put my article in an envelope, sealed it, and dropped it in the mail. I didn’t see Villacorta, or check the paper to see if he’d published it. I broke away from Tonio and Jhon, paid them twenty soles for the suit and the shoes and the memories. I thanked them from the very bottom of my new clown heart. And I didn’t do their act, or any act. I spent my savings. I put on the polka-dotted suit and stepped into the unwieldy shoes. I painted my face in the dim reflection of the hallway mirror. I placed the red Ping-Pong ball over my nose, felt the tight pull of the rubber band against my hair. And I rode the buses, paying my fare like any other passenger, except that I was unlike any other passenger. I knew I would see her. This was our city, hers and mine. We would meet somewhere beneath Lima’s mournful gaze.
I rode to La Victoria, where the corner kids eyed me, wondering if it was worth their trouble to mug a clown. I walked the narrow streets, my shoes flopping on the crumbling sidewalks. I sat on a bench in front of Carmela’s house and waited. My black brothers came and went to their schools, to their jobs. They didn’t even shoot me a glance. I was part of the architecture. A cop stopped and asked if I was all right.
“Just resting, chief,” I said.
Was I from around here?
“I’m Don Hugo’s kid.”
“Carmela’s Hugo?” he asked. Then he left me alone.
Carmela came home carrying dresses, and smiled at me because she smiled at everyone. Her door swung open wide, and from my bench I peered into her world, my mother’s new world. And then things came at me in waves: the street, the house. I haven’t seen you since you were this big, Carmela had said at the hospital. I remembered. When I was six, Don Hugo had taken me to see his mistress. I’d never seen a black person before. I cried and said she looked burnt. She grinned and pinched my cheek. He hit me and told me to be nice to my tía. Now I couldn’t bring myself to ring the doorbell. I knew she would have been kind, even with me dressed this way. As kind as she was to my mother. She’d answer any of my questions and tell me how she met my father, how she fell for him, the sweet things he’d told her. Carmela and my mother must have spoken of all this already. What revelations did I have for them anyway? They had worked out the details of their parallel heartbreaks: who had him when, who had him first, who was innocent, who was guilty. And they’d forgiven him, and that was the most astounding thing of all.
Why were you always forgiving him, Ma? He told her everything first — about you, about me, about the work he did and planned to do. He let you swim in darkness, and wonder at the vacant spaces, and ask yourself what mistakes you’d made. And then he left us. And you forgave him, Ma. You forgave him.