“We’re brother countries,” Fredy said.
“We share border and history,” said Wari.
The Ecuadorian was all obsequious smiles, spoke of the peace treaty that was signed only a few years before. Wari played along, shook Fredy’s hand vigorously until Leah seemed at ease with her mistake. Then she and Fredy talked business, haggling in a teasing way that seemed more like flirting, and of course Leah won. When this was finished, she excused herself, and drifted away to the other stands, leaving Wari and Fredy alone.
When she was out of earshot, Fredy turned to Wari. “Don’t ask me for work, compadre,” he said, frowning. “It’s hard enough for me.”
Wari was taken aback. “Who asked you for work? I’ve got work, cholo.”
“Sure you do.”
Wari ignored him, inspected the table laid out with small olive forks bent into ridiculous earrings. At the other end, there were black-and-white photos of Andean peaks, silvery and snowcapped, and others of ruined fortresses of stone and colonial churches. The scenes were devoid of people: landscapes or buildings or scattered rocks carved by Incas, unified by their uninhabited emptiness. “There’s no people,” Wari said.
“They emigrated,” sneered Fredy.
“This shit sells?”
“Good enough.”
“That’s my girl, you know,” Wari said all of a sudden, and he liked the tone of the lie, the snap of it, and the way the Ecuadorian looked up, surprised.
“The gringa?”
“Yeah.”
“I bet she is,” said Fredy.
Then two customers appeared, a young woman with her boyfriend. Fredy switched to English, heavily accented but quite acceptable, and pointed to various objects, suggesting earrings that matched the woman’s skin tone. She tried on a pair, Fredy dutifully held the mirror up for her, her distracted boyfriend checking out the photos. Wari wondered where Leah had gone off to. The woman turned to him. “What do you think?” she asked, looking back and forth between Wari and Fredy.
“Is very nice,” Wari said.
“Like a million bucks,” said Fredy.
“Where’s this from?” she asked, fingering the lapis lazuli stone.
“Peru,” said Wari.
Fredy shot him a frown. “From the Andes,” he said.
“Trev,” she called to her boyfriend. “It’s from Peru! Isn’t it nice?”
She pulled out a twenty and Fredy made change. He wrapped the earrings in tissue paper and handed her a card. The couple walked away, chatting. Wari and Fredy didn’t speak.
Leah reappeared and Wari made sure to touch her, thoughtlessly, as if it meant nothing at all. He could feel Fredy watching them, studying each of their movements. “Did you tell Fredy about your opening?” she asked Wari.
He shook his head. “So modest,” Leah said and filled in the details and, to his delight, exaggerated its importance and weight. Wari felt like a visiting dignitary, someone famous.
Wari put his arm around Leah. She didn’t stop him. Fredy said it would be difficult to make it.
“Okay, but maybe?” she asked.
“Please come,” added Wari, not worrying about his pronunciation.
Leaving is no problem. It’s exciting actually; in fact, it’s drug. It’s the staying gone that will kill you. This is the handed-down wisdom of the immigrant. You hear it from the people who wander home, after a decade away. You hear about the euphoria that passes quickly; the new things that lose their newness and, soon after, their capacity to amuse you. Language is bewildering. You tire of exploring. Then the list of things you miss multiplies beyond all reason, nostalgia clouding everything: in memory, your country is clean and uncorrupt, the streets are safe, the people universally warm, and the food consistently delicious. The sacred details of your former life appear and reappear in strange iterations, in a hundred waking dreams. Your pockets fill with money, but your heart feels sick and empty.
Wari was prepared for all this.
In Lima, he rounded up a few friends and said his good-byes. Tentative, equivocal good-byes. Good-byes over drinks, presented as jokes, gentle laughter before the poof and the vanishing — that Third World magic. I may be back, he told everyone, or I may not. He moved two boxes of assorted possessions into the back room of his parents’ house. He took a few posters off the walls, covered the little holes with Wite-Out. He encouraged his mother to rent out his room for extra money if he didn’t come home in a month. She cried, but just a little. His brother wished him luck. Wari offered a toast to family at Sunday dinner and promised to come home one day soon. He embraced his father and accepted the crisp $100 bill the old man slipped into his hand. And in the last days before leaving, Wari and Eric exchanged feverish e-mails, ironing out the fine points of the exhibit: the exact size of the canvases, the translated bio, the press release. All the formalities of a real opening, but for Wari, it was so much noise and chatter. The only solid things for him were the ticket and the runway and the plane and the obligatory window seat for a last, fading view of Lima. The desert purgatory, the approaching northern lights.
I’m ready, he thought.
And if no one questioned him, it’s because the logic was self-evident. What would he do there? How long could he live at home? A divorced painter, sometime teacher — what does an artist do in a place like that? In America, you can sweep floors and make money, if you’re willing to work — you are willing to work, aren’t you, Wari?
Yes, I am.
At anything? Outdoor work? Lifting, carting, cleaning?
Anything.
And that was it. What other questions were there? He’d be fine.
Only his mother gave voice to any concerns. “Is it about Elie?” she asked a few days before he traveled. Wari had been expecting this question. Elie, his ex-wife, whom he loved and whom he hated. At least there were no children to grow up hating him. Wari was relieved it was over, believed she must be as well.
“No, Ma,” he said. “It has nothing to do with her.”
So his mother smiled and smiled and smiled.
In Eric’s apartment, Wari daydreamed. He dressed up the lie about Leah. He lay on the couch, composing e-mails about her to his friends back home, describing the shape of her body, the colors of her skin. The solution to his fourteen-day quandary: marry her and stay, marry her and go. Marry her and it would be all the same. He imagined falling in love in monosyllables, in nods and smiles and meaningful gestures. Telling Leah the story of his life in pictograms: His modest family home. The drab, charcoal colors of his native city. His once-happy marriage and its dissolving foundations, crumbling from the inside into a perfect parody of love. It was early afternoon and Leah readied herself for a wait-ressing job. The shower ran. Through the thin walls he could hear the sound of the water against her body. Her light brown hair went dark when it was wet. He closed his eyes and pictured her naked body. Then Elie’s. Wari turned on the television, let its noise fill the living room. Almost a year from the attacks, and the inevitable replays had begun. He changed the channel, his mind wandered: Fredy on a train home to his Chinese wife, wondering if what Wari had boasted of was true. Elie, somewhere in Lima, not even aware he was gone. Leah, in the shower, not thinking of him. On every channel, buildings collapsed in clouds of dust, and Wari watched on mute, listening hopefully to Leah’s water music.
Wari rapped twice on the wooden door. This was years ago. “Chola,” he called to the woman who would be his wife. “Chola, are you there?”
But Elie wasn’t there. She’d left the music on loud to discourage burglars. She lived in Magdalena, a crumbling district by the sea, in a neighborhood of stereos playing loudly in empty apartments. Fourteen-year-old kids cupped joints in their palms and kept a lookout for cops. They played soccer in the streets and tossed pebbles at the moto-taxis. Wari knocked again. “She ain’t home,” someone called from the street. Wari knew she wasn’t, but he wanted to see her. He wanted to kiss her and hold her and tell her his good news.