An economist friend of mine said he could always tell how grim the situation was by keeping track of the hours hookers put in. He lived in Lince, near Avenida Arequipa, no more than ten blocks from that notorious strip that’s always highlighted on the Sunday television news magazines. In the early 1990s, he said, they didn’t appear on the streets till eight or eight-thirty, and disappeared by four. As the crisis deepened, prostitutes worked longer hours, choosing their corners as early as six and staying until the beginnings of the morning rush. A full twelve hours, my friend said, smiling, just like the rest of us.
I recalled this conversation because there in the plaza, just after noon, a middle-aged woman with dyed blond hair was putting in her time too. She was thick and square, her exact age hidden beneath layers of makeup. The meat of her thighs pressed against the fabric of her skirt. Hookers working day shifts, I thought with a laugh, and wondered if my friend could theorize about that level of misery, and then wondered for a moment if he too had been laid off, and if so, what his plans were. Or did he, like me, have none? I watched the woman, her forced coquettish smiles. She perked up pathetically when she saw me glancing at her. I turned away. She’d do better business at dusk, I thought, not in the bright glare of midday.
I was — and I can’t explain why exactly — moved by the sight of her. I make no claims to altruism, or to a generosity beyond what is humane and decent. Only this: I felt that something special was in order, something that might make the city more livable, less cruel, softer. It is something maybe any father would feel, on his daughter’s birthday or on any day when that child you love helplessly is present in your thoughts, and you wonder what you can do for them or for the world they will inherit. I am also a man whose actions do not always conform to any logic. Sonia used to call me the King of the Desert because of my admiration of the grandiose. I have read history. The hopeless acts of our Peruvian heroes are beautiful in their way, even triumphant. I know our traditions.
We’ve all had our troubles. My father flirted with bankruptcy for decades before finally giving in. He owned a little bookshop in Miraflores, had flush times and then bad times and then worse times. He sold calendars and notebooks and dictionaries and pencils, and also the classics in leather-bound volumes. By the time the business went under, I was already at the public university and somewhat insulated from my family’s troubles. He took work as a cabbie and died a few years after the bank had foreclosed on him. I started helping with an uncle who delivered Mary Kay cosmetics to pharmacies around Lima. We worked the city end to end. This is how I learned to fear poverty.
I bought a handful of bananas, gave up my spot in line, and walked toward the prostitute. She stood under the awning of a photo store, next to a leathery old man selling newspapers spread on a blanket. She saw me coming and smiled. I held my bananas out for her and said hello.
“Hello,” she said, smiling conspiratorially. Her face was broad and bronzed by the summer sun. Three freckles dotted her left cheek and rose in unison when she smiled. She looked at her naked wrist. “Is it time, baby?” she asked coyly. “Already?”
“Yes,” I said awkwardly.
She frowned, then caught herself. She was younger than I had first thought, not quite forty yet.
I held out the bananas. They were streaked with black. She took the bruised fruit and stroked the length of one of the bananas.
“Ooh, kinky,” she said, still smiling. “Do you like kinky, flaco?”
The corner was draped in white light. Her faux-blond hair shone carmine against the black roots, then orange, a shifting shade each time she turned her head. With her red fingernails, she pulled one of the bananas from the rest and peeled it lazily, wearing an alternately pained and then delighted expression. She asked me if I liked it. Her three freckles danced.
The blood boiled hot in my ears. I mumbled an apology. She looked at me, uncomprehending, and continued to mime sexy for me, as if by sheer persistence she could arouse me.
There are moments — and I’ve learned to recognize them — when something that previously seemed quite reasonable, even kind, is revealed to be profoundly stupid. Time stops, words peter out, thoughts shrivel and collapse upon themselves. I’d done this before. Misguided acts of charity. Sometimes I am right and other times I am wrong. I’m never exactly sure what seemingly good idea might entrance me.
An instant later, a police officer had joined our discussion.
“What’s going on here?”
“Este pendejo,” the woman began, and I knew that whatever she told him would mean bad things for me. She rambled. I had propositioned her, she said, and that wasn’t her line of work. It was an insult to her dignity. She was a mother of two and a Christian, she said, pointing at the silver cross that hung in the curve between her breasts. I had been dirty, had insinuated acts that went against nature. She held the bananas up as evidence of my perverse appetites. “I’m only glad you came when you did,” she said to the officer. “There’s no telling what he might have done.”
It was a disgusting display. A middle-aged woman, with children back at the hovel she called home, hooking on a hot February afternoon and turning a simple gift into an excommunicable offense. The cop smelled a shakedown and could barely contain his glee. He sized me up. I hadn’t lost the habit of wearing a suit every day. He must have thought I had money. He dismissed the hooker with a nod and a pat on the ass. She sauntered off, turning only to scowl at me. Halfway down the block she let a banana peel slip from her hands into the gutter.
The cop smiled openly now, treacherously. He ran his hands through his oily hair and grabbed me by the arm. His untrimmed fingernails dug into my bicep.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
Sonia was a student of mine at an admissions prep institute. By the time she had failed the exam the second time, we were already lovers. A year later, at twenty-one, she was pregnant with Mayra. We were unmarried with no intentions. In fact, I never had the chance to ask her. In the same breath she told me she was pregnant and too young to be married. I had just turned twenty-nine and felt too young as well. A scandal ensued. Our parents, who despised each other, met to negotiate. They decided to force us to marry. Decency and decorum were invoked. I went home every night to be berated for my irresponsibility. Sonia was threatened with trials of all kinds. The brutish and short life of our bastard child was described for us in vivid, apocalyptic detail.
One day her father, Mr. Sepulveda, called and said he wanted to speak with me man to man. I came at the appointed hour, nervous in my best suit. I was prepared to be bent and pressured, my will molded anew, certain I would cave. Sonia’s mother let me in and asked me to sit. The room was so still and silent I could hear the dust motes settling on the plastic couch covers. Mr. Sepulveda appeared, carrying a tray with two glasses of rum and Coke. He nodded and sat, raising his glass in my direction, before sipping his drink. “A toast,” he said obscurely, “to love and to the sea.”
“Well,” he said, after a sufficiently long pause. “You really fucked up, didn’t you?”
“Sir?”
“Did you suppose I asked you here to offer my congratulations?” He shook his head, as if answering his own question, then raised his arms, addressing the ceiling, or perhaps the heavens themselves. “Who am I to blame for all this?”