|
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
armed. Restaurants have guards to watch over patrons cars while they dine; a
home with even the slightest hint, a mere whiff of wealth, has a
twenty-four-hour civilian guard. Children are escorted to and from school.
And there is something to fear, make no mistake about it. Terrorists, for
example; internationally prominent, like Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path,
and another, named for an Inca leader, Tupac Amaru, responsible for the
occasional bombings, hostage takings, and other acts of terrorism. But perhaps
even more frightening than terrorists are the desperate, the millions of poor
and unemployed who left their homes in the countryside to come to the city in
search of a better life, only to find themselves worse off, by far, living in
wretched shantytowns on the outskirts of the city, without water, sewage
treatment, or electricity.
Perhaps to compensate, Limenos have painted their city the most astonishing
hues, colors to banish the greyness and anxiety: sienna, burnt umber, cobalt,
and the purest ultramarine, and shades the color of ice cream, soft pistachio,
Page 65
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
creamy peach, French vanilla, and cafe au lait.
The central square in every Peruvian town, and Lima is no exception, is
called the Plaza de Armas. In Lima, the plaza is a striking yellow ochre
broken only by the grey stone of the governor s palace and the intricately
carved wood casement windows on the buildings surrounding the square. And like
every Plaza de Armas, it is a hive of activity, filled withambulantes, people
who come in from the shantytowns to hawk candy and drinks on the sidewalks;
money changers with their calculators and wads of bills, giggling schoolgirls
weighing themselves, for a small fee, on scales on the corner; street cleaners
dressed head to toe in brilliant orange, stooping and sweeping in an almost
compulsive rhythm the hustle and bustle of everyday life in the city.
A large statue of the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro on horseback once graced the
center of the square. Spain, its lust for gold and empire unsated by
successful conquests in the more northern Americas, sent Pizarro to bring the
mighty Inca Empire to its knees, a stroke of history that earned him his
position of honor in the Plaza de Armas. As the saying goes,sic transit Gloria
mundi: Pizarro s horse s rear faced the cathedral. The Church was not amused,
and so Pizarro and his horse were relegated to a small side square just off
one corner of the plaza. Now it is the inhabitants of the building that bears
the conqueror s name and the patrons of the cafe at street level who get to
look up the backside of Pizarro s horse.
I was in that cafe for what amounted to a job interview, unbelievable though
that seemed to me. I was to meet someone by the name of Stephen Neal,
archaeologist and former classmate of Lucas s. I d spoken to him briefly on
the telephone, and we d arranged to meet. He sounded pleasant enough on the
phone, but I had no idea what he looked like. To facilitate our meeting, he d
told me he had fair hair, what was left of it, and a beard. I had been about
to tell him I was a strawberry blonde when I caught myself. Brown, I d told
him, my hair is brown. Being someone else required, I found, eternal
vigilance.
Who was Rebecca MacCrimmon? I wondered. Did she really exist? If she did, did
she look like me, or at least like the person pale skin almost transparent
against the dark brown hair that I had really seen for the first time, stared
at length at, in the mirror of the tiny, run-down but clean hotel off the
Plaza San Martin? If she was a real person, was she still alive, her passport
and driver s license taken like mine, or lost perhaps, in some Mexican
adventure, then put to other uses? Or was she dead, her identity transferred
to me after her demise? No stranger to adventure, I had never felt like this
before, cut off from something so personal, so basic, as my name.
It was a disorienting experience in a way I cannot describe, and yet somehow
oddly liberating. Rebecca didn t have bills to pay, meetings to go to, and,
more importantly, she didn t have an ex-husband she still had rather
ambivalent feelings about, who d had the bad taste to open a shop right across
the road from her. She wasn t slowly going bankrupt, and best of all, neither
she nor any of her friends were being investigated in a murder case, nor was
Page 66
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
she being pursued by a cold-blooded killer.
On the other hand, it did have its hazards. I d assured the airline personnel
that I had, indeed, packed my own bag and it had never left my sight, a
statement that was patently untrue, and one that constituted a leap of faith
in Lucas and his compatriots that left me breathless. What if a security guard
asked me to describe its contents? I had no idea what it contained. I was
nervous as I cleared immigration on my way out of Mexico, then again as I
entered Peru. Would they catch me with some seemingly innocuous question about
my life? Even my clothes felt as if they would betray me, although the jeans
and the denim shirt fit just fine.
On the plane, I sat, eyes squeezed tightly shut, my hands gripping the seat
arms, reciting over and over in my mind, like some feverish mantra, my new
name, my birth date, my home. I pretended to sleep, too nervous to eat, and
unwilling to hold a conversation with my seatmate, lest I betray myself in
some way. When, as the plane began its descent into Lima, the flight attendant
touched my arm, calling me Senora MacCrimmon and handing me an envelope, my
heart leapt into my mouth.
But then there I was in my little hotel room, clean and tidy but threadbare.
I circled the bed looking at the suitcase which lay there unopened, like
someone else s abandoned bag turning endlessly on an otherwise empty baggage
carousel. Inside was the new me: another pair of jeans, two pairs of khaki
mid-thigh length shorts, an Indian cotton skirt in blacks, aquas, and rose, a
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plmew.pev.pl
|