by Lyn Hamilton
So if not Jorge, what or whom? She will have to think of something, and soon. Señor Vargas, the landlord, despite his infatuation with her, is too much the businessman to let her stay for long without payment. She had better not open the door. She would kill Ramon, really she would, if he wasn’t dead already. Taking all their money—her money, really, he would never have made the arrangements on his own—when they were just beginning to get ahead, with the promise of more to come. And flying off to Canada! How exactly is she to pay to have his body shipped back home? Maybe she’ll leave him there. She won’t wear black for him, either. It doesn’t suit her. She’s meant for prettier things. Papa told her.
She sighs. There is only one answer. She’ll have to go and talk to the Man. She doesn’t like him: There is something about him that frightens her. But what choice does she have? After all, he owes her, doesn’t he? Without her pleading, Ramon would never have helped the Man with that little problem he had. Yes, that is the answer. She will go and see the Man.
The sun apparently does shine in Lima from time to time. I didn’t see it. For about nine months of the year, the city is blanketed in a grey pall that consists of mist from the sea, the garua, and pollution from millions of cars and factories. It is a damp, gritty greyness that bums your throat and lungs and eyes, and oozes its way into your soul.
Lima also, to my eyes at least, has the air of a city besieged. Every building, every parking lot, is watched by at least one guard, some of them 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, creamy peach, French vanilla, and café 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 with ambulantes, 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 comer; 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 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 Señora 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 turquoise Indian cotton blouse to go with it, a light cotton sweater, weatherproof jacket, and a pile of T-shirts. There was some utilitarian cotton underwear, including socks, a long T-shirt that would double as a nightie, a pair of sandals, running shoes, and work boots. I regarded the shoes and boots with unease. In my experience, shoes generally fall into one of three categories: almost comfortable, uncomfortable, and excruciating. At home there was a collection of footwear that would give Imelda Marcos pause, testament to an almost obsessive pursuit of the perfectly comfortable pair of shoes. I tried on the sandals and running shoes: They fell into the almost comfortable category, much to my relief. The boots I would leave until later.
Rebecca MacCrimmon was a bit older than I, forty-five to be precise, although with what I’d been through in the past few days, looking older than I was did not seem an insurmountable problem. She was, I decided, a bit of a hippy at heart, a child of the sixties who had not succumbed to the acquisitiveness and self-absorption that had overwhelmed many of our generation. Her T-shirts supported various ca
uses: The first urged one and all to save the rain forest; another, and this one brought a smile to my face, proclaimed archaeologists to be better lovers; the third asked the world to save the whales. I held the whale T-shirt up to me. It was clear my first purchase would be a new shirt. No one with my generous proportions, I decided, should ever have to wear a picture of a whale.
Money was a problem, of course. I couldn't be running out to replace my wardrobe. I had some cash, the equivalent of about $400, but I had no credit cards, the absence of which I felt keenly. Credit cards, I decided, had become my personal security blanket. I would have to be very careful with money, that was certain, but I would buy a new shirt nonetheless. Because, as it turned out, I had job prospects.
The letter I’d received on the plane told me that my application to work at an archaeological site in northern Peru was being seriously considered, and that I was to contact Dr. Stephen Neal, co-director of the project, on my arrival in Lima. The letter informed me that if I were the successful candidate, I would be expected to report for duty on August 28, two days hence. The letter said that my lodging and meals would be covered, but that unfortunately there were no funds available to pay a salary, however small. As compensation, however, there was the privilege of working with someone of the caliber of the other co-director, Dr. Hilda Schwengen, whoever that was. The signature on the letter was that of Stephen Neal, and a postscript added, much to my relief, that the successful candidate would also receive transportation to the site from Lima.
For a moment or two, as I sat in the cafe and waited to meet my soon-to-be employer, my attention was diverted by a crowd of uniformed schoolchildren, wearing red blazers and navy slacks and jumpers, on an outing in the square. “Ms. MacCrimmon, by any chance?” the voice asked, and for a moment I was about to say sorry, no.
I liked Steve Neal immediately. He had a kind of large, rumpled look, a warm handshake, a friendly and open face, with eyes that crinkled at the comers when he laughed, which he did a lot.
“Beer?” he asked as he sat down. “Dos cervezas, por favor,” he said to the waiter, as I nodded. “Pilsen Trujillo,” he added.
“So how do you like Lima so far?” he asked. “And how is Lucas? I hear he’s taken up politics. I suppose archaeology does tend to get a little political from time to time.” He laughed.
“Both Lucas and Lima are fine,” I replied, handing him the letter Lucas had given me for him. I waited while he read it. As I’d promised, I hadn’t looked at it, but my curiosity was piqued as Neal's eyebrows raised ever so slightly at one point in the text.
“Okay,” he said, carefully pouring his beer. “Let’s talk about the job.”
This was the moment I had been dreading. Lucas had done exactly what he said he would do. He had got me to Peru and had provided me with a way to get to Moche country. The rest was up to me. But I was certain the first question would be from which august institution of higher learning had I received my degree in archaeology or anthropology. My degree was in English. The second question would undoubtedly be, tell me what you know about the ancient cultures of the north coast of Peru.
Unfortunately, my experience in archaeology was limited to spending a few pleasant afternoons with Lucas on sites he was digging. He’d let me help with the work, under his supervision, but no one would ever call me an archaeologist.
As for the second topic: As recently as two weeks ago, I had only a passing interest in the ancient cultures of Peru, and that related solely to studies I had done a few years back on the Maya in Mexico and Central America. In a gesture that I knew was futile, I had spent the morning before my job interview dashing around Lima from museum to museum. The sum total of my knowledge to date was that there were a number of cultures that had inhabited the northern coastal desert of Peru long before the Inca and the Spanish conquest, including Chancay, Chimu, Chavin, Moche, and Lambayeque, but that, in my opinion, the Moche were the most brilliant craftspeople of them all. If anyone was capable of the artistry that made the little gold man I still carried with me, it was a Moche craftsman.
I had seen rooms of ceramics, textiles, and metalwork made by these peoples and had been quite overwhelmed by the artistry and technique they had shown. I had even seen rooms filled with Moche erotic ceramics, by and large couples in positions I can only describe as anatomically challenging. Some of these ceramics had depicted one member of the twosome as a death skull and skeleton. The guard on the room had told me this meant the Moche thought too much sex would kill you. The current status of my love life being what it was, I had decided this was not something I needed to spend much time worrying about.
As entertaining as my museum tour might have been, the point was that if I were asked the question, Can you tell late Moche from Lambayeque? the answer quite clearly was no.
The question Neal posed took me completely by surprise.
“I don’t suppose you know anything about running a business,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “Paying bills, wages, dealing with government authorities, that sort of thing? The point is, I’m an archaeologist, not a businessman, and all the organizational stuff I have to do is getting me down. I’ve got some really good lab people, good workers on the site, but no one to keep the whole show running smoothly.”
Did I know something about running a business? Of course I did. I’d been running my antiques and design business for about fifteen years, with only one interruption. I needed to approach this with a certain amount of caution, of course. I’d decided that the only way to survive as Rebecca MacCrimmon was to keep her background as close as possible to my own. That way, I would be less likely to get caught out in a contradiction. Rebecca was from Kansas; her driver’s license said so, and I had only passed through Kansas once. That one I would have to be very careful about. But running a business? Who was to say Rebecca MacCrimmon didn’t have business experience?
“I have a fair amount of business experience,” I replied carefully in my best Spanish. “I had my own business for a number of years. Retail. I sold furniture. I didn’t have a lot of staff, but I had some, and they always got paid. The bills did too. I am also accustomed to dealing with customs officials and agents, bankers, tax people, accountants, and shippers. I can honestly say that I never missed a shipping deadline through a fault of my own.” I paused. “Although I'll admit it was close a few times.” I laughed.
“You’re hired,” he said.
“I am?” I replied in surprise.
“Sure,” he said. “Your Spanish is good, Lucas says you can be trusted—trusted absolutely, actually—and you can take the work I hate off my hands. That’s good enough for me.” He laughed. “Lucas says in his letter he is asking me for a favor. Don’t tell him, but I think he may have been doing me one!
“You know the terms—transportation to the site, room and board once you get to the site. I know it’s not much. Will you do it? Do we have a deal?” he said, extending his hand across the table. I took it.
'”We have a deal. When do I start?”
He spread a map out on the table. “We’re working at a site here,” he said, pointing to what appeared to be a blank spot on the map, “between Trujillo and Chiclayo. Early to middle Moche site. Showing a lot of promise. The closest town is Campina Vieja.”
Good old Lucas, I thought: right to Campina Vieja. I must have started, though, because Neal hesitated for a few seconds before continuing. “You can fly to Trujillo, and then you’ll have to find the Vulkano bus station and take the Trujillo/Chiclayo bus. The buses run almost hourly, and they’ll stop at Campina Vieja if you ask them.
“I’m flying back to Trujillo tonight, so why don’t you fly out tomorrow sometime and have a look around Trujillo—there’s some interesting Moche and Chimu sites to see there—then take the bus the following morning. I’ll be in town for much of the day and I’ll keep an eye on the bus stop. Just sit yourself down on the bench if I’m not there when you arrive: I’ll be along and drive you out to the site. We’ve taken o
ver an old hacienda and set up operations there. You can meet the rest of the team, including the boss, Hilda, when you get there.
“Now let’s go and see about getting you an airline ticket,” he grinned, “before you change your mind. What do you prefer to be called, by the way?”
I almost made a mistake, I felt so relaxed in his presence, but I caught myself in time. As I hesitated he said, “Do you prefer Rebecca or something like Becky?”
“Rebecca,” I said. “Definitely Rebecca.”
After Neal and I had parted company, as the sun began its rapid descent into darkness, as it does this close to the equator, I paid a final visit to the place where, according to Rob Luczka, the man I had called Lizard, Ramon Cervantes, had lived. It had not been all that difficult tracking the place down, there being only one Ramon Cervantes listed in Callao. As I had on two previous occasions, I hailed a colectivo, that particularly Peruvian mode of public transit, a private minibus or van that plies a regular route, a sign in its front and side windows indicating its destination. In addition to the driver, there is an assistant who opens the sliding door and signals the number of empty seats with his fingers. The van barely stops to pick you up and drop you off, but it’s cheap, and it gets you there, weaving its way through Lima’s appalling traffic, pollution, and noise.
Ramon Cervantes, I was now certain, was not a wealthy man, living as he had on a dark little street in a part of Lima out near the airport that I would characterize as decidedly modest, a neighborhood that reeked of rancid cooking oil and thwarted aspirations. The streets, unlike many of the streets in the old part of central Lima, were paved, although badly rutted and potholed. Ramon had lived in a flat that one reached by going up a dark and dirty staircase running between a malodorous restaurant and an engine repair shop. At street level, the visitor was overwhelmed by the dinginess of the location, but if one stepped back, across the street, one could see, on the second floor, vestiges of Lima's colonial past in the large windows fronted by wrought iron railings, and the swirling plaster wreaths and garlands along the roofline above them. The shutters on the apartment to the left of the staircase were closed tight.
