Pacazo Read Online Free PDF Page A

sharp sound, metal striking stone, and I sit up. Nothing more comes. I settle back into the crater. A hospital room, a beautiful brunette flatlining, and a much older woman crying into a handkerchief. The hillock, surrounded. Half the Spaniards are wounded. I close my eyes and they know they will die in the morning. No one bothers to unsaddle the horses, and no one sleeps. I pick at the scabs on my forehead. My mother asks me to stop. Then a new sound. The Spaniards listen, unbelieving, but yes: a trumpet.
    Almagro and thirty cavalry, says the narrator, sent ahead by Pizarro not to rescue Soto but to slow him down. The trumpeter in question is Pedro de Alconchel. He is not in fact calling to Soto, is unaware of the vanguard’s position, means only to halt his own party for the night. Soto’s trumpeter answers from the hillock. This is Juan de Segovia, says the narrator. It takes me a moment, but yes, of course yes, a form of my own name. I look back at my parents. My mother, expressionless. My father stares at his hands.
    Soto and Almagro embrace. At dawn the Spaniards mount. The Incas stare. The Spaniards set their lances. The Incas whisper to one another. The Spaniards attack, and the warriors who hold their ground are ridden down, and those who run are saved by the fog that comes to hide them.
    I open my eyes. A funeral, a chase, men beaten with bouquets. The battle is done and blood trickles bright down the side of Soto’s face. I twitch, shift in the crater, and my father clears his throat, tells me that conquistador blood runs in my veins.
    It is not the kind of thing I would ever have imagined him saying. I ask him to repeat it and he nods. Juan de Segovia? he says. Your ancestor. We named you after him.
    Unfeasible—my luck has never been that good—but needed. My mother will not look away from the set. My father, too, again focused on the program. I get up, sit on the couch between them, watch as the Spaniards take Cuzco and replace the Inca empire with their own. Neither of the trumpeters is ever mentioned again.
    The beautiful blonde woman is now asleep in bed. The handsome man opens one eye, looks over at her, draws back the covers. To the best of anyone’s knowledge Juan de Segovia died before fathering any children, is thus the ancestor of no one and Mariángel wakes crying. She pauses for breath and I wait. She cries again and I go, find her arm caught between the mattress and the side of her crib. I free her, calm her, hold her until she sleeps. Then I go to the bathroom and masturbate to a memory of the woman and her knife.
    Back to the couch. Find the remote, flick through the possibilities, stop at an old movie. Cantinflas rides his motorcycle in tight circles, spins to face backward, stands on the seat, on the handlebars, anything to impress the captain and win a spot on the motorized unit.
    I have seen this movie before, do not remember what it is called, and this morning on my way to work I saw five people riding a single motorcycle. A baby about Mariángel’s age was sitting on the gas tank, a middle-aged man was steering, and behind him were a middle-aged woman, a thin young girl, and a boy about five years old. It was not a large motorcycle, but the people looked happy. I flip through the other channels. When I hear the bell of the garbage truck, and the grunts of the workers as they sling bags into the air, it will be time to go to bed.
     
     

3.
    MY PATIO CHAIRS ARE VAST, hemp and rebar, delightful, and there are small birds in my almond tree. The birds are mainly brown. I have seen them many times before but do not know what they are called.
    Mariángel sits on the tiled floor beside me. She stares up at the awning, then out at the birds, points as they all take sudden flight. She looks at me to make sure I saw them too and I lift her onto my lap, say that of course I saw, that the birds were outstanding, and already they are back in the tree. Mariángel wriggles away, takes a seat again on