Pacazo Read Online Free PDF

the floor.
    For a time I watch the birds and watch my daughter watch them. I love the attention she pays them, but do not understand the nature of the noises she makes—she is imitating or calling to them, or possibly giving orders. Then I take up the newspaper.
    Most of the papers here devote themselves to sports and extraterrestrials and nearly naked women. Their headlines are scandalous, or would be if the editors were not so inventive. Ass, tits, pussy: new words for them are created each week and abandoned the next for other, newer words.
    El Tiempo should in theory be more useful. It is Piura’s non-tabloid newspaper, named for time and tense, yes, and also for weather. Today there are stories about the earthquake and the plane crash, a burglary at a paint store, a protest against rising gasoline prices. First page to last, and nothing. The photographs now, all faces foreground and background. Nothing. A third time to look for code-shift or tic, for any gap showing through to the unwritten or unpublished or both, and this is useless, is driving nails with a screwdriver, and of course again nothing, like yesterday, like all other days.
    I am or was an above-average carpenter. Many people find this surprising.
    Mariángel has made her way to the tree, sits in the dead leaves at the base of the trunk. She stares up and speaks to the birds, tips over backwards, rights herself slowly. The birds ignore her, flit to the top of the wall as Casualidad comes out the back door bearing a basket of laundry, return to the branches when she turns for the lavadero.
    Casualidad sets some of the clothes to soak in the new galvanized tub at her feet. The rest she scrubs piece by piece and most often her eye patch is beige but today it is blue. She hums as she scrubs, a single note, sharpening and flattening from time to time but never enough to reach the next note up or down. She knows the names of most species of birds, hates all of them equally, chases them from the yard unless I am present and watching, and what little I know is inexplicable: thirty years ago a hummingbird flew straight into her face, and its beak plunged into her eye, almost deep enough to touch her brain.
    I have never otherwise heard of a hummingbird doing such a thing, but I have no reason to doubt what she has told me, and her real name is not Casualidad. It is Pilar. The day I hired her away from the university cleaning staff, I told her that I needed something else to call her as my wife’s name was the same and I wished to avoid confusion. She said, Qué casualidad. I smiled and thanked her—in addition to Lady Diana I have had students named Conception and Welcome and Hitler, so Coincidence did not seem too strange a name. Then a few weeks ago her son, Fermín, who comes twice a month to tend the yard, asked why I called her that. She said that it made no difference and told him to watch where he was watering. For several days I tried calling her Pilar, but it was an impossible thing.
    Fermín is twelve but looks ten except for his gaze. Casualidad lifts the patch to wash the sweat from her face, and I catch a glimpse: the iris and pupil are covered by a layer of tissue that glows opalescent. She turns off the water and dries her hands on her apron. I call to her, ask if she knows what these small brown birds are called.
    - Arrozeros, she says. If they could choose, they would eat nothing but rice. They will even come into the kitchen if you leave a bowl uncovered. It is a mistake I will never make again.
    I tell her that there is nothing to worry about, and ask about her meeting with Fermín’s teacher.
    - It is not a serious problem, she says. Only that he will not speak in class.
    In most senses she is the best maid I have ever had, though lately she is moving more slowly, and yesterday I found four clean plates stacked in the refrigerator. When I ask, which is not often, she says that she is happy working for me, would not want to work for anyone else.