War by Candlelight: Stories

city of clowns

When I got to the hospital that morning, I found my mother mopping floors. My old man had died the night before and left an outstanding bill for her to deal with. They’d had her working through the night. I settled the debt with an advance the paper had given me. I told her I was sorry and I was. Her face was swollen and red, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She introduced me to a tired, sad-looking black woman. “This is Carmela,” she said. “Your father’s friend. Carmela was mopping with me.” My mother looked me in the eye, as if I was supposed to interpret that. I did. I knew exactly who the woman was.

“Oscarcito? I haven’t seen you since you were this big,” Carmela said, touching the middle of her thigh. She reached for my hand, and I gave it to her reluctantly. Something in that comment bothered me, confused me. When had I ever seen her? I couldn’t believe she was standing there in front of me.

At the velorio, I picked out my half brothers. I counted three. For twelve years I had insulated myself from my old man’s other life — since he left us, right after my fourteenth birthday. Carmela had been his lover, then his common-law wife. Petite, cocoa colored with blue-green eyes, she was prettier than I had imagined. She wore a simple black dress, nicer than my mother’s. We didn’t say much, but she smiled at me, glassy-eyed, as she and my mother took turns crying and consoling each other. No one had foreseen the illness that brought my father down.

Carmela’s sons were my brothers, that much was clear. There was an air of Don Hugo in all of us: the close-set eyes, the long arms and short legs. They were younger than me, the oldest maybe seventeen, the youngest about eleven. I wondered whether I should approach them, knew, in fact, that as the oldest I should. I didn’t. Finally, at the insistence of our mothers, we shook hands. “Oh, the reporter,” the oldest one said. He had my old man’s smile. I tried to project some kind of authority over them — based on age, I guess, or the fact that they were black, or that I was the real son — but I don’t think it worked. My heart wasn’t in it. They touched my mother with those light, careless touches that speak of a certain intimacy, as if she were a beloved aunt, not the supplanted wife. Even she belonged to them now. Their grief was deeper than mine. Being the firstborn of the real marriage meant nothing at all; these people were, in the end, Don Hugo’s true family.

At the paper the next day, I didn’t mention my father’s death to anyone but the obituary guy, whom I asked to run a notice for me, as a favor to my mother. “Is he a relative?” he asked, his voice noncommittal.

“Friend of the family. Help me out, will you?” I handed him a scrap of paper:

Hugo Uribe Banegas, native of Cerro de Pasco, passed into eternal life this past February 2 at the Dos de Mayo Hospital in Lima. A good friend and husband, he is survived by Doña Marisol Lara de Uribe. May he rest in peace.

I left myself and my brothers out of it. Carmela too. They could run their own obituary, if they wanted, if they could afford it.

In Lima, dying is the local sport. Those who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD. I don’t work at that kind of newspaper, but if I did, I would write those headlines too. Like my father, I never refuse work. I’ve covered drug busts, double homicides, fires at discos and markets, traffic accidents, bombs in shopping centers. I’ve profiled corrupt politicians, drunken has-been soccer players, artists who hate the world. But I’ve never covered the unexpected death of a middle-aged worker in a public hospital. Mourned by his wife. His child. His other wife. Her children.

My father’s dying was not news. I knew this, and there was no reason for it to be surprising or troubling. It wasn’t, in fact. At the office, I typed my articles and was not bothered by his passing. But that afternoon Villacorta sent me out to do research on clowns, for a Sunday feature on street performers he’d assigned me a few weeks earlier. It may have been the mood I was in, but the idea of it made me sad: clowns with their absurd and artless smiles, their shabby, outlandish clothes. I’d walked only a few blocks when I felt inexplicably assaulted by loss. In the insistent noise of the streets, in the cackling voice of a DJ on the radio, in the glare of the summer sun, it was as if Lima were mocking me, ignoring me, thrusting her indifference at me. A heavyset woman sold red and blond wigs from a wooden cart. A tired clown rested on the curb, cigarette between his lips, and asked me for a light. I didn’t have the heart to interview him. The sun seemed to pass straight through me. My tiny family had been dissolved into another grouping, one in which I had no part.

In Lima, my father had settled on construction. He built offices, remodeled houses. He was good with a hammer, could paint and spackle, put up a wall in four hours. He was a plumber and locksmith. A carpenter and welder. When offered a job, he always answered in the same way. “I’ve done it many times,” he’d reassure a contractor while examining a tool he’d never seen before in his life. As a child, I admired my father and his hard work. Progress was something you could measure in our neighborhood: how fast the second floor of your house rose, how quickly you acquired the accoutrements of middle-class life. During the week, he worked on other people’s homes; on weekends, he worked on ours. Hard work paid off. We inaugurated a new stereo with a Hector Lavoe tape. We watched the ’85 Copa América on a fancy color television.

It was not all that transparent, of course. My father was vivo, quick to understand the essential truth of Lima: if there is money to be made, it must be bled from these stone and concrete city blocks. Some win and some lose, and there are ways to tilt the odds. He was charming, and he did good work, but he was always, always looking out for himself.

He was too restless to survive back home. Pasco, where he and my mother and I were born, is neither city nor country. It is isolated and poor, high on a cold Andean puna, but in a very specific way, it is urban: its concept of time is mechanized, and no one is spared by capitalism’s ticking clock. Pasco is not pastoral or agricultural. Men descend into the earth for ten-hour shifts. Their schedule is monotonous, uniform. They emerge — in the morning, the afternoon, or the evening — and start drinking. The work is brutal and dangerous, and in time, their life above ground begins to resemble life below: the miners take chances, they drink, they cough and expel a tarry black mucous. The color of money, they call it, and buy another round of drinks.

My old man wasn’t suited to those rituals. Instead he started driving trucks to the coast and into the city. He was twenty-nine when he married my mother, nearly a decade older than his young wife. He’d spent most of his twenties working in Lima, coming back only once every three or four months. Somehow a romance blossomed on his trips home. By the time they married, they’d been a couple for five years already, most of that time apart. I was born six months after the wedding. He went on coming and going for years, making a home for himself in the city, in the district of San Juan de Lurigancho. When my mother would no longer tolerate being left alone, he brought us here too.

That was, I think, the only good thing he did for us. Or for me. When I remember Pasco, that cold high plain, its thin air and sinking houses, I’m grateful to be here. I grew up in Lima. I went to university and landed a respectable job. There is no future in Pasco. Kids don’t study and anyway, are taught almost nothing. They inhale glue from brown-paper bags or get drunk in the weak morning light before school. In Lima, the skyline changes, a new building goes up, or one comes crashing down. It’s gritty and dangerous, but the city persists. In Pasco, the very mountains move: they’re gutted from the inside, stripped of their ore, carted away and reassembled. To see the earth move this way, to know that somehow, everyone you live with is an accomplice to this act; it’s too unsettling, too unreal.

I was eight when we moved. My father was a stranger, it seemed, even to my mother. They held hands on the bus to Lima, and I slept in her lap, even though I was too old for that. It was early January; we left Pasco iced over, the syncopated drumming of hail falling on its metal roofs. We watched the speckled orange lights fade behind us, and when I woke up it was dawn and we were pulling into the station in Lima. “There are bad people here,” my old man warned us. “Be mosca, Chino. You’re an hombrecito now. You have to take care of your mother.”

I’d been to the city before, two years earlier, though I scarcely remembered it. My father had come home to Pasco one day and carried me off for three weeks. He’d led me through the city, pointing at the important buildings; he’d shown me the movement of the streets. I remember my mother telling me that at age six I was already more traveled than she was. Now she held my hand as the world swirled around us, and I watched my old man push his way through the men at the open door of the bus’s baggage hold. It was just after dawn. They elbowed and pushed one another, the crowd swelling this way and that, and my father, who was not tall or particularly strong, disappeared into the center of it. My mother and I waited. I stared down a mustachioed man who was circling us, his greedy eyes tugging at the bag my mother had wedged between us. Then there was yelling: one man pushed another, accusing him of trying to steal his packages. The accuser had a foot planted firmly on top of one of his boxes. It was taped, a name and address printed on one side.

“Oye compadre, que chucha quieres con mis cosas?”

“Ah? Perdón, tío, my mistake.”

The second man was my father. It was an accident, he protested. Packages look alike. My father’s long arms were bent, palms up, a charmless shrug. But the older man was furious, his face red and his fists clenched. “No mierda, aquí no hay errores. Thief!” The other men pulled them apart; in the blur of it, my father grinned at me, and I realized that we’d brought only bags, no boxes.

In front of the Congress, along Avenida Abancay, a protest had spilled off the sidewalk, and traffic was stalled for five city blocks. The protesters were construction workers or telephone workers or obstetricians. Social movements, like all predators, sense weakness: the president was teetering; half his cabinet had resigned. But on the street it still looked like Lima, beautiful, disgraced Lima, unhappy and impervious to change. I’d been to a press conference in the suburbs and was on a bus headed to the city. The air was sticky and as thick as soup. A svelte policewoman in her beige uniform directed cars east, through the miniature streets of Barrios Altos, where cramped quintas fell in on each other, where kids laced up their cheap sneakers, scanning the slow-moving traffic for an opportunity. The day before, there had been robberies, entire buses shaken down at a red light, and we were all tense, bags clutched tightly against our chests. It was the first week of carnival, and everyone from age five to fifteen (which, in Barrios Altos, is nearly everyone) was in the streets carrying water balloons, menacing, eager. The dilemma we faced was which way to suffer.

“Oye, chato. Close the window.”

“Estas loco. It’s too hot.”

The tug-of-war began, between those who were willing to accept the risk of theft or pranks in order to counter the oppressive heat, and those who were not. The driver strained against his homemade seat belt. Windows opened and closed, pulled and pushed from all sides, and on the sidewalks, youths salivated, hands in buckets, kneading water balloons as if they were their best friend’s girlfriend’s tits. Then it came from everywhere at once: from the narrows between crumbling buildings, and from the roofs as well, kids tossing overhand and underhand, unloading balloons two at a time. Water splashed through the cracked windows. The sidewalks glistened, littered with the exploded insides of red and green and white balloons. The primary target, I soon realized, was not our bus, or any bus, or, as is often the case, a young woman in a white shirt. Instead, on the sidewalk, dodging water balloons, there was a clown.

He was a vender, a traveling salesman, a poor working clown. He’d stepped off a bus and found himself in the crosshairs of a hundred children. He was struggling to get his bearings. He tucked his head into his chest so that his multicolored wig bore the brunt of the attack, strands of pink and red sagging beneath the soaking. He had nowhere to go: a step forward, a step back, a step to the wall, a step to the curb — he danced clumsily in his big clown shoes, the balloons raining on him. There was laughter on our bus, laughter that built community: passengers emerged from their private meditations to point and laugh and ridicule. Ah Lima! The clown looked up helplessly, his suit clung to him. The chorus came from the children; to the staccato rhythm of bursting balloons and impatient horns, they sang: Payaso mojado! Payaso mojado! Our driver tapped his horn along to it; we crept forward ever so slightly. Wet clown, the children sang, to the tune of an old Alianza Lima chant. Then the ticket collector, moved by pity, opened the door and pulled the clown in. We fell silent.

He dripped on the corrugated metal floor of our bus, his white face paint running, crinkled pink hairs sticking to his cheeks. It had colored his neck, had stained his clown collar. He made me want to cry, this poor clown, this pathetic specimen of Limeño. Hermano! Causa! The bus didn’t move, and then it did. The volley of balloons receded. And then, in the uncomfortable silence, disheveled though he was, the clown went to work. He reached into an inside pocket and took out a large plastic bag of mints. Tiny drops of water slipped off the bag. “Señores y Señoras, Damas y Caballeros,” he proclaimed. “I’m here today to offer you a new product, a product you may never have seen before. Developed with the newest and most refined technology in European mint processing…”

We could still hear the protest on the west side of the Congressional building. Wooden spoons against pots, a dull metallic complaint, rhythmless, the thick voice of the people with their unfocused rage. The disgruntled and disaffected threw stones and burned tires and scattered through the antique streets of the city. The clown in his plastic clown voice tried to sell us mints, his smile a force of will.

The newsroom swarmed with activity; a presidential pronouncement on the economy had set everyone to work. There were rumors: a cabinet member had fled the country. I didn’t pay much attention. I left the office early and went to San Juan to see my mother. I took a copy of the paper to show her the obituary, a peace offering of sorts.

San Juan, my old street: the same crooked tree casting thin shadows in the vanishing light of dusk. I’d been living downtown for six years, but I recognized some faces. Don Segundo, from the restaurant, who had fed me for free a hundred times when we were short. Señora Nelida, from the corner, who would never give back our ball if it landed on her roof. Our old neighbor Elisa was there too, sitting, as she always did, on a wooden stool in front of her store. One of the legs was shorter than the others. She’d repaired it with a phone book, wedged between the ground and the offending leg.

“Vecina,” I said.

We spoke for a minute, the exchange easy and familiar. What I was doing. My work at the paper. How proud they were of me in the neighborhood when they read my name in print. I knew this last part wasn’t true, at least not among the people my age. I’d seen how my old friends looked at me: aware, perhaps, that I had once existed as a part of their world, but dismissive of every claim I could have of belonging there still. We were disappearing fragments of each other’s history, fading tracers against a clear night sky.

Finally Elisa said, “Your mother’s not home, Chino.”

The streetlights had come on, and I noticed with some surprise that they crawled up the mountainside now. The neighborhood was still growing. New people arrived every day, as we once had, with bags and boxes and hopes, to construct a life in the city. We’d been lucky. Our new house had been small but well built. Everyone had welcomed us. Our street was overflowing with children, and within a week I’d forgotten about Pasco, about the friends I’d left there. My mother found work as a maid in San Borja, four days a week at the Azcárates’, a friendly couple with a son my age. Her employers were generous, kind, and understanding to a fault, especially after Don Hugo left us. They lent us money and helped pay for me to study when my old man abandoned that responsibility as well. They never kept her late — so where was she?

Elisa looked at me somewhat sheepishly. “You know, Chino, she’s been staying with la negra. With Carmela’s family, in La Victoria.”

“How long?”

“Since your father got sick, Chino.”

Elisa motioned for me not to leave while she sold a kilo of sugar to an elderly woman in a light-green dress. I’d rolled the newspaper into a tight baton. Now I tapped it against my thigh. I considered Elisa’s news, what it meant. The scope of my mother’s weakness, her astounding lack of pride. How could the arrangement work on either side, especially now, with the man who connected these two women dead? Carmela ran a dress shop, an enterprise she’d begun with my father’s investment. With my money probably, which should have been spent on my books, on my schooling. The business had succeeded, but was it enough, I wondered, to support the grief of two widows and three children — two of whom, at least, were still in school?

Elisa turned to me again as her customer shuffled down the street.

“Does she come here then? Ever?” I asked.

“Your mother? Sometimes. I saw her a few days ago. I don’t ask so much, you know. She’s embarrassed. She’s afraid of what you’ll think.”

“She knows exactly what I think.”

Elisa sighed. “She didn’t want you to know.”

“Then you shouldn’t have told me.”

Elisa leaned back against the metal gate in front of her store. “Oscar.”

“I’m sorry, vecina.” I looked down at my feet like a misbehaving child, and stamped out the prints of my sneakers in the dusty earth. “Anyway, thank you.”

“I’ll tell her you came by when I see her. Or you know, Chino, if you want you could—”

“Thank you, vecina.”

It was late. From my old street, I used to cut across the field behind the market, at any hour, fearlessly, but now it was an unnecessary hazard. The addicts would be out. In the firelight flicker of their ritual, I might have recognized an old friend, ashen, lost. I walked the long way out to the avenue.

I tried to picture my mother in her new home, sleeping on the guest bed or on a cot that she put away each morning. She and Carmela, sharing stories and tears, forgiving the old man in a nostalgic widows’ duet. What could they have in common? Carmela was Limeña, a businesswoman; she knew how the city worked. My mother had been just a girl when she met my old man, barely fifteen. In Lima, he had learned to dance salsa. To drink and smoke, to fight, fuck, and steal. My mother had learned none of this. She had waited for Hugo to come home and propose. Even now, she still had her mountain accent. For years she had known only one bus line—“the big green bus,” she called it — that took her to the Azcárates’ home. What could Carmela and my mother share besides a battleground? My mother had capitulated. It gave me vertigo. It was the kind of humiliation only a life like hers could prepare you for.

On Saturdays, when we first moved to the city, she would take me to the Azcárates house with her. We rode that big green bus, my mother tense, watching the streets pass in gray monotony, afraid of missing her stop. As a child and not an employee, I was able to cross certain lines. The Azcárates’ were permissive with me, and I never felt out of place in their home. I’d lay out my books on the table in the garden and do my homework, humming songs to myself. Sometimes their son, Sebastián, and I would wage war, setting up epic battles with swarms of plastic soldiers.

My mother liked everything about being in that house. She liked the order of it. She liked the plush of the golden brown carpet. She even liked the books, though she couldn’t read them, for the progress they represented. If I was bothering her in the kitchen, she always shooed me away: “Go grab a book, Chino. I’m busy right now.”

I was sitting with her in the kitchen one day when I asked her why we had moved. In the comfort of that kitchen, I knew that this was better than that, but the way my mother spoke of Pasco sometimes, one might picture a wide, fertile valley with temperate climate and warm people, instead of the poor and violent mining town it really was. Lima frightened her. She felt safe in exactly two places: our house and the Azcárates’ house.

“We had to move, Chino. Your father was here.” She was baking a cake and stirred the mix with a spatula. “Do you miss Pasco?”

I didn’t have to think about it. “No,” I said. “Do you miss it, Ma?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Why?”

Her face fell. “Your grandparents are there! I grew up there! Chino, how can you ask such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. She was a mystery to me, romanticizing the life we’d left behind. “It’s cold there.”

“If you lived away from me, wouldn’t you miss me?” she asked.

“Of course, Ma.”

“That’s how I feel.”

“Why don’t they come to Lima?” I asked.

“Ay, Chino, they’re too old. They wouldn’t like it here. Lima is too big. I’ll never get used to it.”

“Papi doesn’t miss Pasco.”

She smiled. Lima was his backyard, the place where he could become what he’d always imagined himself to be. “He’s different,” she said finally. “And you, Chino,” she added, “you’re just like your father.”

I sat on the Jirón, watching Lima pass by. A pedestrian mall of roast chicken joints and tattoo parlors, of stolen watches and burned CDs. Colonial buildings plastered over with billboards and advertisements. Jeans made at Gamarra to look like Levi’s; sneakers made in Llaoca to look like Adidas. A din of conversations and transactions: dollars for sale; slot machines; English tapes announcing, “Mano”—pause, pause—“Hand.” Blind musicians singing songs. Pickpockets scoping tourists. The city inhaling.

I’d read my father’s short obituary over and over, read it against the other news of the day, looking for connections, for overlaps, for sense. The privilege of being a journalist, of knowing how close to the precipice we really were, hardly seemed worth it at times. The president seemed dazed and disoriented before the press. Ministers disappeared on midnight charters to Florida. Life moved. I watched a cop take a bribe in the privacy of a recessed doorway. A nun tried to pin a ribbon on me, for a donation. I dodged her with my most polite smile.

Then, from the Plaza San Martín, the whole world was running toward me, and past me on to the Plaza Mayor. Metal gates closed with clangs and crashes all along the Jirón. Business were shuttered with customers inside. The cop disappeared. I imagined the worst: a drunken mob of soccer fans wrecking and looting, raping and robbing. I ran to the end of the block and watched the people scatter. Then the Jirón was empty, and before me was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen.

Fifteen shoeshine boys.

The children walked in rows of three, dressed in secondhand clothes, sneakers worn at the heels, donated t-shirts with American logos. Some were so young they were dwarfed by their kits. One dragged his wooden box behind him, unconcerned as it bumped and bounced along the cobblestones. All were skinny, fragile, and smiling. As they marched toward me, they were led by a clown on stilts, twice their height, dancing elegantly around them in looping figure eights, arms extended like the flapping wings of a bird.

I was seeing a girl once, Carla, who’d worn stilts in a church youth group circus, who needed them in fact, whose little hands and feet and breasts and legs soon lost their charm for me. Nude, she was so compact as to appear almost stout. Dressed, she manipulated her form in tight jeans and tighter spandex tops. Her body flopped and sagged as she undressed, and she would stand slump-backed before me, a little ashamed. Carla lived in San Miguel, near the water. We would go to the ocean sometimes and look at the flumes of gray brackish water pushing out into the sea in curlicues, Lima’s broken covenant with water. Once she brought along her stilts, which she claimed not to have used in years. She was beginning to bore me at that point, but I’d never seen someone on stilts up close, or dated a woman taller than me. I helped her up on them, and suddenly she was imposing, half a body above me. Gone was the timid and cautious girl I knew. Everything about her seemed larger, fuller. Her face was lost in the glaze of the setting sun. She was a monument. She waltzed along the gravel, patting me on the head, and I was a child again. From below, her breasts seemed bigger, her hips more slender. She laughed carelessly. I reached up and grabbed her thighs, dug my fingers into her stately flesh. She was on the verge of toppling over but I held her. I pulled her zipper down with my teeth, buried my face in her crotch, and worshipped this majestic woman before me.

Now I watched in amazement as the protest strode past me, the children whispering their demands, the panic subsiding. Had it been a drill? A joke of some sort? Store owners and customers emerged from their bunkers, relieved and confused. Lima was playing tricks again.

I was twelve when I learned my old man had another angle. The scheme went like this: you put in a new bathroom, or tile a kitchen, or add a third floor to a house in Surco or La Molina. You are a model worker, always polite and respectful. You don’t play your music too loud. You wipe your feet and clean up after yourself. All the while, you do your real work with your eyes: Television, check. Stereo, check. Computer, check. Jewelry, check. Anything electric can be sold: kitchen appliances, even wall clocks. Nice clothes too, especially women’s. You scout for windows without locks, flimsy doors, back entrances. You keep track of schedules: when the husband is at work, when the wife is at the salon. When the kids come home from school. When the maid is there alone.

My father and his crew were smart. They could wait a few months or as long as a year. Sometimes the neighborhood security guard was in on it too; for a small fee, he could tell you when a family was out of town. Other times, the maid got the worst of it: the fright, and often the blame.

I remember one evening at our house. They were planning, or, perhaps, celebrating. There were six of them, and I knew some so well I called them tío. They came around a lot, to drink with my old man, to play soccer on Sundays. And they sat close together, talking in low voices, bubbling now and then into laughter. I was called to bring more beer from the fridge. I passed the cold bottle to my father, who took it without looking, intent on what his partner Felipe was saying. I listened too: “I always try to smack the maid real good,” Felipe said proudly. “And I try to break something — just so the family doesn’t think she was in on it.” Everyone cheered this perverse generosity. My father too. I stood at the edge of the circle of men as they passed the beer around. I hardly understood it. Standing at the edge of the circle of men, I thought of my own mother falling to the floor.

On Valentine’s Day I treated myself to a hooker. In honor of my old man, I suppose. It fell on a Sunday, so lovers had the whole day to make out in the parks, hands furtively sneaking beneath blouses, thumb and forefinger greedily undoing buttons. Lima is an industrious city, even on holiday. The whores work overtime because they know how we are. I didn’t feel especially lonely — my life is what it is — but I found myself walking that evening, distracted, unsure of what I was looking for exactly. I told myself I was going out for some air. And I was, ambling through the city, down Avenida Tacna, past the slot machines and the vagrants asleep on benches. It was still crowded out: the sidewalks full, eddies of transients milling at the corners. The cars to Callao honked their horns, calling for passengers. And there the parade began: tall, short, fat, skinny, old, young. Beneath every arched doorway, or leaning against the dirty walls: chinas, cholas, morenas y negras.

They don’t say anything; they watch you watching them. And you do. And I did. It occurred to me that I wanted to get laid. The idea made me smile. I paid them more attention, and walked slowly and waited for one to catch my eye.

I used to think my old man met Carmela this way. That he picked her out from a runway of prostitutes, whores on parade, eager for an affair with a confident and smiling, hardworking thief. That logic suited my anger: his new wife, a common prostitute. It didn’t happen that way of course. Maybe he loved Carmela. Maybe she made him feel things my mother didn’t. I don’t care. You don’t do that shit. You sleep around. You fuck another woman in the anonymous dark of a rented hotel room. You drink with your friends and tell them all about it and laugh and laugh and laugh. But do you fall in love? Do you let yourself be drawn into a parallel life, another marriage, another commitment?

You go home to your wife. You live with the decisions you made.

“What you looking at, muchachón?”

My reverie ended. The whore licked her lips.

“Your ass, niña,” I said, and she smiled slyly.

“You can do more than look, you know.”

It was my turn to smile. I checked my pocket for money, felt the tattered edges of a single worn bill. It would be enough. The avenue was dark, only half-lit by the orange street lamps. I squinted and stepped toward her. She was a beautiful negrita. She wore a tight blue tank top, generously revealing. One of the straps hung off her shoulder just slightly. The whore put her hand on my stomach, her palm flat against my shirt. The sharp edges of her nails ran up and down against my skin. They were painted red. Her smile was about the dirtiest thing I’d ever seen. The city had emptied and there was only us.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Villacorta was asking for his article. I was avoiding him. The government had not fallen, and the protests continued. A group of unemployed textile workers burned tires and looted in El Agustino. There was talk of the president not returning from his next state trip. I was counting on the story to snowball, to crowd my clown feature out of the news section the following Sunday. An extra week would help.

I worked and slept and worked, and thought as little as possible about my old man, my mother, Carmela. I thought about clowns. They had become, to my surprise, a kind of refuge. Once I started looking for them, I found them everywhere. They organized the city for me: buses, street corners, plazas. They suited my mood. Appropriating the absurd, embracing shame, they transformed it. Laugh at me. Humiliate me. And when you do, I’ve won. Lima was, in fact and in spirit, a city of clowns.

The February heat smothered the city, even after dark, and in the evenings, I rarely made it farther than the bar downstairs. The overhead fans whirled, stirring the warmth. I liked listening to the hum of a dozen separate conversations, to the clink of glasses, to cheerful applause in the back room. It made me feel less alone.

One night, a clown stood at the counter next to me. I recognized him. He worked mornings in front of San Francisco, for the children who went there on school trips. I knew the red-and-orange plaid of his suit. Usually he had a partner, but he was alone now, tired, halfway out of costume, headed for home. Like me, he probably wanted a drink to help him sleep. I should have let him go on his way, but before I realized it, I’d blurted out, “You’re a clown.”

He turned, puzzled, and looked me in the eye. “You asking me or telling me, causa?”

“Asking, friend.”

“And who the fuck are you?” His frown was very un-clown-like, the kind of look that would frighten a child. There was white greasepaint ground into the wrinkles at the edges of his mouth.

“Oscar Uribe,” I said. “I write for El Clarín.”

“The newspaper?” He turned away now, back to the business of ordering a drink. I pulled out two chairs at a table by the bar and moved my bottle of red wine.

“Maestro!” I called to the waiter. “Another glass, please!” The waiter acknowledged me with a wave. I looked back at the clown, motioning to the empty chair. He shrugged and sat.

His name was Tonio, he said, and he didn’t have all night.

But I kept the wine coming. I found myself telling him about my mother, about my old man. About Pasco and San Juan. He listened and drank. Then he told me about his hometown in the north, about arriving in Lima penniless. He said he’d lived under the Santa Rosa Bridge. And clowning? “It’s work, brother. Better than some, worse than others,” he said. “I’m not good at much else. It’s either this or stealing.”

“Amen,” I said.

He told me how good it felt to be someone else for a living, to be out in the streets on a clear day. He said the children had sweet faces and it touched him to see them happy. He complained about having to compete with every out-of-work nobody selling candy on buses.

“Does it pay the bills?”

“I don’t need much,” he said, nodding. “No wife. No kids.”

“How did you settle on this work?”

He smiled then so unexpectedly I thought he had misunderstood me. And it was a wonderful smile, a real clown smile. With his thumb, he rubbed at the paint still hiding in the creases of his face. His expression told me I had it all wrong. “No causa,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s like this: you wake up one morning, and boom! you’re a clown.”

Señor Ingeniero Hubert Azcárate opened the door. He shook my father’s hand, patted me on the head, and waved us both in. I wiped my feet three times, back and forth against the heavy doormat. I’d been there many more times than my father had. He was watching my every move. There were three stairs, and at the bottom of the landing the room opened up into a wide, airy space full of light. An L-shaped sofa and a leather armchair were positioned around a wooden coffee table. Built-in shelves along the walls held hundreds of books. I’d looked through them before. Read many. The windows looked out on a garden terrace with trees and grass and flowers sprouting in warm colors.

“Mari!” Señor Azcárate called out. “Your husband is here, with Chino!”

My mother appeared from the kitchen, a little shocked to see us. Her maid’s uniform was a pristine white. She kissed us both on the cheek, and then she asked, concerned, “What are you doing here?”

Señor Azcárate had already found his way to his comfortable leather chair, and he sat now, observing us with an air of patrician benevolence. “Oh don’t worry, Mari,” he said. “Your husband only wanted to speak to me. It’s no problem at all.”

“Go on back to the kitchen,” my father said. “We’ll come say good-bye before we leave.”

“But, Mari,” Señor Azcárate called. “Bring me some coffee. You know how I take it. Would you like coffee, Hugo?”

“Oh no, thank you.”

“It’s no trouble. Really. Mari, bring two coffees.” She nodded and left.

My father sat down. He began by recounting reasons we were grateful to Señor and the Azcárate family. The generosity, the solidarity, the understanding. “Things haven’t always been easy, but I always tell Mari, I tell her every day, God was smiling on us the day she got this job.”

I had never heard my father invoke God for any reason other than to explain the weather.

Señor Azcárate nodded, yes yes yes, savoring my father’s gratitude. He was a thin man, whose pale blue eyes had become even more prominent as his hair had receded. He often squinted when he spoke, as if we were drifting away and he might lose sight of us. “Please, please, Hugo. Go on.”

“Señor Ingeniero, at Chino’s new school,” my father continued, “everyone will have money.” I was about to start at a private school in San Isidro, where the Azcárates had arranged a scholarship.

“Are you worried about the tuition?” Señor Azcárate asked. “I explained to Mari that everything is covered except the uniforms.”

“No, no, it’s not that.” My old man searched for the right words. “You know, Señor Ingeniero, I’m a builder. I work almost every day — I should say, every day that I can.” He put his arm around me. “We’re so proud of Chino. I always knew that he was a smart one. But, you know, we struggle to pay for this, to pay for that. There isn’t always work, that’s the thing…. I’m embarrassed to even ask, after all you’ve done for us.”

“No, no, ask, Hugo, please.” Señor Azcárate leaned toward my father. My father’s silence was studied. “How long has Marisol worked with us?” Azcárate asked. “I’ll tell you: long enough so that she’s family.” He smiled, then turned to me, speaking as if to a child of five. “You’re family, Chino, you know that? Your father, he’s family too.”

I nodded, perplexed. Finally, my old man spoke, and this time he went straight to the point. “I was hoping, if it’s possible, if anyone from Chino’s new school would be doing work on their house…”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“No, but if they were, could you put in a word for me? For my business?”

It was Don Hubert Azcárate’s favorite kind of favor: the kind he could fulfill. The kind that confirmed his own charity. He was a nice man, he really was. He promised that he would. My father smiled happily. “Thank Señor Azcárate, Chino,” he told me. I shook the engineer’s veiny hand. Then my father thanked him effusively. The two men embraced. “You don’t know what this means to me,” my old man said.

My mother appeared with the coffee.

All my life, I’ve been Chino. In Pasco, in Lima. At home, in my neighborhood. The way some people are Chato or Cholo or Negro. I hear those two syllables and look up. There are thousands of us, of course, perhaps hundreds of thousands, here and everywhere that Spanish is spoken. No nickname could be less original. There are soccer players and singers known as Chino. One of our crooked presidents lived and died by his moniker: chino de mierda. Still, it is my name, and always was my name. Until I started at Peruano Británico. There, I was called Piraña.

Piranhas were already a phenomenon in Lima by the time I started high school. The authorities had ordered investigations and organized police sweeps. There were news reports and shocking images. A city on the brink. In packs of fifteen or twenty, they would swarm a car and swiftly, ruthlessly undress it. Hubcaps, mirrors, lights. The crawling commute held the prey in place — the owner of the car, helpless, honking his horn frantically, aware perhaps that the wisest thing was to do nothing at all. To wait for them to pass. But that was only an option for a while. More audacious crews started breaking windows, taking briefcases, cell phones, watches, sunglasses, radios. Full service, people joked darkly. A new kind of crime, sociologists said. And an astute observer — of the kind who traffic in phrases — named them piranhas.

At morning roll call in the courtyard of my new school, my class lined up single file. I found my place in the order of last names, Uribe, almost at the back. Ugaz in front of me. Ventosilla behind me. My uniform was neat and pressed and I looked, from a distance perhaps, just like all the others. The teacher called us off, and one by one we marched to our new classroom. It wasn’t until recess that afternoon that my classmates sought me out. “Oye, you play?” The kid held a soccer ball in his hands. He kicked it to me. I passed it back, making sure I used good form. I introduced myself as Oscar or Chino. “César,” he answered. We formed a team. We grabbed a kid with glasses and put him in goal. We played. We scored and were scored on. We yelled and sweated and cursed and then, when I took the ball from a kid on the other team, he called a foul, dropping to the floor, and held his ankle, grimacing. In San Juan, I would have called him a pussy, and that would’ve been that. But he yelled, “Oye! Oye!” and we stopped. “That’s a foul here, huevón,” he said, frowning. “Where the hell are you from?”

I didn’t have to respond, but I did. I could have said any place in the city, but I didn’t. “San Juan de Lurigancho,” I answered.

Of course, eventually they would have found out where I was from. They would have seen me walking back to the Avenida Arequipa to catch the bus home. They would have known that I didn’t live in La Molina or Surco. But perhaps if they hadn’t learned this detail on the very first day, if they had known me better, they wouldn’t have associated me with the criminal reputation of my district.

“San Juan?” he said, breaking into a cruel smile. “Oooooohh…Habla Piraña!”

I met Tonio the next morning at eight-thirty in front of San Francisco. He was already painted and dressed. I was still shaking off sleep and a red wine headache. He introduced me to his partner, a yellow-faced clown named Jhon.

“You’re the reporter?” Jhon asked suspiciously.

“Be nice,” said Tonio.

He pulled an oversize polka-dotted suit from his backpack. It was white with green dots. It fit me like a garbage bag. Tonio declared it perfect. Jhon agreed. A pair of green shoes was next; I wiggled my feet into them. They were twice the length of my forearm. Then Tonio handed me a mirror and three plastic canisters of face paint, each the size of a roll of film. “You take care of that,” he said, holding out a thin brush.

I felt outside of myself, the details of the previous night’s conversation so hazy and wine soaked, I couldn’t recall exactly how I had ended up there or what commitments I had made. In the mirror, I watched myself transform. I put red circles on my cheeks. Jhon passed me a nose. It was an oversize red Ping-Pong ball cut in half and threaded by a rubber band. It fit nicely. Finally, Tonio pulled a worn jester’s hat from the bottom of his bag. The pointy edges fell limply in my face. It would have to do.

Walking through the city, one-third of a trio of clowns, I was surprised to find how relaxed I was, and how invisible. You’d think the world’s gazes would congregate upon us, on our loud costumes and our hand-painted smiles, but most people simply ignored us, walked past without a glance; only children smiled and pointed, sometimes waved. Jhon and Tonio chatted about soccer, I watched and listened in a daydream. We were ghosts in the multitude, three more citizen-employees of the great city, awake and alive on a Thursday morning.

We let a few buses pass because they were too empty. “It’s bad luck at the beginning of the day,” Tonio explained. Finally, Tonio nodded as a more crowded bus approached. We pushed past the ticket collector and were instantly onstage, all eyes on us. “Señores y Señoras, Damas y Caballeros!” We stood in a row, Tonio in the center, yelling over the asthmatic rattle of the engine. “I am not here asking for charity! In fact, I am a rich man! This is my bus! This is my driver! And this,” Tonio bellowed, pointing to the ticket collector, hanging halfway out the bus door, calling the route, “this is my mascot!”

Jhon was the chorus, echoing every pronouncement Tonio made, in the stereotypical voice of a drunk lifted from a Rubén Blades song. He pretended to fall, and Tonio made sheepish apologies for his drunken partner, who had spent the night before “celebrating the purchase of a new three-story home in San Borja!”

I felt useless. I flashed my dumb clown smile and tapped my fingers against my chest. I could feel my face paint drying to an uncomfortable film, affixing an unnatural contortion to the muscles of my face. I was dazed, almost seasick, as the bus sped along the avenue. They were talking but I could barely hear them. Tonio was wrapping up. “My humble servant — God bless the poor deaf-mute — will be passing by your seats now to collect your fare.” He bowed low and then nodded at me.

We weren’t selling anything; this was a bold conceit Tonio had devised to cut costs. It was our bus; I passed down the aisle, collecting everyone’s fare. “Pasajes, pasajes a la mano,” I murmured, just as a ticket collector would. Some passengers, napping, barely opening their eyes, handed me a coin without thinking. Some dropped loose change in my hand, some even thanked me. Most ignored me, looking away, even men and women who had watched the act and smiled.

I collected a total of 4.20 soles. The bus stopped. “Ladies and Gentlemen, good day!” Tonio shouted. We stepped into the morning sun. The whole thing had taken five minutes.

I put a coin in the slot and dialed the number to Elisa’s bodega. It was early afternoon. Tonio and Jhon sat in a café across the street, sharing a cup of tea. We were back downtown, taking a break. We’d been thrown off buses, had change tossed at us, been spat at. But we’d made money. A good day, Tonio assured me, better than usual. They seemed content.

The phone rang and rang in San Juan, and then she answered. She asked me how I was.

I looked at the busy street, the people meandering homeward or workward. “I’m at the office, vecina, I can’t talk long.” I asked her if she’d seen my mother.

“At the funeral, Chino. Why weren’t you there?”

“I had to work. I couldn’t make it. Did she say anything?”

“She misses you, Chino.” I heard Elisa sigh. “She said that everything is good with Carmela. That she might sell the house.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Chino, are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Are you going to visit her?”

Tonio and Jhon were paying with change, haggling for a little extra hot water. They counted the money out in ten-cent coins. The waitress tried to hold back a smile. Jhon leaned over the counter and blew her a kiss. They were charming clowns. “Thank you, vecina,” I said and hung up the phone.

My new nickname both labeled me as dangerous and emasculated me. I was never scary to them. I was a joke. I represented nothing, except a mistake perhaps. A nerdy kid from the ghetto. I was too skinny. Too weak. Even when I played well or ran fast, they hurled insults at me. In San Juan, we’d joked about how I would beat up these pitucos, but the reality was so different. They wielded their power carelessly, sometimes unconsciously. They could cut me out with a comment or simply with silence.

“It’s time for you to start working,” my father announced.

It was my second year at Peruano Británico. I was almost fourteen. In more than a year, I’d never been invited to a classmate’s home. Each day I rode the bus from San Juan to San Isidro in silence.

I’d given my father’s line of work a lot of thought. I’d examined it under rules of ethics and law. It was wrong. Certainly. But when he told me it was time for me to work, my mind gathered a year of scattered insults and wove them together. I savored those injuries, imagined what a delight it would be to go through one of those boys’ houses, to exchange smiles and nods and handshakes. To work there, and then to steal. I began to understand my old man, or to think I did. But I wanted to be sure.

“I want to work,” I said.

“Of course you do. Every man wants to work.”

“Pa, are we going to break into this house?”

He sat back. Frowned. He’d misread me. “Have people been saying things?”

I nodded.

“And what do you think about what they say?” He seemed poised to smile at the slightest hint of approval from me.

“I believe them.”

“Well, Chino,” he said and stopped.

I wanted to tell him it was all right with me. That those rich fucks could complain to God if they didn’t like it. That they could move to Miami and become American. That if they wanted to call me Piraña, then they’d better be good and fucking ready when I came in and repossessed all their treasures.

He ran a finger through his hair and winked. His large black eyes were set close, his mouth was small, comically so, but his broad smile evened everything out, organized the jumble of his features. He kept his black hair meticulously combed back. At rest, he was a caricature of an Indian. In laughter, he was a mestizo Clark Gable. So he laughed and smiled and made that smile the linchpin of his personality. Now he met my gaze, his son — I believed, his only son. “Chino, we’re just men who work. You and I both. Crazy things happen in the city.” He snapped his fingers and laughed. He hugged me. “Okay?”

The wife had a good eye for color. She had decorated the house herself, she told us. She walked us through the expansive suburban mansion, me, my father, and Felipe, pointing out renovations and design touches: a wall they’d knocked down, leaving only painted beams. “See how this adds space to the room? Gives it another feel?” she asked. The three of us nodded, our eyes wide and observant. There were skylights, balconies, a garden with blossoming trees, but we focused on what could be taken away: a computer, a stereo, even a dishwasher. The husband was an executive at a bank, an old friend of Señor Azcárate. They wanted to remodel the second floor, to add a television room, she said. It wouldn’t be that much work, maybe three or four weeks. Some painting. New carpet. A couple of new windows and light fixtures.

I worked on Saturdays, and I saw my father more then than I did at home. During the week, he was mostly gone. His youngest son was still in diapers, and my mother must have known about Carmela by then. When he was home they argued, but I didn’t know why. The construction on our house had stalled, the second floor still open air, a thick plastic sheet tied at the corners of three walls. When they were fighting, I retreated there and watched the ridges of the hills draw lines against the sky.

The family we were working for had a son, Andrés, who was in the class above me at Peruano Británico. At his house he ignored me. At school he let it be known that I had crossed the line. I felt the stares, the judgment. By the time he woke up on Saturdays, I had already been working for three or four hours. His weekends, as far as I could tell, took the shape of an extended yawn. I placed tiles in the hallway. He ate cereal. I sanded down corners and measured for the bookshelves we’d be building. He talked on the phone, loud enough for me to hear. “Yeah, Piraña’s here. You bet I’m watching my shit, huevón.” He made no attempt to hide his disdain for me. I listened to him speculate as to which girl would be the first to let him seduce her there. How far she would spread her legs. With a long phone cord dragging behind him, he paraded through the work area, complained of the dust, asked his mother to tell us that the sanding was hurting his ears. He put on a show of power. I bowed my head at the appropriate times and pretended not to hear.

One Saturday, when we were almost done, the entire family was getting ready for a wedding. The mother flitted about, changing her dress three times. The father came in to tell us that we’d have to leave a little early because they all had to go. We were hurrying our work along, trying to finish, when Andrés called out to his mother, “Mami, tell Piraña to stop with the hammering! I can’t even think!”

He stepped out into the hallway, wearing a gray wool suit and a red tie, still unknotted. He glared at me.

“What did you call him, Andrés?” his mother said sharply, coming into the room. Her hair was styled in a hard, gelled bob. She stood in front of him, waiting for him to speak.

“Piraña,” Andrés muttered.

“What?” she said, surprised, embarrassed. “Why would you call him that?” She turned to me. “Son, what’s your name?”

“Oscar, Señora.”

“Your mother works with the Azcárates, doesn’t she?”

I felt myself turning red. “Yes, Señora.”

“And what year are you in?”

“Third, Señora.”

Andrés watched this exchange with practiced condescension. In his elegant suit, he was transformed, ready to be photographed for Lima’s society pages. He was taller than me, bathed at that moment in superiority, profound and harsh. I wore my work clothes, worn at the knees and splattered with paint.

“Andrés,” his mother said, “this is Oscar. This young man is a student at your school. He is friends with Sebastián Azcárate. Now shake his hand and introduce yourself like a gentleman.”

His eyes steeled, and his hand too. He held it out.

“Andrés,” he said.

“Oscar.”

We shook. No, you were right, I thought, Piraña concha tu madre. That’s my fucking name. I glared at him and held his hand, perhaps a moment too long. I squeezed.

“That’s enough, boys,” his mother said, and they both turned to leave.

“Good afternoon, Señora,” I called.

We played to passengers in Santa Anita, Villa Maria, and El Agustino. We rode through Comas, Los Olivos, and Carabayllo. Three days. Lima on display, in all her grandeur, the systems of the city becoming clear to me: her cells, her arteries, her multiple beating hearts. We collected laughs and coins until the money weighed heavy in my suit pocket. I was a secret agent. I saw six people I knew: among them, an ex-girlfriend, two old neighbors from San Juan, and a woman from the university. Even a colleague from the paper. Exactly zero recognized me. I was forgetting myself too, patrolling the city, spying on my own life. I’d never felt this way: on display, but protected from the intruding eyes of strangers and intimates.

I watched the ex-girlfriend chew the nail of her pinky. When we were together, she’d seemed to me the type that would flower, grow into herself, become more attractive each year. But she was twenty-seven now and still not beautiful. I looked her in the eye as she handed me a coin, felt a shock when her finger grazed my open palm. She had no idea who I was.

My old man had paid off the security guard. He’d given us a time and a day. The whole family was out of town. I’d been waiting six months for this. I was a good student and they hated me. I was a good soccer player and they mocked me. I didn’t understand a thing about them, or why they were the way they were.

We rode in Felipe’s windowless van. They tossed me over the wall. I opened the garage and they backed the van in. The rest was easy. The television, the VCR, the computer, the stereo — each was carried down and packed carefully into the van. We moved nimbly through the dark house, carrying the wares as if they were works of art. And they were. A sleek cordless phone meant thirty soles. A blender, fifteen, if you knew where to sell it. It was so ordered and efficient, it didn’t seem like stealing at all.

My father told me once that in Lima anything can be bought and sold. We were walking through the market in San Juan, past the fruit stalls, flies buzzing around the meat and fish. A woman sold clothes piled in high, disordered mounds. Fake Barcelona jerseys. Stolen car parts and bags and watches. An old man stood by his cart of hardware: hammers, pliers, and nails, bent, rusty, unmistakably used. My old man found it pathetic. “Used nails!” he cried out. “For the love of God, are we this poor?”

I did a last run through the house. We were almost done. It was my first time out, my old man’s way of saying he trusted me. I wanted in because I trusted him. We were going to be okay. I knew it. We would have money. We would finish the second story of our house, and my mother would be happy again. They would both be happy. I had no idea that he was preparing to leave us.

I lingered at the top of the stairs, looking at the room we’d built. It was really something, even with the gaping hole where the television had been. I was proud of my work. A few steps down the hall, along the tiles I’d laid myself, was Andrés’s room. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. We’d already taken his boom box and alarm clock. I turned on the lamp. In the closet there were half a dozen pairs of shoes and button-down shirts in white and blue. I touched them all. I ran my fingers along the rack and found it: his gray wool suit. I’d just pulled it from the closet when my father walked in.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed. “Turn that goddamn light off!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. We were in darkness again.

“We’re leaving. Put that back,” he said. “We can’t sell that.”

“We could.”

“We’re in a hurry, Chino. Let’s go.”

“It’s for me,” I said.

“This isn’t a department store. You don’t need that.”

He was right. I didn’t need it, wouldn’t need it. Not until I wore it for my interview at El Clarín seven years later. I knew it would take me a year or two to grow into it, if I grew into it at all. It was a dull, shapeless longing, but it was real. “I want this,” I said, “for my birthday.”

I could barely see him in the purple shadows.

“Your birthday?” my father said. He’d forgotten. “Well then, take it.”

I rode around the city in my green-and-white suit and thought about my mother. I put my article in an envelope, sealed it, and dropped it in the mail. I didn’t see Villacorta, or check the paper to see if he’d published it. I broke away from Tonio and Jhon, paid them twenty soles for the suit and the shoes and the memories. I thanked them from the very bottom of my new clown heart. And I didn’t do their act, or any act. I spent my savings. I put on the polka-dotted suit and stepped into the unwieldy shoes. I painted my face in the dim reflection of the hallway mirror. I placed the red Ping-Pong ball over my nose, felt the tight pull of the rubber band against my hair. And I rode the buses, paying my fare like any other passenger, except that I was unlike any other passenger. I knew I would see her. This was our city, hers and mine. We would meet somewhere beneath Lima’s mournful gaze.

I rode to La Victoria, where the corner kids eyed me, wondering if it was worth their trouble to mug a clown. I walked the narrow streets, my shoes flopping on the crumbling sidewalks. I sat on a bench in front of Carmela’s house and waited. My black brothers came and went to their schools, to their jobs. They didn’t even shoot me a glance. I was part of the architecture. A cop stopped and asked if I was all right.

“Just resting, chief,” I said.

Was I from around here?

“I’m Don Hugo’s kid.”

“Carmela’s Hugo?” he asked. Then he left me alone.

Carmela came home carrying dresses, and smiled at me because she smiled at everyone. Her door swung open wide, and from my bench I peered into her world, my mother’s new world. And then things came at me in waves: the street, the house. I haven’t seen you since you were this big, Carmela had said at the hospital. I remembered. When I was six, Don Hugo had taken me to see his mistress. I’d never seen a black person before. I cried and said she looked burnt. She grinned and pinched my cheek. He hit me and told me to be nice to my tía. Now I couldn’t bring myself to ring the doorbell. I knew she would have been kind, even with me dressed this way. As kind as she was to my mother. She’d answer any of my questions and tell me how she met my father, how she fell for him, the sweet things he’d told her. Carmela and my mother must have spoken of all this already. What revelations did I have for them anyway? They had worked out the details of their parallel heartbreaks: who had him when, who had him first, who was innocent, who was guilty. And they’d forgiven him, and that was the most astounding thing of all.

Why were you always forgiving him, Ma? He told her everything first — about you, about me, about the work he did and planned to do. He let you swim in darkness, and wonder at the vacant spaces, and ask yourself what mistakes you’d made. And then he left us. And you forgave him, Ma. You forgave him.

After we broke into Andrés’s house, the loot was split, but my mother and I saw none of it, except the gray wool suit. The next week I found myself burnishing the lacquered floorboards of another fine home. Another Saturday, and then another. I went on three jobs with my father and his crew. I understand now that money must have been tight. He had four sons to support. We’d just finished a two-week job on a house when Felipe came by with the van. I remember thinking it was strange that they hadn’t given the place time to cool. I thought I understood the hustle. I asked my father about it.

“Shut up,” he said. “Don’t ask questions.”

We drove through the dark streets. I sat in the back, felt the van swaying. I had no idea where we were going, but when I got out, I knew immediately where I was. I looked at my father, horrified, expecting some kind of explanation, but he just shrugged. Crazy things happen in the city. They boosted me over the wall, into that garden where I’d played as a child. I could see through the glass window, the high bookshelves against the far wall, the elegant leather sofas.

They were too rich and too trusting. Their watchman was asleep in a rickety wooden chair. I opened the garage door from the inside and the man woke with a start. My father stepped in and broke his jaw. Felipe dragged him into the garden and tied him to a tree. The watchman sat there, blindfolded and gagged and bleeding, while we disassembled the house. Their possessions were so familiar it was like stealing from myself.

It was terrifying and logical: the riskiest hit of all. I led Felipe and my father around the house like a tour guide: don’t forget the microwave and the blender my mother loves so much. And, in here, the clock and the old engineer’s nifty calculator and the television with its remote control. There was something beautiful in our silent artistry. Everyone would be a suspect. The gardener, my mother, my father, me. Whichever members of the crew had worked on the house. And the watchman tied to the tree, bleeding into a rag.

The van was full. It was time to go. The watchman’s chin was slumped into his chest, his breathing heavy. I felt the conviction that he too was one of us, and it disgusted me. It could have been anything: a stray light that shone on him or a spasm in his face that made me think he was smiling. I kicked him. He snapped to attention, seeing only his blindfold. He struggled against the tree. I hocked something viscous and unclean on his forehead. The color of money.

My father called me, and we disappeared.

She left Carmela’s and I followed her. She got on the bus at Manco Capac. She wore her uniform, as clean and as white as a high summer cloud. She didn’t notice me behind her, sat across from me innocently, not even looking in my direction. I closed my eyes, felt the rumble of the bus along the potholed avenue. The ticket collector sang the route: La Victoria, San Borja! La Victoria, San Borja! Between the standing passengers, I could still catch glimpses of her. No one sat in the empty seat beside me. Then she stood. She got off, and I followed.

I knew the way, of course, to my Saturday home, where I once kept my mother company and did my homework on the garden terrace. The space my father and I had violated, nearly sacrificing her livelihood. But she had always been safe there. And, worse, I had too. They’d welcomed me into their looted house, consoled me when I cried. You’re too old for that, Chino. Look, they didn’t steal the books. The old engineer with his generous heart, trying to make me feel better.

I trailed a half block behind her now, an expert in my clumsy green shoes. She walked along the sidewalk and I tracked her, marching down the very center of an empty street. “Ma!” I shouted. “Ma!” She half-turned, and then sped up at the sight of me. I rushed to keep pace with her. “Ma!” I shouted again. “Ma, it’s Oscar! It’s Chino!”

She stopped beneath a flowering tree and stepped out into the street. “Hijo?” she said. “Is that you?”

I hadn’t seen her since the velorio. I had left her to bury the old man without me. She had held his hand and watched him die. She had put him in the earth and covered him.

“It’s me, Ma.”

“Chino!” she cried. “You scared me!”

“I’m sorry, Ma.”

“Your nose, Chino?”

I pulled off my red nose, let it drop to the ground.

“And your shoes? What’s all this?”

I stepped out of the clown shoes and kicked them toward the sidewalk. “I’m writing a story, Ma. For the paper.”

She nodded, not understanding.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“Where have you been, Chino?”

“Here and there,” I said. I took off my wig. “I’m here now.”

She took me in her arms and stroked my hair. She kissed my forehead and wiped the paint from my cheeks. “Are you all right?”

“I’ve been to Carmela’s, but I didn’t knock.”

“You should have,” she said. “Will you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did he ask about me?”

It was a travesty, my wanting to know, but I did. She held me tighter. My face paint was running, coming off in white streaks on the sleeve of my suit. “He missed you, Chino,” she said.

I felt the warm, salty wet of her cheek against mine. It felt good to be held.

“I missed you too,” my mother said.

“I won’t leave you,” I cried. But a shiver passed over me. I knew in my heart that the clown was lying.