War by Candlelight: Stories

a science for being alone

Every year on Mayra’s birthday, since she turned one, I have asked Sonia to marry me. This year our little girl turned five. Each rejection has its own story, but until recently, before the two of them left, I preferred to think of these moments as one long, unfinished conversation. Mayra’s fifth fell on a hot, bright day. I had twenty-five soles in my pocket, the ring, and a little makeup kit I’d bought for my daughter. I was at the Plaza Manco Capac, waiting for a spot at the lunch counter of a cheap criollo place before heading over to see the women of my life.

Sonia and Mayra lived in a hostel downtown. It’s an old building that belonged to the man who would have been my father-in-law. When Sonia failed the university exam, her father sent her to the States to learn a little of the language of tourism. When she returned he installed her in the hostel as the administrator. Mayra was just a few months old. The inn is called Hostal New Lima, just like that, with Spanglish syntax. She got the adventurous, the young and unshaven, the backpackers in their inimitable style, wearing vests with dozens of pockets or pants that unzip to become parachutes or inflatable rafts. Americans and Germans and French. For years Sonia occasionally took one to bed, but I never thought these flings amounted to much. In a way, I was proud of our modern arrangement, which I thought approximated those slippery, ambiguous, but ultimately loving relationships I’d seen on American sitcoms. We had our special anniversaries, our traditions, and Mayra’s birthday was one of them. It was the day we pretended we were a family still or that we once had been. It was the day I proposed with subtle fanfare that we become one.

The street was steaming, everywhere that soggy and unpleasant heat the city is known for. The plaza was brimming with the destitute and their predators. A man in dirty clothes slept facedown in a sparse patch of grass beneath a tree, while an orange-clad municipal worker swept around him with a large palm frond. At the corner, a few red-eyed street kids huddled greedily around a bag of glue. A woman pushed a cart of bananas up and down the street, her open hand indicating they were five for fifty cents. The bananas were leftovers, throwaways, mushy and bruised and sweet. Peels littered the cracked sidewalk. It was Lima in her splendor. Since being laid off from the bank, I was experiencing for the first time real poverty, distinct from any other I had previously survived. It manifested itself first as a condition of the mind: an emptying panic, a kind of vertigo, coupled with the conviction that all my misfortunes were an elaborate hoax. This set of psychological symptoms is common among those of us who, as children, never had to skip a meal. For us, the current crisis is particularly cruel.

An economist friend of mine said he could always tell how grim the situation was by keeping track of the hours hookers put in. He lived in Lince, near Avenida Arequipa, no more than ten blocks from that notorious strip that’s always highlighted on the Sunday television news magazines. In the early 1990s, he said, they didn’t appear on the streets till eight or eight-thirty, and disappeared by four. As the crisis deepened, prostitutes worked longer hours, choosing their corners as early as six and staying until the beginnings of the morning rush. A full twelve hours, my friend said, smiling, just like the rest of us.

I recalled this conversation because there in the plaza, just after noon, a middle-aged woman with dyed blond hair was putting in her time too. She was thick and square, her exact age hidden beneath layers of makeup. The meat of her thighs pressed against the fabric of her skirt. Hookers working day shifts, I thought with a laugh, and wondered if my friend could theorize about that level of misery, and then wondered for a moment if he too had been laid off, and if so, what his plans were. Or did he, like me, have none? I watched the woman, her forced coquettish smiles. She perked up pathetically when she saw me glancing at her. I turned away. She’d do better business at dusk, I thought, not in the bright glare of midday.

I was — and I can’t explain why exactly — moved by the sight of her. I make no claims to altruism, or to a generosity beyond what is humane and decent. Only this: I felt that something special was in order, something that might make the city more livable, less cruel, softer. It is something maybe any father would feel, on his daughter’s birthday or on any day when that child you love helplessly is present in your thoughts, and you wonder what you can do for them or for the world they will inherit. I am also a man whose actions do not always conform to any logic. Sonia used to call me the King of the Desert because of my admiration of the grandiose. I have read history. The hopeless acts of our Peruvian heroes are beautiful in their way, even triumphant. I know our traditions.

We’ve all had our troubles. My father flirted with bankruptcy for decades before finally giving in. He owned a little bookshop in Miraflores, had flush times and then bad times and then worse times. He sold calendars and notebooks and dictionaries and pencils, and also the classics in leather-bound volumes. By the time the business went under, I was already at the public university and somewhat insulated from my family’s troubles. He took work as a cabbie and died a few years after the bank had foreclosed on him. I started helping with an uncle who delivered Mary Kay cosmetics to pharmacies around Lima. We worked the city end to end. This is how I learned to fear poverty.

I bought a handful of bananas, gave up my spot in line, and walked toward the prostitute. She stood under the awning of a photo store, next to a leathery old man selling newspapers spread on a blanket. She saw me coming and smiled. I held my bananas out for her and said hello.

“Hello,” she said, smiling conspiratorially. Her face was broad and bronzed by the summer sun. Three freckles dotted her left cheek and rose in unison when she smiled. She looked at her naked wrist. “Is it time, baby?” she asked coyly. “Already?”

“Yes,” I said awkwardly.

She frowned, then caught herself. She was younger than I had first thought, not quite forty yet.

I held out the bananas. They were streaked with black. She took the bruised fruit and stroked the length of one of the bananas.

“Ooh, kinky,” she said, still smiling. “Do you like kinky, flaco?”

The corner was draped in white light. Her faux-blond hair shone carmine against the black roots, then orange, a shifting shade each time she turned her head. With her red fingernails, she pulled one of the bananas from the rest and peeled it lazily, wearing an alternately pained and then delighted expression. She asked me if I liked it. Her three freckles danced.

The blood boiled hot in my ears. I mumbled an apology. She looked at me, uncomprehending, and continued to mime sexy for me, as if by sheer persistence she could arouse me.

There are moments — and I’ve learned to recognize them — when something that previously seemed quite reasonable, even kind, is revealed to be profoundly stupid. Time stops, words peter out, thoughts shrivel and collapse upon themselves. I’d done this before. Misguided acts of charity. Sometimes I am right and other times I am wrong. I’m never exactly sure what seemingly good idea might entrance me.

An instant later, a police officer had joined our discussion.

“What’s going on here?”

“Este pendejo,” the woman began, and I knew that whatever she told him would mean bad things for me. She rambled. I had propositioned her, she said, and that wasn’t her line of work. It was an insult to her dignity. She was a mother of two and a Christian, she said, pointing at the silver cross that hung in the curve between her breasts. I had been dirty, had insinuated acts that went against nature. She held the bananas up as evidence of my perverse appetites. “I’m only glad you came when you did,” she said to the officer. “There’s no telling what he might have done.”

It was a disgusting display. A middle-aged woman, with children back at the hovel she called home, hooking on a hot February afternoon and turning a simple gift into an excommunicable offense. The cop smelled a shakedown and could barely contain his glee. He sized me up. I hadn’t lost the habit of wearing a suit every day. He must have thought I had money. He dismissed the hooker with a nod and a pat on the ass. She sauntered off, turning only to scowl at me. Halfway down the block she let a banana peel slip from her hands into the gutter.

The cop smiled openly now, treacherously. He ran his hands through his oily hair and grabbed me by the arm. His untrimmed fingernails dug into my bicep.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

Sonia was a student of mine at an admissions prep institute. By the time she had failed the exam the second time, we were already lovers. A year later, at twenty-one, she was pregnant with Mayra. We were unmarried with no intentions. In fact, I never had the chance to ask her. In the same breath she told me she was pregnant and too young to be married. I had just turned twenty-nine and felt too young as well. A scandal ensued. Our parents, who despised each other, met to negotiate. They decided to force us to marry. Decency and decorum were invoked. I went home every night to be berated for my irresponsibility. Sonia was threatened with trials of all kinds. The brutish and short life of our bastard child was described for us in vivid, apocalyptic detail.

One day her father, Mr. Sepulveda, called and said he wanted to speak with me man to man. I came at the appointed hour, nervous in my best suit. I was prepared to be bent and pressured, my will molded anew, certain I would cave. Sonia’s mother let me in and asked me to sit. The room was so still and silent I could hear the dust motes settling on the plastic couch covers. Mr. Sepulveda appeared, carrying a tray with two glasses of rum and Coke. He nodded and sat, raising his glass in my direction, before sipping his drink. “A toast,” he said obscurely, “to love and to the sea.”

“Well,” he said, after a sufficiently long pause. “You really fucked up, didn’t you?”

“Sir?”

“Did you suppose I asked you here to offer my congratulations?” He shook his head, as if answering his own question, then raised his arms, addressing the ceiling, or perhaps the heavens themselves. “Who am I to blame for all this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Mr. Sepulveda had a grizzled look about him. Sonia, I remember thinking, was beautiful in spite of her father’s genes. He was in the process of aging poorly. There was a clumsiness to his features, as if he’d been assembled by a child. When he took a drink the entire glass disappeared in his enormous hands.

“What are your plans then?” he asked. “How will you provide for my grandson?”

I told him I was working at the bank, that I was hoping for a promotion. When I mentioned that I would continue to teach for extra income, he chortled.

“Teaching? That’s what you call it? Preying on young women?” he said. “Sonia didn’t pass the exam, so what exactly do you teach?”

Sonia is not a test taker. It came down to this simple fact: a fluttering in her heart, perspiration welling up on her palms, all the things she knew fleeing from her. The very words scrambled, she said. It was like being drugged.

I told Mr. Sepulveda the statistics: how fifty thousand apply for seven thousand slots.

“A failed man is never alone,” he said sternly. “You know I won the visa lottery?” His gaze tightened on me.

Luck, conveniently reinterpreted as achievement. I nodded.

“I worked with these!” he said, leaning toward me across the coffee table, suddenly animated, holding those large hands in my face. “In Paterson, Nueva Jersey, in Los Uniteds! With Dominicans! With Puerto Ricans! With blacks! They have children twice a year, those Americans! With fathers who come home from prison on the weekends! Their lives move faster than ours. They murder each other for welfare money! Their children are born addicted to drugs!”

I was starting to have no idea what he was talking about. I nodded only because I didn’t know what else to do. Sonia had recounted these diatribes for me with such uncanny accuracy that I felt like he was reading a script. I stifled the urge to smile.

“I’ve seen it all,” he said, falling back into his seat. “What you and my daughter have done. Nothing surprises me anymore. I can’t be shocked. Those people.”

He pronounced the words as if the very syllables were dirty.

“I don’t trust you,” he said, “but I trust my daughter.”

“I do too, sir.”

“Whose idea was it to not get married?”

“Ours,” I answered.

“Sonia says it was hers.”

“Maybe it was hers.”

“But you agree?”

I said that I did.

“I would like to kill her, honestly. It’s not that I like you, I don’t. But still, I would like to force her to marry you.” He sighed through his teeth, emitting a thin whistle. “But I won’t.”

“Sir?”

He asked me how old I was and I told him.

“And where do you work again?”

“At the Inter-Provincial Bank of Peru.”

He scanned me from top to bottom. “I can’t pretend to understand. I mean, there’s nothing obviously wrong with you.” He emptied his rum and Coke. “You can wait a while, can’t you?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was agreeing to, or what had just transpired. I didn’t dare smile, or betray any expression, and in any case, I wasn’t even sure what I felt: Relief? Disappointment? Confusion? Was I being blocked from marrying the woman I loved or had I been spared the consequences of a youthful indiscretion? He looked at me for a moment longer and sighed once more. Sonia’s mother reappeared in the doorframe.

“Well, son,” Mr. Sepulveda said. “Go ahead and finish your drink. I have work to do.”

The cop led me to a desolate corner of the neighborhood, where the cobblestones shone through the crumbling cement like open wounds. My shoes were scuffed and worn at the toes; his were polished a midnight black. I tried reasoning with him, but explanations were useless, equivocations beside the point. My daughter, Mayra, the collapsing economy, my protestations of poverty — all superfluous details. Starting at thirty, he worked his way down in increments of five soles. He described my humiliation, the effect an arrest for solicitation might have on my attempts to return to the world of finance. He murmured encouragement. He lathered himself in generosity. He saluted the flag. It was an outrageous bribe, an unheard-of sum, but I paid ten soles just to be done with him. If he’d wanted more, if he’d wanted Sonia’s ring or Mayra’s gift, I was prepared to fight him, I told myself, no matter the consequences.

The day was already long, though it was barely past two. I walked back toward downtown, commiserating with myself, creating and then debunking excuses for my own buffoonery. We are a nation of skillful gesturists. Men and women who transcend with small actions, a people condemned to make poetry. I am no different, working gracelessly within that grand tradition. Our heroes ride their steeds off mountain bluffs, tumbling to glorious deaths. They inject themselves with poisons and languish in the name of medical progress. Inevitably our heroes die, or their hopes do, and this is a plaintive point of pride for our long-suffering people. How and when, the method and the moment for a final and solitary defeat. It is our highest art.

Mayra was born on February 5, 1996. I was there in the delivery room, watching the magical process, my weak knees wobbling. It was the most complete day of my life. When I held my daughter, what I wanted with all my being was to marry Sonia, to become a family.

In the aftermath of my conversation with Mr. Sepulveda, our relationship fell apart. It occurred to me suddenly that there might be something wrong with me, or something imperfect in my love. Of course, both statements were true. I got drunk with some friends and they counseled me to forget her. I revised history: no longer frightened to my core of marriage and fatherhood, I became in my mind a jilted man who wanted to take responsibility for his child, a man cruelly rebuffed without cause. I told everyone in earshot I wanted to marry her, safe in the knowledge that it was an impossibility. And in the space of a few months I called every woman who had ever smiled at me. I took these women dancing and bought them drinks, spent lavishly on their entertainment, and slept with as many as would have me.

It was an accomplishment just to be allowed in the delivery room. A negotiation. Sonia didn’t want to see me. I insisted that I had rights and she relented. Once there, I was despondent and inspired, hopeful and depressed, aware of the pain I had caused Sonia. I saw Mayra’s little legs and little arms and the slick newness of her tiny face. Her hazel eyes were the same color as her mother’s, and the two of them were in that moment my religion. I found myself wanting to cry at the beauty of her tiny body, her unblemished personhood. And at what I had done. My selfish crimes seemed an insurmountable obstacle if I were ever to be her father.

Sonia and Mayra were waiting for me on the step of the hostel when I walked up. It had been a week or so since I last saw them, long enough for my appearance to be an event. My little girl squirmed out from her mother’s embrace, took one awkward step toward me and stood in my way. She had her arms crossed and her face frozen in a grimace. What theater! Her black bangs tickled her forehead. I knelt before her and offered her my cheek for a kiss.

“Do you know today is my birthday?” she asked gravely.

I looked up and caught Sonia smiling. I asked her in a tremulous voice if this was true.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Well,” I said, reaching into the inside pocket of my suit jacket, “then I’m glad I didn’t give this away.”

Mayra’s eyes opened wide with wonder. It was a small, thin package, the makeup kit. The wrapping paper was red and green, a festive Christmas pattern that looked out of place in February. Mayra didn’t seem to mind.

“Mayra honey,” Sonia said, “why don’t we go upstairs and open it.”

It was too late. It would be opened right there, on the sidewalk between the step and the street. She was already tearing into the paper, using her little hands and her teeth and all of her urgent enthusiasm.

Sonia stood from the step and gave me a kiss, slipping her right arm under my jacket and around my back. She whispered a question in my ear, why I was late, and I mumbled a response about telling her later. She said she had something to tell me too, then she bit my earlobe softly.

The package, once opened, left Mayra a bit befuddled. It was a simple gift really, with two lipsticks, a small hairbrush, and some powders and blushes that I thought might be fun for my little girl to play with. She was stuck on the box. “Is she old enough for this?” I asked.

Sonia frowned and knelt down to take a closer look.

“What is it?” Mayra asked.

“It’ll make you even more beautiful than you already are,” I said.

“Lipstick!” Mayra exclaimed. She had pried it free, twisted the bottom until it was fully extended, standing in a shiny red salute.

“You couldn’t have gotten her a book?” Sonia asked.

“I want her to like me.”

She smirked. “What do you say, Mayra, baby?”

“Thank you, Papi,” my daughter purred, and all the day’s small troubles and all the grander ones seemed distant and unimportant.

“Next year Daddy’s going to get you a book,” I said.

Mayra stuck her tongue out. I scooped her into my arms.

There was a movie to see and ice cream to have and balloons and conversation and strolling and hugs. For the first time in Mayra’s short life, I let Sonia pay. When I pulled out the fifteen soles I had, she wouldn’t take them. We took a cab to Miraflores and walked along the boardwalk, high above the sea. The summer sun slipped toward dusk in lurid red streaks. We stopped at the park to watch the hang gliders, dozens of them floating high above the city’s coastline.

Mayra had never seen them before. She asked if they were giant birds.

I said they were, but Sonia shook her head. Poor Mayra looked at the both of us, bewildered.

“What are they then, babe?” I asked Sonia.

“Not giant birds,” she said, backtracking. “No, no. Enormous birds.”

“Is that bigger than giant?” Mayra asked.

I reassured her it was, and she seemed pleased.

I put Mayra on my shoulders so she could have a better look. She squinted against the dying sun, pointing at them as they swept in slow motion, left and right above the horizon. I took Sonia’s hand in mine, and she gave it to me easily. Enough time has passed, I thought. Tonight she might finally say yes.

I have proposed in her parents’ home. In a fine restaurant, after wine and dinner served by waiters with European accents. At the zoo, two years ago, with balloons and a trumpet I’d borrowed from a friend. And on Mayra’s fourth birthday, in the naked intimacy of Sonia’s bedroom. Last year, like every year, she told me she loved me but wasn’t sure that was enough. I told her it was enough for me, that I loved her. It’s not that I haven’t thought of giving up; it’s that I don’t know how.

A few months after Mayra was born, Sonia traveled to the States to learn English. Her family wanted to get her away from me, from the stress. For half a year I visited my daughter three times a week, suffered through awkward silences with the Sepulvedas, who didn’t know whether to hate me or applaud my persistence. I sat on their sofa, under the dour gaze of Mrs. Sepulveda, rocking little Mayra in my arms. At night I created scenarios that ranged from the tragic to the blessed: Sonia in the States, meeting a man who swept her off her feet. A tall, white man. A rich man. A man more handsome and more intelligent than myself. Kinder certainly. A better father. These were my nightmares when I thought I had lost her. But I let myself dream as well: Sonia returning, chastened by what she had seen there, overwhelmed by the depravity her father had described, forgiving, wanting a fresh start.

Back when I worked for my uncle, we made a delivery once in San Juan de Lurigancho. I left the back door of the van unlocked. We were only inside a few minutes, but when we came out, it was open, and a few scraggly dressed kids were running off with boxes of foundation and perfumed lotions and soaps. We started to chase after them, when the owner said she recognized the thieves. Come back later, she said. I’ll straighten this out. We made a few more deliveries, came back a couple hours later, and followed the woman to the first child’s home. It was humble, the door made of wooden slats so poorly constructed you could stick your fingers through the yawning gaps. A small woman let us in, listened with her hands behind her back as we explained what had happened. The home smelled of boiled vegetables and mud. The sheepish child appeared when he was called, twelve at most and barefoot. My uncle spoke. The boy curled his toes into the dirt floor and rocked back on his heels. His mother apologized profusely. Then the boy left and reappeared with a box of fingernail polishes. My uncle noted there was one missing.

“I used it,” his mother said. “It was a gift.” She held her colored nails out for us to see.

Her nails were painted a deep, earthy red. “It looks very nice,” I told her.

I remember telling Sonia this story, years ago. It was a late morning in bed and she sat on top of me, drawing her name on my chest and stomach with a blue ballpoint pen. When she pressed hard into my skin, it tickled.

When I got to this point in the story, she looked up. “What did you do?” she asked. Her hair fell in my face.

The truth is my uncle took the nail polish. He resealed it and we sold it. He apologized to the woman and he felt terrible, but he did it. Money was tight.

“We let her keep it,” I said. I’m not sure why I lied. It just seemed so terrible.

Sonia went back to her work, her tongue poking out, applying another baroque S to my body. I tried to peek over my chin to see.

“What?” I asked.

“I mean, weren’t you broke? Wasn’t your family broke?”

“You would have taken it from her?”

“It wasn’t nail polish she needed.”

“It was a start!”

“Oh, Miguel,” Sonia said and kissed my stomach. “First take care of your own, babe. That’s what I’ve always been told.”

The woman didn’t protest. She thanked us politely for not going to the police. I exchanged glances with the boy, knowing he wouldn’t be punished. He knew it too. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was sure of it.

I lay there, felt the nib of the ballpoint pen tracing letters on my skin. I closed my eyes and Sonia laughed exquisitely. “I’m done,” she announced. “You can look now.”

When I opened my eyes, she pulled off her shirt in one quick move. It amazed me. Her breasts were small and round. She handed me the pen. “Now it’s your turn,” she said, smiling. She closed her eyes and waited. “Hurry!”

We were in the cab riding home when she told me Mayra had received another gift for her birthday, that it had come in the mail and that it was postmarked from the United States. There was a heaviness in her voice that surprised me.

“Really?” I asked. It was late and I felt suddenly tired. “From your uncle?”

She shook her head. From an American. A travel writer who had written a review. He had stayed awhile in Lima. Apparently I’d met him. Didn’t I remember? Sure. The tall man, the white man, the rich man of my nightmares.

“I didn’t realize you were staying in touch,” I said. “That’s nice.”

The city was dark, our daughter asleep between the two of us.

“He wants me to come visit him. He said he can help us get the visa.”

“Us?” I asked.

“Me and Mayra.”

I felt myself nod and was aware that my daughter’s tiny feet lay across my lap. I had the impulse to hold her, to turn her so that her cheek rested against my chest.

“Are you going to go?”

“He’s paying for the tickets.”

“Are you going to stay?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

The cab moved swiftly along the dimly lit streets. Along Tacna, thickets of people waited for buses that would carry them home, crowds thronged around the entrances to underground clubs. Techno music attacked our silence. We were almost there, to the New Lima. I’d told her already about my run-in with the law, self-consciously omitting details until the whole episode sounded like fragments of surrealist poetry. I’d spoken of my impending financial ruin and again felt the humiliating rush of blood to my face. We’d lapsed into silence. She knew all of my secrets and now I knew hers. She was leaving me for Los Uniteds, for its mighty economy, its fertile ground where dollars grow wild. He wouldn’t be taking her to Nueva Jersey, I assumed, but somewhere with verdant lawns and dustless houses, a place where newness hung in the air like perfume. Why wouldn’t she go? And if she left, why would she return?

“Do you love him?” I asked.

She nodded. “You can love more than one person at a time,” she said.

We were silent until the hostel. There we put Mayra to bed, the sweet smallness of her, innocent of our machinations and our troubles. At what age would she begin to understand? How many years did I have left before she would recognize me for the failure I was? How many more before she forgot me?

Sonia and I drifted back into the drab front lobby. Above the counter was the starred review in a cheap wooden frame. I tapped the glass with my knuckle, wanting to shatter it. “Is this it?” I asked.

The three couches were set at right angles to one another. She collapsed into the one by the far wall. There was a high window above it and a wan yellow light fell into the lobby. She didn’t answer me.

I felt fidgety. I couldn’t sit or stand. I paced in front of the counter. I had scarcely eaten all day and felt suddenly light-headed. “What’s his name?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Where does he live?”

“Nowhere.”

“Is he rich?”

“He isn’t rich.”

“Do you miss him? Is he blond? Do you speak English with him? Does he e-mail you, call you, send you pictures?”

“Stop,” she said.

I was drunk with questions, walking tight circles in front of her.

Sonia let out a sigh. “This isn’t exactly how I imagined my life.”

In this city, there is nothing more useless than imagining a life. Tomorrow is as unknowable as next year, and there is nothing solid to grab hold of. There is no work. There is nothing I could have promised her in that moment that wouldn’t have been built on imagination. Or worse, on luck.

“What do you expect me to do?” she asked, watching me through the long seconds of my silence. “What would you do?”

“I don’t know,” I said finally.

“You’d do what’s best for her.”

I slumped in the sofa to her right and closed my eyes tightly. My ears were ringing. “So it’s just for her,” I said through gritted teeth. “And poor little you has to leave and move to Gringoland.”

“I don’t want to fight.”

“Just say what’s on your mind.”

She sucked her teeth. “You remind me of every mistake I’ve ever made.”

“That’s funny. Because you remind me of our daughter.”

“Not her,” she said. “I wasn’t talking about her.”

“Of course you weren’t. I get it. You want new mistakes.”

“Why not?” She stood up, suddenly angry. There was heat in her voice. “Let me guess,” she said. “You have the ring in your pocket. You want to get down on one knee and read me a love poem and you want me to cry and you want me to want you. But I’ll say no because I’m the only one who thinks between the two of us, and so you’ll disappear for a month to lick your wounds and I’ll have to hear from Mayra that her daddy picked her up from kindergarten, that he brought her a present.”

I was sweating. “What about us?” I asked.

She stared at me for a moment, disbelieving. I thought so many things between us had been forgiven. “Why didn’t you fight for me?” she said.

I started to answer — that I was, that I had been for five years — but she cut me off. “Not now — then.”

It felt terrible to have nothing to say.

“I never wanted to have to get married. I wanted to want to get married.”

“Do you want to marry this guy?”

“He hasn’t asked me yet,” she said. “But he will.”

It was nearly midnight. The soft sounds of traffic drifted in through the window. I needed to think. I pulled out my fifteen soles and asked her for a room on the empty fourth floor with a view and a balcony. Sonia looked at me perplexed.

“This is a hostel, isn’t it?” I said. “Are Peruvians not allowed to stay here?”

In the pale light I could see her glaring at me.

“I’m sorry.”

“Fifteen’s not enough.”

“I’m good for it.”

Sonia stood and walked around the counter. She ran her finger along the keys, pulling one off its hook and handing it to me. “You know the way up.”

I asked her to wait.

I went to the back room and fumbled in the dark until my eyes adjusted. Mayra was sleeping. I picked her up, careful not to wake her. She molded her sleep to my embrace with barely a murmur. I stepped out into the light and saw Sonia sitting on the counter, her legs swinging against the wood. She looked so young.

“I love you, Miguel,” she said. “But marrying you would be like giving up.”

She handed me the key and kissed me good night.

I watched Mayra breathe for a while and dozed off. I awoke to Sonia moving through the shadows of the room and into bed. Our daughter slept between us, the only honest person in her family.

I drifted into sleep again and dreamed, this time for real, such saturated, overblown dreams that when I woke up just after dawn the whole of the previous day seemed perversely dreamlike too. Were they leaving? Were they already gone?

Sonia was asleep on her side, facing me, with an arm over Mayra.

After a while I got out of bed and pulled back the curtains to find that daybreak had exploded over Lima again. I was filled with inexplicable energy, though I hadn’t slept much, and an optimism that bordered on delusion. The emptiness in my stomach was gone. They wouldn’t leave, I thought. They couldn’t.

Sonia groaned and covered her eyes. Mayra grumbled and turned over. “Papi!” she complained.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” I said grandly, with a sweep of my arms. “The sunrise!”

Sonia rolled over into her pillow, muffling a tiny laugh, and then popped up. She smiled weakly at me, then fell into a deep full-body yawn, catlike, that ended with her outstretched toes poking out from beneath the sheet. “Wake up, honey,” she said to Mayra. Then to me, “Good morning.”

I let the sun pour in through the window, lighting her smile. Then Mayra was awake and sitting up in bed. “Daddy,” she called out, pointing at my belly. “You’re fat!”

“Mayra!” Sonia said. “Don’t be rude!”

But it seemed so funny to me. I laughed. I’m not fat; it’s just that I’m not young anymore. I grabbed my belly and pretended for a moment my navel was a bullet hole, that I was mortally wounded. I crumpled to the ground, “Oh, Mayra,” I called out.

My daughter crawled over to the edge of the bed and hung there, looking me in the eyes as I lay on the floor. Her black hair stood up in places, a wild mane of tangles. She broke into a wide, goofy smile and I closed my eyes.

Imagine, as I did then, time in the form of a narrowing tunnel, pulling your loved ones farther and still farther from you. Distances expanding relentlessly, life reduced to memories of people who have gone away. Imagine the odd and terrible silences, the emptied spaces. Imagine withering in this place alone. See your daughter in a faraway northern nation, with its cold winds and heavy rains, struggling to distinguish you from a slew of blurred sights and sounds and smells. Imagine memory’s illogic has buried you behind the noise of this city’s traffic or the scent of the New Lima’s musty hallways — imagine: people and things I can barely recall, a report by Mayra Solis and somewhere in that forlorn text: her father! Imagine she forgets her Spanish, and all her fears and hopes and loves and dreams are trapped, lost in a vault of foreign sounds.

Sonia said something, and then I could hear the voice of my daughter, but my thoughts were elsewhere, or else they were so precisely there they were underground, boring holes in the earth beneath the city, or floating just above it, tying ribbons to the tallest trees. I stood up slowly. I think Sonia must have recognized the flight I was on because she fell silent. Squinting against the light, she watched me and I watched her.

“What?” she asked.

I am a man of traditions, and because I am that man, I bent down on one knee, again, one final time. Sunlight gathered in the room, a breeze circled and blew the curtains apart. Sonia shook her head — no, no — but I kept on. My daughter had clambered back on the bed and sat, her legs underneath her, watching us as if it were theater. And there were no trumpets or violins or sounds at all. Only quiet. I took the ring from the inside of my jacket. “Sonia,” I said, and played my last card, and so, regret nothing.