Daniel Alarcon - War by Candlelight - Stories

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.