Daniel Alarcon - War by Candlelight - Stories

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.