Friendly House

            Ever since I moved out to Huanchaco six weeks ago, I’d rented a room in Friendly House. It was a five-bedroom place a few blocks off the beach road with a living room, a shared kitchen, and a small courtyard, where you could rinse out your wetsuit and hang it out to dry.

            It was Friday. Outside the window of my room, the old vendor yelled “Tah-MAA-Les!” in his flat baritone. He must have been seventy, carrying the tamales in a huge woven basket, on his head a typical Quechua hat. There was something ancient in that yell that moved me: the declarative, uninflected sound bouncing off the cobblestones.

            Earlier that morning, I’d walked across the stones barefoot, all the way to a break called Frog Bar. Paddled out, careful to avoid the spines of the urchins. The fog was so thick you couldn’t see the shore. The waves were so consistently good here that the locals never surfed early, so I was alone out there. Riding across pyramids of water inside a cloud. Beginning at one foggy point in space, riding to another. Then, all of a sudden, the fog lifted. I looked back at Huanchaco, the thin little Peruvian beach town. Stared up at the brown hills above it. The town’s church looked down on us from the hill, backlit by the sunrise, and beside it, the little graveyard.

            Now I was feeling that surfy feeling: the residual sensation of the waves moving under me, mixed with contentedness and the desire to lay down and nap.

            I had just come in from the shower when Maria Jose knocked on my door.

            “You need the room made up?” she called.

            “Sure,” I said, rather surprised by this request, “Come in.”

            If you asked me why I lived in Friendly House, I could tell you exactly: her. She was twenty or so with straight brown hair and moles on her cheek, like a constellation of tiny moons. She smiled often, laughed in a girlish way, and, for reasons I could never fathom, loved the TV show “Two and Half Men,” which she watched in the common area with subtitles on to practice her English. She found it wickedly funny.

            Now, I stood there with a towel around my waste, watching her as she got on to my bed, leaned across it. She reached for the corners of the fitted sheet, her dress riding up her thighs, and I stole a peek at her cleavage. Her necklace hung there, a black thing with some kind of ocean stone glowing iridescent in the light.

            “What are you up to today?” she asked, when she was finished, the sheets balled into her arms. “Wait. Don’t tell me… Surfing?”

            “Haha,” I said, dryly. Wriggled into my pants. “Actually, I surfed already. Have to go in to work now.”

            “That’s right. You do work, don’t you?” she teased. “How are they?”

            “Well, Doña Vicky hasn’t come by to see me in weeks. Every time I go look for her, she’s mysteriously out.”

            “How’s the artesenía?”

            Recently, we’d started a workshop to help the women in our community sell artesenía – necklaces and the like –  to the backpackers. It had occurred to me that Maria Jose would be the perfect model.

            Poor guy! my colleagues said, when I brought the photos of her to our office. Maria Jose lounging near the shore. Maria Jose in a bathing suit, eyes narrowed seductively. Stuck in Huanchaco with her. How can you stand it!

            But she was whip-smart, too, a marketing student at Trujillo University. Summers, she sometimes worked as a brand rep for the beer company Pilsen Trujillo on the beaches of Lima or Mancora.

            “Hey -- since when do you wash anything?” I said. “Doesn’t your mom usually take care of this?”

            She wrinkled her nose at this. “My family’s visiting this weekend,” she said, vaguely.  She ran a finger through her hair, tugged at her earlobe, distracted or nervous.

            I’d missed a shirt button, and she fixed it for me with those small hands of hers. She had tiny hands, her pinkies thin and crooked.

            “Your hair is so blonde now,” she said.

            It was true. Months of heavy surfing had bleached my hair. I was tan. My lats and back were suddenly defined. No longer the skinny, diffident person I’d been when I arrived here.

            I stared at her. Her face was inches away from me. The desire to touch her pulsed through me, turning my insides to mush. Very lightly, I put my hand on her back, pulled her toward me. Looked into her eyes.

            She let me do it.

            “Here’s the thing,” she took my hands and led them along her body. “No matter what you try and become,” she dropped my hands. “You’ll still be yourself.”

            I packed my blue volunteer chaleco, the logbook with all the loan details, and my notebook into my backpack. By the time I left my room, I found Maria Jose there, with her uncle and aunt, and a little boy she hadn’t mentioned. He was maybe five-years-old, a smiling blonde child. Maria Jose’s uncle had the haircut of a Spanish friar – the big bald spot and the thick rim of hair around it.         

            “Buenos días,” I said to them, “How was the trip?”

            “You must be one of the guests,” the uncle said. He regarded me with distrust, studying my face, as if trying to figure out what I was about. “Are you one of these surfers Maria Jose is always talking about?” At his feet, Maria Jose played with the little boy, the two of them in an entirely different world. 

            “I’m learning,” I said. “But I guess you never stop learning, do you?”

            Because I was running late, I was forced to take the combi. The combi was a van, which somehow squeezed in twelve adult human bodies. How? An extra row of seats was added behind the driver. Then there was all the doubling up: every decent seat was allotted to two people. It was the Russian roulette of rides: sitting in the lap of a sixty year old man one day, splitting a spot with a pretty girl the next. Today though, I was able to get a bucket seat to myself.

            Cumbia thumped from the speakers, as we made our way out of Huanchaco, over the cobblestones, down the paved road, past the guard tower. The cobrador yelled out: “Trujillo! Trujillo! Vamos!”

            Then we were out into the open road: the beaches where no one really lived. It was so brown everywhere. Dirt and sand and a few shacks. We passed Chanchan, the ancient Pre-Inca beach city. The walled sandstone featured iconography of birds and fish. Occasionally, a concert would be held there, late at night.

            It was my habit to write on my commute, so I put my earbuds in, took out my notebook, and tried to squeeze out a few words. I was working on a short story about my grandfather. He’d escaped Poland when he was fifteen, gone to live with an uncle in Guatemala. After falling out with his uncle – who, family legend had it, threw him in jail and never paid him for the work he did – he joined up with some friendly family and ended up in Peru. Here’s where the story got murky. Supposedly, he started a trucking company. Our surname came from Peru, a city there. He’d acquired a fake Peruvian birth certificate, before eventually making his way to Mexico, contracting malaria, and nearly dying while engaged to our grandmother, who had been repeatedly urged to break off their engagement, before her betrothed finally reappeared some months later.

            The story I was writing was about the time my grandfather nearly sabotaged my father’s second wedding. I was his best man. I remember looking out from the chuppah, as he began yelling in Spanish, mid-ceremony. He didn’t believe this white-haired rabbi conducting the intermarriage was really a rabbi. Or maybe he was simply having one of his mood swings?

            In my story, I had taken my grandfather’s point of view, as he sat there in the ceremony. He regarded us disdainfully. His spoiled and under-achieving progeny in California. The divorced son, marrying a non-Jew, dropout from the PhD program. His spoiled grandkids: the failed writer, now bumming around at home. His two daughters, both divorced, as well. Filled with revulsion at all of us, he yelled out in a kind of fugue: Ask the rabbi a question! Test him on his Hebrew!

            As was my habit in those days, I worked with remarkable care or maybe just fear. I wanted every sentence to be one hundred percent correct, beyond reproach. Before I knew it, the forty minute ride was over, and all I had was the line: “He looked at his son and could find no evidence of the genetic inheritance that should have passed from him to his son.” I pressed delete.

            “Bajó!” I yelled to the cobrador, as we neared the plaza de armas. Clambered over four people. Got out.

            Trujillo’s Plaza de Armas was somewhat famous for its large, prominent statue of a David, which was notable for its conspicuous lack of human proportions: the limbs, strangely elongated. In that way, it seemed like a poor imitation of an Italian piazza. The cheap Peruvian knockoff. Still, it’s cut-rate charms worked on me: the yellows and reds of the old buildings, the antique wooden doors. I passed the Alianza Francesa, where Bee, the director of our little non-profit, had once taken me to see the Herzog film “Aguirre, the Wrath of God.” The street names alternated between Spanish and Inca. Tupac Amaru. Pizarro. The conquistadors got equal billing as the natives, which struck me as an odd compromise. Didn’t you need to take a moral position? Or was it better like this? Was this more truthful, somehow?

            I found the little museum café and went inside. Ana, my language partner, was already there. She was a petite woman with freckles, a shy demeanor, and dark hair, wrapped in a tight bun.. In her capacity as psychologist at the non-profit where I volunteered, she seemed quite exceptional. Once, there had been a meeting and the leadership team had run very late. She had been forced to improvise, as we all sat sweating in someone’s living room: the two of us and thirty women from the community.

            She told the women at the meeting to think about their inner child. We all have a child within us, she explained. Then, she handed out paper, and got them drawing. What is your child’s deepest desire? Draw it now. Don’t think. You could have heard a pin drop in there. It had moved me, as these dozen women began to draw intently. Afterward, I asked Ana where she’d learned that exercise. I didn’t, she told me, I made it up.

            We were translating a story together, “Paper Lantern” by Stuart Dybeck, one of my favorites.

            I ordered an Americano. Ana ordered the same, but she filled hers with six or seven spoonfuls of sugar, spooning them in and stirring as she sipped.

            “Why do you like this story so much?” she asked me, at last.

            “I don’t know,” I said. “ I guess it just feels real to me. Here’s a guy with all the sensitivity in the world, and all he gets is this one amazing ride. This one night.” I sipped my coffee.

            “You don’t think you’ll find love beyond that?” she asked, cautiously.

            “Me? God no…”

            “You believe that, don’t you? That you’re not worthy of love?”

            For some reason, maybe the way the sun was peeking through the window of the café, my eyes welled up with water. I couldn’t speak for a few seconds.

            I checked my phone. Time didn’t matter much here, true enough, but I told her I was late.

            The area where we worked was called El Porvenir. The future! It was a little shanty town a few miles outside Trujillo, where immigrants, mostly from the mountains, put up huts made of sticks. You’d come back one weekend and there they were: the invasions, they were called. They’d build them, fly the flag of the mayor and hope for the best.

            I made my rounds, walking the neighborhood in my blue chaleco. Knocking on the doors of the clients. After an hour of this, with the sun beating down on me, I got tired, and went to the office for water, coffee, and AC.

            I sat in the office, teaching Gerson chess and chatting with Einer, a fourteen-year-old boy who lived with his grandmother around the corner. Somehow, we began a discussion about chevere versus bacán. What was the better word for cool?

            Chevere, which came from Che, was my personal favorite. I didn’t really get the connotations of bacán, which sounded like vaca. Cow.

            I was more familiar with the Mexican word for cool: Padre. As in: Que padre! What a father! or What a priest! But that kind of parsed for me. It was like what a boss. Mexico still being so male-dominated and chauvinist, that the role of the father was worthy of being elevated: the one who gets the big piece of chicken, the one who fucks.

            After I left the office, I dropped by the volunteer house to say hello. As usual, the volunteers were drinking. They sat in the courtyard, drinking Pilsen Trujillos and smoking. Popping the bottle caps off with their lighters.

            I didn’t know most of the new crowd, though I knew a few of them and most of their names. There was: the Chilean girl with thick rimmed glasses, the petite, fire-cracker German girl, the young couple from the UK (both skinny, half South American, big techno fans), the young Australian/Asian kid about to start a development studies program at uni, the old Spanish social worker lady of about fifty-five, the failed boat captain from the UK, by way of Belize, an obvious lush, and many more.

            I found Drew. He’d been a volunteer on and off for years. He’d been part of the British Territorial Army, and was plotting a transition into a career as a paragliding instructor. We played some backgammon, betting a few soles a game, and drank a Pilsen Trujillo together.

            Bee and Lourdes were in the office. The two of them ran the whole show. While the rest of us simply passed through, did our little jobs, donated some money, and stayed for the party, they were neck deep in budgets, raising money, keeping the organization alive.

            Bee looked so tired tonight. A streak of gray had entered her dark hair and her face seemed creased with worry.

            I’d lived in the volunteer house myself for four months. It had been lovely at first. But then, at a certain point, everyone in my cohort had moved away, back to their real lives. The new crop of volunteers arrived. It seemed somehow cheapening, to see the cycle repeating itself. I could no longer give the same credence to deep conversations about Pervuain culture, the philosophy of volunteering, group trips to the little sierra town. The locus of my interest wasn’t here anymore, but back in Huanchaco. Back in those waves. Back in Friendly House.

            It was on the micro -- the colorful, slow-cruising bus -- riding home from the volunteer house, that the feeling started. I was sitting there, slightly tipsy, when a couple got on. It was one of the backpacker girls: Carmen, a dark eyed beauty, and one of the bricheros. They took the seat across from me and sat there, holding hands and making out.

            Suddenly, my chest tightened. The floor of the bus seemed to crack open.

            What was I doing here? I was the child of infinite potential. I was twenty-five now, and I’d amounted to nothing. So, it was true. My grandfather was right, after all. I was shit.

             We reached my stop and I ran from the bus. Took my wetsuit off the clothesline and pulled it on. During the day the swell had filled in. Now, the ocean looked angry.

            I jogged  down the beach, way past Frog Bar, past the last of the structures on the strand. There was a channel way down there that I’d seen some good surfers use before. I paddled out. The waves seemed to come out of nowhere. Breakers the size of a barn rolled toward me, sending me somersaulting to the bottom.

            Somehow, though, I made it out.

            When I finally turned and paddled into a wave, I looked over the ledge and seemed to be fifteen feet high. It wasn’t possible. Not for me! I became dizzy. I was going to die out here!

            If it ended this way, at least they could say he ended it doing the thing he loved!

            But no, the body knows what to do… Instinct and adrenaline took over, as they would so many times in the years to come.

            I waited for the smallest wave and let it knock me forward. It was still ten feet tall, but I rode it in.  On my belly like a beginner. Held on.

            You couldn’t really call what I’d done surfing, but I felt like a champ. I was alive.

            I walked home carrying my board, as darkness descended on me. The first few fogatas were lit. I spotted Paul at the first one. A dark-skinned Peruvian brichero kid. He had a scar on his cheek, but otherwise, he was handsome. He held a guitar. He was playing Californication, but satirically. Singing in a silly voice, messing around with it, as a couple of backpacker girls watched.

            Paul had studied art at the Trujillo institute, and his paintings were always interesting: sometimes geometric experiments, often drawings of the local environment – perhaps because that appealed more to the backpacker crowd, his customers and his potential conquests? The work seemed never to be quite finished. The color or the figurative work seemed to be simply abandoned at some point.

            When I really got to know him, years later, he’d tell me how he’d grown up so poor the sound of a ringing phone gave him terrible anxiety. It wasn’t a sound you ever got used to if you hadn’t had one until you were sixteen. But you’d never know any of that to look at him. He oozed cool and brichero confidence.

            “What’s up?” I said.

            “This is Marta and Gretta,” he told me. “Ladies, this is Fuckface.”

            “Fuck off!” I said, more annoyed than pissed.

            “Look at that big shit-eating grin. You see it, don’t you? You do. Come on. I know you do.”

            It was true. I was grinning maniacally. Still lit up from that wave minutes earlier.

            The girls excused themselves to the bathroom, and I nodded at Paul.

            “Let me ask you something. How do you do it?”

            “Seriously?”

            “Yeah.”

            He considered me carefully. “Well, here’s a few ideas. The surfer is a classic archetype. You walk over with a board under your arm. Big smile. Say hello. Ask her what her name is. Simple stuff.”

            I nodded.

            “Try it,” he told me.

            I did.

            “Don’t walk like that,” he said.. “Your feet are too close, like you’re on a tightrope. Space them apart. Toes out. Occupy some space, man.”

            The girls returned and I said goodbye.

            It was with Paul’s words in my ear and the thrill of life-threatening surf in my bones that I walked, toes a little more apart, out into the night, toward Frog Bar. For some reason, I decided to take the long way. Turned up the alley, careful to avoid the divot in the concrete where I’d been electrocuted once or twice due to the horrible wiring. Passed the neighbor’s little flat. I heard a sound. It was unmistakable: an American studio audience’s canned laughter, mixed with a sharp, choked cry. Peered in.

            There she was, sitting on the neighbor’s couch smoking a cigarette, watching “Two and a Half Men” and crying in the dark. Her makeup was smudged from her tears. Maria Jose.

            The door was cracked open, so I let myself in, sat beside her on the couch.

            “What’s wrong?”

            “Nothing,” she said. “I’m completely fine.”

            “You sure?”

            She ignored me. Kept watching her show.

            “Listen,” I said, “I know I’m incredibly boring to you, let me buy you one. What do you say?”

            She laughed at this: maybe my pathetic persistence was amusing to her? The dogged pursuit from the unlovable.

            “Fine,” she said. “Whatever.”

            We walked up to Frog Bar. I paid the doorman for two covers. Went inside.

            It was crowded, sweaty. On stage, four dreadlocked Peruvians were playing reggae. There was the singer, a guy banging bongos, guitarist, bass, and a fourth guy on a laptop. They were terrible.

            The bricheros were out tonight, in full force: six or seven Peruvian guys vying for various sexy backpackers. They were called bricheros because they were on a mission to build a bridge. A bridge to where? America or Europe. A bridge to: health care, massively higher wages, maybe even a half-decent public education?

            I went up to the bar. Ordered two maracuya sours. Gave one to Maria Jose. We clinked our glasses, drank the sour sweet drink, stood there in the sweaty crowd. Maria Jose looked half-bored, half uncomfortable, as the music thumped and people danced.

            After the song ended, I asked Maria Jose if she wanted to sit. She nodded. Went outside.

            “What happened tonight?” I asked Maria Jose, when we’d found a seat at a table on the sand.

            She fumbled for a cigarette. I took out a lighter and lit it for her.

            “You know how my family is in town?”

            I nodded.

            “Well,” she continued, “I invited Richard to meet them. To dinner with us.”

            I grunted. Richard. I didn’t like to think about him: the oafish boyfriend lurking somewhere here in town.

            “First he said he was going to be ten minutes late. Then thirty. Then an hour. Then, he didn’t show at all. He tells me work is running late. Whatever… Then, we’re walking along the street, and I see the sack of shit. Drinking at Sabes with his friends.”

            She puffed her cigarette anxiously, exhaled through her nose.

            “What a fuckin’ asshole!” I said, feeling it all of a sudden. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I knew he was a sack of shit well before this. But that really is pathetic.”

            She nodded.

            “He’s really fucking this up… but hey, I guess I should thank him.”

            “Why’s that?”

            “Well,” I smiled at her. “Here you are.”

            I was thinking up more flattery when Katy walked by. She was chewing gum and wearing a sexy top. When she saw me, she gave me the stinkeye. I nodded in a non-specific way, trying to avoid eye contact.

            Some weeks ago, I’d gotten black out drunk and hooked up with her. It was a Tuesday. We were two of maybe six people in a tiny bar. We danced salsa together. I had no idea how to dance, but that didn’t stop me attempting to twirl her. Twirl her and twirl her! Only the next morning did I realize her teeth were problematic. It wasn’t Katy I was worried about, but Marco, her boyfriend.

            “You realize he’s not in your league,” I told Maria Jose, trying to forget about Marco. She smirked at this. “Seriously? You’re not just some pretty face. You’re funny. You have your own business. You’re beautiful.”

            “Go on,” she said, starting to enjoy it, maybe.

            I noticed Maria Jose’s drink was empty. Got up to buy us another round.

            I had just reached the front of the drink line, when I felt a shoulder digging into my back, knocking me off balance.

            “Look who it is,” Marco said. “What’s up, Fuckface?”

            “Don’t call me that.”

            “Listen to this huevon. He thinks he’s hot shit. I’m going to call you what I call you, Fuckface.”

            He sniffled loudly and aggressively, and I wondered if it was coke that made his pupils so dilated, or simply rage.

            “I saw you out there surfing tonight.”

            I nodded.

            “You’re a kook. You’re liable to get killed out there, and that would be bad for Huanchaco. Bad for tourism.” He snorted again. “ You fucking kook. Riding on your belly. Holding on for your life.” He imitated me: my stink bug stance, ass hanging out stupidly, my arms gripping desperately to the board as I rode in.

            I felt my face start to flush.

            My drinks were on the bar, and when he turned to laugh with his friend, I took them, spilling in my hurry. Slumped off.

            Back at the table, Maria Jose was no longer sitting alone. Paul was with her, leaning close to her, talking up a storm and sending her sidelong glances.

            “What are you doing here?” I hissed, when Maria Jose got up to pee, “Where’re those chicks you were with?”

            He shrugged, scratched himself.

            “ They’re resting .”

            “Oh,” I said, after a second, getting his meaning. “I see.”

            “She is something, isn’t she,” he said, as we both watched Maria Jose go. “I’ll say this for you. You’re ambitious alright. You don’t know how to talk to women, and no one would ever call you confident, but you don’t lack ambition.”

            I shrugged, looked up and saw Marco, moving toward our table, with another muscular surfer.

            I leaned close to Paul, grabbed his ponytail. Hard.

            “Don’t fuck this up for me. Stay away from her,” I warned him.

            He smiled at this. “Hey. I like this new you… This is good.”

            I wound my way through Frog Bar. The bricheros were all making their moves, dancing with reckless abandon, holding the backpackers close. I found the ladies’ bathroom, paused at the door.

            “Maria Jose!” I yelled. No answer.

            Checked around me. Pushed my way in.

            “Maria Jose!” I yelled at the first stall. A scream came back at me.

            “Maria Jose! Maria Jose!” I yelled.

            “What the fuck?” she said. “What are you doing?”

            She appeared from another stall, and I took her by the hand.

            “We need to go. You and me. Right now.”

            We ran out of there, along the beach. Soon, Frog Bar was just light behind us. Orange crabs scampered along the rocks, among lobster tails, washed up kelp. The sky had cleared. The moon was shining.

            “Do you know the constellations? Did you ever learn them, when you were growing up?”

            “A few,” she said.

            “I have this idea about constellations. I guess I got it from a story. It’s like this. Most of the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. But there are a few moments that last, burning like stars, like constellations. These are the moments that define our lives. And there are only a few people in our lives, not many, with the power to create them.”

            She stared at me, intrigued perhaps by the sudden passion in my voice.

            I kissed her.

            When we entered Friendly House, the two of us drunk and suppressing laughter, Maria Jose warned me to be very quiet. Her mother was asleep two rooms over. Her aunt and uncle and nephew were sleeping on inflatable mattresses in the living room.

            We tiptoed past them, entered my room.

            I held her close to me, kissed her again, then tossed her onto my bed. Moved toward her. It was electric: her eyes looking into mine. Her breath on me. Her taste. Her smell.

            I was just unhooking her bra and working my hand underneath it when a noise stopped us. The sound of the door, tiny footsteps. It was the little boy.

            “Well hello, little man!” I said,  “Isn’t it a little late for you?”

            Maria Jose looked at him, her eyes filled with deep emotion.

            “Come on, chico,” she said, going over to him, “let me take you back to bed.”

            A few minutes later, she was back.

            “You’re good with him,” I told her, “I mean, really good. You’d make an amazing–.”

            Her eyes filled with tears.

            “What?” I said. “What is it?”

            “He’s not my cousin,” she said.

            “He isn’t, is he? He’s so blond. He looks nothing like your uncle...”

            When I was fourteen, I worked at one of the bars. There was an Australian guy who came back then. This was when Huanchaco was still a fishing village. He was one of the first foreigners. He and I…”

            I stared at her.

            “Now you know all my secrets,” she said.

            It was like seeing a different person. Like she was transforming before my eyes.

            “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life,” she said.

            “Me either,” I said.

            I’ve never told anyone this part before, but here’s what happened next: I lay there, holding her, all night. Who was I? Who was she? It seemed to me then that the truth was unknowable and yet it was all so simple. We slept like that. Soon, the sun was rising. The birds were chirping. I touched her face, very gently as the old vendor yelled “Tamales!” and the sun peeked in through the blinds.