Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

pottery, mestizos in Chicago Bulls T-shirts hawking pirated cassette tapes—to the guide’s 1985 Oldsmobile, lovingly buffed but hopelessly battered, and drove to the Convento de los Descalzos, a sixteenth- century monastery with two lavish chapels; and to several outlying churches.

If cities were cheese, Lima would be Swiss on a waffle. Its avenues were moonscapes of potholes. After banging and bouncing over ubiquitous craters, as well as dodging traffic even more anarchistic than Bangkok’s, the two men found Lima’s religious buildings islands of peace. Glum, maybe, morbid, perhaps, but in contrast to the busted infrastructure, rackety commerce, and thievery-on-parade, nothing short of serene.

At one point during the tour, having observed that Switters never knelt nor genuflected and that he had to be frequently reminded to remove his hat and stub out his cigar, Juan Carlos could no longer restrain himself. “Senor Switter, I am suspecting that you are not being the Catholic fellow.”

“No. No, I’m not. Not yet. But I’m thinking about joining up.”

“Why? If you do not mind me asking.”

Switters pondered the question. “You might say,” he eventually replied, “that I have a special feeling for the virgin.”

Juan Carlos nodded. He seemed satisfied with the response. Naturally, there was no way he could have guessed that Switters was referring to his sixteen-year-old stepsister.

The sun dropped into the horizon line like a coin dropping into a slot. The ocean bit it to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. Twilight softened the city visually but did not hush it. If anything, Lima became more raucous, more crowded, more menacing with the coming dark. Switters kept his wallet in his front pants pocket, kept his Beretta in his belt. He belonged to that minority who had yet to accept the rip-off as an inescapable fact of modern life.

Their tour completed, the guide and his client stopped at a working-class bar for a glass of pisco. Who would have thought that the juice of the grape could be transformed into a substance so near to napalm?

“Heady, no?” exulted Juan Carlos.

“Quintessentially South American,” grumbled Switters.

In the course of conversation, Switters revealed to Juan Carlos his plan to repatriate Sailor Boy. For some reason, it struck the guide as a horrid idea. He warned his client that there was an unpublicized but widespread outbreak of cholera in the countryside and that the Marxist marauders known as Sendero Luminoso or “Shining Path,” thought to have been eradicated in 1992, had come back to life and revived their campaign to murder innocent tourists as a means of improving the lot of the Peruvian poor. The American explained that he’d been inoculated against cholera and that he’d had run-ins in other countries with self-styled “liberators of the people” and they didn’t scare him a bit. He said the latter in a whisper, however, well aware of the prevailing political climate in bars such as this one.

Juan Carlos countered that the cholera vaccine was only about 60 percent effective and that he hadn’t realized that a dealer in farm equipment led such an adventurous life. (Switters had passed himself off as an international sales representative for John Deere tractors.) Furthermore, he would bet Switters another glass of pisco—”Not on your life, pal”—that his grandmother was already in remorse over her decision to return her longtime pet to the wild, and that if Switters went through with such a rash exercise, he eventually would join his dear relation in profound and protracted regret. Juan Carlos was adamant about his sense of impending tragedy, and to convince his foolish client, he begged him to come along on a brief drive. Switters agreed, if only to avoid a second pisco.

They motored to the posh neighborhood of Miraflores, parked, slipped through a hedge, crossed an overgrown garden—stirring up in the process a bloodthirsty billow of bugs—and tiptoed onto a patio, from where they might peer through the windows of an elderly, distant relative of Juan Carlos. This scene, naked parrot, merciless mosquitoes and all, has already been described.

If the guide expected that a peepshow of a feeble widow and her feeble bird, blinking and stumbling toward the grave in each other’s company, expected that a stolen exhibition of enduring and everlasting owner-pet fidelity would melt his client’s heart and move said client to facilitate a joyous reunion between grandmother and ill- advisedly emancipated parrot, then he was mistaken.

However, the first thing Switters did when he got back to the hotel was to go on-line and check his box. An e-mail message from a repentant Maestra canceling her instructions and insisting that Sailor be returned to her care with all due haste? No, not surprisingly, there was nothing of the sort. Maestra would never be counted among those millions who permitted loneliness to compromise their principles, their judgment, their taste.

The single message on the screen was a coded one from the spookmeister at Langley, reminding Switters to “obey protocol” and inform the Lima station of his presence and intent in the city. Well, he’d think about it. The word obey, from the archaic French obeir and the earlier Latin obedire, meaning “to give ear,” entered the English language around 1250, the year in which the goose quill began to be used for writing—and to this day, should one give ear, one can detect the stiff scratch of the goose quill in its last syllable. For his part, Switters associated obey with oy vay, the Yiddish cry of woe or dismay, and while there was absolutely no etymological justification for it, it did provide a hint that obey was not the kind of word to make him glad.

“Sorry, pal,” Switters said to Sailor as the bird watched him apply calamine lotion to a galaxy of mosquito bites. “I’d love to spend some quality time with you, but duty calls.” No sooner did he exchange his C.R.A.F.T. Club T-shirt for a fresh one in solid violet, splash on some Jungle Desire cologne, and dilute the pisco aftertaste with a gargle of mouthwash than he was out the door.

A pothole-spelunking minicab carried him to a modest steakhouse in the Barranco, a district popular with students and bohemians. Hector Sumac was seated at table, sipping a North American beer.

“You dig the Yankee brewski?” asked Switters.

“This Bud’s for you,” answered Hector.

Thus was mutual identity established.

Hector Sumac proved to be a nerdy-looking fellow, pale for a Peruvian, with a shaggy pageboy haircut (Beatles, circa 1964) and those dinky little wire-rimmed spectacles commonly referred to as “granny glasses.” (Switters’s granny, by contrast, wore an outsized, owlishly round, horn-rimmed pair that made her look rather exactly like the late theatrical agent, Swifty Lazar.) Even sitting down, however, young Hector betrayed a fluid, athletic grace, and though he lacked bulk, he might be quick and tough enough, Switters thought, to give a good account of himself on the rugby field.

Switters ordered a Yankee beer as well, and the two men whipped up small talk, first about the unusually warm day and then about cybernetics. Hector was surprised—even impressed and amused—when Switters confessed that he used a computer only when it became unavoidable for efficiency’s sake.

“What interests me are the post-Newtonian, extrabiologic implications of a human species able to think and act using clusters of electrons: light, in other words. If the opening act of the evolutionary drama involved a descent from light into matter and language, then it only makes sense that in the closing act, so to speak, we reunite with our photonic progenitor. The role that language—the word—will play in our light-driven metamorphosis is the furry little question that cranks my squirrel cage. Say, didn’t the guinea pig originate in the Peruvian Andes?”

“But personally you do not boot up?”

“Sure I do, pal. E-mail’s a wonderful convenience—even when it’s goddamn hacked, but that’s another story. What I’m saying is I’m not gonna sit around for hours every day having nonorgasmic sex with a computer or a TV set. These machines will fuck the life right out of you if you give ’em half a chance.”

“I log on five or six hours a day,” admitted Hector somewhat sheepishly. “But I am always happy when I have the chance to read a good book.”

“Yeah? What do you read?”

“I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.”

“Good luck to you, pal. That’s a search these days.”

For the third time, an impatient waiter cruised up to their table. “This place is good for meat,” Hector said. “What is your favorite dish?”

Switters stared wistfully into space. “Spring lamb Roman Polanski,” he said.

“It is not on the menu, I am afraid.”