When Kate nods in an exaggeratedly forlorn way, they all laugh. Even Kate finds that thought hysterically funny tonight in this magical place, so far away from the mission at Santa Catalina. She is grateful when Pepe appears so they can change the subject.
“Did you enjoy the wine?” Pepe asks, smoothing crumbs from the tablecloth with a knife. When they cry out their enthusiasm he smiles slightly. “You ought to visit the winery if you have time. It is about thirty minutes from town in an old hacienda.”
Kate hasn’t even thought about the next day’s activities. How is she going to steal away? She has complicated her flight by joining Diane and Sheila; yet she finds them kind and comforting. They bring back a world she had left years ago, a world of impulse and fun, a world with no commitments.
Pepe lingers at their table, and says, looking at Kate, “I will tell you a true story about this winery that many tourists do not know, nor even many Peruvians, I think. The winery is still irrigated today by a canal that was built by the great Inca Pachacutec. He built it as a gift to Princess Tate, with whom he was in love. According to the legend of my people, it took 40,000 men only ten days to build the canal. It brings cold pure water down from the mountains to make the desert of Ica bloom with grapevines. Pachacutec named the canal Achirana.” He stood very still as his words echo in the evening air.
“What does Achirana mean?” Kate feels that Pepe wants her to ask him this.
“It means: ‘That which flows cleanly toward that which is beautiful.’”
After he leaves, the girls sit in silence on the veranda. Kate feels the damp air on her bare arms, and the long forgotten sensation of the breeze ruffling her hair. It has been years since she had sat outside bareheaded. A little tipsy, she finds herself longing for Tom. Absently, she listens to Sheila and Diane plan their visit to the winery the next day. She says nothing about leaving. Kate knows she should push on to Lima, but now she wants to see the canal that Pepe had spoken of.
Later, stretched out on her cot under the window in one corner of the spacious bedroom, she falls asleep thinking of flowing water, cool and clean, as waves lap the sand of the lagoon under the chaste moon of Ica.
C
hapter Fifteen
Monday, June 29, 1964
Waking to the sound of birds twittering outside the window, Kate remembers where she is. Early-morning bird chatter was one of the things she has missed most during her last six months in the Altiplano. Although it is still dark in the room, she can make out the outline of two sprawled bodies in the great cama matrimonial, as the señora called it. This has been her first good night’s sleep since staying at Peter Grinnell’s house three days ago.
In the bathroom she finds her habit still damp. She slips on the shirt and skirt she wore the night before and unlocks the door quietly. She’ll go to Mass before the girls get up. Yesterday had been Sunday. She’s shocked to realize she hasn’t even thought of Mass.
No one is in the foyer below, but she hears sounds coming from the hall that leads to the kitchen. She knocks timidly on the swinging door, and pushes it open to see Señora Reyna seated at the long table, sipping her café con leche, reading a newspaper. Pepe is bending over the stove, lighting the gas; the smell of strong coffee fills the room.
“Buenos días, señora,” she says to woman. “Could you please tell me where the nearest church is with an early Mass?” Kate, dressed in the Peace Corps worker’s clothes, waits for a look of surprise or disapproval to appear on the woman’s face. Surely she recognizes Kate as the bedraggled nun of yesterday.
The señora looks at her for several long moments and then puts down her cup. In silence she rises and walks with Kate down the hall to the front doors. She pulls back the sliding locks and steps out onto the porch to show Kate the direction she should walk to find the church in the village.
Walking down the tree-shaded driveway, Kate breathes in the fragrant morning air, and watches the gray sky turn pink. She turns right at the gate and soon passes some concrete-block houses before entering the main street with its few store windows still shuttered fast. Then she sees the chapel, all white stone, squat and rounded like a massive loaf of bread. She steps over the wooden portal and blinks in the sudden dimness. The two candles on the altar are lit, the priest bent over, mumbling the Confiteor. Kate realizes that not a whisper of the recent changes to the liturgy had reached this remote church. She genuflects and joins the few elderly black-clad women who are the chapel’s only worshipers. The priest, too, is old, his shoulders bowed beneath his cream-and-gold embroidered vestment.
She listens carefully to the priest recite the words of the Gospel:
I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me
is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize
you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His shovel is ready in his hand,
and he will winnow his threshing floor; the wheat he will gather into his granary,
but he will burn the chaff on a fire that can never go out.
Water and fire. Both are dangerous. But fire can purify and refine. It can burn away the dross. And water can drown you, or quench your thirst. Like love, she thinks. She’d never known its fierceness before now. There was a passage in the scriptures about love, something about how “many waters could not quench love.” What was it from? And how could one tell the wheat from the chaff in love?
