Free Pacazo by Roy Kesey

prepare defenses and supplies. In May at last the Incas come. They load their slings with heated stones and set fire to the thatch roofs of the city. The wind rises. Soon all of Cuzco is aflame, all except the enclosure where half the Spaniards hide, and this is the legend, the Virgin on the roof of Sunturhuasi, putting out the flames.
    Stench of the open drain, and no eyewitness mentions her. Titu Cusi writes instead of slaves with buckets, but Garcilaso gives her as fact, and Guaman Poma de Ayala draws her riding a cherubim, water spraying from her palms, the Incas falling back in terror. A cloud now, and easier walking. The siege weathered three more months. Fish and lizards from Piura dried underground by the Tallán and paid years before in tribute, stored against famine in mountain caches, now spirited into Cuzco. The Spaniards counterattack, retake Sacsayhuamán, Manco’s honor guard slaughtered, the natives swimming out into Chincheros Lake to escape and lanced there in the water or captured, the women’s breasts and the men’s hands cut off.
    When the Spaniards are reinforced, Manco runs. The Chachapoya offer refuge, but something is not quite right. They had welcomed Alvarado, fought often on the Spanish side, are perhaps still aligned. Manco turns, spins, settles finally in Vilcabamba and a taxi honks and slows.
    The license plate starts with P but ends with 81 and the driver is an old man. Behind it is a garbage truck, two boys hanging off the back, bandanas across their faces. Then a mototaxi, the front half that of a motorcycle and the rear a sort of chariot, plastic and vinyl stretched over a metal frame, and the mototaxi too honks and slows. They are slightly cheaper than regular taxis, slightly slower and much louder. I shake my head and the matacojudo ending is among the finest I have imagined, but now here at the park I look at the empty vines and they seem too thin, too fragile for that sort of work.
    Additional means of transportation: combis, which are vans, and colectivos, which are old sedans converted to diesel and often missing several windows. Unless the distance is unreasonable I walk so that taxis will stop, and I have heard that there are restaurants here where small lizards are still on the menu. Ceviche de lagartija. With luck pacazos are sometimes used instead.
    Along the edge of the park, and on the far side teenage girls are gathering on the grass for their walk to school. They are dark and bright and lovely, wear the uniform chosen thirty years ago by General Velasco. Few schools still use it. White blouse and black shoes, charcoal skirt and socks, it is the perfect uniform and the girls surely detest it.
    Velasco also seized the vastest encomiendas here, gave the land and equipment to cooperatives of the local poor. This was the center of his attempt to redress the past four hundred and sixty years. It failed in most ways but not everyone is sad that he tried, and there is movement far down the street, someone thin and dark and waving perhaps at me.
    Closer, and yes, Armando, assistant professor of History, expert on eighteenth- century patterns of inheritance. He is sitting at a table on the patio of Neuquén, a restaurant I have sometimes found useful for beer and grilled meats in the evening. He was helpful in my first years here, had a good sense of what was to be found in each Peruvian archive, was rarely wholly wrong in any respect. He waves each time he sees me, is ebullient in regard to most things.
    - Juan de Segovia! he says.
    Somehow it still amuses him to call me this. The first time he did so was years ago. He had not known of the conquistador, had transliterated my name for the simple pleasure of hearing it in his language, and the waitress brings his breakfast—a plate of cold cuts, a basket of bread.
    - Hello, Armando. Ceviche de lagartija?
    - But we would never have ceviche for breakfast!
    - I know.
    - A joke!
    - Of sorts, yes.
    - How is your thesis progressing?
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