Torata by Zoe Marie Bel

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In what remained of the marketplace in the small town of Torata, Peru, the Red Cross rescue workers gathered for briefing. Among the rubble left by the earthquake were watermelons with smashed skulls and yelps of color where spices had fallen from their baskets. There was a peach too, just one. Perfect, except for a small cut, apparently made by a fingernail. A customer, perhaps, testing too hard for freshness, then putting it back.

A young man had drifted from the rescue unit and picked up the miracle of the near flawless peach. He considered it, his attention vague in his jet-lag. He did not believe in God, and thought life was a flight through smoke that ended when it ended. Still, there was something about fruit. An intricate construction of sweetness and color you could put your palm around.

The supervisor of the rescue unit noticed the young man. He watched him for a moment. The supervisor’s name was Gustavo, a Brazilian who had come many miles from home to feel it in this line of work.

The young man’s armband told Gustavo: doctor. Gustavo might otherwise have thought: archaeologist’s intern, first week on the job. The young man was in his early thirties, a few years Gustavo’s junior. His clothing was not loose fitting or sun-strategic, and he was still conscious of the flies. He had come here, it seemed, from a life indoors, and recently. Gustavo suspected idealism. That, or disaffection at home. Neither was an asset out on the rescue field. 

The personnel list showed Gustavo five medics: four Peruvians and one American. As the young man softly restored the peach to the ground, Gustavo figured he’d found their yanqui. 

Gustavo assigned the American to three natives and their waddling tow-truck. Its cabin was watertight and offered a few rookie comforts like air conditioning and old maps for a false sense of coordination.

The American insisted on sitting out on the flatbed instead. Binoculars clamped to his eyes with one hand; his other hand soon torn and bleeding from its grip on the scaly edge of the truck as it nudged through the city debris. The American had done the same training as everyone else. He wasn’t here for the bubble-wrapped version. 

Gustavo noticed that too. 

“Gus,” Gustavo said, when he next encountered the American in the mess tent. “Call me Gus.”

The American smiled, but stuck to the full three syllables of his supervisor’s name as they stood on line for dinner and made small talk about the history of earthquakes in this region. Gustavo had a stringy climber’s body, no muscle less or more than what he needed. His eyes were dusty brown and observant. A barely-there beard framed a mouth that would move, at most, to a tight, wondering smile. 

The American felt a flicker of something as they talked. But he was cold and hungry, and he let those dual agitations distract him. Out here, this awful place, he didn’t want this feeling, not even just a flicker. 

When their turn arrived at the self-serve table, the American saw all the hearty dishes had been ravaged. He sighed and ladled shambar soup into his bowl until it was near overflowing. A liquid meal, so be it.

A jowly administrator on line ahead of them had several pan de yema rolls heaped on his tray. Gustavo snatched one and tore it in two. He tucked one half by the American’s bowl and kept the other for himself.

The administrator shrugged, then burst into laughter. “The audacity of a street pigeon! Gus, I will bring breadcrumbs to throw for you next time.”

“I doubt it, Matias. That would require you not to eat them first.”

Their banter went on for a time and somehow culminated in an open invitation to the administrator’s summer lake house for fish supper. After the administrator had moved on, Gustavo said to the American, “Don’t let tragedy make you polite out here. You’ll be the only one.”

Gustavo smiled, put bread in his mouth, and turned to leave. 

“Ansell,” the American said. His name.

Still chewing, Gustavo simply nodded. Ansell realized he’d have known that already, of course. Curious, then, that his eyes still seemed to receive it as interesting information. 

The first week of the rescue operation was not so much seven days as one long day, punctuated by the few hours of regulation sleep that no one wanted. Even in his dreams, Ansell was pulling infinitely at rocks with swollen hands, both dreading and desperate for the perky colors of clothing that marked a human body. But, slowly, even in his dreams, further digging revealed only a body part. 

By the second week, hope of further survivors had shrunk to the size of the tapers that locals placed in their windows to summon back home the souls of the missing. Ansell’s medical skills were largely redundant. He was digging out bodies just like everyone else. 

The three Peruvians who drove him around were almost as noisy as their truck. Their talk of infamous poker games and the rumored incomes of old friends gave Ansell’s brain something to process as he worked, and kept him from thinking. Above it all, the sun was spectacular, laying every color it knew upon the vast open wound of the ground.

Then, one evening, Ansell left his meal pack untouched and headed away from the truck, no more noticed by the Peruvians when leaving than he was when there. Ansell walked with an urgency he couldn’t explain. At least, not until he arrived at a dip in the rubble, where no one could see him, when he fell to his knees and wept. 

Weeping that resembled vomiting – heaving and visceral. What had he hoped to achieve out here, coming all this way from Chicago? Not this. This he could have gotten from a freeway collapse back home. 

How long exactly it was before he was no longer alone, Ansell couldn’t say. All he knew was that he was gripped and eased to his feet and turned around, grimly and frankly, like he was a horse that had bolted and gotten itself into a goddamn mess. The person righting him was Gustavo, eyes the same blunt action list as always. 

And Gustavo held him. No tenderness. More a practical strain of determination: pressure applied to a wound, as Ansell himself had had to do, so many times. The only feeling conveyed in Gustavo’s grip was that these tears were inevitable and universal. Ansell’s time had come for them, that was all. And so, Ansell let the surge of them play out.

When Ansell was done, silence returned and something shifted. The embrace stopped being a structure they had adopted to contain a problem. It became another man, with breath and texture, primally close.

They both pulled back without a word. Gustavo hooked his thumbs in his beltline.

“I was looking for you,” he said. “There’s new work. When you are ready, come to the briefing tent.” At Ansell’s hopeful look, Gustavo added, “Not survivors. Come… when you are ready.”

A little dust was stirred up as Gustavo climbed back to unbroken ground. Ansell watched as he went from silhouette to article of faith in the darkness.

When Ansell had first realized it was men, not women, who would drip through his thoughts like warm honey, he was furious. He had felt it as a kind of cruelty – the math of it. In a subway train, there would be only two or three hearts who could feel for him in return. In an elevator, there’d likely be none at all. 

He’d been a teenager back then and, true to that age, seeking misplaced comfort – wanting to be one of many, to be mass-produced. (He remembered a cartoon in his father’s psychology monthly: a distraught teenager the police are trying to talk out of jumping off a rooftop. The kid tells the lead officer what the problem is: “I’m original.”) Ansell had since come to interrogate himself: why did he need to feel the possibility of love everywhere? Because that was how heterosexuals experienced life? So what? And who said that to have sexual potential everywhere was happiness? It sounded like a nightmare, in fact. Back home in Chicago, Ansell loved heading to the third-floor pediatric file room, where it happened all the staff were female, and how he felt as he walked inside: there were friends here, only friends. (As far as he knew, there was no word yet in existence for the specific form of comradeship a gay man or woman can feel toward the opposite sex. But someday, Ansell hoped, there would be. It was a feeling worthy of its own word.)

Still, something surfaced in moments like this one. Sure, the love that had once meant stoning, exorcism or lobotomy was now in bedtime stories and soft serve commercials. All the same, under that cruel math, it would always be reluctantly that Ansell found himself intrigued by another man. Because the chances were, he was in it alone. And out here, miles from home, on this land that was hard to imagine had ever been home to anyone, Ansell had plenty of definitions of alone already. 

He stopped watching Gustavo. He resolved to avoid him for the rest of this assignment.

The new work that Gustavo had to announce was a trove of townhall records that had come into view below the rubble. The documents – some of them spilled loose from their containers and exposed to the elements – must now be fully unearthed. This was particularly mobile rubble that would take the weight only of two men. A patient, thought-out excavation was therefore required – aggression would destroy what they hoped to recover. This ruled out Ansell’s three Peruvian escorts. The only paper they were used to handling respectfully was the kind they rolled to make cigarettes. 

Given the sensitivity of the task, Gustavo would work on this personally. He wanted Ansell as his second man. A surgeon, Gustavo noted, had careful hands.

In the briefing tent, Ansell looked away and almost gave a tortured laugh as he remembered his resolve of just thirty minutes ago. Avoid Gustavo? This was over a hundred years’ worth of records. It would take two men at least a fortnight.

As Ansell tried to pull together a plausible excuse, Gustavo motioned to the town official for a document.

“I think it will be good for you,” Gustavo shrugged. “These papers, they are life.” 

Gustavo set down the document. Inside the plastic preservation sleeve the discovery team had furnished, it was filmed in chalky white dust. A birth certificate, dated 1937. It was the color and condition of rotting straw, and the painstakingly solemn cursive across it had been shown about as much reverence by time as most other human grandeur. All the same, Gustavo was right: Ansell was enchanted.

“Tomorrow to start,” Gustavo said. “Okay?”

They worked intently, soon adapting to each other’s rhythm. The first task of each morning, repeated throughout the day, was to chalk a plan on a former classroom blackboard: what rubble would be moved, in what order, and where. Dependable pathways across the rubble left in place were marked with the small red flags they’d previously used for human remains. As they stooped, heaved and refused to buckle under the weight of what they carried, sometimes together, the creaking of each other’s boots and the occasional grunt of exertion or surprise was small talk enough. This was on a hilltop, arrived at via a thin ribbon of road that only donkeys ascended with ease. Women would sometimes come with encanelado – cinnamon cake – and battered cans of Dr. Pepper. A town official would periodically stop by for the crate in which they placed all the recovered documents, find it too heavy, and send up three ropy boys instead. Otherwise, Ansell and Gustavo were alone.

One afternoon, Gustavo suddenly grinned and pulled out beef jerky. Had Ansell noticed they were under surveillance? Ansell, of course, had not. A bush dog was snouting in the debris nearby. Zorro vinagre – vinegar wolf – was what locals called this animal. Squat and bushy-tailed, with intensely staring eyes below a red-tinted brow. 

The dog smelled the dried meat, and its attention locked on the man holding it.

“A bush dog is friendly until it is savage,” Gustavo said with admiration. “Where the line is? Well, that’s an eternal question.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t…” Ansell was thinking of the time a thick-coated Texan had walked into his hospital and asked where he should put his gun. No one was sure if the guy was polite or psychopathic. With stakes like those, they didn’t care to find out. Security had put him on the ground and dragged him out into the snow before he could say another word. The police took him away and no one ever knew, polite or psychopathic.

Ansell very much preferred wild things to stay in the wild.

But Gustavo was already chasing the bush dog through the rubble, skidding and scampering like a wasteland Mowgli. Very soon man and beast were tug-of-warring over the beef jerky, Gustavo’s fingers several times coming within an inch of amputation as the dog’s jaws shifted. It seemed the two of them would fight to the death over this meager strip of meat. The same glint was in both their faces, though. On the human side at least, it would be called joy.

Ansell watched in soft confusion. Uptight Gustavo. Became Gus before his eyes.

He let go of the jerky, and the bush dog was sent back as its wrenching became suddenly unnecessary. It sprawled in the dust with its prize in its jaws, glaring but also infantile in its disorientation. 

Then, “Atta boy,” Gus said, and the dog sprang up and became a mere ripple in the shadows as it went on its way. 

Later, there were drives in Gus’s Bronco through the neatening debris. Motown on the radio. A hint of mango in the air from the only shampoo provided in the staff showers.

“Why sign up for this?” Gus asked, tapping the Red Cross decal on the dash.

The reply Ansell finally settled on was: in Chicago, people died of overconsumption and underachievement. He couldn’t stand the joke of that combination anymore. He came here to serve something higher.

Gus nodded for a time, then smiled, “Broken heart.”

That’s what Gus figured had propelled Ansell out here. Always, the wounded are the kindest.

Ansell looked at him steadily. Gus was right, as it happened. But, riding along with Gus like this, those days felt sealed and harmless. 

Ansell said, “There was someone.”

Gus shrugged, “Someone?”

They had arrived at the pronoun junction. Ansell had been doing this his whole life, and it never got easier.

Ansell said, “But he didn’t break me.”

Gus drove, eyes fixed on the road. Ansell looked away, guts twisting. This was a Catholic country, after all. And customs between men were different here. Embraces and kisses, given so much more freely and unthinkingly. If he had sensed something in Gus, it had been an optical illusion, that was all – Ansell himself projecting it. Even years of cruel math couldn’t stop that from happening.

Gus said, “Of course not, doctor… It’s only bones that break.”

And Gus smiled, tender beyond his martial beard. 

Ansell’s breath came back to him. 

He savored the air for a moment. Then he said, “And you?”

Gus tapped out a rhythm on the wheel, full of joy suddenly, just as he’d been with the bush dog. “And me.”

They looked at each other.

Every now and then, someplace in the world, the math goes your way.

Ninety-seven days they worked in Torata, until the still-living tissue of the city came into view amid the sifted and piled ruins. 

Gus had a month of leave before his next posting, which might be anywhere in South America. As a volunteer, Ansell was free to choose if he served again, but not where. The odds seemed low that the lottery of disaster response would appoint them teammates for a second time. There was Ansell’s inexperience, plus the heavy accent in his Spanish that added further limits to his usefulness. The thirty days of Gus’s leave, then, was all that seemed certain when it came to what was theirs from hereon.

Gus took Ansell to a friend’s apartment in Lima. It had no furniture but was full of half-finished watercolor paintings, leaning headfirst against the walls. Among them, Gus and Ansell fucked, and slept, and cooked childhood favorites bare-chested, and talked while stretched out below the pockmarked ceiling, or sometimes out on the balcony, where the galaxy seemed to lean in over them as though to listen too.

Ask Gus where was home, and he would point to his clothes. They were the only thing that came with him everywhere. There was a house in Piura with his name on the mailbox, but his sister handled his mail for him and he barely thought of it. 

Trauma scene management, Gus smiled grimly, probably should not be a man’s passion. But he loved the teamwork. He loved seeing what surfaced in men and women when there was even the slimmest chance of survivors. So he saw himself doing this, pursuing disaster across the continent, for the rest of his life. He would never belong to anyone, but maybe there would be another man whose path would fall in with his, without self-contortion or suffering on either side. 

Maybe, Ansell said, and thought about his options from here. Should he choose not to serve with the Red Cross again, his six-month visa would not be renewed. He pictured becoming an illegal immigrant in a direction not considered typical: North to South America. Setting up an off-books medical practice somewhere (no visa would mean no medical license), then treating hookers for unwanted babies and the slashed hands of cockfighters, as he waited for Gus’s next leave. With no possibility of things ever getting easier because, under the law as it stood, he could never be Gus’s spouse.

When Ansell told Gus all of this, Gus boomed laughter. “Cockfighters! They would pay you with the loser from the last fight, plucked for roasting.”

When he saw Ansell reluctant to reduce this to a joke – Ansell had been imagining in earnest – Gus set down the pipe he was filling. (Artisan tobacco one of his favorite pastimes, away from the disaster field.) 

Gus put his hands on Ansell’s belly.

“We will live a lifetime,” he said. “In this month together, a lifetime. Then you will leave, and we’ll each have a different sky above us, night and day rhythmed differently overhead. Time will pass. Months maybe. Possibilities, priorities, they will shift in you, and in me too.” 

“No,” Ansell said quietly. “I don’t think I’ll-“

“You won’t know the words in your mouth until then. But if they are my name, you’ll call. You’ll hear me smile if you’re who I want to hear. Then I’ll be in the rain at the end of the runway, corazón. I’ll be waiting in my car.”

The window was open to the night and, somewhere down below, a bar was thrumming with a song Ansell couldn’t quite hear. He took a breath and let his heart, somehow on this ledge despite all his precautions, feel not the height he might fall but the breeze. So many times, we miss out on that simple thing, experiencing the breeze.

Ansell said, “Okay.”

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Zoe Marie Bel writes fiction and poetry. ‘Torata’ is from ‘Hard Place Rock’, her debut short story collection. Zoe’s writing has appeared in ‘The New York Times’, ‘Australian Book Review’, ‘Mystery Tribune’, and more. Her poetry chapbook ‘Foothills’ publishes February 2024. She spends time in Los Angeles and Paris. zoemariebel.com

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9 April 2024