The Dust Never Settles by Karina Lickorish Quinn

Author:Karina Lickorish Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Peru;Peruvian;Lima;Homecoming;History;Past;Haunting;Beautiful;Ghosts;Spectres;Ishiguro;Latin
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2021-08-12T16:22:43+00:00

‌Part II

Once

After she had performed the third miracle of the breakfast, the dead and risen Santa Julia Álvarez Yupanqui emerged from the yellow house to walk amidst her queueing devoted. She saw among them many faces she recognised: faces she knew from her own life in Los Polvos but also faces she recognised from her observations while she had been above the world in janaj pacha, and it was difficult for her now to distinguish which faces she had known in life and which in afterlife. She felt that there had been a blurring. A blurring between the things that had happened to Julia, daughter of Julio and Merly Álvarez, and the things that had happened to Santa Julia, the risen. The sense of lives arranged in time (a sense of past, present and future) had been utterly exploded. All she knew for certain was that there were those whom she could help and those she could not: some lives she could reach out and touch and others she could see and smell and hear but they were blocked from her as if behind a pane of rippling glass.

She moved among the devoted who, after Anny-Lu had told them about her encounter with the saint, had cut open the padlock on the casona’s gates and spilled into the gardens. They were gathered in crowds under the naranjos. Some of the youths leaned against the tree trunks with their arms folded, unsure what to expect when the dead returned to life, trying to look casual but scanning their eyes here and there, expecting light because that is how resurrections were depicted on the religious postcards and calendars their parents affixed to walls. Other young people partnered up, embracing and nuzzling behind foliage or around the corner of the house, the heat of romance intensified by the trespassing and the proximity to their parents. Those better versed in the rituals of worship identified the spot where Julia had met her death (the cleanest tiles, the ones that smelled most strongly of bleach) and erected a makeshift altar out of two crates balanced on a wheelbarrow and draped with a sheet.

To the altar, Hilario García García, a schoolteacher at Escuela 5086 Santíssima Madre, donated a book. It was a beautiful volume with creamy paper, cloth binding, a purple ribbon to divide the pages – a book he had purchased with a semester’s savings to reward himself for staying at Escuela 5086 when he had been offered a job at the local American school where the salary was higher and the children cleaner and there was never a shortage of pencils. This book, in which Hilario García García was the first to write, became the petition book of Santa Julia in which pleas were made and answers acknowledged.

Eugenia Sánchez, who was known for keeping a pristine house, donated a bowl of potpourri to the altar, and José-Maria Villanueva (who had not been seen at church for years on account, it was assumed, of the rumours), brought to the altar a dozen votive candles.

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