The Dust Never Settles

Praise for

THE DUST NEVER SETTLES

‘A sorcerer walks through these pages weaving time past and time present into a Scheherazadean swirl. This is a mesmerising feat of imagination and a masterful debut.’

Paul Lynch, author of Irish Novel of the Year winner, Grace

‘Captivating and epic in scale, sumptuously imagined, with a wry and generous vision of human frailty, Lickorish Quinn’s magnificent debut enchants from first page to last. It is a work of astonishing empathy and expansiveness, a story that bends spacetime to take us on a journey towards a place and an hour where redemption might prove possible. Lickorish Quinn is a breath-taking writer of singular voice.’

Patrick Flanery, author of Absolution

‘Karina Lickorish Quinn is the new face of magic realism. She has given it, through Anaïs, a female body and soul… She makes it sing, she makes it work and she has built a world that stands on its own three feet. Like its title, The Dust Never Settles will stay floating inside the reader, impossible to forget or unsee.’

Laia Jufresa, author of Umami

‘An innovative and precisely imagined exploration of identity, family, ghosts, and the intersection between personal and national history. It swept me away.’

Clare Fisher, author of All the Good Things

‘The Dust Never Settles is ambitious, fascinating and endlessly inventive – a time-bending, kaleidoscopic fever dream in which the living coexist with the dead, and the past with present.’

Luiza Sauma, author of Everything You Ever Wanted

‘Karina Lickorish Quinn has rendered on the page a person and a place in all their conflicted histories so convincingly and dizzyingly and singularly that the very ink haunts. It leaves a shadow text on the reader’s psyche. The Dust Never Settles is a marvelous, vertiginous work that mercilessly conveys the post-colonial state.’

Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter

‘Rarely has a haunting been so eloquent and arresting, so painterly and polyphonic, demanding urgently to be read.’

Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters

For Tom.

And for Athena.

It was the custom of the dead to visit one another, and they hosted great dances and revelries. Sometimes the dead came to the houses of the living, and sometimes the living went to the houses of the dead.

Pedro Pizarro, 1571

Contents

Part I

Part II

Appendices

Echeverría Family Tree

Cast of Characters

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

They say that there was a mountain. Its name was Tampu T’uqu because it had three windows. Some say inside it and some say on top of it there was a Paqariq Tampu. It was a cave or maybe a house, a kind of lodge in which things came to life.

In this birthplace, out of the three windows, three peoples were born. From the window named Maras T’uqu, the Maras people were born. From the window of Sut’i T’uqu, the Tampus people were born. But out of the middle window, the one called Qhapaq T’uqu, came eight siblings: the four Ayar brothers and their four sisters.

The Ayar brothers and their sisters were not like any other people who lived in the world. They emerged from the mountain wearing fine clothes, woven with gold given by Father Sun. Around their necks they carried bags inside which were catapults, and sister Huaco and brother Ayar Manco (whom the sun also named Manco Cápac) brought with them golden staffs.

The eight siblings left the mountain and set out in search of land to cultivate. Ayar Manco and Mama Ocllo would throw their golden staffs and see if they would penetrate the soil, but time and again the golden staffs could not sink into the earth because the ground was too hard. Then Ayar Cachi, who was the strongest of the brothers, became frustrated and, from a very high peak, cast four pebbles into the distance with his catapult. He was so strong that his pebbles levelled mountains, crumbling them utterly and leaving valleys in their place.

Then the other Ayar brothers became afraid of Ayar Cachi because he was so strong, and they plotted to get rid of him. They told him they had forgotten some golden vases back at Paqariq Tampu and sent him back to fetch them. Ayar Cachi did not know that his other siblings had followed him and, when he re-entered the mountain, they rolled huge stones over the windows so that he could not get out again. They waited until they heard him hammering on the insides of the mountain, screaming out for help, and then they knew that Ayar Cachi could not escape and they left him there.

The siblings believed Ayar Cachi had died and, with time, they felt guilty about what they had done, but by then they had forgotten where the Tampu T’uqu was and could not find their way back. So they journeyed on and founded Cusco and the Inka Empire with its Four Realms, the Tawantinsuyu.

When generations to come told the story of the siblings, some would say that Tampu T’uqu was near the shores of Lake Titicaca. Others said it was further north, deep in the Cordillera or even as far inland as the jungle. But there was one who knew the exact location of Tampu T’uqu because she had seen it during her time ascended into janaj pacha, where she sojourned with the saints and the stars. There she had also seen that Ayar Cachi had not died but had simply been interred inside the mountain, waiting to be released.

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Part I

One

Last night the ice-cream pedlars haunted me. They came to my hotel room and danced around my bed. I knew them from my childhood, when I had stood in the window of Mama and Abue’s house and watched them sell their wares to the children from the houses at the bottom of the hill. They never made the strenuous journey up to la Casa Echeverría to sell anything to us. Even when Abue tried to appease me by buying a hand-cranked ice-cream maker and when Carmen made the empleadas churn milk in the kitchen all day, my cravings could not be satisfied. No matter how much ice cream they made, no matter how many hours they worked, turning over the milk, folding in home-grown lúcuma or Mama’s manjar blanco, what I wanted more than anything was to be like the children who I watched from the upstairs windows, playing barefoot games of football down in the Avenida or laying out glass bottles as skittles in the sand of Los Polvos and eating their neon-coloured ice pops.

My primos and I were not allowed to go out and play with those children. It was not only because the armed conflict that had begun in the highlands had by then reached the city, though the adults did worry that there might be Reds out there among the shacks of Los Polvos – ‘resentidos’ who would seek to evict us. I did not understand the conflict then, did not understand the meaning of land or how history piles and piles upon itself until it cannot bear its own weight, but I overheard some of the younger staff say the war was a pachacuti, that space and time were turning over and the world would be left upside down and inside out. The high would be made low, they said, and the low lifted high. Others said this was nonsense and that they had better watch their tongues.

But it was not only because of the war that we were not allowed to go down to Los Polvos. It was also because, Reds or not, they were not our kind of people. That is what the adults said. Not our kind. Then the adults would try to distract us with new toys and pretty songs or, when we became petulant and said that we would run away to live in the other town at the bottom of the hill, the aunts and uncles would scoff and say, Really? You want to live without food or clean water? Without a pretty house and a garden or a roof over your head? Still, what I wanted was to befriend those other children whose games I watched in secret but never joined. And I longed for the men in the canary-yellow outfits to pedal their carts up the hill and sell us their cellophane-wrapped, half-melted, branded ice-cream sandwiches. But they never did.

And so, after the many years in which I had forgotten all about them, last night the ice-cream vendors came to me. I sat awake for hours while they pedalled their yellow cart-bikes around my room, blaring their kazoos and peddling their goods to illusory customers. They sold rancour-flavoured cones and bittersweet neon ice pops. They pelted me with ice cubes that melted around me until my sheets were soaked and my body was clammy and shivering. They filled my dreams with painful memories and screamed in my face with gaping mouths and hollow eyes in which I saw only a gaping darkness.

Around my hotel bed they rioted, tearing through the cushions with their teeth and swinging from the curtains like demented monkeys. They were furious with me, and I cannot blame them, because today I will hand over the keys for Mama and Abue’s house to the developers who will begin tearing it down tomorrow. For my treachery, for betraying Mamabue’s house, the ice-cream men came to punish me with havoc, breaking into every last one of my suitcases and strewing my belongings across the floor.

I left them to their insanity and wandered the halls of the sleeping hotel – the empty corridors, the desolate lobby, the dining hall plunged into darkness. To know one Hotel Vivaldi is to know them all. This one, El Hotel Vivaldi Miraflores, is identical to all its brothers scattered across the world, with its ceilings glittering like hammered gold and its neoclassical statues in white resin or bronze plate that stand sentry along the hallways and around the circular lobby. It was at the Hotel Vivaldi Park Lane that Rupert asked me to marry him in the gilded dining room where mirrors upon mirrors replicated us a thousand times over until I had seen myself from every angle and wasn’t sure whether the trembling in my fingers was from the enormity of being proposed to or from the fear of not knowing which me was flesh and which reflection. I was everywhere, refracted – in the glass windows, in the polished marble floors, in the lacquered furniture: nowhere could I escape myself.

It was the same last night. Even with the hotel unlighted and unpeopled, the slivers of light found me and cast my shape on the mirrored walls. She fascinated me, the woman in the glass, this midnight fugitive, a racing figure draped in a white robe, borrowed and far too large, hurrying from a carnival of tiny ice-cream men disembowelling her luggage. As she ran, the Vivaldi statuary seemed to come to life. The semi-naked women draped in falling linens gathered into gossiping huddles, the muscular soldiers turned their heads in judgement, while the horses and cloven-footed creatures flared their nostrils in disdain. Under these watchful eyes, she did strange things in the night-time – kissed the open mouths of the clean white orchids in the stairwell and stuffed her pockets with the silver-wrapped candies in the lobby. In the empty dining hall, where the pianola played on alone and the tables were all set identically, row on row, waiting for diners who were now all sleeping, she climbed onto the bar, spread her arms, and began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster until the reflections all blurred together into a haze of white.

‘¿Señorita Gest?’

I did not remember immediately who she was – Miss Gest – in this place where I had booked a room under my father’s surname to avoid the inquisitive looks, the enquiries about my health from people who knew someone who knew someone who knew my Titi’s ex-husband’s best friend’s grandfather’s psychologist’s parrot… In Lima, the Echeverría name is known to everyone, but Gest has, except in academic circles, retained some anonymity. For archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, Professor Leonard Gest has some middling consequence; to the rest of the world, as to me, he is an unknown. So I used my father’s name here to render myself invisible.

‘¿Señorita Gest?’

I came to an abrupt stop and waited for the dizziness to subside and the three misty and floating valets to merge into one with his feet pressed firmly, shoulder width apart, on the marble floor.

‘Are you all right, señorita? Is there something you need?’

‘Nothing, thank you. I am quite well.’

‘Breakfast is not served until six…’

‘Yes, I know. I was just taking some air.’

Finding my way back to my suite, drawing my robe closer around me against the night’s chill as I crept along corridor after identical corridor, I realised I had forgotten my way. On which floor was I staying? And on which side of the hotel – north or south? Facing the sea or inland? Into the pockets of my robe I stuffed my hands, rifling anxiously with my fingers, but there was no door key, only hoards of Hotel Vivaldi candies whose wrappers seemed to rustle and hiss at me as I searched.

Back at the front desk, the gold-suited concierge stood rigidly, like a tin soldier, eyes wide but glazed, staring far off into the distance, or into the past. I waited for him to acknowledge me, my hands folded on the desk in an attempt to convey calm and self-assurance. If I touched my surroundings – the desk, the tiled floor, the backs of the black velvet-covered chairs – I could anchor myself here, make myself familiar, seem as though I belonged. But as I waited, touching things, running my fingers over the lacquered desktop, fiddling with the pen, smoothing the pages of the visitor book, the concierge continued immobile and distant, his eyes unseeing behind the cataracts of sleep.

I thought of waking him – of rousing him by his name, Javier, embroidered in gold on his jacket. What would he say if I explained myself, if I told him how I was locked out of my room in the middle of the night, lost and wandering the empty, darkened corridors in my bedclothes like a restless spirit? No, I couldn’t wake him for that. The alternative, though, was to wait until the morning for the elegant guests to descend and find me curled up in one of the high-backed armchairs of the lobby hugging my nightdress around my knees like an insomniac child.

The tremors in my fingers returned – tremors I have endured since childhood, which descend suddenly and often, for no apparent reason, taking possession of my hands as if they were not mine but a stranger’s, clumsily grafted onto my wrists without sympathy for my instructions or wishes. To still their trembling, or at least to hide them from my sight, I plunged my hands into my pockets again and with such force that I sliced my right forefinger on something thin and sharp – the door key, which had been in my pocket the whole time. I had not found it because my hands had been searching for metal, not a plastic magnetised oblong, without character or feeling. I had forgotten: humanity is phasing out the old. The metal key, the written letter, the landline telephone. Already in Rupert’s London apartment block the metal key is obsolete: every resident has a sleek black electronic key card to unlock their home.

With a thin stream of blood trickling down my finger, I held the key card up to my eyes and examined it closely. On one of its corners a tiny nick in the plastic had created a sort of sharp little mouth with fangs, now stained red.

I have trouble with new things. I injure myself with them – or they attack me. Gadgets give me electric shocks and the appliances I use always break. It’s your energy, the Tías used to tell me. Tu energía – it interferes with the current. Rupert has tried to train me into carrying a mobile phone so he doesn’t have to worry when I leave for my walks. He made me promise to switch it on and contact him as soon as I arrived in Lima. Where is that telephone now, I wonder. Buried, I imagine, somewhere in my luggage.

Returning to my room, I found the ice-cream vendors had melted away leaving only one man behind, faded now and shrunken, reduced to the size of a doll, slumped, exhausted, on my suitcase in the corner of the room. Only his eyes were lively, sticking to me wherever I moved.

I know what you think of me. There is nothing to be done.

If you wanted it enough, you would find a way.

I grabbed the vendor around the waist and shook him violently. He did not resist but hung limply in my hands, his limbs flailing loosely, neck folding backwards and jerking precariously as if, at any moment, his head might snap off and roll away. I wanted to shake him to pieces, to dust, and sweep him out of the window and away towards the sea, but he would not disintegrate, so I threw him inside my suitcase and shut the case quickly, snapping closed the padlock.

Now, here on the floor in the dark, sucking on my bleeding finger, surrounded by my dispersed clothes and the disorder of the devastated room, the eviscerated pillows, the scattered papers, I cannot ignore that the tiny vendor is right – I will have to face the ghosts. I thought that I would face them yesterday at the Iglesia Santa María Reina during the Mass for the repose of the Echeverría dead: all day I waited for them as the priest read name after name of departed relatives, with the living Echeverrías gathered around me muttering interminable prayers, but the familiar dead did not attend.

It is a necessary pain of having a large family that someone is always dying. It is a merciful relief of having a large family across the waters that it is impossible to attend all of their funerals. For years I have been losing Titis and Tíos almost every month and, every time, my mother would call to inform me of their passing and, every time, I ignored the phone, listening from across the room to her voice reciting a message. I never called her back. What was there to say? Another relative had retired from life but between her and me nothing had changed.

Each time she called, I marvelled that it was not to announce the funeral of my Tía Consuelo, the great-aunt who has been dying for fifty years, confined all this time to her room at the rear of la Casa Echeverría by countless ailments – or, perhaps, by just one all-encompassing and devastating disease no doctor could ever name – accompanied constantly by her ancient doll, Conchita la Freak, with the mismatched body parts. But it appears that, though everyone else has succumbed at their allotted hour to the inevitable; though her brother, Ignacio Segundo, shot himself in the face while polishing his revolver; though her nephew, Tío Lucho, plummeted from the peak of Huayna Picchu; though her cousin, Almendra la Amarga, yielded at last, at the age of ninety-six, to a particularly strong dose of ayawasca that stopped her heart in the village of Tamshiyacu to which she had travelled to discover what the purpose of her life had been, Tía Consuelo lives on.

Yesterday, during Mass, while the priest took a rest break from the punishing labours of reading through the list of the countless Echeverría dead, with my aunts and uncles embracing and kissing and pulling me this way and that, laying their hands on my stomach in prayer, laying their palms on my forehead in concern – You look pale, hija, are you ill? – Of course the girl is ill: she’s pregnant! – I asked them if they knew what had become of la Tía Consuelo. But nobody knew. Childless and unmarried, Tía Consuelo has for decades been nobody’s concern. But I assumed she had died ya, Tía Mimi said. Oye, Pulpo, do you know anything of la Tía Consuelo? And that was the message that was passed from person to person through the church as we waited for the priest to return: What has happened to Tía Consuelo? Does anyone know anything about Tía Consuelo?

As the priest droned on, I listened for Consuelo’s name but did not hear it, perhaps because it was not read or perhaps because I was distracted by the little pink fish that torments me. It is with me still, bobbing irritatingly against my right cornea, refusing to be ignored since the day three months ago when I sat in a toilet cubicle in my graduation cap and gown, knickers round my ankles, a pregnancy test between my fingers, waiting for pink lines to materialise, which they did – both of them. And with those two pink lines appeared the little pink fish, only a speck then, a minuscule spot on my vision, a particle of dust, I thought, easily blinked away.

But the little fish has not faded: it has grown and become more insistent for my attention – attention divided evenly between it and the incessant waves of nausea that radiate from my guts. It hovers on the waterline of my right eye, tiny but resolute, eyeballing me with a gaping mouth in which I can see my past stretched out and mapped like a star chart. It can only be the size of a poppy seed, no bigger, but when it opens its mouth, it seems to have swallowed the whole universe.

Before I began my journey back to Lima for the first time after all these years, I stayed with the Napiers, Rupert’s family, at their country home. We were celebrating our engagement – mine and Rupert’s (though I had not yet said yes). There, I prayed a novena regarding this torturous little fish. It was not easy explaining to the Napiers why I had insisted on locating the nearest Catholic church nor why I traipsed there through the countryside every morning after breakfast for nine consecutive days in order to pray. Seven years they have known me and been my surrogate family, ever since I appeared on my father’s doorstep, soaking from the rain, fleeing Perú and the ghosts and too many memories and he, unable or unwilling to father me, thrust me upon them. In all that time, I have not often gone to Mass, not once gone to confession. In truth, it was not easy explaining to myself, a lapsed Catholic, why I felt so compelled towards divine supplication. Perhaps the little pink fish made me feel my need for God. Or perhaps it was the Bible verse Titi María Dolores embroidered on the handkerchief she sent me from Lima two weeks ago:

Herencia de Jehová son los hijos;

cosa de estima el fruto del vientre.

The fruit of the womb is an inheritance from the Lord, and every child is a blessing, the Tías wrote in the card that they had all signed and enclosed in the box along with the handkerchief, a gold medallion engraved with the icon of Saint Gerard Majella (patron saint of expectant mothers), a litre bottle of orange-flower water (distilled by Tía Gring’s own hands), and a book of prayers for pregnancy. I don’t know how they knew I was pregnant: I suppose Titis always know.

On the ninth and final day of my prayers, with an early transatlantic flight and an intense bout of morning sickness, I lifted my petitions to God and completed my novena in the multi-faith prayer room at Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport. I knelt at the front of the room, without a cushion, on the grey-blue standard-issue geometric airport carpet, underneath the rotating carousel of religious icons, all of them chained down to safeguard against theft. Inserting a pound into the slot, I turned the wheel through the options (a stainless-steel menorah; a resin Buddha; a flaking painted statuette of Pushan, the Hindu god of marriages, journeys and the feeding of cattle), found the figure of the Blessed Virgin, and made her face me.

Hail Mary, llena de gracia, the little pink fish is with me still, getting entangled in my eyelashes and making my eyes water.

Dios te salve, María, perhaps you remember the business with the spirits. I have evaded them, now, for many years and have no desire to return to the days of the visions and conversations with those that others cannot see.

I leave it in your hands, this trouble with the little pink fish. Si es la voluntad de Dios, I ask you to make it leave me.

As I clicked my rosary beads clumsily between my fingers, out of practice, the Virgin Mary looked down at me with benevolent eyes of azure blue, her alabaster palms held out, robes quivering slightly in the flickering light of the fluorescent tube above us.

Santa María, Mother of God, I asked you yesterday – I am sure you remember – about my pregnancy. The nausea is espantoso. I ask you to take it away or give me the patience to bear it. The nausea, that is. And the pregnancy. Because you know – of course you know, Holy Mary, madre de Dios – that I don’t really want this baby. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

And again, I lift Rupert up to you – he has asked me to marry him, and I have not said yes, nor have I said no. I have said to wait. So we are waiting, he for my answer and I for no sé qué. A sign, I suppose. From you or from God…

In my pocket, the Napier engagement ring pulsed against my hip bone. Rupert wanted me to wear it, despite my lack of conviction. He said he knew, just knew, that we were destined for each other, as if the future were written, as if nothing was left to the vagaries of choice in this world. To save on awkwardness, and to save hurting his mother, his sisters, I wore it in the Napier house. How could I tell them that I felt suffocated by it? That I felt they were trying to absorb me, dissolve me, swallow me into their clan when they already thought of me as daughter, sister? But when I left their house I always removed it and put it somewhere out of sight. And even then, through the thick fabric of my jacket, it bothered me – the weight of the gold, the sharp angles of the diamond, the bulk of its presence.

Kneeling in the airport chapel, as I reflected on my potential engagement, on the imminent sale of my childhood home, and on my own demons, la Vírgen María contemplated me sorrowfully from her place on the pay-as-you-go carousel of divinities. A single tear of blood seeped from the caruncle of her right eye and trickled, painting a track of red, down her cheek to her chin, where the drop hung tenuously.

Behind me a family of worshippers had gathered to watch and wait for their turn at the altar. I did not want them to notice that I had made the mother of God cry. As I reached up with Titi María’s handkerchief to wipe away the scarlet tear from the Virgin Mary’s face, staining the white cotton with a crimson bloom, the Holy Mother reached down to me and pulled me by the wrist with a cold, stiff alabaster hand. With my head next to hers, she whispered:

Aunque vengas disfraza’o, te conozco, bacalao.

Even when you come in costume, codfish, I will always know you.

Reflected from behind me in the telescreens of flight information, I could see the waiting family, absorbed in their chaos: the woman – the mother, I supposed – weighed down by bags and surrounded by restless, impatient children, looked weary and desperately in need of her deity.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, ruega por nosotros, sinners, ahora and at the hour of our death. Amén.

Hurriedly, breaking free from the Virgin’s grip, I let the young family take my place. The mother inserted a pound coin into the slot and turned the wheel to the resin statue of Buddha.

As I wandered the terminal and waited, I turned the Virgin’s words over and over: Aunque vengas disfraza’o, te conozco, bacalao. Te conozco, bacalao, aunque vengas disfraza’o.

These are the words that Mami always used when Leandro and I tried to blame the ants for breaking the pottery or the ghost of Francisco Pizarro for drawing on the walls. Aunque vengas disfraza’o, te conozco, bacalao, she would say: Even if you come in disguise, I know you, codfish, and she would wag her finger and shake her head with a knowing smile. It made me laugh and imagine a codfish in a trench coat and fedora, shuffling around on its tail fin, trying to fit in, going about its daily business, driving a car, buying groceries, trying to conceal its fishy smell.

After she came to work for us, Q’orianka learned the phrase too, but over the years she shortened it, first to te conozco, bacalao and then, at last, to bacalao, so that when we lied she would cry Codfish! Codfish! and chase us around the house until we confessed, collapsing in a giggling heap, sweaty and breathless.

Leandro, my brother, namesake of our father, should be with me on this journey, but he is too busy. He posted me his signed documents, appointing me as his legal agent, in an envelope with an EC1A postmark and a scribbled note on headed paper from the bank where he works:

Soz can’t come. Work MANIC. Waiting to exchange on Pan Peninsula apt. Bad timing.

Then his signature and, squashed into a corner, an afterthought, Besos a todos.

So Leandro has not come. And Rupert, too, has more important things to do. If he knew about the two pink lines he might have found time. But I have travelled to Lima alone. No, not alone: I have the little fish. Though perhaps the little fish will not join me today when I go to meet the developers at la Casa Echeverría – when I go to sign the papers for the sale of Mamabue’s house. Perhaps little fish do not like to witness ancestral casas being sold and razed.

Aunque vengas disfraza’o, te conozco, bacalao, said the mother of God.

These same words were on the lips of my relatives at la Iglesia Santa María Reina yesterday as they took in my appearance. Strange transformation she has made, this girl, they seemed to say. But still the same, underneath. Still an Echeverría inside. Although not quite. I never was completely one of them either. Here or there, London or Lima, it doesn’t matter. Even with my mother no longer living to tell me, I cannot escape those words reminding me that wherever I go, I have always been a codfish in disguise.

My homecoming journey took me into the past. Everything was just as I remembered. On the flight from New York there was the same atmosphere of jubilant homecoming among the passengers that I remember from childhood. A few rows behind me there was a family of four generations – from bisabuelita to newborn – returning to Perú for the first time in decades after making their American fortune. The padre of the family, whom they called el gordo, was a fat señor with laughing eyes and a gold chain bracelet on his fleshy wrist; he kept standing on his seat to rouse the entire plane into enthusiastic renditions of the Peruvian national anthem:

¡Somos libres!

¡Seámoslo siempre! ¡Seámoslo siempre!

Beside me, a young backpacker with blond dreadlocks asked me to translate the words for him.

‘We’re free,’ I told him. ‘We’re free. Let us always be.’

But when the enthusiastic gordo began to sing traditional huaynos, the backpacker could not understand how I was able to sing along but not to translate the words.

‘This is in Quechua,’ I explained. ‘I don’t speak Quechua.’

‘You don’t speak Quechua, but you can sing it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Our maid taught me. But she didn’t teach me what it means.’

He looked at me with puzzled amusement, as if I were a quaint curio in a glass cabinet. After that I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep to avoid having to speak with the backpacker again.

Disembarking the plane at Jorge Chávez airport, I was immediately bathed in the Limenian humidity. The air is close here. And tactile. Not aloof and tasteless. It demands to be felt and to feel, like the insistent affection of tías abuelas after years of absence. And with the humidity came the briny, algal smell of sea that stirred in my guts a feeling I had forgotten – a feeling galvanised by years of self-protective distraction from remembering. It was a species of longing and, at the same time, of recuperating – of losing and of finding what was lost. It was a feeling that made me, suddenly, quite seasick and I stumbled, had to reach out my hand to steady myself. My hand fell on the arm of el gordo, the singing padre de familia from the plane. He placed his enormous hand over mine and said, ‘Returning home is felt in the intestines, no es así mija?’

It felt warm to be called mija: it had been a long time since a stranger had called me their daughter.

‘Es así,’ I told him, because he was right – homecoming is felt in the viscera.

As we walked across the tarmac towards the terminal, already I could see the arrivals concourse was teeming with families clutching bouquets of helium balloons, giant stuffed animals and cardboard signs, all pressing urgently against the steel barricades and craning their necks to catch a first glimpse of their loved ones. I walked behind the maletero I had hired, who pushed a trolley heavily laden with the five pieces of luggage in which – unsure how long it would take to sell Mamabue’s house – I had packed enough of my clothes to see me through at least a year in Lima. I would not learn until later, until after the Mass for the repose of the Echeverría dead, that the buyers were already lined up, that the papers had been prepared, that the signing and completion of the sale would take place the next day.

Just in front of me, as we headed to the arrivals hall, triumphantly leading his clan, was el gordo, who, when he emerged from the sliding glass doors, was greeted by a rapturous cheer from an enormous crowd of relatives all wearing identical lime-green T-shirts emblazoned with his face and the words ¡Los García Siempre Regresan! – The Garcías Always Return!

Wailing cries of joy, a stout lady with the same thick wrists and black eyes as el gordo threw herself against the barricade with such force that it collapsed with a crash, and the García relatives surged forward, clambering over the metal, tumbling over each other, weeping and laughing, until el gordo, his wife and their children were swallowed by the crowd. Taking advantage of the breach in the barrier, other families poured out, falling upon the arrivals – not always the ones for whom they were waiting – with kisses and songs, while European tourists looked on with ashen faces, dodging unsolicited affection, calculating the quickest route out of the amorous chaos.

In the confusion, as the guards tried to contain the crowd, I was separated from my luggage while people whom I will never know filled my hands with candies and flowers and coins. Pushing against the current of bodies, I searched desperately for a face I recognised.

Then, his head protruding above the horde, I saw him – Tío Pulpo, my mother’s brother, Mamabue’s eldest and the last survivor of his siblings. According to tradition, it should have been Tío Pulpo living in the casona all these years but, after he returned from college in the United States, he had no interest in Mamabue’s house.

‘Anaïs!’ Tío called above the roar of the crowd, waving as if from a great distance. He was there with his wife, my Tía Mimi, who wrapped her arms like a straitjacket around me and led me hurriedly from the mayhem out into the twilight morning where my maletero was waiting in the car park with my bags.

‘¡Loco, loco, loco!’ Mimi cried, gripping my arms with her hands and surveying me intently as if to check for injuries. Or shortcomings. ‘Certainly these things never happen in England. ¿Estás bien?’

Without waiting for a response, she kissed me absently on both cheeks and held me in a tight embrace. On her hair I could smell perfume and