Alone, Alfonzo smoked a cigarette for courage, and when there was nothing else to do he hummed a prayer and dialed the number for Viviana Lopez-Cuña.

BENEATH THE BEACH

23.

Viviana Lopez-Cuña came from a family of graceful shadows. They flickered even, or perhaps especially, in front of one another. The breeze of sadness never ceased.

In their youth, her parents, Nancy—called Naya by friends—and Adriano had helped found a dissident art movement called Zanistoism. It was really just a loose affiliation of artists and intellectuals who’d attended the Zana University of Science and Arts in Peru, but Adriano had penned a manifesto with his friends and the art world had latched on. A manifesto does a tidy job of defining the limits of an ism, which later scholars appreciate.

Vivi’s parents’ names appeared passingly in art books she read in college. She could never find pictures of them, though. It was only their friends and enemies who appeared in the photos, animals she’d heard abstract gossip about while she was growing up, animals who were now either old or dead. In the pictures they appeared as young animals leaping around doing dances before brightly painted abstract cloths strung up in fields, or gathered in a dingy warehouse practicing plays. Her parents were considered minor, background figures in their country’s art world. But that was still something. All the creatures in the photos looked so confident in their beauty and their good ideas.

A long time before Vivi existed, when Adriano and Naya were still renegade Andean artists painting rivers and staging plays about atheism and free sea love, Naya gave birth to Vivi’s brother, Silvio. Silvio was her parents’ darling baby when they themselves were just students. The three of them grew up together. All the wild fun seemed to have been had before her birth. By the time Vivi was aware, her parents and her brother were grown and serious. Her parents had teaching jobs; they debated politics, drank coffees, and shared the secrets of adulthood with Silvio. In retrospect, Vivi knew that Silvio was still an adolescent in those years, still a high school student, but Vivi always knew him as her parents’ beloved peer. They poured him small glasses of their wine and let him smoke on the balcony. They debated enclosures and grain riots and bird separatism while Vivi drank her milk and played with bits of string on the floor. Her father never condescended to Silvio the way he did to Vivi. She was the little girl who tripped over her own toes. Silvio was the genius son who excelled at chess and astronomy and won awards at school.

Silvio’s death was Vivi’s hinge. Before and after pivoted on that event.