American Chica (12 page)

She kept taking Vicki away from me, making me feel as if I were some barn animal. She doesn’t like me. I don’t know why. She’s not like any mother I’ve ever known. More like a jealous girlfriend. I think she’d be happy to drive me out and get her son back in her clutches again.

Aw, come on,
said my grandfather, walking in from the other room.

Darling,
said my grandmother to him,
listen to her. Hear what she has to say.

No. I’m not listening to another word. Takey,
he said to my mother, using the name he had called her since infancy,
that woman is related to you now.
He nodded toward the children.
She is part of your life.

Later that week, Mother boarded the plane to Lima with three-year-old Vicki clutching her skirt. A violin nestled in one arm, a male infant in the other.

5

—

G
ODS AND
S
HAMANS

Dioses y Brujas

T
HERE’S MORE TO
this world than it tells us. I’ve always known it. I’m haunted by an unseen dimension in which everything has roots, logic, and reasons—a tie to another point in time. I believe this with a child’s certainty: That there are demons and angels. That there is kismet. That stars command us. That a past we may never have heard of can poison a future we cannot foresee. That we are travelers on an ancient spool, iterations that trundle around again—since time immemorial—from bone to dust to bone.

Connections are everywhere, if I can track them. Here’s one: A geological force called “man” fashions a rocket from minerals on the side of a hill. There is iron, a little nickel, a bit of potassium, some zinc. The minerals are the residue of his ancestors’ bones. He shoots them skyward, opens a hole in the stratosphere, and hundreds of years later the dust of his forefathers—with its ancient loves and antipathies—rains down on his descendants. They don’t see it, they don’t know it. But it sifts gently over them; it settles.

As a child I saw the obvious parallels: Jesus and sun gods, witches and Buddhas. What was Jesus if not
inti,
the Inca thresher of earthly light? What was a witch if not hunger, a longing for order, a hand in the dark? What were the New Testament, the Torah, the Koran, the Upanishads if not guiding legends,
historias
to lead us through? Even Gautama Buddha, in his infinite wisdom—in the shade of a tree, on another side of time—practiced the magic of the Inca: Take in the evil, shoot it into a stone. Breathe it in, breathe it out. Until enlightenment comes.

I had equations for everything. If my grandfather was not descending the staircase, it was because a force was pulling him up. If I was drawn to a
loco,
it was because madness tinged my blood. If I could feel both gringa and Peruvian, it was because I juggled two brains in my head. If the image of my mother and a stranger was burned into memory, my mind was trying to show me something my eyes couldn’t see. The possibilities of connections were legion, and they set me to staring at ceilings with plans. There were inheritances to track. Ramifications to hunt. Vines to follow.

Little wonder that for the rest of my life I have studied the string that ties my parents together and shackles them back to their pasts. I want reasons for what drew them together, for turns they took from the roads they’d known. As a teenager, I was lured by their story in the way any child would be. But in the years of hearing and rehearing it, I have seen that it holds more than logic: There is a prayer in its recitation, and a lesson at the end of the prayer.

WHEN MOTHER RETURNED
to Lima with her three precious charges—Vicki, George, and her violin—she found Papi living with a monkey and an anteater. They were occupying the roof of the Avenida Mariátegui house, clambering down the stairs from
time to time to scare the maid, Concepción, or to send one of my father’s drinking buddies howling out the door in a hallucinatory rant. The monkey was dun brown, tall as a seven-year-old, with beady black eyes and a bark like the squeak of a hinge. The anteater was an aging caudillo, surveying the rooftops of Lima with an attitude, flicking his tongue from his snout.

It had taken no more than a month for a manly mayhem to overtake Tía Carmen’s place. A gathering spot for Papi’s companions—his engineering students from the Colegio, police initiates from the academy, and solitary gringos from W. R. Grace—the house had become more drinking establishment than home, more fraternity than the sleepy colonial address my mother had left behind.

Papi’s uncle, Tío Salvador Mariátegui, a tall, gloriously whiskered, bemedaled naval
comandante,
had brought the monkey and anteater from one of his forays into the Amazon. It was said that he had conquered the tributaries of that great river as thoroughly as he had the hairs of his extravagant mustache, a magnificent handlebar that swooped out and back with rococo flourish. Less than a decade later, in 1958, Tío Salvador would pack up three hundred years of his ancestors’ armor, pin innumerable medals onto his admiral’s uniform, and set out to become emperor of Andorra, a tiny principality in the east Pyrenees. But for now, it was jungle animals he ruled. The unlikely twosome he’d brought onboard the ship had entertained the sailors on the long trip down the Ucayali; Tío Salvador’s plan was to truck them up to his mountain house in Chaclacayo, where he imagined they would make an even more entertaining sight in his garden, in the company of his huffy peacocks. When it was clear he wouldn’t have time to execute the whole plan, he decided to deposit the monkey and anteater at least part of the way there, in Lima, with my father. Promising to return for them, Tío Salvador disappeared up the Ucayali again.

The duo was irking the neighbors, drawing cold sweat from Concepción, but richly amusing Papi. Every time he stepped onto the rooftop and saw their absurd profiles, he’d throw back his head and roar. Day after day, as he tells it, he pulled on his forelock and listened to reports from Concepción:
The grocer across the street is complaining,
señor.
He says that the one with the long nose hangs out over the roofwork and scares away clients. But that isn’t all, Don Jorge. The lady next door says she doesn’t dare look out her own window, because if she sets eyes on the monkey, her unborn will come out ugly as sin.

Muy bien,
Concepción,
my father responded.
Tell the grocer he’s right, the anteater probably does scare his clients, but only those of the six-legged kind. His store is so full of
cucarachas,
the man should be paying me a fee. Tell the pregnant
señora
to take a good look at her husband. The monkey won’t make one bit of difference. Her baby’s already a freak.

Somewhere during all of this, Mother walked in. It was the first of a lifetime of reconciliations: I have seen so many by now. It starts with an arch departure, a certainty that their life together is too much to handle; then come the months with my parents in different places, gazing silently from windows; a letter; a call; a telegram; and finally, a joy-filled embrace. My father swept his baby boy into his arms. The animals swung their nasal protuberances in the air. Vicki laughed.

Within a few days, Mother was on the telephone to Abuelita.
Rosa,
she said,
come meet your grandson.
My grandmother thanked her. She arrived with her daughters and sat in the
sala
awhile.

It was a checked conversation, in the clipped spirit of that uncertain time. Abuelita held George, cooed over him, but the occasion was only marginally festive. Mother served gringo-style hors d’oeuvres with melba toast, mint jelly, Philadelphia cream cheese. The family nibbled politely, remarked on the baby’s handsomeness, then excused itself to go.

It was an era of paradox, even if no one was saying so. There was a tiny man-baby in the cradle, but there were also two beasts on the roof. Armed soldiers were posted on street corners, but the country was on the verge of an economic boom. My parents’ marriage had nearly foundered, but it had also been blessed by a second child. Abuelita had paid Mother a visit, and stepped smartly out of her way. The bridge had tottered under the burdens, and settled itself with a sigh.

The monkey and the anteater moved on to join the peacocks in Chaclacayo. Tía Carmen’s house bustled with our little family again. George grew round,
bien papeado.
And the neighbors admitted it was good to have the gringa back in town.

When Mother became pregnant with me the following year, Papi announced the most surprising shift of all. Once I was born, we were to leave Lima. He’d been offered a big job in Cartavio, he told her. In a hacienda owned by the gringos, where she was bound to feel more at home.

In March of 1950, my family picked up and headed north to Cartavio. Awaiting us there was the childhood of my memory: the garden below my window, the smell of burnt sugar, the yellow of floripondio, the animals with eyes at half-mast, the stones, the bones, the dust. There, too, were the
apus
—gods watching us from the mountains—and three shamans who would plow grooves into my heart: El Gringo, a witch, and Antonio.

BY THE TIME
I was four, I was well-versed in the legends of the
pishtacos.
Why would I doubt that ghosts existed, when there were so many about? Our
amas
had taught us about the spirits that circled above us, howling when winds were strong, screeching when seas got rough. So that when El Gringo came hobbling around the corner one day, I never doubted that he was
un vivo muerto,
one of the living dead, and that he had the power to curse us. So that when I saw the old woman, the
bruja,
for the first time, I knew that she had come to speak to me.

Her eyes told us she was a witch. They were milky with too much seeing, marbled by sun, clacking around in her head as she wound through the streets of the hacienda, hawking fruit. When the
bruja
saw our faces behind the fence, she would stop, squint like a lizard, and flick her tongue against two yellow protrusions—more tusks than teeth—that drifted in the rolling sea of her mouth.
Ahí,
she would grunt. There you are.
Los duendes.
The dwarves. And George and I would step out and look in her face.

This was Cartavio. An oasis of cement, iron, and sugar in the long, gray sandlot of Peruvian coast. For children of privilege no less than for children of the poor in backwater towns like Cartavio, life was a dusty affair—an endless shuffle through dirt, punctuated by rapture and calamity, and encounters such as this, with mango-toting witches in multicolored skirts.

We emerged from behind my father’s wall one day, my brother and I—now five and four—to find the neighborhood children trotting to her cart. There was Billy, the big Scots boy with the dazzling smile; Carlitos, the tiny, pinched son of the factory’s accountant; Margarita, the flat-faced daughter of the cook across the street. We hurried out, knowing that the rush to the
bruja
’s cart could mean only one thing: The witch was reading futures today.