American Chica (32 page)

THE PLAYGROUND OF
the Roosevelt School was swarming with hundreds of children, milling about and yammering, waiting for the bell to ring. We edged through the gate and stood in awe.

A girl about my age leaned against the wall and stared at us. She was dark-skinned, frail, her eyes bulging from her face like boiled eggs, blue-white and rubbery.

“Primer día?”
she asked. First day? I was gawking around me, an obvious newcomer. I nodded that it was so.

“You speak English,” she said, more of a fact than a question.

“Yes,” I answered, ready to prove it. But she continued in Spanish, and my affirmation hung in the air like a hiss.

“Then you’ll be fine,” she assured me. “Don’t look so worried. I’m Margarita Martinez. My English is not so good. They put me in
Señora
Arellano’s class.”

There were two streams for every grade at Roosevelt, Margarita explained. The main one was for English-speakers, a smaller one for those who spoke better Spanish. I would be tested for my abilities and streamed according to my tongue.

The man who would decide my fortune was vexed in the company of children. I could see it the moment he called out my name. He was frowning and fidgety, flicking his hair with his fingers and peering impatiently at his wrist. I followed his orange head into a room next to the headmaster’s office.

“Do you speak English or Spanish at home,
señorita?”
he asked me in Spanish, motioning me to a chair.

“Both,” I replied, and stared at his hair. There was something miraculous about the way it cocked up on top and slicked flat around the ears.

“Which do you read?”

“Both,” I answered again.

“No,” he said, drumming a long white hand on the tabletop. Gold fuzz sprouted on his knuckles. He was wearing a ring, ponderous as a prime minister’s. “You don’t understand me. There must be a difference in the level at which you speak and read your two languages.”
Ee-dee-oh-muzz.
His Spanish was broad and drawling, like my mother’s. He opened a green folder and looked through it, and then switched his questions to English. “What I’m asking you, missy, is which language are you more proficient in? There are no records or tests here.”

“I think I’m about the same in both,” I said.

“Sir,” he said.

“What?”

“I think I am the same in both,
sir.”

I repeated the phrase after him. I had never heard anyone in the United States of America talk like that. I wanted to fall on the floor and squeal, his words were striking me as so idiotic. But there was nothing amusing about the man.

“Here,” he said. “Read to me from this book.” He shoved a brown volume across the table, pinched two fingers, and then plucked a white shirt cuff out of his jacket sleeve.

I turned the book in my hands.
Indians of the Great Plains,
the cover announced. I opened it. “What part would you like me to read?” I asked.

“Any page,” he said. “Pick one.” He sat back and crossed his hands behind his head.

I flipped through, looking at pictures. Somewhere near the
middle, there was one labeled
Medicine man with a rattle,
or words to that effect. The witch doctor was peeking out of a tepee, holding an artifact. In the foreground, an Indian brave in a loinflap ran down to a river with his hair spread behind him like wings. The text was interesting enough, something like this:
After the last steaming and sweating ceremony, the Indian plunged into water during the summer, or into a snowbank in winter. Thus purified, he was ready to make an offering to the Great Spirit or seek a sign from the Great Beyond.

I stared at the words and considered my situation. I could read this aloud and be waved into the English stream. It was clearly as simple as that. Or I could play possum, as Grandpa Doc liked to say. Put one over on the prig.

I snapped the book shut and set it down on the table. “I can’t read this,” I said, and looked up.

“You’re not even going to try?”

I shook my head. “Too hard.”

“Well, read this, then,” he said, and slid another book at me. It was thin and bright as a candied wafer.

I picked it up, leafed through. Then I smoothed it flat on the table in front of me. “Jane … puh-plays … wi-i-ith the … ball.”

“I see,” he said, after some pages of this. “I thought as much. That will do.” He scribbled a long commentary into my file.

I was put into
Señora
Arellano’s class and, for what seemed a very long time, my parents were none the wiser. I toted my children’s illustrated
Historia del Perú,
memorizing the whole litany of Inca rulers until I could recite their Quechua names with all the rattletybang of gunfire.

And Margarita Martinez paid attention to me.

THERE IS A STORY
they tell in Cajamarca about four sons from an honorable family that knew the value of honesty, the
pleasures of hard work, and the worth of a job well done. The first son set out to build houses. The second became a general in the army. The third founded a bank. The fourth went east and made hats. Time passed, and the hatmaker fell in love with a green-eyed woman. He asked her father for her hand. But, as fate would have it, her father rejected him. It wasn’t only that the commerce of straw hats wasn’t grand enough. The suitor’s skin wasn’t fair enough, his eyes not clear enough, his language not elegant enough, and, to seal the rejection: Of all his brothers, he was told, he had the least clout.

The hatmaker wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was intent on winning the green-eyed lady. First, he took stock of his situation. There was nothing he could do about his shade of skin, the brilliance of his eyes, nor the cleverness of his tongue, but he certainly could do something about his clout in the world. He swindled a mansion out of his first brother; he killed the general and took over his men; he kidnapped the banker and created an empire. And when he was done, the green-eyed woman was his.

So what is the moral of this story? The answer out of Cajamarca is: Do what you can. You can’t change skin, can’t fix tongues, can’t brighten eyes, but power is for the taking. Steal it, lie for it, kill if you have to. You can win the girl with the interesting eyes.

Looking back, I understand what was happening—though I certainly didn’t understand it at the time. Mother had made a bargain with Papi: He could take the risk of resigning from Grace and joining his brothers, he could even put us in a smaller house, but the first cut of his salary would go to the Roosevelt School, and her children would be educated as Americans. She hadn’t factored in the realities of that decision. Roosevelt was where the prosperous Americans were. It was where the sons and daughters of diplomats, industrialists, bankers went to be schooled. Had I continued to be a little princess of the Grace
regnancy, I might have had some currency there. As it was, we had become children of diminished circumstances—we never said so, never complained—but the knowledge that we had lost our power did not come without its consequences. My instinct was the Cajamarca instinct: Do what you can. Get it back.

I had no power among rich Americans. I could fool them, however. Trip them up. Dodge their game. I would lie for it, cheat for it, dance fast if I had to. I would get the girl with the bulgy eyes.

Although I fooled my way into a desk next to Margarita Martinez, I didn’t turn out to be a particularly good friend to her. We played together when we could, but she was far too interested in dolls for my taste. Her house was down the
avenida
and around the corner from ours, much grander, with a host of servants trailing her down the street. She hadn’t been able to get into the fancy Catholic girls’ schools for some reason, and her father—a restaurant owner—had done what he could. He wangled her way into the Americans’ school. She was timid, something of a priss on the playground, and I enjoyed lording over her far more than I should have. I made her do things my way.

I cannot say what was in my brother’s or sister’s heart, but an appetite definitely stirred in mine. I found myself looking around, assessing what kind of power was available to me. There did appear to be some: With Peruvian children at Roosevelt, I bragged I was really a gringa. With gringos, I crossed my eyes and retreated into Spanish. With sissies like Margarita, I played queen. I did what I could.

But there was something else, far more potent. As I settled into that Lima house, with its front door smack on the street, I began to decode a system I had never even suspected in the haciendas, for all that the hierarchy was obvious. I began to see that not only did the rich gringos wield a good share of the power in the city—this was all too apparent in their houses, their cars,
their clothes, their toys—I could also see it was the fairer Peruvians, the ones with less visible Indian blood, who ruled Peru. The more Spanish blood in your veins, the more power you had. Maybe I had an advantage here; maybe I could reap the benefit. Nobody was posting signs about it or sending the less fortunate to the other side of the tracks, but the evidence was everywhere: The Indians were the servants, beasts of burden, construction workers, street hawkers, beggars. The
mestizos—
people of mixed race—were the shopkeepers, office workers, scrappy entrepreneurs. From time to time I would see a Chinese or Japanese woman behind a counter, or a tall black man in a uniform guarding the doors of a fancy hotel; the variations were relatively few. But the highest caste of all—the landowners, intelligentsia, the moneyed classes—were almost always
los blancos,
the whites. Clearly, my grandparents weren’t rich. But, even though my grandfather had hightailed it upstairs and forfeited his career, the two had a respectable position in Peruvian society. They had inherited a hacienda in the mountains when Tía Carmen had died. They had a comfortable house in an attractive neighborhood of Miraflores. We also had something we could never lose: We were
gente decente.
From the good families. As my grandmother was fond of saying,
somos puros Hispanos
—we were Spaniards to the core.

I had had some exposure to the power of skin: I had been of a questionable race in my mother’s country. For all our material slippage, I remained a member of the upper class in my father’s country. I did not use this information immediately, but I logged it away, in the spirit of one-upmanship. It was the coin of the realm.

THROUGHOUT CHILDHOOD AND
down to this day, George would always be our psychiatrist, the seismograph of the family—his
delicate emotional tissue warning us of subtle shifts in our terrain. His little yellow pills were working so well now that he was no longer twitching, walleyed, and fearful. The medicine man in Boston had brought back his beautiful face. The pills were a six-month treatment for stress, so effective that my brother had become valor itself, running through traffic, jumping from treetops, rappelling the neighborhood walls.

He was so boisterous that the ambassador’s boy would not play with us. His maid shook her head no at the gate. Too busy with a tutor, she said, or at a party, or splashing about in his bath.

But there were others willing to join us in the dirt lot under the imagined tower: Barbara, the helmet-haired Swiss, whose toenails were scrubbed clean as shells. Roberto, Margarita’s brother, a scamp who won points by intercepting secrets Vicki was scribbling on paper, stuffing in cans, and pulleying to her friend upstairs. Albertito Giesecke, who refused to kiss me because he’d given himself to God. Sandra, the Japanese-American, whose U.S. Army father was stockpiling Swift Armour hams in a bomb shelter he’d carved under their house. Margarita herself, who sat on a curb and watched us carry on, her egg-ball eyes abulge. George had had no trouble convincing her to kiss him. I had seen them go at it in the lot, behind the retaining wall.

“Let’s play Pizarro,” George said one day, coming out to the lot with a bowl on his head. “All I need is a
lanza
and a
caballito.”
He picked up two lengths of wood. “Here,” he said, and put one between his legs: “My horse.” Then he swung the other above his head like a crazed conquistador at the apocalypse: “My weapon.”