American Chica (33 page)

Conquest became our game in that viceregal city. We returned to it day after day the way a gambler staggers into a casino to finger a table’s felt. Buy the chips. Win the kitty. Win a war, win a kiss, win Peru. You want to taste my sword?
Thwap.
You die. I
draw and quarter you the way they drew and quartered Tupac Amaru. The way they strapped his limbs to four horsemen and charged. The way they pickled his penis.

I put aside
qosqos
and
apus
and energy bubbles and Antonio’s black stone for a piece of
la conquista.
Perhaps it was my school-books that convinced me, with their lavish praise for Pizarro and splendid woodcut illustrations of his subjugation of the Inca. Perhaps it was the city that beguiled me, with its concrete palaces and pomp. “You see this magnificence?” Papi said as he strode through the Plaza de San Martín, his arms thrown up into the air, his torso turning like Caesar before Rome. “This is our patrimony. This is your birthright. Your forefathers built Peru. Your great-grandfather lived over there in his last days, on the top floor of the Hotel Bolívar. Every day he put on spats and a waistcoat and walked to El Club Nacional for a
copita de jerez
with his friends. Our family lived in these streets. You see these lampposts on the square? I helped build them myself when I was fifteen years old and an apprentice at an artist’s foundry. Your world is here. Your history is here, Marisi. You are the heart and soul of this country.”

La conquista.
In a day when the world was for the taking. When the Huari conquered the Moche, and the Inca conquered the Huari, and the Spaniards conquered the Inca, and the Arabs poured into Spain, and the Vandals overran Rome. What could be more exhilarating than to spring into alien land unexpected? Take it. Claim it. Put a flag on it. Until something more powerful comes along.

“I command you to stop!” Canute said to the sea. But the waves lapped the sand as they’d always done. Ah, but there’s always something greater. Call it God. Call it Death. One should
take
things while one can.

Fewer than two hundred men took the Inca. They trekked from Tumbes to Cajamarca with horses, a little gunpowder, and
swords. They captured an empire that ruled more than twenty million: the Tahuantisuyo, mighty domain of the Inca. How? Certainly not because they were any more clever; the Inca had reached a level of civilization that Spain itself did not know. The lords of the Andes were orderly: They fed their people, irrigated their deserts, built impregnable fortresses, ruled with an iron hand. Certainly not because that straggly regiment of 168 was powerful enough to stop a sea of natives. Had the Inca wanted to, they could have swallowed the dogfaces whole. Drunk their blood. Why didn’t they? Here it is: Because they felt a magic at work, some undefinable force of destiny. Black light. Open the
qosqo:
take it in. Spain strutted through Europe, bragging about its military victory, but this was no victory. No. The truth was all there in that city, slow though I was to see it. Peru was no product of conquest. It had been forged from transcendent surrender.

Our little band ran through the neighborhood day after day after school, enacting the Spanish side of the story. I marched out to the empty lot with cardboard strapped around my knees, a tin pot on my head, a garbage cover in one hand, a strong stick in the other. I was Don Pedro the Cruel. I was Boabdil. I was El Cid, ready to die, hungry for revenge.

It was hard work, this autoindoctrination. This ad-lib curriculum in power. Often, I just scraped by. One of my lions broke out of its cage one day, surprising me and my men. I had been sleeping by the fire, sated with rum and skewered heart. The roar was faint at first, like the rumble of a distant
huayco
—rock grinding on rock—and then I woke to see the animal coming at me through the hall. He was massive, blond, padding across the tile with his shoulders churning. His head hardly moved at all.

I snatched my cloak and wrapped it tight around my arm. My guard staggered back, a fringe of straight hair flopping against her forehead. She fell into an empty vat. The clatter awoke my
minister, who stood and dusted off his robes. His eyes widened when he saw the approaching cat, but he didn’t spring out with his bludgeon; he slinked behind my couch like a ferret into a hole, afraid. I went forward to meet the beast, swinging my sword—Tizona—above my head. Then a most magical thing happened. The lion stopped and stared at my advance, as if my very form were mesmerizing. He snorted once, raised his magnificent brow, and sent his eyes from side to side.

I strode up, grasped him by the mane, led him back to his cage in the adjoining hall, and thrust him in. When my brother rattled in with his armor clanging about him, ready to defend me, I turned and raised two fingers to signal that I had been blessed by the shield of God. Then I slapped the fur from my hands.

We went into the desert after that, in search of the counts of Carrion. They had committed dastardly acts against me and their wives. Me, they had betrayed with talk, with oily, insidious promises they had never made good. Their wives, they had nearly killed. They had lured them out to a meadow, offering words and wine. But once there, they had kicked them, lashed them, stripped them, and left them there to die. I had heard of these cowardly deeds from my scribe, who read me the news from a scroll of blood-smudged parchment.

I rescued the wives and bound their wounds while George rode on to give the fleeing counts their due. He found them just outside Valencia, sniveling by the retaining wall, seeing the reflection of their absurd little selves in the shine of their conqueror’s eyes. They threw their hands over their heads. When I galloped up in my chariot with their women huddled against my legs, they surrendered to my chains.

I died some days later, but not before I made plans. I gathered my men. Embalm me, I told them. Find Clam-Hand Wooten,
bring him here in the silver bullet with the flying dogs on the sides, tell him to fix up my face, scarred now from so many battles. Then strap me to Babieca. They balked at this, thinking my horse would sense that I was dead and buck me into the dirt by the side of some
carretera.
But no, I said, Babieca is loyal, he will carry my corpse. Do all this, men, then point the horse toward the battlefield. Send him against King Cúcar, with my body on his back.

They did exactly as I said. They cleaned me and trussed me and strapped me to Babieca. And then the two of us rode out to meet the Moors. They were terrified when they saw me, clutching their breastplates at the very sight of my hair on the wind. “But she was dead!” they cried out. “They told us she was dead!” And then they scattered like crazed cockroaches. Vanquished.

“Of course you like to play those games,” Abuelita crowed as she poured tea for us one evening. “You two are probably very good at them.” Papi had taken me, George, and Vicki to our grandparents’ house for what would become our traditional Sunday visit. Mother had excused herself and stayed home.

“It’s in your blood, you know!” Abuelita continued. “Don’t forget that your great-great-great-grandfather
(el bis bis bis bis!)
General Joaquin Rubin de Celis de la Lastra was the first Spaniard to fall in the Battle of Ayacucho. You might even say that the fall from his horse marked the independence of Peru!”

“And how about Pedro Pablo Arana?
El bis
of the other side!” Tía Chaba chimed in, one eye on my shrinking grandfather, her hair piled high in a twist. “He led three hundred rebels on horses!
Cataplún, cataplún!
Swooping down from the mountains to fight the corrupt military tyrants!” She rapped the table with her beautiful long red fingernails, as if they were hooves. She
flashed her eyes inside exquisitely drawn lines of kohl. Vicki grinned triumphantly.

Power. It was a family thing.

AS THE ARANA
brothers were making their bid for power, establishing Techo Rex offices in Lima, importing the latest American engineering equipment, plotting like Cheops to erect something monumental, every law of thermodynamics was being played out within the confines of our house. Push was coming to shove. Electricity was filling the air. Even the nervousness that once coursed through George now snaked, through some Newtonian concatenation of converted energy, across the house to creep into Mother. Her brow was perpetually dug with Trouble, her eyes gun-barrel gray. Her fingers were chewed back, raw. I no longer saw them dancing along the neck of a violin or drawing on the wand of a bow. She seemed limp, lifeless, moving through rooms as if she no longer knew where she was. Looking for cues that weren’t there.

She seldom went out. Far from the gringos in the haciendas and free of the obligations of a teacher, she was afloat in an alien city, hovering above the ruckus like gossamer on the fly.

She tried to bear up by reading philosophy. The books were barometers of her mood: Nietzsche’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Will Durant’s
The Lessons of History.
The themes were will, control, subjugation: off a broad brush, on a large scale. When we’d walk in from school we’d see her reenter in stages: the chin up, the quick blink, the realization that we were standing before her, and then our mother descending the staircase of her mind, peering down at us from some far landing of consciousness. She was there, but she was somewhere else, too, like a lynx with its nose in the wind, sensing trails that could call her away.

Something had wormed deep into Papi, too, but it was
Trouble of a different sort. He was home later and later. Out with old school friends. Out with engineers. Out with club mates. Out with old friends he met at the bar. Out.

There were endless excuses, dragged forth in the wee hours of morning. Words that slithered under doorjambs, over pillows, wedging their way into dreams. In all, there was a sense of intemperate crescendo, as when opera swings into a devil’s dance. The slurred opening, the long growl, the hammering on the door, the plangent trill of my mother’s voice when he staggered in under the influence, “This is what
macho
means, eh, Jorge?” Is this what Lima men do? They bickered at night, they sneered in the morning, they rolled their eyes heavenward, he lurched from the room. Our air was filled with their static.

The electricity was so pervasive, it eventually coursed into water as well. We couldn’t get any. Water, the very stuff that the Chimu had handled so deftly, that the Inca had mastered after them—labyrinths of it, pulsing through desert like veins through a warm animal—water had stopped cold in Lima. It trickled reluctantly from faucets, thinning to a sullen drip, stopping altogether by late afternoon. When the family above us cooked or bathed, our supply was paralyzed, and our throats would fill with the stench of ripe commodes.

It happened in August, when the
garúa
squatted over the city the way smoke squats on peat fire. A gray haze locked itself in between Cerro San Cristóbal and the Pacific so that we could see nothing beyond our own walkway. So that a priest approaching his church would wonder if it still flew a cross. It was clear the
apus
were angry, mocking us from their perches. You say you need water, you miserable
olla podrida
of pig-farm conquistadors and faithless
serranos?
Here you are. Take it. Fog.

It seldom rained in Lima. The city hadn’t seen real rainfall for years. Water hung in the air, it pounded the shore, but the kind you could use was rare. Even then, in Lima’s splendid modernity.
Even then, with engineers all about. Whatever water there was, we were looking at. It sat in our faces, curled around our hair, wound its tubercular coccus into our lungs. We could not drink it, we could not clean ourselves in it, we could not boil an egg for dinner. But the worst of all worries was this: Lima was thirsty. The bodiless head was approaching.
Tac pum.

There was a race to see how much we could collect in our buckets, save up, for all the times the spigot ran dry. Next door in Sandra’s all-American house, ready as her father was for nuclear missiles or an atomic holocaust—his basement shelves creaking with pig—they were having trouble finding enough water to brush their teeth. In our house, things were worse. We had to compete with the people upstairs.

One Saturday, Vicki turned on the faucet, thrust a finger under the trickle, and found herself tingling with electricity, her crisp hair standing on end. Our water had become charged, galvanic, but only at certain times of the day; it would begin about noon, when Nora prepared the main meal of the day, and it would last through evening.

Papi puzzled over it for days, banging tubes, twirling nozzles, poking rubber cables deep into the metal. Eventually he pulled out the reason why. Someone was dangling a live wire into our tubes from the upstairs bathroom, and the someone was doing it whenever we needed water the most.

Our father stomped to our neighbor’s door, with the evidence in his hand. They denied everything. But the next day, our water was back to a magnificent trickle. We took shallow baths in it, luxuriating in the warmth.