American Chica (36 page)

He sat in his chair, put an elbow on each armrest, and carefully brought the fingertips of both hands together so that they met. He separated and touched them, opening and closing, as if he had something to say. But the dialogue continued its tinny course—
claro que hay una ventaja con caña, pero es difícil que de en la sierra; pues tiene un gran mercado; el asparrago también seria bueno, no?
—with my aunts and uncles working hard to make Abuelito’s advent seem ordinary. Finally, my grandfather’s hands stopped moving, and he looked over them into my mother’s face. The room fell silent.

“Why do you despise me?” he said in a high, squeaky English, with a voice I seldom heard. My abuelita shot a look around the room. She had no idea what he had just said. No one translated.

My mother’s eyes grew wide, and her face, which until that moment had been the picture of boredom, took on the color of a ripe guava. “I don’t …” she sputtered. “But I don’t …”

He lowered his eyes, clutched the sides of his chair, and, with great effort, drew himself to his feet. He turned and shuffled away.

“Pero, hijito!”
Abuelita said, in her jolly tone, although the party had grown stone-cold sober. “You come all the way down here and then you say something in English—something none of us understands—and now you’re going back up again? Stay, Victor! Have a little glass of sherry. Have some cake!”

He raised one hand and fluttered it, keeping his eyes on his shoes.

“Despise him?” my mother said in the car on the way home. “Despise him? How could I possibly despise him? How could anyone on this earth think your father despicable?”

“He’s an old man,” said my father. “Who knows what’s on his mind.”

I asked what
despicable
meant, but I needn’t have. I soon met the word again, in a context that made its meaning abundantly clear.

I was in the house of Albertito Giesecke. I had developed a crush on the boy, had wangled my way into playing chess in his house one winter afternoon, when his mother invited me to tea. The Giesecke name was fairly well known in Lima for Albertito’s grandfather. More than twenty years before, he had flown over Machu Picchu to confirm Hiram Bingham’s “discovery” of that mystical mountain city.

Albertito’s father seemed Peruvian in every respect to me, although I’d been told that the flying grandfather was an American and that he was famous for brave expeditions. Albertito’s father had gone to Papi’s preparatory school, Villa Maria. They had been friends. He indicated where I should sit at the table and then peered at me while he smoothed a napkin over his tie.

“So,” he said, “you’re Jorge’s daughter?”

“Sí, señor,”
I responded, and sank my teeth into an
alfajor,
savoring its sweet caramel center.

“Claro, pues,
you look like an Arana,” he said.

He studied me as his wife asked me about the Roosevelt School, as she chattered on about the
garúa,
about how it was impossible to breathe when fog locked in over the city. I thought perhaps he was admiring my good manners. I had had excellent lessons from Abuelita on how a lady should conduct herself at table, even if I didn’t employ that training all the time. I was being a perfect little
señorita.

Finally,
Señor
Giesecke wiped his thin lips on his napkin, leaned across the table toward me, and spoke in a clipped English. “You know, I’ve always wondered whether your father was related to the
cauchero.”

“The
cauchero?”
I said. “Oh, you mean the Arana who lived in the jungle? The rich one with all the rubber? People are always asking me that. My aunts and uncles say no.”

He laughed merrily and took a long, noisy slurp from his cup. “Of course they would say no,” he said then, clacking the cup back in the saucer. “I would say no myself, even if it were one hundred percent true. He was a nasty man, Julio César Arana. A monster.
Uy-uy-uy! Pedro, José, y Santa María!
He was totally
despicable.”

THAT SAME WINTER,
I began ballet classes. Mother had noticed my tendency to exaggeration—“It’s the soul of an artistic temperament!” she assured my father—and responded accordingly by enrolling me in the British Academy of Dance. As far as she was concerned, there would be no skimping on any form of education. It was a mansion with high ceilings on Calle Esquilache in San Isidro. There, I took to ballet as if I’d been born to dance, stretching out at the barre, growing thin as a whippet, gliding in mirrors, pausing in doorways like a haughty diva with a neck as long as a swan’s. This was a new kind of power, a fine ammunition.

My teacher was a diminutive Englishwoman. On the first day, she waddled into class like an undernourished duck, toes pointing at opposite walls. But once music rippled up and slid into her limbs, she became agile as a nymph: smooth-browed, tulle-winged, all of her grammar in her bones. I ached to be like her, worked hard to imitate the sinews of her tiny body.

I returned from class one day filled with important news. I’d been cast as a bluebell in
The Nutcracker’s
Waltz of the Flowers. I pranced in the door, whipped a heel onto the dining room table, and spun
chainés
through the hall. Mother laughed and clapped her hands. I went to bed more pleased with myself than I’d been in a long time.

But at two o’clock in the morning, Papi swung in through the front door, lit to the gills. Mother had been sitting in the living room waiting for him, her cigarette glowing in the dark. The crescendo of their exchange was what woke me—first came the Valkyrie, then came the
basso.
A two-part invention. With cymbals.

The first dish flew into the floor of the hallway. The second punched a hole in the living room wall. Vicki and I sat up. George came in, rubbing his eyes.

“They’re at it again,” he said.

“I know,” said Vicki. “Don’t worry. Sit here with us. It’ll be over soon.”

We sat there listening, watching the light flicker on the walls. Cars were moving along Avenida Angamos, even at that hour of the night.

“I’m fed up, Jorge! You know what that means?
Fed up!”
and the walls reverberated with another explosion.

“Ay, por Dios!”
croaked the answer, and we heard the shards under his shoes.

But it didn’t stop. The upstairs neighbors clomped down to complain. Mother stormed past into the street, flagged down a
taxi, and directed the driver to my grandparents’ house.
“Espérate,”
she told him as he gawped at her night clothes—wait—and then she stepped out of the cab and climbed onto the ledge under my uncle’s window. “Víc-tor!” she sang into the night.
“Ayúdame.”
Help.

The next thing we knew, Tío Víctor was standing in our bedroom doorway, his silhouette sharp against the blaze of the hallway. He was shaking his head.

The sight of him—black against the fulgor of light—is etched into memory like a chord before the key modulates, like a sign that the tempo must change. There was no fire, no corpse, no wounds, but I knew this time things had gone too far. Until then we children had been spectators at a private drama. We had seen curtains rise, curtains fall, costumes change, and then we had watched our players strut out again, slick back their hair. My uncle’s silhouette changed everything. We were pathetic. We were disgusting. The pretense was pointless now. People knew.

Our parents scrambled to make the unfortunate scene up to us. One languid Sunday afternoon, Papi drove us out the bumpy Carretera Central to Peru’s mecca of roast chicken, a ranch two hours outside Lima, La Granja Azul. With us was our cousin Cito. He was six foot two and buckram straight, a clone of his father, the distinguished and extravagantly mustachioed
comandante
Tío Salvador. We took a table in a tiled courtyard beside a flowering garden, under the crest of a looming mountain.

The chicken arrived in heaping rattan baskets, fragrant and steaming with cumin and achiote, flanked by crisp yucca fries and a piquant sauce of ají. The grown-ups drank Pilsen; the children,
chicha morada.
It was a lotus-eater’s banquet, an orgy of forgetting. Peruvian style.

There was much to enchant us. Family stories wove their sultry magic, curling into our brains like a drug. It seemed that Tío Salvador, who was one of the most skilled sword fighters in all
Peru, had recently challenged someone to a duel and nicked someone with his
florete.
It was in all the newspapers. They were thrilled about this, brought up the story of the monkey and the anteater, and reminisced about Papi’s godfather, an old roué who’d been shot in the back on his way into his mistress’s house.

George and I were captivated by those stories and lingered long after lunch to hear them, but the conversation soon turned to subjects less interesting to us: how four new trucks with the Techo Rex logo were sitting idle in Lima. Bored, we decided to leave the adults to their lamentations. We hadn’t been this close to Pachamama in a long time. We decided to head up the mountain behind us.

We trudged up the gray dirt, staring down at our feet, scouring the trail for evidence of a benevolent
apu.
The mountain was barren, a sullen hump of dust and stone. A futile walk, I thought. No trophies here, no tooth or bone. But I was wrong.

“Look over there!” George sang. “A skull!” He clambered after it, grinding stones as he tore up the steep incline. I swiveled around to see if I could spot a skull of my own. In the distance, I saw a glint of white. I decided to cut my own path after it.

I shinnied up the bald scarp with nothing to hold on to, no frazzled bush, no craggy rock. The ground was dry, and as I ascended, cascades of tiny stones crunched under my shoes and spilled behind. Dust puffed, circled my head, invaded my nostrils. I could taste grit on my tongue.

We didn’t need to go far to find what we were looking for: a finger bone here, a link of spine there. I grabbed a protrusion as I passed, pulled out a jaw, wrenched out its teeth, and stuffed them into the pockets of my new yellow dress. “George! Three teeth!” I boomed.
Dientes!
Then I saw how high I’d come.

George was so far away he seemed to be on another mountain. He was small as a bluebottle, spindly black. He did not hear me call out.

He was almost at the top of his ridge. If I could just scrabble a little higher, I would reach mine first, peer over Olympus to the other side. I grew dizzy with the height, the dust, the sun at the back of my head, but I finally came to within feet of the crest. I turned to check George, could not find him, then scaled ahead, anxious to see.

I mounted the peak and looked over. No more than twenty feet away, rising out of the earth, was a white plaster Virgin, her hands spread out in welcome, a grave at her feet. There was a hole in her chest, and inside that, a heart pulsing blue. I staggered. Black stones shifted under me. One foot slid out. I pulled it back.

I turned to where La Granja Azul lay, as neat and as tidy as the scene in my father’s garage. I could see the garden, I could see tables, but I couldn’t see my parents. I leaned out to find them. Then the world started to spin.

I was falling. Tossed from that summit like a boned cat, I slid, bounced, plummeted, flipped onto my head, and skipped down the slope, skull against skulls, spraying bone into air. Halfway down, I landed on a ledge, flapping my arms helplessly, desperately scanning the garden below. My parents stood by their table, looking up at me, rigid as statues. But my footing was not firm, and, as I reeled again, I saw my mother’s face for a fleeting instant. She turned her back and her gold head whirled from view.

There is little I recall after that. I know that Cito bounded up to lift my body out. I know Georgie screamed that it wasn’t his fault. I know my father sped into Lima, swinging around to look at me again and again with tears sliding out of his eyes. I know my mother was bending over me when the anodyne lifted. “Look what you’ve done, Marisi,” she said. “You’ve gone and ruined your dress.”

I blinked and came to. I was in what looked to be a hospital room, wrapped like a mummy, skin tingling. I reached up to
touch my head. It was clean as a cue ball, a swatch of gauze on top. My mother held up a scrap of yellow dress. It was shredded, brown with blood. “Look what you did,” she said.

“The
apu,”
I said, my tongue thick with narcotic. “And the Virgin Mary.”

She tilted her head and focused her eyes on mine. “What do you mean?”

“George and I were hunting for teeth and bones. That’s why the
apu
got angry. He made me fall.” My legs ached; my head was throbbing.

Mother smiled and dropped the dress on the gurney. “So. Good. The doctor said you might have had a concussion, but I can see you’re all there. If you’re talking about George and bones and
apus,
you’re the child I remember. Your noggin’s working fine.”

She paused, put one hand on my shoulder, and looked into my face earnestly. Even now, almost four decades later, I remember her words. She would repeat them again and again later: “Look, Marisi. That was no ghost. No evil spirit of the mountain. It was God: God did it. And, while we’re on the subject, there’s nothing wrong with your hunting for bones. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t like it one bit. But there’s a difference between my not liking what you do and what you do being wrong. It’s what we creatures do, go digging in the dirt. What we’ve always done. We do it because we’re part of it. You, me, your father, the doctor who put bandages on you, the birds in the trees, this hank of yellow dress. We’ve all come from a mountain, one way or another, and it’s back to a mountain we’ll go.”