American Chica

by Marie Arana

  A letter to her parents struck a plaintive note. I’m expecting another child, she wrote, and am dreading the humiliations of another public birth in this city. I’m walking the streets like a banshee. All I can think of is you.

  In the spring of 1948, when the answer to that letter came, for the first time in two and a half years my father noticed the postmark. It was not from Seattle. It was from Rawlins, Wyoming. He swallowed hard, said nothing. She opened the envelope, drew out the contents: Two tickets home. Two one-way passages.

  For three months, Mother and Vicki were gone. The first two months were spent awaiting the birth; the third, recovering from its ordeal.

  Mother’s second child entered this world not like a descendant of la Conquista—crown first, courtiers all about—but like a ferret with its teeth in her entrails. It was a difficult birth, breech. In Lima, when Papi received the telegram about his boy, he celebrated many times over, with multiple corks on the fly.

  It would be different if I were with Jorge’s family now, Mother said to her mother one afternoon when the two of them were alone. You can’t imagine how difficult his mother is.

  Yes, dear? her own mother said simply, tugging spectacles down her nose.

  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

  —

  GODS AND SHAMANS

  Dioses y Brujas

  THERE’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 laughe
d.

  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.

  By the time we reached her, she was addressing Billy, who, at eight, was almost as tall as she was. He was sober, grim-mouthed, standing there with his chin thrust out, a pointed promontory in a freckled field.

  “Come, gringo,” she told him, “hold my braids while I see into tomorrow. One in your left hand, papito, one in your right. Good.”

  For the next few moments, Billy looked himself, a simple boy in a noonday game. He took the braids and his face relaxed, so that for a fleeting second he looked like his sweet-eyed mum, the gentle Scots lady who lived next door. Then suddenly it was as if a charge was shooting through him. His back arched. The bruja’s braids undulated like snakes. Carlitos shimmied back into Margarita at the sight of them, but the girl pushed him away and stood erect, her eyes wide, mouth in a tight, thin line. Billy, too, seemed frozen from head to toe; only his arms moved tortuously, in waves that appeared to issue from the witch’s hair. George and I shifted from foot to foot, turning nervously and searching each other’s face to see who would cut and run. But we’d witnessed these things before, and though I could see George’s face furrowed with worry, I could also see determination in his stance. He stood his ground in line. Quickly, I squirmed in behind.

  “Ya, ya,” the bruja said to Billy, her voice high and silky as a little girl’s. “You have the face of a leopard, papo. Eyes of a puma. Heart of a bird. The spotted face will never change. The other two you yourself must change. See like the bird, gringito. Make your heart beat like a puma’s. You must work at this. Work.”

  Billy dropped the braids, let out a grunt, and stumbled back against George. I took the big boy’s wrist and pulled him behind me. He wafted back like a feather.

  George stepped forward and grabbed the woman’s braids. Her eyes focused and then squeezed shut. Her chin was still as granite. George did not move.

  After a while, her lips began to pulse as she sucked on her delicately moored teeth. She ceased to look like a witch, more like a rag doll, her braids jutting comically from behind.

  “Come another day, boy,” she said at last, shaking her head. “I see night, I see stars, I see a path. But nothing more. The spirits in you are sleeping. We must not wake them now.”

  I loved George with every bone in me. He had a noble brow, straight and clean, and hazel eyes that squinted up with a golden glow. His lips were full and rosy, pouting from his face like guavas. He was as agile and impish as I was lumpish and slow. He’d walk on garden walls like a trapeze artist; swing bananas from his pockets as if they were pistols; lob balloons full of water from a second-floor window. All I could do, in my fat little self, was look on his antics and giggle. If I could have had but one wish from the bruja, I would have asked her to make me like him. Seeing him now, disoriented and fortuneless, I could feel my heart slide through my chest.

  “Marisi! Georgie!” I heard a woman’s voice call out from our garden. It was Claudia, the cook; she was circling the house looking for us. Anxiously, I stepped forward and took the heavy hair. The witch’s eyes were mantled with clouds, and I wondered if she could even see me. But she wasted no time in telling me what she saw.

  “A root is stirring under your house,” she whispered. “It is thick and black, with branches that grow while the condor sleeps. You will think the leaves pretty. You will pay it no heed. You will wake every day like the condor and fly. But, chica, someday that vine will reach your window. It will fly inside and grab you by the throat. Prepare yourself.”

  For days after that, the bruja’s words played in my head. What could they mean? A vine? Under my house? The image crept into my dreams. I found myself reaching for my neck in alarm. I imagined black snakes, as fat and tense as a witch’s braid, making their way up our pristine walls in the cover of dark, reappearing each night infinitesimally longer, imperceptibly thicker. Up, with no one believing it but me. Up, with everyone draped on their beds in slumber. Up, and there, before an open window, the sorry wretch of a girl, clenching the covers, gaping at shadows, fighting off sleep to keep the thing back.

  Eventually, I had to tell. My mother seemed to take the news in stride. She listened thoughtfully to what I had to say, opening her eyes wide to ingest every word. None of this is true, she told me quietly, after all of it was out. None of it. No such thing will ever happen to you.

  But that night I heard her pace my parents’ bedroom and shout the whole thing out to m
y father. These people this! she said. Those people that! Those people were demented, sick, obsessed. Wasn’t it enough to pass their brujerías on to one another? Why did they have to go around poisoning her children as well? Mother had sent my big sister’s ama packing some months before when Vicki had recounted some of the stories the young woman had been spinning. Mother reminded my father of that now. “You remember what she was telling Vicki? That spirits of the dead crawl through the earth! That they enter the trunks of trees! That they slither through branches to grab at the living! She was saying it to our little girl!”

  “Ah, bueno,” my father responded, plumping the pillow and readying himself for sleep. “You fired that ama, all right, but you can’t very well fire a street vendor.”

  “We’ll see about that,” my mother said, with a voice that made me shrink from the keyhole and slink to my bed in dismay. Getting rid of the witch wouldn’t help me at all. Not at all. What I needed was someone to get rid of the vine.

  The next morning, I slipped into the garden and scoured the perimeter of the house for anything that looked like a creeper. Pretty or not, I pulled it up, tore it to pieces, and threw it onto a wheelbarrow. George helped me, giving long opinions on whether or not a flower or a weed might pose a danger. Our house stood on concrete stilts, giving us good opportunity to crawl beneath and check the situation thoroughly. Apart from candy wrappers we had put there ourselves, there was nothing suspicious. Certainly nothing headed for my window.