American Chica

by Marie Arana

  At noon, Mother emerged from the house, walked resolutely through the gate, and headed for the witch herself. George and I lurked behind the side walls, peeking through the gate to see our mother’s blond head bob up and down in a rich display of anger. The neighborhood cooks and gardeners shuffled out to listen to the gringa speak Spanish: “No mas brujería, m’entyenday?” she said, wagging a forefinger. Next to her willowy heights, the witch looked small and harmless. “Take your fruit away,” my mother said with finality. “We will not buy from you again.” The witch lowered her head and stared at the ground. Her lower lip hung down and her teeth moved in and out, in and out. But when my mother spun around and marched back to the house, the witch’s eyes clacked around again like dull balls in a pinball arcade. “Mango!” she screeched, finding our faces in the iron gridwork. “Tráeme la boca! Bring me that mouth! Hay mango!”

  “Watch,” I said to George, as we stumbled away. “This will only make it worse.”

  LOOKING BACK, I see that if I had a system of beliefs as a child this was it: the bruja, the loco, the look in any number of amas’ eyes when they spoke about the dead reaching for us with long, green fingers. I do not remember attending church. If priests were disseminating the word of God—and there was every evidence that they were there in Cartavio, scurrying from barrio to barrio in long brown robes—those men were not speaking to us. If Mother was telling us stories of Moses and Jesus—and most assuredly she was, judging by the little booklets that still sit on my shelf, colored in by my childish hand—those men were not speaking to my soul.

  I cannot speak for George, whose spirit has always been greater than mine. I only had to look at him to understand what I should be feeling about a wounded animal, a beggar, a stranger at the gate. I cannot speak for Vicki, whose brain has always been better furnished than mine. I only had to ask her to tell me more about the pishtacos to hear long disquisitions about how it was all poppycock, the unfounded ravings of ignorant minds. But for me, the Indian leyendas were religion. They were my church, my commandments, my faith. I worried them in the way my Lima aunts fingered their rosaries. I knew that my mother disapproved of those tales, and yet I suspected that, as with much she appeared not to know about the Peruvian world around me, this was simply a language she did not understand.

  The bruja’s warning about the vine shot through me with all the urgency of a Virginal sighting at Fatima. There was a fat black root under my house and someday it would wring my throat. The admonition was far more vivid than any litany of saints my Catholic father could recite for me or any hymn about rocks my Protestant mother could sing. It would be a long time before I could laugh at the bruja’s warning. I was convinced I’d find the vine at my window. I was sure I’d look up one night and watch it twitch its little black head and fly in at me. I may have learned to laugh at the bruja’s words but, to this day, I cannot stand to have anything rest on my neck.

  THE ONE WHO taught me how to use Peru’s leyendas was Antonio. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, eighteen years old, one of seven servants in our house. From the moment my conscious world had other people in it, Antonio was the one I wanted to look at, be with, know. He was tall for an indigenous Peruvian, high-browed, straight-necked, with skin the color of cinnamon bark. His forearms and shoulders were hard from years of heavy lifting. Since twelve, he had taken odd jobs in the factory and the hacienda: heaving cane, lifting vats, packing paper, working in the houses of the rich.

  He didn’t have the pocked face of a cane-cutter: no scars digging into his nose and cheeks, no welts inflicted by high cane when a field-worker’s machete slashes into the corte and angry stalks spring back like thorned swords. Antonio’s face was smooth. His eyes, black as a monkey’s. Ringing the straight, flat line of his mouth was a high ridge—almost purple—that I loved to look at, longed to trace with my finger, imagined from the window of my room whenever I heard him talking to our mayordomo, Flavio, or laughing with Claudia, the cook. His mouth was like a wale on ripe fruit.

  But the thing I most loved about Antonio was the way he talked to me—as if I was someone worth talking to—and the way he listened. No matter how busy he was, no matter how many chores my mother gave him, he always had time for me, spinning about when he heard my voice squeak, “Antonio! Espérame! I have something to ask you!”

  I asked him trivialities, concocted to allow me to cast my eyes up at him, stare at the trickle of sweat on his chest, ponder the contours of his face.

  From the day Flavio had brought him to the house and introduced him as his nephew, my mother had singled him out as a bright young man. “That boy is smart,” she would say, looking down at him from my window. “He has a future, and a mind for something better than this garden.” I would watch her scratch her head and think what she might do for him: Teach him how to converse in English, do sums? Read to him from Van Loon’s histories or Plutarch’s Lives, as she did for us? Just as long as he doesn’t go far, I’d pray. As long as he stays right there, by the window.

  I loved him in the extravagant way children love grown-ups of the opposite sex. It is a need born early, our hunger for romance. We love our uncles because they are not our fathers, because they are familiar enough but essentially strangers: free, unpredictable, wild. We love our mother’s friends because they have pretty faces, because their smiles invite us to, because their eyes seek us out whenever we enter a room. I loved Antonio because he was handsome; because he was good; because he appeared to love me back; because, when I considered the way he turned to look at this midge of a human being, when I saw the light in his eyes, when he put down his tools to pay attention, I knew that I was his; and that fact made him fully and incontrovertibly mine.

  It was Antonio, as I say, who taught me most about the leyendas. But it hadn’t started out that way. I had been his teacher first.

  Sometime in my fifth year, during an endless afternoon while Papi was at the factory and Mother helped George and Vicki scribble words into notebooks, I skirted the kitchen and wandered back toward the animal pens. Antonio was there, cleaning out cages and sweeping out dung.

  “Can I watch you, Antonio,” I asked, “while you work?”

  “Sí, sí,” he said, wiping his brow with his sleeve and turning a crate over for me to sit on. “But you must pay the price of admission.” He put a finger to his chin. “Let’s see,” he said. He was sloe-eyed, tousle-haired, and the dirt on his face looked yellow. “I know what you can do, Marisi. Tell me a story.” I frowned, thinking he was making fun of me. But his open-hearted smile told me he was not.

  I sat on the crate, contemplated my white shoes, and tugged my cotton dress over my knees. On that day, I began the ritual that taught me everything. As Antonio heaved cages, pulled weeds, chased a renegade chicken, or wielded a wire broom, I’d repeat Greek myths Mother had told us at bedtime. I began, appropriately enough, with one about gardens: How Hades had burst through the earth into Persephone’s garden, to drag the girl down into hell. I told him about Zeus’s infidelities: How he’d turned a beautiful lover into a cow to avoid his wife’s wrath. Antonio chuckled at that, his white teeth glinting in the sun. “You have chicas, Antonio?” I asked him.

  “Ay, sí,” he said, and shrugged. “But no jealous wife.” He threw back his head and laughed.

  Mother’s face appeared at some point in the course of that afternoon, and I could see by her expression that she liked what I was doing. “Teaching is the highest form of learning,” she told me later. And she told the other servants she approved.

  “Where are you going, Marisi?” Claudia would ask shrilly from her perch in the kitchen as I trudged toward the servants’ quarters out back, a place she knew I was not supposed to go. She was peeling potatoes, and Flavio bustled in and out, carting the day’s dishes from the aparador. “To see Antonio,” I’d say, as if I were the queen and he were my exchequer. “I’m telling historias. It’s storytime.”

  I pretended to be Aesop one day, as Antonio rake
d the beds that lined the garden walk. I told him the one about the bird with the cheese. Then about the lion, the teeth, and the maiden. Last, with all the flourish of a rum-drunk soltero, I spun him the one about the fox and the crane. When I got to the part about the thirsty fox peering down the neck of the crane’s pitcher, unable to reach the drink, Antonio looked up from his knees and shook a muddy finger at me.

  “Oye, chica! That would never happen in Peru,” he said. “A crane in Peru would know better than to do that to the fox. You know what happens to the thirsty, eh? You know about El Aya Uma?” A clod of dirt dropped from his hand.

  I didn’t know many leyendas at that point, but I knew about El Aya Uma. From quick, whispered accounts by my ama, from Vicki’s long-winded disapprovals, from any number of frightened conversations with George. I knew all I needed to know.

  Andean legend has it that if a man is allowed to go to sleep thirsty, come midnight his head will leap off his body and run out the door. Possessed by El Aya Uma, “The Thirsty One,” the head will hop into the night—tac pum, tac pum, tac pum—out to the open road—tac pum—in search of anything to wet its throat. If the head encounters a traveler, it will chase him down, leap on his shoulders, tear off his head, and fix itself onto the bloody stump. Then it will ride to the river, take a long drink, and gallop home before dawn.

  In the morning, the villagers will gather around to cluck at the carnage. There will be little left of the poor traveler who gets in the way of El Aya Uma: a rag of skin in the garden, a severed head on the road. Dregs of a demon thirst.

  Antonio was right. A Peruvian crane would have poured the fox a drink.

  I jumped off the crate and ran to where Antonio knelt in the dirt.

  “Don’t talk about El Aya Uma to me, Antonio,” I said, putting my hands on his shoulders and making him look in my eyes. I loved this man. I couldn’t bear the thought of his being sent away by my mother, like the bruja with her fruit. “If my mother hears you tell stories like that, she’ll come out and tell you to go away. I’ll never see you again.”

  Antonio looked startled.

  “Promise you’ll never do it again,” I pleaded, “and I promise never to tell. Ever.”

  “I promise,” he said. “I promise.”

  But come the next afternoon, I was daring him to tell me more.

  “Listen to this one, Antonio,” I began, dragging my crate close to the garden wall. He was scrubbing it with a long hemp brush.

  “There was this woman, see? A queen. And when her husband went off to war and got killed, she was home with her three daughters. They were beautiful girls—muy bonitas, I’m telling you—big and pink with yellow hair and cheeks as full as papayas. All the men were crazy in love with these girls. And the queen loved them, too. Every night she would tuck them into bed, pat their pretty faces, and tell them historias, just like I do for you, Antonio. Maybe better.”

  “Impossible,” he said, his back still to me.

  “But then one day, an army of men swept into the city—whoosh! And they rode on their horses—cataplún, cataplún—right into the house, right up to the beds of the girls, and pulled ‘em out. Pah, pah, pah! All three. Like that.

  “The soldiers took the big pink girls out on horseback and galloped around until the girls couldn’t breathe anymore. Then they threw them down on the ground like rag dolls—splaaaa—and rode away.”

  Antonio turned and looked at me as he dipped his brush slowly into a bucket of water. “Ay,” he said.

  “Ay, ay, ay!” I barked back. “Because the queen got mad. She got so mad, she got out her chariot. You know what that is, Antonio? It’s a fancy carretón with horses.”

  “Ya, ya,” he said. “Go on.”

  “She put her three dead daughters in the front of her carretón and tied them in with ropes so they wouldn’t fall off. And then she rode out onto the battlefield, shouting.

  “You know what she said? This is the best part. She said, ‘I am the daughter of mighty men!’” I pounded my chest for emphasis. “‘And these are children of a very brave race! We are women! We are warriors! Fierce! And we fight not for kingdoms, or gold, or land. We fight for freedom! You think you can take us from our beds, ride us around, and flop us on the ground, splaaaa? Think again!’” I was standing on my crate now, crowing over the wall.

  Antonio was staring.

  I sat back down.

  “And so?” he said.

  “And so she went home and they never bothered her again, and all the queen’s subjects stood outside the palace and sang ‘Beautiful Dreamer.’”

  He scratched his head. “What home? Queen of what?”

  “Queen of the gringas, Antonio. Her name was Boadicea.”

  “And so she lived happily, et cetera, et cetera?” he said, waving the brush in circles.

  “No, not really.” I screwed up my nose. I knew that if my mother sang “Beautiful Dreamer” at the end of a story it was probably because it ended badly. At least in this case, I had found out the ugly truth. “Not really. After a while, Boadicea lost the war and took some poison and died.”

  Antonio burst into laughter, spraying the air before him. “Your mother told you that? And she doesn’t like you to hear about El Aya Uma?”

  “Actually, she didn’t tell me that last part,” I confessed. “Vicki read it in a book. She told George and me how the historia really ended.”

  “So the men win the war against the queen of the gringas, and the gringos keep the women in their place,” Antonio said.

  “But their gringa mothers protect them,” I said, sticking a righteous finger into the air, feeling every inch a gringa myself.

  “Well, mothers are always protecting their children, Marisita. That happens in Peru, too. Even brujas look out for their daughters.”

  The brujas. The witches. Antonio was in dangerous territory now. I knew the leyenda he meant. It was the one about the hungry crone who sent her daughter out to scoop out a warm heart for lunch. The girl didn’t have to go far. She carved out the neighbor’s and brought it home to her mother, who devoured the beating thing in one swallow. When the priest came to demand why the girl was staggering around town, crazed, the witch only smiled, picked her teeth, and said she had no idea. The child had just been doing her chores. So it was that a bruja could defend a daughter.

  Antonio hadn’t said a word about that leyenda. But he was teaching me its applications. We were communicating in code now.

  “Antonio?”

  “Yaaaah?” He was concentrating on a patch of black mildew.

  “Listen. This is really important. Do you think it would be a good idea to give El Gringo—you know, the blind loco who comes in the afternoons—a Coca-Cola instead of bread? George and I always give him bread, and I’m a little worried about that. I don’t want him to go to sleep thirsty.”

  El Gringo, El Aya Uma, the brujas. I was thinking of little else anymore but forces of evil. Antonio spun around and looked at me with concern.

  Not too long after that, he taught me the biggest lesson of all. Mother had taken over the kitchen one afternoon, tutoring Claudia how to make English marmalade. Flavio had gone marketing. The amas were doing the laundry. My father’s pongo, Juan Diaz, had come to take George to the factory to watch sugarcane push through the trapiche. Vicki was doing some artwork. I darted through the house and headed out back for Antonio.

  I found him behind the animal pens, by the servants’ quarters, where the stairs led up to his room. There was something odd about the way he stood there, face to the wall, motionless, straight-backed, his hands out of view. He had on a dark blue cotton shirt with holes worn through to his skin.

  I tiptoed closer, intrigued by the tableau of man and brick, not wanting to shatter its spell. As I circled around, I looked down at the object of his focus. He was holding himself, and from him, a long stream splattered the wall.

  “You’re peeing,” I squeaked.

  He turned suddenly and burst out laughing. “Sí.�
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  I drew closer to get a good look.

  “You’ve never seen one of these before?” he said, wagging the hose back and forth so that it spat at the air.

  I shook my head no. But it wasn’t true. I had seen George’s once, very quickly, before his ama ran in and covered it up. Nothing stopped me from staring now.

  “Can I touch it?” I said, and stepped forward with one hand out.

  He hesitated, then smiled and shrugged.

  I lay my hand on the soft head and rested it there a moment, before it leapt and I jumped back and giggled, my hands to my face.

  “Bueno,” he said, more soberly now, and tucked himself away.

  “Now, look at me!” I sang, and with three brisk moves, pulled down my underpants, sat down, and yanked up my cotton dress.

  He looked at the place between my legs, then at my face, and smiled.

  “Ya, ya, gordita. Ya.”

  “See it? See my thing?” I asked him, looking down at myself. “It’s a hueco.” A hole.

  “And here is another one,” he said, pointing at my navel.

  “Sí. But it’s not the same. It doesn’t do anything,” I said authoritatively, my legs waving about.

  “No, mamita, that’s not true,” he said. “Put the other one away and I’ll tell you about this one.” I scrambled to my feet and pulled up my drawers.

  “That,” he said, pointing to my midriff, “is the center of your being. The middle of your universe.”

  “Let me see yours,” I said, and he pulled up his shirt and obliged. It was pushed deep, and the folds were brownish black. I raised my hand slowly, putting two fingers to its lip. The skin flinched. Then, I slid my forefinger into the orifice. He yelped and caved in, laughing.

  “What’s inside?” I asked.

  “Mi alma,” he said. My soul.

  He squatted down and looked at me, eye level. “This is your qosqo, Marisi.” His fingers tapped my belly lightly. “Your core. If you learn to see and feel with it, you will know the life force. This is where your power is, your energy. It is the greatest leyenda I can teach you. Learn to open your qosqo and feed on the world around you. Learn to eat the earthquakes. Learn to take in the chaos. Learn to pull it in to your barrigita. Then cast all the poisons out.”