American Chica

by Marie Arana

  “The poisons?”

  “The black light. The power of destruction.”

  “How do I cast them out?”

  “First you bring them in. Open your qosqo. Let everything rush in, the bad with the good alike. If you walk through life afraid of the bad, you will walk hunched over, broken, defensive. Stand with your qosqo to the world. Straight. Proud. Open up. Open wide. Face the black light de frente and take it in. And then, when you are filled with the storm of life, let the poison pour away. Away. Away. Into the heart of a stone.”

  “And my other hueco?” I asked him provocatively, knowing that like the witch and the leyendas, that nether region of my self was important and forbidden.

  “There is nothing wrong with it. It is fine. It is good. The body works from there. And it plays. Someday a man will teach you to play that game. But learn this much from me: It is your qosqo from which your life will flow.”

  He dusted off the back of my dress and we walked together into the garden.

  I PRACTICED USING my qosqo after that. I pointed it up at the dark when nightmares startled me out of sleep. I stood at the window and aimed it down into the garden to stop vines from taking root. I scanned trees with it, on the chance that pishtacos were lurking there, waiting to spring.

  Antonio’s lesson worked; I became less worried about the loco and the bruja, and, for the time being at least, all the bad forces in the world seemed manageable, the chaos devoured, the black light spit away.

  Four decades later, as I look back on that seminal lesson, I still wonder what concatenation of history and conscience predisposed me to be sure I was there to learn it. And to be drawn as I was to Antonio. These things cannot be attributed to chance.

  Divine chance, perhaps. As in the story of my friend, Eddie, a “Blackamerican,” as he likes to call himself, who set out a few years ago to find out who his ancestors were. Family lore had it that his great-grandfather had been a slave and had been manumitted in the courthouse of a little town in Virginia. Eddie made his way there cross-country on a motorcycle, filled with a wronged man’s fury, determined to see the proof for himself. What he found took him by surprise. It was true that his great-grandfather had been a slave on a white man’s plantation and that the master had taken the slave down to the courthouse to free him. But the words on the official document changed Eddie’s life forever. There on paper, clear as could be, was evidence that the white man was not only the black slave’s owner, he was his father, as well. The slavemaster had taken his black son down, acknowledged their blood tie, signed the papers, and given him his freedom. When my friend got back on his motorcycle for the ride home, he did it with the eerie understanding that he would never again feel something so simple as pure, racial anger. He was black. But he was also white. He was master; he was slave.

  I am recalling that story now because it has everything to do with links and connections. Just as Eddie understood that he had been called to Virginia to learn an essential lesson about his anger, I was called to Antonio to learn a lesson I absolutely would need to know. It was a question only the leyendas could answer: Where does the evil go?

  6

  —

  POLITICS

  La Politica

  WHERE DO THE poisons go? If it was a question for the spirit, it was one for the real world, too. The rage of the Second World War—the blood lust, the hatred, the killing—stopped, but its black light continued. Like amperage moving along the earth’s surface, it galvanized air, tripped minds with a different fervor. In Peru there was an eerie escalation. The new president, José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, had legalized the long-vilified leftist party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, and a socialist zeal quickened the air. Prices rose. Tempers mounted. The Peruvian military, which the Aranas and Cisneroses had always been wary of—which, from time immemorial, had seen itself as the guardian of prosperity—began clanking its guns.

  By late 1948, Peruvian soldiers were taking to the streets to tamp down the leftist euphoria. It had not been the first time. In an uprising in Trujillo sixteen years before, the APRA had massacred a group of army officers and the military had struck back, arresting or executing anyone they could identify as communist. The liberal tone of Bustamante’s presidency had the army on edge again. Unions were making demands. Inflation was spiraling. Grim-faced men in uniform began to be seen outside the presidential palace, on street corners, chasing “left-wing hooligans” down streets. As Mother returned from the United States with Vicki, George, and her violin in tow, she noted the graffiti on the road from the airport: Hay un bobo en el palacio! the red letters screamed. An idiot has broken into the palace! Who was it? The president himself.

  By October 1948, the military had seen enough. General Manuel Odría stomped into Lima’s Plaza de Armas and announced an end to the socialist foolishness. No one so much as blinked an eye. Coups d’état were not new in Peru. Since the turn of the century, the country had seen more military coups, in fact, than democratic elections. General Odría sent Bustamante packing, moved himself into the presidential palace, and announced that he would give Peru a proper election. But seven years later, when I was standing on an empty crate, declaiming mythology to Antonio, the general was still there. The communists and anarchists had fled to the hills, or out of Peru. Their leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, had taken asylum in the Colombian embassy in Lima, and the general’s soldiers were clomping up and down with submachine guns to make sure that he stayed inside.

  The fever did not abate. The early 1950s were boom years for red dreams: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were weaving guerrilla visions in Latin American jungles, and the Peruvian left was champing at the prospect of overturning a grim and oppressive cycle. There was a long tradition of exploitation in Peru. It had begun under the Inca with the mita, a system in which peasants were made to contribute years of labor to the state. They were told their work would bring glory to the empire of the sun. When the Spaniards conquered Peru, they adopted the same practice, forcing the peasants into their own version of the mita, this time for the glory of the crown. Things had not progressed much in the one hundred twenty years of the Republic. The villagers in the countryside now were being lured to work for new masters on the sugar and cotton plantations; they did not volunteer their most productive years for free, as their ancestors had done before them, but they accepted pittances: a few soles, a thatched roof over their heads, a ration of meat and a little rice. Antonio and his peers were part of that cycle: boys who had grown up watching their fathers rise from their mothers’ beds at midnight and trudge out to a mine or a field or a factory, to push cane through a trapiche until dawn. When their turn came, boys would take up that trek with their fathers, a hard route traced by every generation in the grinding Peruvian wheel of fortune.

  The eloquent Haya de la Torre, born into one of the buenas familias of Trujillo, was convinced he could reverse the treadmill. While George and I were running from house to fence, keeping an eye on the bruja and the loco, Haya de la Torre was doing business out of the Colombian embassy compound, preaching revolution to men like Antonio. He railed against the gradual handover of land to “rapacious” American companies like W. R. Grace—particularly in his home province of La Libertad—the very corner of Peru where my father was raising American smokestacks.

  The sugar and paper haciendas of W. R. Grace were prime targets for the anticapitalist forces of Haya de la Torre’s APRA. The company, which had grown rich in Peru as an exporter of bird dung, was now a major trader between North and South America. It owned Grace Line, the first steamship company to operate between the Americas, which dominated all shipping back and forth over the equator, and Panagra, the premier air carrier of the Americas. The Grace family had gone from guano to paper, from tin to railroads, and from a modest start in a ship chandler’s shop to ownership of an airline and a shipping fleet.

  Grace was like any other major U.S. venture in Peru. In some ways, it brought improvements. It pro
vided steady work in an unstable time. It delivered expertise. It built towns, set up schools, established clinics. But Grace was not in the country to do charity work. It was there to do business. Peruvian hands were cheap and Peruvian resources were plentiful. There was sugar, paper, copper, steel, oil to be had—in quantities unrivaled in other parts of the world. And, without too much fuss, a company—like a military general—could stride into the main square, start up an industry, and put the profits into whatever pockets it chose.

  For Grace, as for any capitalist giant in Peru in the ‘50s, APRA socialists spelled trouble. The Apristas recruited actively among the young in the cities and then spread discontent in the countryside, persuading field-workers and factory laborers of their rights, building the union rolls, spinning visions of a great Utopia. My father’s bosses in New York were well aware of the nervousness the socialists were sowing in the Peruvian hinterland. There was nothing happening in the north of Peru that was not also happening in places like Detroit and Chicago. But in Peru, the stakes were higher, the situation more explosive. The protections of the law were not always guaranteed—who knew if the police would be able to stand up against an angry strike, an anarchist incursion, a massacre, a revolution? And if the law did prevail, it might take a fascist turn, in the direction of a military state.

  The powers that be at W. R. Grace, in their sleek Manhattan offices on Hanover Square, understood as well as any distant colonial power that the way to manage their holdings in Peru was to place bright locals in governing positions. My father was a prime candidate to run their empire and impose a shinier, American version of the mita: He was a U.S.-educated engineer with an American wife and solid Lima connections; a Peruvian with one foot in the old oligarchy and the other in a growing camp of young, future-minded pragmatists who hoped to sweep their country into a bright, new age. The gringo bosses would come and go from New York or, at most, sit for a few months in Lima offices. A few of the younger gringos would come and go from the casa de solteros next door. But when it came to managing day-to-day affairs on the ground where the cane was being cut, the sugar was being processed, the paper was being milled, and the rum was being drawn into vats, it was my father who was in charge.

  The gringos at Grace had another advantage they had not even bargained for: my mother’s little empire at home. If the Peruvian adage is true—that all politics is decided in the kitchen—it was being proven under our own roof in Cartavio. All the intelligence W. R. Grace needed to maintain a grip on its factories was coming from our mayordomo, Flavio. It was Flavio who revealed to my mother how much of a hold the APRA had on the people of Cartavio, and it was she who passed that information up the company ranks.

  Flavio was a formal man, straight-backed, in his late thirties, a flinty indígena who prided himself on knowing how to run a house, serve a meal, please the most discriminating guest. But one morning, when Papi was away in Lima, Mother found him crouched behind the radio in the comedor, trembling in the corner, sweat drenching his face and hair.

  “Flavio! Qué te pasa?”

  “I had to come tell you, señora.” His voice was high and mewling, like a child’s.

  “What?” and she swung open the kitchen door, looking for Claudia. “Claudia? Antonio? Where is everyone?”

  “No one is here, señora. Just me. Claudia is in Chancay with my mother. I told my nephew to stay away as well. The others are in the village.” He whispered the words, knitting his fingers in front of his mouth. She drew close to listen.

  “Why are you there on the floor, Flavio? Why are you so afraid? What’s happened to you?”

  “I don’t want them to see me through the windows, señora. If they find out I’m here …”

  “What are you talking about, hijito? Who are they?”

  “The obreros, señora.” The workers. “And the union people.”

  Flavio spun out the story for my mother, describing the men who had come from Trujillo to meet with the workers while the people in the big houses slept. The hacienda’s obreros were not being paid enough, they’d been told. The norteamericanos were sucking them dry. Rich Peruvians like my father were helping them do it. There was much grumbling—mucha queja—in the air. And danger. Soon there would be a strike.

  “They’ve forbidden you to come to our houses?” my mother said. “Why?”

  “Because the organizers are strong, señora,” Flavio rasped. “They call this a revolution. They say that those who are not one hundred percent on their side are the enemy. I am not one hundred percent, señora. I care about you and the señor. I didn’t want you to wake up this morning to an empty house without an explanation. Especially with the Ingeniero in Lima. But the truth is that they could kill me for this.”

  “Go, Flavio,” Mother said. “You’ve done enough. Don’t put yourself in any more danger. The children and I will be fine.”

  He went, scooting out the back door on all fours, pushing himself through a hole in the garden wall and then running head-down into the cane field behind. But he came back that night and every night after that to feed Mother new information.

  When Papi returned from Lima, Mother told him everything. He knew just what to do.

  “Fiesta,” he said. “Pan y circo.” The people would be made an offering.

  He organized a pachamanca in Cartavio’s main square and invited the entire hacienda—every worker, every vendor, every loco, every wife and child. He ordered up valses criollos, música serrana, selva drums: every kind of dancing from Andean to Amazon. He brought in a feast: goats and ducks and potfuls of savory dishes. And Cartavio rum. Lots of it. As much as a town could guzzle.

  Late one Sunday afternoon, the tables were set up on the square by the central market, the band struck its first chord, and the aroma of roasted flesh began to wind through the streets. At first, the only ones there were the engineers and their wives, sipping, stepping about, glancing nervously over their shoulders. But house by house, the workers and their families began to file out. In their best shirts, with lavender oil matting their hair. “Hola, amigo. Qué tal? Cómo te va?” First a little plateful of cabrito. Then a little taste of the carapulcra. A traguito of rum. Before long the square was full. With sugarfire warming its veins, Cartavio began to dance.

  There were, some ingenieros admitted later, people there they’d never seen before, skulking around the edges like hyenas around a kill. But the music, the food, and the rum were working for W. R. Grace that night. Ay, ay, ay ay! Canta y no llores! Papi was making the rounds, slapping backs with one hand, wielding drinks in the other. Before long, Cartavio was full of belly-bouncing laughter, a roaring, squealing bacchanalia. When Mother looked out into the bobbing mass, she saw Flavio, drunk as a skunk, hopping through the night on one foot.

  For a while labor relations were better. A party glow buzzed over Cartavio like a sputtering neon halo. But it didn’t last long. When the strike did come, it was fast and fierce. Because of Flavio’s intelligence reports, however, the company gringos knew about it and were prepared. They called for the Peruvian government to step in and keep the peace. Cartavio’s Peruvian managers, many of them confirmed anticommunists—some of them sons and daughters of the forty-family oligarchy that ruled Peru—found themselves in the nervous custody of the police and the military. Papi was put under house arrest.

  He wasn’t there for long. The police teniente in charge, Pepe Canales, turned out to be a former student from Papi’s engineering classes at Lima’s police academy. The moment he saw him, he gave him a hearty abrazo. Then, when an army colonel was sent in with troops, he turned out to be a pal from the Club Regatas—a drinking buddy from the monkey-and-anteater days. Papi was told he could do whatever he pleased.

  The head engineers walked into the abandoned factories, started up the machines, and kept the production lines going, doing the labor of a hundred peons.

  But the climate changed when Papi went into Trujillo to report on the strike to the prefect of the province of La Liber
tad. Police teniente Canales paid a visit to my mother. He was trembling, jittery as a macaque as he marched up to us in the garden and left the gate wagging behind. Flavio had already told Mother the most recent news: The morning before, the teniente had risen from his comfortable bed, pulled on his brass-buttoned uniform, had a good breakfast, and headed out for his car. There, he found a slashed tire and a note slipped under his windshield wiper. The note told him to take a good look at the rubber. Unless the policeman left Cartavio, the next slash would be in his throat.

  “Buenas tardes, señora,” he said as he approached us. His hands were jammed deep in his pockets, jangling their contents with the impatience of a crap-game croupier. I could see through the gate to his uniformed men outside.

  “Everything all right?” he said. “How are you and the children?”

  “Fine, Lieutenant,” my mother said dryly. “We’re fine.”

  “Don Jorge is not here, is that right?”

  “No. He’s in Trujillo.”

  “And the servants are holed up in the village, I suppose?”

  “Yes. No one has come,” my mother lied.

  “Ah, ya,” he said, and dropped his eyes to where we sat in front of her, our hands idle in our laps. We stared at his uniform, the shiny medals, the raised lettering on his shirt pocket.

  “And look who’s here!” he said with false jollity, bending down toward George so that we could see beads of perspiration spring onto his brow. “Mi compadre! Mi amigo! Cartavio’s shortest police officer! You want to come with me, Georgie? You want to do the rounds with my men? Ride in my car? It would make your father so proud, no?”