American Chica

by Marie Arana

  “Being a yanqui does not make you better,” Tía Chaba sniffed, once she’d gotten over the scare of losing me to the streets. “The norteamericanos have nothing over us.”

  “A motley race,” my abuelito added in English, dipping his toast into his tea.

  The days that followed were punctuated by remonstrance and retaliation. I stomped upstairs, took out my grandmother’s pinking shears, and lopped off one side of my hair. There was a flurry of dismay when I leaned over the banister and presented my edited conk, but nothing like the breast-beating admissions and apologies I thought I so richly deserved.

  “You know, her mother has never taken her to church, never taught her her prayers,” I heard my grandmother say to my aunts one morning, as I lurked unseen on the stairwell. “Can you believe it? What kind of mother is that?”

  I couldn’t hear my aunts’ responses, but my grandmother’s voice was high-pitched, loud, and I could hear every word. “The woman is so willful. Doesn’t she realize she has an obligation to teach a child? If children don’t have proper religious educations, how can they hope to be anything other than monkeys in Manú? Have you taken a good look at that girl? Is that how gringo children are? Wild?”

  That afternoon, my Tía Eloísa draped a black lace mantilla over my shorn hair and drew me into the household chapel on the second floor. It was a tiny niche with a carved altar, a towering plaster image of the Virgin Mary, and a small crucifix. A wood Jesus draped languidly from the cross. Two beautifully carved candles with miniature illustrations of flying angels stood unlit on each side. “I want you to repeat after me,” my tía said in a husky whisper, pulling me down on my knees. “Ave Maria, madre de Dios—”

  “Mother of God?” I said. “Where is she? I didn’t know God had a mother,” I said.

  “She was at the foot of the cross when Jesus Christ died,” my aunt went on, “kneeling before him, the way we’re kneeling right now. Let’s pray to her, Marisi. She listens to children. She’ll listen to you.”

  “Did she listen to him?” I pointed up at the dead Christ.

  “Of course she did, Marisita.”

  “Well, it didn’t do him any good.” My aunt’s little eyes widened, and then her neck swiveled so that her powdered face turned up and shone white with light from the ceiling. She crossed herself, stood, and left.

  I decided to stage a hunger strike. Folding my arms across my chest at the lunch table, I refused every dish that was set before me: papa a la huancaína, sopa con albahaca y fideos, arroz verde con pollo, delicia de chirimoya. All my favorites trooped by and lined up one by one, untouched. The grown-ups carried on, nodding and munching and savoring the delights with little sighs of pleasure.

  “You’re not hungry, Marisi?” my grandmother said, dispatching a glimmering morsel of sweet chirimoya. “How very unusual.”

  “Why don’t you go off and play, Marisita?” said Tío Víctor, just back from Peru’s interior and unaware of my state of siege.

  “She will sit there until she finishes,” said Tía Chaba, and flashed me a gimlet eye.

  The conversation droned on, analyzing everything from El Presidente’s war against the communists to the Chinese chifa with the best wontons. One by one, the adults dabbed their chins with ecru linen, excused themselves, and trotted off to siesta. Finally, there were only three of us around the table—Abuelito, Chaba, and I. Camped before me: a regiment of porcelain.

  “Malraux’s Espoir is far superior to anything Camus has written,” Tía Chaba was saying, citing endless twists and turns that congealed in the air and floated past in dry wisps. “More alive, more potent, more true, don’t you think?” She was trying to engage my grandfather, who was chewing thoughtfully and studying his plate.

  “We don’t disagree, mi hija,” he replied finally, “but I’m clearly willing to give L’Homme révolté more credit than you are.” He smoothed the damask under his hands.

  He looked from her to me to her again. “It seems you’ve lost your audience, Chabela. No use wasting yourself, no?” He smiled sweetly. And then, with all aplomb, he rose, tipped his head toward me—“Con tu permiso, Marisi”—and tottered off upstairs.

  “Eat,” Chaba said, and was gone.

  What followed then can only be described as a pitched battle, complete with scrawking chair legs and heavy grunting. I left the room. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. Tío Víctor called me to come sit in his lap. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. I screeched, threw myself on the floor, and threatened to call the police. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. I ran to the kitchen and pleaded with the maids. Chaba ran to her room, brought out her belts, wrestled me back in my chair, and strapped me in. When the family gathered for high tea, I was still there, fast asleep, my face in the rice.

  “What on earth is going on?” my grandmother thundered.

  “She was playing passenger on a plane,” Chaba crowed, taking the stairs like a dancer. Abuelita shook her head, called out to the maid who hovered at the kitchen door with her apron twisted into her fingers, and told her to set me free.

  In truth, Tía Chaba was the most exciting woman I knew: big-eyed, boisterous, smart. She could see the future and do magic. “I’m a wicked witch!” she’d screech. “Don’t you cross me!” and then she’d tickle me with her long, red fingernails until I could hardly breathe. Being the youngest in her family, and the most resilient, she had been assigned as the baby-sitter. It was my parents who had gone off and abandoned me. My predicament was not her fault. But because she had consented to be my jailer, she would be made to pay.

  I took to her things with the scissors. I locked myself up in her room. I called her a bruja when she ran after me with a hot curling iron, trying to impose order on my hair. I gasped and clutched at my chest when she walked through the door. There were flank attacks and aerial salvos, hit-and-run and pincers. There were strafes and blasts and fusillades, with battle raids and booty.

  Finally one morning, as I was watching my Tía Eloísa carefully wrap her long-nailed toes in cellophane before she slipped on her sheer silk stockings, she turned and asked me, “Why are you so cruel to your Tía Chaba, Marisi?” and it dawned on me that I’d lost the war.

  I let them take me off and baptize me after that, realizing that somewhere along the way I’d been labeled a problem, worse than the bad-mannered pagan my father had left behind. The one thing I did not want was a brisk court-martial on his return.

  They taught me my prayers, trussed me up in a white wool suit tailored by my grandmother’s own hand, took me to La Parroquia—a stone leviathan in the heart of Miraflores—splashed me with holy water, and pledged me to Jesus and Rome.

  When my father and mother came to the gate to collect me days later, I was clean, beatific, and curly. The essence of tidy prig.

  7

  —

  EARTH

  Pachamama

  THERE IS A story the guides in Machu Picchu like to tell, about a carefree traveler who took a stone from the trail to Inti Punku—the sacred gate of the sun—and carried it back to her home in Bremen. Or Salt Lake City or Lyon; the homeland varies, depending on who is listening. In any case, the woman descended the Andes, returned to her comfortable home on zo-und-zo-platz, parked the stone on her coffee table, and watched her life turn into a nightmare.

  Her husband died in freak circumstances: He was sweeping their second-floor balcony, when suddenly the whole structure—German-made! perfectly constructed!—collapsed into the street, crushing his skull. Her daughter was bitten in the face by a mangy dog, behind their house, in the alley. The police claimed that they hadn’t seen an attack that ferocious in years. When the woman began to get dizzy spells, falling to her knees in her own living room, her head brought eye-level with the stone, she understood why a curse had befallen her.

  She wrapped up the little gray rock, addressed it to the tour office in Cusco, and mailed it to the Peruvian guide who had taken her up the trail to Machu Picchu. For the week he had it, the
stone played havoc with the guide’s life: His wife ran off with another man. His eyelids began to quiver. He couldn’t sleep. When he placed the stone on someone else’s desk one night, that person went home sick the next day.

  The guide took the rock back up to Machu Picchu and handed it to a shaman, explaining the damage the thing had done, warning the wise man to be careful since the curse might fall on him now. The shaman turned the granite in his palm and nodded. He knew what the problem was. It was an ariska salkkarumi, he said, an unhealed stone from a bad man’s grave. It had absorbed too much evil. It simply needed to be prayed over, blessed, and returned to the earth, where it would be purified in the bosom of Pachamama. And so it was. The rock was reunited with its mother, the shaman lived on to do good works, the guide flourished, and the German tourist learned something about the real order of things.

  The crushing power of Pachamama. Earth mother. I had heard about her from Antonio: She was the substance from which all things were made, from which all life arose, to which all would return. He’d hold rocks aloft in the garden. “You see this one, Marisi?” he’d say. Then he’d talk about its relative density, color, weight. He’d tell me what was in it: life’s dust, desiccated flowers, excrement, crushed butterflies, stillborn babies, winged monsters, flesh of snakes, bones of men, fallen monuments, fused together in Pachamama, waiting for regeneration, whenever the apus willed. Stones had energy and we, as earth’s creatures, could call forth their ancient, cumulative power, if we were wise enough.

  I figured my father was on excellent terms with Pachamama. How could he not be—a man who moved the earth, raised factories, turned cane into so many permutations? He was surely smiled on by the apus. Engineers as a whole were beloved in Peru. Doctor Arana, the workers and townspeople called him, El Doctor Ingeniero, with a reverence they reserved for priests. A status was accorded engineers that far outweighed any status accorded physicians or lawyers. Engineers pushed aside Pachamama, raised things up from her, the way the Inca had raised temples at Sacsayhuaman. They were rock movers, stone fitters, empire builders, with rare knowledge and intricate minds. They were respected, admired in Peru—so much so that the Republic had made presidents of them.

  In any case, when I, the engineer’s daughter, returned from the balconies of Lima to the well-turned soil of our garden, I was glad to be coming home. On the long trip from the capital to Cartavio, we seemed to be shucking modernity. The massive concrete and wood facades were replaced by single-family dwellings, the city was replaced by smaller and smaller towns, until there was hardly a town at all, just the spine of Pachamama. Then Cartavio sprang toward us, in all its full flower.

  Antonio seemed happy to see me. I was a Christian now and told him so, brandishing the prayer cards that my grandmother had given me, with the Virgin and Santa Rosa in richly draped gowns. He nodded happily and told me that he, too, prayed to the Virgin. “She’s part of it, yes. A big part of it.” He took out his own prayer card: It was a greasy slip of paper, worn and yellowed by use, with a picture of Jesus’ face, eyes cast heavenward and red heart in evidence, rays blazing from his chest. “Everything fits together, Marisi,” he said, as I followed him back to the garden. “Because everything springs from the stuff beneath our feet, these rocks. The Virgin and the Christ are from Pachamama just as you and I are from Pachamama, just as that tree over there is, and that smokestack above the tree is. They all have a place on this earth.” He held out a handful of dirt, and grinned.

  I had much more to learn from Antonio, and I turned to those lessons eagerly. For every recitation I gave him about Abuelita’s house and the wondrous events that had transpired in it, I was traded a lecture about centers of energy. Apart from my qosqo, the most powerful seat of my soul, there were the chaki in my feet, the sonqo in my heart, and the nosko just at the point where my forehead meets my hair. If I could concentrate all my being into these sites, Antonio said, I could use them to fend off evil or to sense things a human couldn’t ordinarily sense. I might conjure a message from Pachamama herself, rising up through the bowels of the earth, passing up my chaki to my qosqo to my sonqo to my nosko, at which point a flash of comprehension would tell me what I needed to know. “Someday, when all the people of this world gain wisdom,” Antonio told me, “the Pachakutekk will come.”

  “The Pachakutekk?” I asked him.

  “Yes, Marisi, that is when the world will turn. If we are good enough, kind enough, the world will have the right sort of Pachakutekk. Evil will fly to the stars and we will live on Pachamama in peace.” Until that point, Antonio added, the earth would rumble and turn, but not in a happy way.

  The earth rumbled and turned not long after, and, as he had said, not in a happy way. I was sitting at the piano with my mother one evening, when she announced quite suddenly that she wanted to send Antonio away.

  “He has a good head, that boy,” she said. “I want to get him out of this nowhere place. Give him some mundo. Send him to school.”

  My heart plunged. Send Antonio to school? Away from Cartavio? What would I do without him to talk to about brujas and Pachamama and the power of my qosqo? I felt a wave of black light advance toward me, recede, then advance again with a terrible energy.

  I put my feet squarely on the floor and concentrated every cell of me. Come into me now, Pachamama, help me. Up the chaki to the qosqo to the sonqo to the nosko. Suddenly the front door whirled open and my father stood there, framed in the doorway as the trees swayed behind him in the dark.

  “We’re leaving Cartavio,” he thundered. “Tomorrow we pack.”

  So it was I who left Antonio, not the other way around. It was a strange kind of Pachakutekk, but the world was definitely turning. W. R. Grace had decided to send my father to more ambitious climes: Paramonga, where the Americans were not only spinning out sugar and paper, they were racing into the plastics age.

  Flavio, Claudia, and Antonio busily helped us pack. There was hardly time to say sad good-byes, for my father’s replacement was on his way to take over the house. On the morning that we boarded Don Pepe’s Chevrolet to leave, I found Antonio squatting by the front gate, waiting to see me. He was wearing a clean white shirt, and his straight, black hair was brushed back against his head. When he stood, I shot into his arms. He pressed me to him and then drew away, handed me a round, black pebble, and said he would never forget the things I had taught him. “Take this bit of earth, this little piece of Pachamama,” he said. “Send your worries into it. And when you speak, gordita, I promise it will speak to me.” I turned it in my hand, its shape as sleek and cunning as the blue telephone my father had tricked me with in Lima. “Yes,” I said. Sí.

  THE ROAD FROM Cartavio to Paramonga led through Chan Chan, the thousand-year-old metropolis of the Chimu kings, a labyrinthine mud remnant of an empire that had once stretched between the Andes and the sea, along seven hundred miles of Peruvian coast. The Chimu were a powerful, rigidly class-conscious people who cherished their engineers, abused their peons, butchered their thieves, fashioned canals, and loved jewelry. When the Inca armies swept into Chan Chan in 1470 and carried off its bespangled king, Minchancaman, the Inca inherited a vast repository of Chimu knowledge, from complex hydraulics to the forging of gold. But the Incas would not remain victors for long. When the Spanish conquest of Peru began in earnest half a century later, the mighty Incas were reduced to servants, and the mighty city of Chan Chan was abandoned to the desert wind. Now, from the roads, it was barely discernible, a long hump in the yellow sand.

  We drove past the iron-girded mansions of the city of Trujillo, with their elaborate white portales and carved mahogany balconies. It was an ancient city, founded in 1534 by the pig-farmer conquistador Francisco Pizarro to honor the Trujillo of his birth, a town in Spain’s Extremadura. By the 1800s, when the elegant liberator José de San Martín had made it the capital of the province of La Libertad, many of Peru’s richest families had settled there. It was also there—in the 1930s—that the first stirrings of Peru
vian socialism were felt as Peru’s poor wandered wide-eyed down Trujillo’s avenues, lined with resplendent homes. The revolutionary spirit of Trujillo was now stalking all Peru.

  We continued south on the Pan American Highway, that dust-blown ribbon of asphalt that someday would connect Alaska to Chile and memorialize the trip primitive man had made thirty thousand years before. As we sped south of Trujillo, south of the Moche Valley, south of the Huaca del Sol y de la Luna, the land grew bleak and harsh, a terrain as implausible as it was alluring, as pocked as the face of the moon. The cordillera of the Andes raced by on our left, coal black and sinister. To our right, wind-combed bosoms of sand shivered their way to the sea.

  Drop four people into Peru, the saying goes, in four different places, and though they may touch down a few hundred miles apart, they will think themselves in four corners of the world. The country is not large—never more than five hundred miles across at any point, and twelve hundred miles deep—tucked into the west coast of South America, where the breast of the continent swells. It is only three times larger than California. Yet, for all its compactness, Peru is a model of earthly diversities: icy Andean peaks, dense Amazon jungle, relentlessly chapped deserts, and a coast that glistens under the rough surf of the Pacific.

  The five of us stared out at that coast as it spooled by our windows; we babbled randomly, not searching one another’s eyes. It strikes me only now, as I think back on it, how little I had been told about my family’s trip to the United States. It had happened only a few months before, but after George’s boots and hat had been displayed, his holsters and toy guns—after I’d been handed a candy or two and a recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore—I pursued no further information. I don’t remember asking about my American grandparents, who remained, until the moment I set eyes on them, inexplicable mysteries, cataloged under the wrong name. I cannot say whether or not it was a willful refusal to explore their experiences; perhaps it was because I was resentful, or hopelessly ignorant, or because I was content to be the kind of Peruvian who doesn’t think beyond what she sees, chica mesquina, provincial to the core. Or perhaps it was because I worried that in some way the gearwork had shifted, that my parents had come home new, and that changes were bound to be for the worse. Or perhaps the rest of my family was talking about that faraway fantasyland; I just didn’t want to hear it. All I remember is my father and Georgie chatting aimlessly in the wide front seat next to Don Pepe, while Mother, Vicki, and I chatted aimlessly in the rear—hombres en frente, mujeres atrás, Peruvian style. I don’t recall hearing a word about their travels.