American Chica

by Marie Arana

  George and I had hoped Don Pepe would catch up with our cousin Salvadorcito, a twenty-year-old naval cadet on leave who had captained the truck that carried our things from Cartavio that morning. He was the only son of Tío Salvador, our quixotic uncle, who, a few years earlier, had deposited the anteater and monkey with my father in Lima. Perhaps only to us, Cito seemed more adventurous than his eccentric father. The last we had seen of him, he had looked adventurous indeed—sitting astride Mother’s piano, bouncing down the road with his skinny elbows flapping like a gallinazo’s, one hand pointing to the horizon.

  But Cito was nowhere to be seen on that vacant highway. Our loud game of “I Spy” collapsed into a long, contemplative gaze out the window. Sand. A whorl of dust. A pile of stones. Four poles and a sagging roof of straw. A cross thrust into a mound. Vicki read. Mother slept. Papi yammered about politics with Don Pepe. George looked out at Peru with a twitch tugging his face—one more thing he had brought back from America, apart from his cowboy gear. Six hours later we flew past a field of marigolds. It was as bold a signal of our approach as we could have wished for, but we continued to stare at the orange expanse like astronauts caught in a warp. “Veinte minutos más!” cried our driver, and then, quite suddenly, Paramonga filled our heads with a burst of astringent perfume.

  We passed from flowers into fields of ripe sugarcane, each thick stalk raising a white-plumed banner of welcome. On the side of the road, where the blacktop sliced into the dirt, big-skirted cholas trudged with their children, trailing puffs of yellow dust from their heels and turning to peer at us from fossil-hard faces. A high-walled ancient fortaleza, once home to the Chimu, whirred past us on the left and then we saw the large white board with the crisp green lettering: HACIENDA PARAMONGA.

  It was different—very different—from Cartavio. In Cartavio, Grace had built an elaborate town, with a central plaza that held a mayoral mansion; a local government office; a looming, colonial church; a police headquarters; and the señorita’s school. The workers’ cinder-block housing had been built around that square, like spokes off a giant wheel. To one side of the plaza had been the market, where farmers could sell their meat and produce. The chief engineers’ houses, where we lived, had been a paradise well apart from the hubbub, behind a high wall. In Cartavio, the roads had been improvised, the cane cut away, the dust tamped down, and surfaces slicked with molasses, so that a raw sweetness filled the air.

  In Paramonga, there was no huge plaza. The streets were paved. Down the sinuous, concrete road that led from the highway, we passed the homes of the skilled workers—long cement structures, daubed over with many colors, punctuated by multiple doors. The factories dominated the hacienda, sitting squarely in the middle of it, as if here in Paramonga, Grace was past all pretense of civic-mindedness. This was industry—massive and frontal—positioned in the heart of a community where someone in a less evolved age might imagine a plaza should be. There was a busy market to one side; from its brightly painted stands, jaundiced chickens dangled from hooks, plucked clean, eyes buzzing with flies. A guest house for visiting gringos sat on the other side: It was a tall, Swiss-style chalet with brown wood fretwork and a pointed Tyrolean roof. Behind that was the engineering office, an imposing two-floor tropical command post perched on stilts, wrapped in windows, hung with lattices, and set off by a long staircase that scrolled out importantly, as if it were the approach to a sacred site. There was a melon-colored movie house, a tiny park with six benches, Wong’s corner dry-goods store, and then a hillside of thatch-roof shacks. Behind all of that, in a compound that opened onto the sea, were the chief engineers’ houses: a boulevard of stucco structures, each more opulent than the last. The one on the corner, the one that faced the palm-ringed Club de Bowling, the one with a white arch leaping over the door—the best one—was ours.

  WITHIN A DAY, Cito had commandeered all the furniture into place and was spread-eagled on a club chair poolside, throwing back pisco sours. I could see his pale forehead and lanky figure from my bedroom window. It was the lookout on Cito that gave me an indication of how different a vantage Paramonga would offer me. This was no inward-looking house like the one I had come from; no tall walls shielded us from the boulevard. There was a stern-looking fence between us and the outside world, that was all. I surveyed our dominion from my new post and then turned back to my room. All my belongings were in their place, put away, save one. I took out the black pebble Antonio had given me the morning before, polished it with the hem of my skirt, and placed it carefully on my dresser.

  The following day, George and I took stock of our neighborhood: The soltero house where the bachelors stayed was next door. The Pinedas, a mild-mannered couple with a loco son, lived two houses down—we could see the gigantic boy through their window, being spoon-fed by an Indian girl. There were five boys our age in the neighborhood, all available for afternoon fun. A number of ladies in multilayered, many-colored skirts hawked bread and fruit in the mornings. No vines grew under us. Our house sat squarely on Pachamama, tight against rocks and earth. From the second-floor windows we could monitor the sweet-smelling factory on the other side of the compound walls. Just beyond the tangle of iron, the black smokestacks, and the flat trucks with their mountains of cane, we could see a gargantuan molasses pit: a still, black lake where the fragrant residue of cooked sugar lay, thick as quicksand. But our perch was urbane as well as strategic: If we stood out under our archway, in front of the door that was shaped like an Inca tumi, we could see all the activity at El Club.

  One morning, as we stood there, we saw the birdlike woman who tended the gardens around the club pool come running out to the street where a huachimán stood guard. She was panting, hunching her shoulders like a nervous crow, clutching her big black skirt in her hands. She shouted something to him that we couldn’t hear and pointed a clay-reddened finger back through the club entrance. She seemed to be imploring him to go back through the portal with her.

  We heard later that they had found a dog floating in the pool that morning, its neck twisted clear around as if it were a chicken being readied for dinner. Word raced through the service ranks up and down the boulevard that it was Tommy, the loco boy, who had escaped from his house the night before, attacked a village dog, wrung its neck, and flung it into the Bowling’s placid waters to float there with its eyes popped out like limpid gooseberries. “Oh, that’s so silly,” Mother said, when we told her what we’d heard, but all day long we saw servants gathering on street corners, whispering to one another and casting accusatory glances at the unfortunate boy’s house. Never mind that the door was locked: He had flown out a window. Locos could do that. Never mind that the dog was too heavy to wrestle and throw: The boy had acquired superhuman powers in the light of a full moon. The boulevard’s grapevine was atremble with gossip, and the señoras in fancy houses all hurried out to lend the servants an ear.

  Nothing was ever resolved about that ill-fated dog. Rumors raged through the hacienda for one day and night, and then they evaporated like tiny bubbles, leaving a different sheen in the air. If nothing else, the incident proved we had embarked on new terrain in Paramonga. Cartavio, our old home, had been a place where we only learned about the world when it strode into our garden. In Paramonga, fences were permeable, real life close by. We were part of a thrumming world.

  Although Paramonga offered a new, more-social life than Cartavio’s, I could see that there would be no Antonio in it. The gardens in front and back were tight little clusters of flower beds. There was no earth to turn, no animal pens, no servants’ quarters apart from a single whitewashed apartment out back where, we were told, a surly old cook once had lived. Our amas and cook had been hired for the house by the company, and they came and went from the hillside shacks; I hardly knew their names.

  There were some marked improvements, however. During our first week, Papi brought home a German shepherd and told us it was to make up for the friends we had left behind. We called him Sigurd, like the Nibelung hero of
Mother’s stories, and we thought him by far the best gift we’d ever had.

  He arrived full-grown, in a crate on the back of a mud-caked pickup. It took three men to lift him and carry him into our garden. The crate was smaller than the dog, and he hunched inside, growling through wooden slats, slavering at the hapless indios who struggled under the angry cargo. We stood on the balcony when they released him, and he sprang from the box like a mythical creature, suspended in air for what seemed an eternity before he touched ground and sent his deliverers squealing to the gate. He bounded along the fence for a full hour, barking furiously, spittle flying, until he finally sank to the grass, exhausted, his long pink tongue hanging out in what looked to be a truce.

  When George and I came down to meet him with kitchen scraps, it was as if he knew we belonged to him. He trotted up, nuzzled our legs with his big blond head, licked our damp faces, and ate from our hands. He took his commands in Spanish: Piso, we’d say, and he’d fall to the floor, limp as a rug. Puerta, and he’d shoot to the gate with his eyes on fire. He was gentle with those in our company, fierce with the unintroduced. The cook told us that he had been raised by a German who lived in the far-off hills. The man had been a Nazi, they said—a word we’d heard often in stupefyingly wearisome dinner conversations—and now he’d gone native, living in a shack with a chola, raising dogs to be killers.

  It seemed an unlikely story to me. It was true Sigurd was a colossus, but he was full of love. When he sat on his haunches, I could draw up all seven years of me and meet his snout with my chin. When I put my hand on his shoulders and looked him in the eye, he would cock his head and place a soft paw on my foot. He would allow George to lasso, even mount him, and then he’d turn circles, flashing my brother a tender grin. He was attentive to the point of obsession, following us around from morning until bedtime, pushing his wet nose into our crotches, wagging a long, fringed tail. It wasn’t until later that I realized the dog didn’t exist to entertain us. Sigurd had been my father’s way of shoring up our fence, raising a wall against those nervous times.

  As George and I grew closer, forging a lifelong collusion, Vicki seemed to float off to far corners of consciousness, like Abuelito in his towered world. She was, to us, an adult, even though she was barely eleven. Her hair had gone from gold to black. She had turned into a serious girl with a serious air and a low tolerance for fools. We could make her wince just by giggling. Hearing us approach, she would recede: into the next room, out to the balcony, up to her bedroom. She was happiest when reading or painting, pursuits that busied her days. Now that she no longer had Billy, the sun-faced Scot of Cartavio, the only company she wanted seemed to be Mother’s. We’d find her hunched over a table by the piano, drawing detailed tableaus of all the Olympic gods, as Mother played “Barcarolle” beside her. Or we’d find her out on the porch, belly-down on a lounge chair, twirling her black hair over a Brontë novel, with Mother in the next chair, deep into a teacher’s manual. Vicki was slow to move, quick to bristle. Her features would shrink, her neck grow short when something was said that irritated her. When the Club de Bowling’s señoras addressed her, I could see her neck virtually disappear: Oye, Vicki! Chica! When are you going to lose that baby fat, learn to mambo, get yourself a good-looking novio? Better start soon, hija. You’ll be an old lady quick as you can say Hac Roboso!

  To me they said equally confounding words: Oye, Marisi! You fat-faced little monkey! Climb up on the diving board like you did yesterday, beba. Come on, give us a flying jump. You’re a jungle Arana, no? Like the cauchero—the rubber man—no? Go ask your papi to tell you about him. Then they’d cackle into their drinks.

  I shrugged my shoulders. El Bowling’s señoras were brightly painted, strident, and silly, but they were harmless as toucans; they didn’t bother me at all.

  They bothered Mother. She had announced to the señoras that she would not be available for coffee klatches or chicha lunches. She was not to be disturbed during the day. From early morning to late afternoon she would be teaching her children. We saw the ladies lift their brows when she said that one day, at poolside. As we moved away, they watched us silently, slurping purple chicha from their straws. When I glanced back from the gate, they were already leaning into one another with commentary.

  My mother didn’t seem to care. She hardly socialized anymore, hardly sought adult company, hardly played her violin. From the moment my father headed for the factory’s command post to the hour the cook bustled about preparing dinner, we were the center of her universe. If she was still playing the piano, it was because it allowed her to pull one of us down on the stool beside her to teach us a thing or two. Otherwise there were sums to be done, essays to compose. We wrote in our neatly lined notebooks stamped Calvert School, Baltimore, and imagined cool-eyed gringos in that distant port city parting the blue covers, contemplating our brilliance, pressing their heads in awe.

  Come four o’clock, George and I were released for garden maneuvers with our ragtag neighborhood platoon. Five boys helped us build a tepee one day, although the concept was alien to everyone but George, who had actually seen one in Norteamerica. The rest of us played along, pretending we knew who the Indians were, but understanding that if they were fighting cowboys with blades clenched in their teeth, they were nothing like the mild-eyed Peruvian indígenas we knew. Nothing.

  George stood on the sidelines shouting orders and waving his pistols as the rest of us wielded bamboo poles and sheets, tying the top off with chicken-coop wire. We worked feverishly, glancing down the boulevard from time to time, scaring ourselves with the possibility that the big loco boy might stagger our way any moment and strangle us with his beefy hands. Tommy never did make an appearance that day, except long after nightfall, when I looked out my window and caught a glimpse of his doughy face over a bib, and the girl patiently shoveling food into it.

  One of our neighborhood friends, Carlos Ruiz, was rod-straight, doe-eyed, with a lick of brown hair shooting up from his crown. He was the son of one of the machine specialists and liked to talk about his father’s expertise. According to Carlos, all the factories, all the output of Paramonga, depended on his old man. He was a handsome boy, tidy and scrubbed, with lemon skin and a chiseled nose. “Listo,” he said as he stepped away from the tepee to survey our handiwork. Ready. He tucked his shirt into his shorts and grinned.

  Carlos’s ama peeked through the gate, where she stood with the other muchachas, chewing stalks of warm sugarcane and talking of love. “Carlos,” she pleaded in a voice that issued, high and reedy, from her nose, “no te ensucies!” Don’t get dirty. “Your mother will yell!”

  “Vamos,” said Carlos, ignoring her and nodding toward our lopsided tent. “Let’s go in.”

  “No, no,” said George. “Not like that, tonto. You can’t just go in. This is a club and I’m the president. We have to have rules.” Then he turned on his feet slowly, thinking what those might be.

  “I know,” he said finally. “Rule number one: You have to learn the handshake.” He made it up right there and then—grab the right with the right, slide up, clasp the elbow, swipe arm against arm, one side then the other, intertwine fingers, and shake. We all did it after that. Again and again, messing up hopelessly, laughing, then starting over, until it was neat and rote.

  “Rule number two!” said George. “In order to be accepted into the club, everyone has to go into that tepee with my sister. One at a time. And once you’re inside, you have to kiss her.”

  “Yechh,” said Carlos, his chest caving with the thought. “Will you go first?”

  “Not me!” said George. “I told you, I’m president. I’m already in the club.”

  “Okay. Me!” said Manuel, a buck-toothed boy with droopy eyes.

  “George,” I protested. “I—”

  “And, Marisi, if you don’t like him, you have the power to say no.”

  My protestation hung in the air. The power to say no? To say who gets in? All of a sudden, the kisses seemed trivial, n
o more than sealing wax on a queen’s table.

  I was so quick to trot along behind George, I never stopped to wonder at the fact that I was the only girl there. It is clear to me now, sitting as I am forty years later, looking out over the rooftops of Washington, seeing other people’s daughters scoot by with their skinny little arms around boys, how different I was from my counterparts in the hacienda. The girls of Paramonga—at least the ones of a certain class—were in their houses, in starched dresses, teetering on their mothers’ high heels, kissing their dolls. They were acquiring the manners my abuelita expected of me: learning to contain myself when others were too boisterous, to be pleasantly outgoing when others were too shy. They lived monitored girlhoods, in aesthetically pleasing places, with carefully selected playmates, and someday they would pass into chaperoned young womanhood, during which their virtues would be guarded like family jewels.

  Peruvian girls were not running about, pounding stakes into earth, tying a tepee down. They were securing respectability, studying the polarities between señor and señora, grooming their lives accordingly, making themselves scarce. Now that I recall, the only ones who came around unannounced were daughters of servants, dirty girls who would shuffle up with their eyes cast down, offering themselves wordlessly to our games.