by Marie Arana
“But that’s not a legitimate rat, dear Watson!” the doctor said, taking the scraggly creature between two fingers. “It’s a cuy, don’t you know? A guinea pig. You Peruvians have them for dinner! Haven’t you seen one toasted and floating in a nice peanut sauce? A few hours sooner and you might have made a good criollo meal with this little fellow. As it is, he’ll make a better tidbit for me. What’ll it be, my dear Watsons? Twenty?”
We nodded happily. Twenty centavos. A candy at Wong’s. Birdseye scrabbled noisily in his tin can, pulled out a coin, and slapped it on the table. “There.”
We reached for the money, passed it to each other, and studied it closely before George tucked it into his pants. Birdseye smiled and pulled a foot-long stick of wood from a pile on the table. He was clearly in the middle of building something.
“We’re not just Peruvians,” George said then, standing there with his chin pushed out, two hands thrust in his pockets. “We’re Americans like you.”
“Yes, you are, but better,” Birdseye shot back.
“Better?”
“Well, sure, son. You two are hybrids. You know what that means? Half-breeds, half and half. In scientific terms, you’re better specimens for that.”
“Half and half is better?” I squeaked.
“You bet it is,” said Birdseye. “In the natural world, you bet. Take botany. You want to make a strong plant? Get two weak ones. Cross ‘em. You’ll get a hardier species every time.”
I looked at George quizzically, trying to imagine my brother as a plant. How could he, as big and strong as he was, possibly be any stronger than Mother or Papi? But Birdseye continued, working as he talked, whittling the stick to the size of others that splayed out from the incomprehensible edifice on his table. “And then, of course, Peruvians are half half. Half Spanish, half Indian. A little Chinese. A little Arab. Americans are half this, half that, too. Down, down, down, five million years through the generations. It’s the cross-fertilization that improves things. Haven’t you heard about mules? They’re stronger, can take more weight, do more work. They’re hybrids. Half donkey, half horse. You’re a couple of mules, you two. Stronger than plain old Americans. Stronger than Peruvians. Mixing! See those flowers over there?” He pointed to a pot of roses, standing amid an army of labeled plants. “The hybrids are the proud and straight ones. See what I mean? Like you! Mix it up, mix it up! That’s what makes us more advanced. It’s a scientific fact. And you can tell anyone I said so.”
He went back to his whittling, but when he looked up, he saw us staring at him, still in thrall to his words, little minds reeling at the thought of our superiority. Laughing, he put down his knife. “You’re good listeners, you two,” he said. “Almost as good as Tommy.”
George and I sneaked looks at each other. Tommy?
Birdseye peered at us over his wire-rimmed glasses, and I pointed a tentative finger in the direction of the house across the street. “That Tommy?”
“Yes. That Tommy,” said the old man unequivocally.
“The loco?” sputtered George.
There was a long silence, and then Birdseye took off his glasses and placed them carefully on the table in front of him. “Martha?” he called. “Martha, are you there?”
“Yes, dear.” A white head bobbed up in the greenery behind, and Mrs. Birdseye wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. She drew herself to her feet and set her spade down carefully. “I’m here.” She came toward us, clapping her hands and dusting them off.
“These fine children, Martha, seem to think that Tommy Pineda across the street is a loco.”
“Oh, no, no, little ones.” The sweet lady came at us, bending over so that we could see the gold flecks in her eyes. “Tommy’s not a loco. He’s slow. That’s very different. It’s something that happens to children sometimes, a sickness. He was born that way. He has a little trouble eating and a lot of trouble talking, and maybe he makes loud, funny noises. But, well! He’s a big boy, seventeen, after all. And he brings Dr. Birdseye the most interesting things—beetles and bird feathers. You see, everything in this world has a sound explanation, a good reason. You mustn’t believe everything you hear. He’s not crazy. Oh, no. And I tell you this with all the confidence in the world: He wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“How about a dog?” George asked.
“Nor a dog. No.”
“They found a dog floating in the Bowling’s pool,” George ventured. “There was no blood in him. Wong said he was dry as salt shrimp.”
“It certainly was no fault of Tommy’s,” Mrs. Birdseye said.
“Our ama says he flies through the night looking for love,” I said.
Mrs. Birdseye seemed physically drawn up by that remark, and then, just as suddenly, her shoulders relaxed. “Well, yes, he very well might,” she said. “And wouldn’t you if you were locked up in that big house all day? I don’t know why the Pinedas feel they have to do that to him. It must be a … well, I just know there’s a reason why. But there’s nothing wrong with that, children—flying through the night looking for love. Poor boy, with all his troubles during the day. Can you think of anything more right for him than love? My word! Nothing wrong with that at all.”
That night I took the antique gray teeth from my pockets and lined them up on my dresser, next to my prayer card of the Virgin and my shiny black stone. I had a lot to atone for. I had ransacked a tomb, wished a plague of worms on Señora Ruiz’s brain, mistaken a sick boy for a loco. Surely the jaws of hell would creak open and thresh me under. Surely the apus would call a curse on my head.
I stroked Sigurd’s wheat-colored brow for a while, then sat on my bed and thought about Antonio. We had never spoken much about the Virgin or about the power of the apus, but Antonio had always made a point to teach me about my fundamental link to Pachamama—that I was a product of natural forces, that I was another version of earth, that I could prevail against evil if I would only learn how. Was it really possible to open up your belly and take in the world? The bad with the good? Could I bring it all in—the ghosts, the demons, the dead, the loco, the vine, the bruja—breathe them in, and then let them ride off on a beam of black light, into the heart of my stone?
Could I fix Tommy Pineda? He might not be a loco, but Mrs. Birdseye had conceded that he was very capable of making nocturnal flights through Paramonga. Never mind that he was looking for love; the very thought of that thick-necked boy, drooling and lurching through the night air, was terrifying—proof that there were strange forces at work in the world. But was it possible to bring Tommy in through my qosqo, pluck him clean of any negative force, any tiny germ of malevolent intent against our bright-eyed Sigurd, and shoot his sickness deep into my pebble?
I pulled up my shirt, bared my qosqo, and turned so that it faced the stone, unobstructed. Assured that my alignment was perfect, I closed my eyes and thought of that poor benighted boy down the road.
Open up, I willed myself. Bring on the storm. Let the bruja’s vine in. Let me be as still as the earth, as steady as Pachamama.
Nothing. There was a gentle rustle of wind through the casuarinas on the boulevard. Not a voice was heard in the house, no sound save the clickety-clack of knives and forks in the kitchen. I couldn’t tell whether my parents’ dinner was just beginning or ending. There was an eerie quiet through my window, as if the Bowling across the way had been emptied of all revelers, as if the casa de solteros had bolted its doors. Sigurd let out a long sigh, smacked his chops, and shifted his body. He stretched his legs, pointed his toes. Eventually, his eyelids fluttered shut. I sat like that for what seemed a long time, barely breathing, holding on to my shirt, pushing my belly toward the stone, trying to rid my mind of everything but the image of Tommy Pineda’s monumental head.
I have no recollection of how much time passed before I felt the bed jiggle under me. My eyes flew open. The room was trembling. The teeth, the Virgin, and the stone were dancing on the dresser, ticking across the top like a company of infantrymen. Sigurd s
at up wide-eyed, then yelped and fled, skeetering down the corridor and banging down the stairs.
The furniture was hopping across the room now, and I could hear glass crash to the floor. My father’s voice boomed through the house. “Terremoto!” he yelled. Earthquake.
Mother flew in the door and grabbed me, her robe flapping like wings on a bat. Then the night went black. Somehow, we made it down the stairs and under the front arch, where my father stood, legs apart, his hands gripping the plaster above him. Vicki and George huddled beneath. We stayed there until the shaking stopped. Out in the garden, the servants were sprawled facedown in the grass.
“Ya,” said Papi finally. “Ya terminó.” It was over.
We could hear running from the boulevard out into the street. “Anyone hurt?” yelled a soltero, hiking himself over the wall and squinting through the dark.
I started to cry. “It was me!” I squawked to George. “I did it! I made it shake. It was all my fault!”
He looked at me as if I had lost my mind.
No one else listened to me. Neighbors rushed down the boulevard, assessing the damage. Papi went to the factory. A soltero checked on my mother. The servants lit candles and clasped us to their chests.
When I was carried back to my room, my things were as I had left them. Except that the little black stone was on the floor.
There is a part of me that still believes I caused that earthquake. Maybe that is why of all the quakes I lived through in my first six years of life (almost two dozen, according to seismological records, some of them far more violent), this is the only one I can recall. I try to muster a memory of the others—the screeching, the running for clear ground, the tinkle of glass. But all I can summon are the hours between dark and dawn of that one night. After I was deposited on my bed, I sat there stiffly, monitoring my navel, cupping my hand over its little void. A number of adoring faces approached to soothe me, but I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes. The amas brought me linden tea. My mother put a cool rag on my fevered skull. At midnight I fell into a deep sleep. All night and all the next day I remained in bed.
On the second morning, Señor González rode up to tell us that he had found Sigurd in the molasses pit, belly up and floating.
THE EARTH WAS always moving in those days. Pachamama was temperamental, moody, shifting her weight heavily beneath us, tossing from side to side. My mother and father were pricked with that same petulance, contemplative and sullen since our move from Cartavio. Since—for that matter—their return from the United States.
I did not identify these things at the time, of course, but that frame of mind is easy enough to locate and retrieve now that I find it cataloged in the same drawer with a lifetime of other vague dissatisfactions. A tight-lipped foreboding moved through our house and, were it not for earthquakes and molasses-coated carcasses and the providential distraction of childish games and of scrabbling in ancient graves, we might have turned to it, pointed, and remarked.
I cannot tell you what actually happened, what incidents signaled the widening gap between my mother and father. Even now, after much reflection, not one specific event rises to mind. I knew it by the way they moved. Or didn’t. The hand that no longer slipped around her waist. The way he propelled himself away from the dinner table. The tic in her brow when he said he hoped his mother would come visit the children. The flare of his nostrils when she drew old letters from the bed table and left the room. The melancholy way she played Palmgren on the piano. The rush of bubbles when he poured himself another rum and Coke. The click of her shoes coming back from a party alone. The sight of his men carrying him home by the elbows after a night of drinking. The angle of Tía Chaba’s glance when she came for a weekend visit. It was as if all Pachamama’s convulsions had joggled them loose.
Shaky days. The earth beneath us was putting on a show, wriggling our toes. “Por fin!” Tía Chaba told us our Spanish forebears had cried when they set boots on Peru. At last! “Terra firma!” Little did they know we descendants would spend the rest of our days quivering on our legs. “Stand your ground!” Mother taught us the gringos had said at Lexington. It was a phrase that sounded very silly to our ears. “The firm ground of result,” she quoted the sainted Churchill, whose name she had given her son. And George Winston and I fell to giggling.
We knew, if no one else was admitting it, that there was nothing firm about Pachamama. I remember being struck by the way northerners look up at the sky when they’re told disaster is coming, but of course it makes perfect sense: It’s from air and water that their dangers come. In Peru, we look at the ground. We are worried earthlings, fitfully tied, creeping about on volatile real estate. We fret about impetuous floors. We shuffle when we dance. We keep an eye down when we do it. There is no Peruvian exempt from geologic upheaval: not the rich, the poor, the beautiful, the ugly. There is a bond of the abused in us, a certain fatalism that accrues to children who are shaken by the earth.
In those years of tectonic uncertainty, we talked constantly about earthquakes. The rumble of a passing truck would set us to grabbing our chairs, cocking our ears, making ready to scamper away. Some of Paramonga’s residents were so practiced in the subtleties of geologic motion that I could see them from my window—the bread vendor, the street sweeper—staring down at their feet, shouting “Temblores! Temblores!” when the rest of us couldn’t feel a thing. George and I would sidle around the garden, feigning a palsy, screaming that we could feel a terrrrrremoto, and then we’d fall to the ground, laughing maniacally, rubbing our faces in dirt.
Papi motioned us to him one evening when he overheard us talking about such things and told us about a quake that had rocked Lima when he was a young man of twenty. Not with the bebecita tremors of our own experience, but with a jactitation that could rip cities asunder. He had been standing on a high floor in a federal building in downtown Lima, waiting to get his driver’s license. Frustrated and anxious to get back to work or school—for those were hectic days—he stepped from side to side in the long line, eyeing the government goon at the counter, muttering curses under his breath.
All of a sudden, the floor began to undulate. He braced himself against a post and took a good look around him, trying to get a sense of what was going on. Where two walls joined, he saw a corner of the room open, each wall shrugging in an opposite direction, leaving a gap in between. As plaster dust drifted past, he looked outside to a patch of blue sky. Below it, suspended, was the church of San Francisco with its bells swinging frantically in its towers. He said that the walls of the building stood cleaved like that for what seemed an eternity to him, the din of bells in his ears and the image of the church etched hotly on his brain. Then the walls closed shut just as neatly as they had opened, and the building seemed none the worse for wear. The bureaucrats slid the government desks back to where they had been, they straightened the president’s portrait on the wall, and before he knew it some hatchet-faced functionary was pointing at him and yelling, “Next!”
In the world of the Inca there are tidy explanations for these things, as tidy as the lectures my cravated grandfather would issue on torque, or as tidy as the earthquake quotient my father would diligently build into his structures no matter where they happened to be. According to the Inca, the earth is made up of energy bubbles—one apu’s domain is here, another’s there—and it is only natural that the earth should react violently when energy bubbles cross. Two force fields meet and you have confrontation. Simple as that. But the ability to take that phenomenon to a higher level—to go from shaking to awareness, from confrontation to enlightenment—is a goal we terrestrials seldom reach.
The crossing of my parents’ force fields was now entering a volatile stage. They had been drawn together at first by a fierce and inexplicable magnetism; they had fallen in love, married, had children; and now they were rolling back in their separate energy bubbles, startled by the ways they had changed. My mother was no longer free, untrammeled, able to pull anchor, move off, and rei
nvent herself, as was her American way. She was in a small place, with small-minded people and unfamiliar traditions, who found her independence bizarre. As for my father, he was in limbo—living in the country of his ancestors, speaking his language with his children, continuing to act as if he were fully Peruvian, but his house was an alien territory.
Not only was each of them now breathing a different, altered air, they were also uncomfortable among people they’d once thought they knew. How could my father confide in his Peruvian compadres? They couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to be the husband of a gringa, to not be puffed up and coddled the way a Latina learns to baby a man. My mother’s American friends could hardly suggest how incomprehensible they thought Peruvians were. Nor, for that matter, did she feel she could confide in them about how increasingly difficult she was finding Peru. There were stop-and-start conversations. Awkward moments. A feeling of irreconcilability filled the air.
Perhaps that is why the subject of another mixed marriage began to interest our household. The romance between Ralph Cunningham and Carmen, the laundress’s daughter, became the topic of intense conversation between my mother and father. It, too, was a flash fire between two opposite fields of energy. My parents found they could talk about Ralph and Carmen and in the process say a great deal about their own feelings. They could do it without being accusatory or hurtful. It was something akin to the manner in which timorous Chinese women once talked to their doctors: by pointing to taboo body parts on ivory dolls and saying where the poor things hurt. My parents would talk about the Cunninghams in endless and heated exchanges. We knew because we listened at the doors.
Ralph Cunningham, it seems, was an Englishman from Dover, a soltero whose solid frame, thick eyeglasses, and stubborn ways belied a hunger in his heart. He had come to the hacienda as a large mule comes to water, in the simple trajectory of a man coming to work. He did not realize he was looking for love.
But love found him. In the form of Carmen, a tiny, brash woman standing in the solteros’ doorway with black hair down her back and one hip dangling midair like an itchy question mark.
