by Marie Arana
Her mother was Mrs. Gilfillen’s laundress, a hardworking indígena from one of the villages that dotted the nearby wilderness. Even when engineer Gilfillen had been alive, his wife had taken an interest in her employee, as loyal and pleasant a human being as the Scotswoman had ever known. But when Mr. Gilfillen died, his widow took that interest a good notch higher, investing a missionary’s zeal in the welfare of the laundress and bringing her daughter into her home to teach her the manners of an Edinburgh miss.
Carmen learned to speak, read, and write good English. She learned how to set a proper table, serve a square city meal, hold forth in polite conversation, and cite a line or two of Robert Louis Stevenson as ably as any silk-gloved debutante. In the mornings, the young girl would leave her mother in the back with her washboard and come in the house to sit at Mrs. Gilfillen’s table. She started at twelve and was schooled till sixteen. But her hips filled out, and her walk took on a market-day waggle. When she learned to squeeze her breasts up between her elbows—a lesson Mrs. Gilfillen did not teach her—and when she colored in her mouth, she began turning heads. That was when the señoras started to squawk, and that was when Carmen found herself spinning through our airtight hacienda toward the door of the solteros.
At first it was a jolly Dutchman who took the luscious bait, flashing his blues in her direction with an irresistible wink. One after another, they all began to play, batting her around the casa de solteros like cats with a soft new toy. Mrs. Gilfillen never knew about Carmen’s visits to the solteros, or, perhaps, being a perfectly proper Edinburgh lady, she chose not to know. But when walnut-skinned Carmen landed—full-mouthed and ripe—on a chair beside Ralph one night, he blinked and gawked and asked her to marry him.
The news shook the hacienda when Mrs. Gilfillen announced it. “I am so ple-e-eased,” she sang to the ladies at the club, “that Carmen has accepted Ralph Cunningham’s proposal. What a lovely couple they will make.” Lovely couple? The wives looked around at one another. A poker-stiff Brit from a cottage in Dover and the hot-bottomed spawn of the splay-footed washerwoman? As opposite energy bubbles as ever there were. Yet, for all the malicious prattle, no one could deny there was electricity there. But a biracial marriage was a current no one wanted to touch.
Pueblo chico, infierno grande, the old adage has it. Small town, big hell. When Ralph Cunningham announced the happy day, the Club de Bowling women stared at the walls. The solteros got out the good gin and begged him to reconsider. When he asked Papi to be his best man, Papi gave a long lecture on como se hace, the things you can and cannot do in Peru. When vows were exchanged in church, a crowd of revelers was there only because the good Scottish widow had insisted on it. And when the new Mrs. Cunningham arrived at the club in her citrus-green sundress, ready for chicha and gossip, she found herself at an empty table, watching the smokestack pump black into the sky.
The como se hace of the Cunningham situation was the theme on which my parents’ bedroom conversations focused. You can’t turn your back on a lifetime, they agreed—and much to our surprise, since even at our tender ages we knew it was exactly what they’d done. You won’t fool anyone; blood will tell. Did those two lovebirds really know what they were getting into? Why didn’t Ralph save himself a lot of heartache, my father lamented, and find himself a nice Englishwoman? And so my mother was made to understand what was in his own heart. Why didn’t Carmen get out of this hellhole, my mother countered, and head for a city where people were more enlightened? And so my father was made to understand how she yearned to be free of small-minded Peru.
The upshot was that my mother quickly befriended Carmen Cunningham. At company parties, at the Bowling, I would stand at my window and watch her make a beeline for the hacienda’s pariah. The two would sit and talk for hours—blond hair grazing black—finding comforts in their otherness. At a distance, the club’s señoras could be seen shaking their heads in bafflement. This one was too extranjera, that one too indígena. What could the two possibly have to say to each other?
The following month, Papi got word he would be transferred to Lima. I took down my relics—my prayer card, my teeth, and my stone—packed them in a box, and, before I knew it, all our possessions were boxed, wrapped, and carried out onto a truck. Lima’s splendors beckoned: our tíos and tías, the urban bustle, the grandness of it all. After many years of home learning with Mother, we were to attend one of Lima’s best private schools.
On the evening before our departure, we were dressed up and taken to a despedida for my father at El Bowling. We were scrubbed and cinched and slicked and told to mind what we said. Vicki pulled her hair into a curly cataract and tucked a book under her arm, just in case. Papi wore a white guayabera, his cheeks flushed with accomplishment. Mother wore a dress of bronze satin, swept up in bright folds at her waist. They moved through the party, cutting their own paths.
A live band was playing música criolla out on the club lawn: “José Antonio” and “La Flor de la Canela.” George and I shot down the walk, between the pool and the tennis courts, and headed for our favorite waiter at the bar. Three knocks on the window and he looked up and gave us the nod. A moment later we were strolling the grounds like grandees, with cold bottles of orange Crush in our fists. We looked for our boys and fed on skewered beef heart: succulent anticuchos on bamboo spears, arrayed on terra-cotta slabs.
“Come on,” said George, finding Carlos Ruiz’s face in the distance. By the pool I caught a glimpse of Mother in animated palaver with Mrs. Cunningham.
We did our boys’ club handshake with Carlos: grab the right with the right, slide up to clasp the elbow, swipe arm against arm, one side then the other, and intertwine fingers and shake. Carlos snuffled loudly and drew a dead lizard from his pocket. It was squashed flat, translucent at the throat, gray with dirt. “I think I have business for Señor Birdseye,” he said, gloating proudly. “Ay, pues! Sí!” we shrieked, and looked around for the old man. “Tell you what,” George said. “Let’s fan out and look for him. Whoever finds him comes back to tell the other two.”
“Right,” I said, and took off for the thatch-roofed dining room.
No sooner did I step into the candlelight than I saw Mrs. Birdseye’s white hair. She turned and met my gaze with a twinkle of recognition and a forefinger in the air. She was standing with someone—I couldn’t see who—and now she reached down, took the man’s hand, swiveled around, and marched toward me with him in her wake.
It was Tommy Pineda. I drew myself up and considered running away. But Mrs. Birdseye’s mouth was moving at me, and as she pushed through the party with Tommy in her grip, she shook a finger at me mischievously.
“There you are! There you are!” she puffed. Behind her, the huge boy was plodding toward me, his heavy feet turned in, his guayabera loose and yellowed. I recall thinking that his head was as squirmy as a rum-drunk turkey’s just before the cook swings it from a pole—upside down—to drown it in its drool.
“Here, here. Look who I have here,” she said. She took a deep breath and looked from me to him.
I had never seen the Pineda boy this close. He was thick and pale, with black hair cropped short and dimples like navels. His forehead was flat as slate, his eyes creased like Wong’s. When he focused on me and grinned, bubbles danced from the corners of his mouth.
“Tommy, this is the little Arana girl I was telling you about. She and her brother live down the street. The ones with the dog that died.” El perro que murió. “You remember, dear?”
“Perrr,” he said, and grunted, his large head bouncing vigorously.
“Muy triste,” she said. So sad.
“Trisss,” he repeated, his spit misting my face and neck.
“I told Tommy what happened to your dog,” said Mrs. Birdseye. “That earthquake—it seems so long ago now—and the terrible way he died. I hope, little one, that when you get where you’re going, your mama lets you have another.” Her curls were shimmering in the candlelight. The giant’s eyes shone black as ston
es. It struck me how impossible it would have been for this docile colossus to kill a dog, suck it dry, float it out in the country-club pool to be screeched at by servants.
He then reached a ham hand in his pocket, pulled out a fist, and held it in front of me, fingers curled tight.
I was fascinated. I stretched one finger out to touch it. He smiled and opened it up like a flower.
I know now that what I saw there meant I was leaving Pachamama. It was a tiny seashell, as pink and as perfect as a freshly cooked shrimp.
“Adiós,” he said, working his mouth with his tongue. “A-Diósss.”
And then he took me by the wrist and turned his gift into my palm.
8
—
SKY
El Mundo Arriba
THE SHELL WAS more than a good-bye gift. It was an omen. Not only would I say good-bye to Paramonga, I would say good-bye to my closest link to Pachamama, to the ground beneath our feet. We skimmed south along the dunes, down the Pan American Highway, eyes riveted on the sea. The Pacific was grizzled and unruly, spitting with indignation. I clutched Tommy’s shell, fiddled with Antonio’s stone, imagined my future as a city girl. But by the time we arrived at Abuelita and Abuelito’s house in Miraflores, eight hours later, it was clear that Lima was not our final destination. Not for a while at least. A telegram sat on their mantel, and when we entered, my grandmother shooed the children into the comedor, seated my mother in the sala, and slipped the bright yellow paper into her hands.
The notice was terse but said all Mother needed to know: Grandma Lo was dying. She wasn’t likely to last through spring. By the time Mother raised her eyes from that missive, she had made a decision: She would travel to her mother’s bedside, take us with her, stay through midsummer if necessary, until Grandma Lo died. The Grace Company routinely granted Papi three months of vacation for every three years of work. That arrangement had allowed my family to go to America three years before, when I had been deposited in Abuelita’s house. My father was due another three months of vacation now, and Mother proposed we spend it in Rawlins, Wyoming. “I’ve lived years with your mother and father,” she said to Papi curtly, “and not always in the most pleasant of circumstances. Now you can make an effort to spend a few months with mine.”
“Wyoming?” Abuelita asked as we kissed her good-bye that evening. She was trussed in a wine-dark suit, her shoes so tight that the skin of her feet plumped over the leather like dough on the rise. “Adónde se van?” rasped my grandfather from the top of the stair, blinking as if he’d just strayed into the light. Where are they going? “Parece que se van a Wyoming, Victor,” my grandmother called up to him—Woy-yo-meen—and she might as well have said “the Yakutskaya tundra,” for all that the name summoned to her mind.
To Abuelita, my mother’s family was a blank no one had bothered to fill. She had not been told—even though my parents had made a trip there a few years before—exactly where my mother’s family lived. Mother and Papi had taken Vicki and George on a long tour through Miami, Chicago, Denver, Wyoming, California, Washington … and the family was somewhere up there. The few facts Abuelita knew had been printed on wedding announcements disseminated eleven years before: Mr. and Mrs. James B. Campbell of Seattle announce the marriage …
“Woy-yo-meen,” my father repeated for his father. “Nos vamos a Wyoming, Papa. I’m leaving the address here on your radio console. We’ll be back by July.”
By sunset of the next day we were over a pearly ocean and I was hoping fervently that we’d see the likes of Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, Pocahontas, George Washington, and Betsy Ross along the way. But the truth of exactly who it was we were going to see would be refined further as we touched down in Miami, boarded a train to Denver, and sped north in a Greyhound bus. Somewhere in that rush of American countryside, I asked Vicki, “Will we see Davy Crockett?”
“No, silly girl. He died at the Alamo.”
“And so where do the Campbells live?” I asked then.
“Not Campbell,” Vicki said matter-of-factly. “Their last name is Clapp. And you’d better not make that mistake in front of them.” She nodded toward our parents across the aisle.
“Oye,” I said, turning to George. “Tell me about Wyoming.”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember much. There’s just Grandpa Doc. He’s huge.”
“A cowboy, no?” I asked, prodding him. “With a gun?”
George squinted at me, his lip in a vigorous tic. He said something back to me, but I was no longer listening. I sat and stared into the whir of green. I’d never seen so many trees before: at least not like this, with wide trunks and round, verdant pompadours. Backs of houses flew by; laundry flapped in gardens. Streets gleamed with shops. There were no ramshackle stands, no hawkers, no one pushing a cart, touting wares. There were front doors, which, like the Birdseyes’, you could walk right up to and knock. There were dogs lazing by. There were stretches of farmland, heaps of rusted-out cars.
Where were the rivers sparkling with gold dust? Where were the gem-lined streets? Where was the money growing on trees? Where were Moby Dick, Sitting Bull, Honest Abe? I was looking at a place unrecognizable from my mother’s historias. The only Americans, as far as I could see, were hurtling by behind glass, over black rubber, down a long asphalt snake.
Our train was a Union Pacific Pullman, a long gray bullet on a string of long gray bullets just like it. It was tidy and comfortable, with ample seats and chummy passengers.
“Where you from, honey?” a towering woman asked me, shoving her head in my face when she heard me chatter in Spanish. I didn’t understand a word of what she said.
Mother reached across the aisle to fend for me. “She was born in South America. This is her first trip to the States.”
“Well, I’ll be,” the woman said, taking me in, head to toe. “She’s a little foreigner.”
“No, ma’am,” Mother said with a tight little smile. “She’s one hundred percent American citizen.”
“Unh-huh,” the woman said, and shambled down the aisle.
“You’re an American,” Mother lectured me gravely, “through and through. Don’t let anyone ever tell you anything different.” She looked through the window and sighed, stroking my hair. In time, she began reciting a verse or two, in her funny macaronic way: “Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who bumpdy-bumpdy-bumpdy said, ‘This is my own my native land!’”
I could see why she loved her native land. It was clean, polished. Even the garbage was tidy. The stops along the way in it were linoleum oases, fitted with candy counters, milk-shake vendors, hot-dog grills, and wide arcades. Tallahassee, Birmingham, Memphis, St. Louis, Topeka, Denver. I wanted to swing through those train stations like a monkey through rain forest, but George held me back, skittering after Mother and Papi, fretting that I’d get us lost or that we’d miss the next train. He was preoccupied and surly since we’d left Paramonga. His words were herky-jerky, full of worry. His face was leaping with tics.
In the St. Louis station, Vicki and I took off in search of a bathroom and came to a stop before two doors marked Ladies. One said Colored. The other said Whites. We puzzled over the words, wondering what they meant, but Mother came by, grabbed our hands, and pulled us through the second door.
“Why does that other one say Colored, Mother?” Vicki asked.
“Because only the colored are supposed to go through it,” she replied.
“Colored?” my sister asked, revealing a rare lack of enlightenment.
“Yes. Haven’t you noticed in the station, darling? Or on the train? The black people?”
“With black hair, you mean?” Vicki said.
“No, dear,” Mother answered on her way into a cubicle, latching the door behind her. “Not black hair. Black skin. You have black hair, but you’re white. Your skin is white. So is mine.”
I listened and looked down at my dark-olive knees dangling over the snowy commode. They were green. They were yellow. They were brown. They w
ere colored. Never in a million years could they be called white. But when Vicki and I emerged from the bathroom and looked around the station, we saw what was meant. There were Americans of a deeper hue. Not ocher like me, not hazelnut like Antonio, but chocolate. We had boarded the trains with them, peered into their faces when they leaned over to chat, bought candy from them at counters. It had not occurred to us that we wouldn’t be allowed to go through the same doors.
I had not yet turned seven, but I knew what race meant. There were Peruvians who measured color with what seemed the precision of laboratory calipers, but I had never suspected that any of it would pose a danger to me. I had balked at not being permitted to invite an india to my birthday; I had pressed my ear against bedroom doors to hear the scandal of the laundress’s daughter, I had been humiliated by a schoolteacher who didn’t think I was sufficiently brown. But race in Peru was a subtler issue than in the United States. Indios came down from the mountains, in from the jungle, went to convent schools, mixed with mestizos, and then their mestizo children mixed with the blancos, mixed with the chinos, mixed with the sambos, moved to the cities, mixed it up more. I cannot claim, at such a young age, to have understood any of it really, but I’d seen Peru in shades, felt it. Here in March of 1956, in the St. Louis train station, however, where black and white was spelled so boldly—where colors were carved on doors with directives—I do believe that for the first time I feared a little for myself.
AFTER FIVE DAYS on the rails, we arrived in Denver and boarded a bus for Rawlins. “We’re almost there,” Papi told us; half a day to go. The view from my window flattened into long stretches of prairie with barbed-wire fences winding like Möbius strips, to the horizon and back again. I tried to count telephone poles, the only promise that life awaited us somewhere up the road, but by the time I got to 157, my eyes surrendered to the landscape itself. There were sprays of tall grass, forlorn and yellow, whipped by a furious wind. Pale tufts of sagebrush and greasewood squatted along the highway. Every once in a long while, I’d see an oil rig, or a cattle shed, or an abandoned shack with its roof blown off and a trail of sun-bleached wood tumbling after. These looked like Peru to me—dunes, ramshackle chacras, dusty remnants of life—and so I found myself dozing off, unmoved by the sights that reeled past. A leaping jackrabbit, the quick duck of a prairie dog, wings aflap in the vaulting blue sky would bring me scrambling back to the window. Until quite suddenly, in the distance, I saw a mountain flex up—white-haired and mighty—under a salmon sun.
