American Chica

by Marie Arana

  Something had wormed deep into Papi, too, but it was Trouble of a different sort. He was home later and later. Out with old school friends. Out with engineers. Out with club mates. Out with old friends he met at the bar. Out.

  There were endless excuses, dragged forth in the wee hours of morning. Words that slithered under doorjambs, over pillows, wedging their way into dreams. In all, there was a sense of intemperate crescendo, as when opera swings into a devil’s dance. The slurred opening, the long growl, the hammering on the door, the plangent trill of my mother’s voice when he staggered in under the influence, “This is what macho means, eh, Jorge?” Is this what Lima men do? They bickered at night, they sneered in the morning, they rolled their eyes heavenward, he lurched from the room. Our air was filled with their static.

  The electricity was so pervasive, it eventually coursed into water as well. We couldn’t get any. Water, the very stuff that the Chimu had handled so deftly, that the Inca had mastered after them—labyrinths of it, pulsing through desert like veins through a warm animal—water had stopped cold in Lima. It trickled reluctantly from faucets, thinning to a sullen drip, stopping altogether by late afternoon. When the family above us cooked or bathed, our supply was paralyzed, and our throats would fill with the stench of ripe commodes.

  It happened in August, when the garúa squatted over the city the way smoke squats on peat fire. A gray haze locked itself in between Cerro San Cristóbal and the Pacific so that we could see nothing beyond our own walkway. So that a priest approaching his church would wonder if it still flew a cross. It was clear the apus were angry, mocking us from their perches. You say you need water, you miserable olla podrida of pig-farm conquistadors and faithless serranos? Here you are. Take it. Fog.

  It seldom rained in Lima. The city hadn’t seen real rainfall for years. Water hung in the air, it pounded the shore, but the kind you could use was rare. Even then, in Lima’s splendid modernity. Even then, with engineers all about. Whatever water there was, we were looking at. It sat in our faces, curled around our hair, wound its tubercular coccus into our lungs. We could not drink it, we could not clean ourselves in it, we could not boil an egg for dinner. But the worst of all worries was this: Lima was thirsty. The bodiless head was approaching. Tac pum.

  There was a race to see how much we could collect in our buckets, save up, for all the times the spigot ran dry. Next door in Sandra’s all-American house, ready as her father was for nuclear missiles or an atomic holocaust—his basement shelves creaking with pig—they were having trouble finding enough water to brush their teeth. In our house, things were worse. We had to compete with the people upstairs.

  One Saturday, Vicki turned on the faucet, thrust a finger under the trickle, and found herself tingling with electricity, her crisp hair standing on end. Our water had become charged, galvanic, but only at certain times of the day; it would begin about noon, when Nora prepared the main meal of the day, and it would last through evening.

  Papi puzzled over it for days, banging tubes, twirling nozzles, poking rubber cables deep into the metal. Eventually he pulled out the reason why. Someone was dangling a live wire into our tubes from the upstairs bathroom, and the someone was doing it whenever we needed water the most.

  Our father stomped to our neighbor’s door, with the evidence in his hand. They denied everything. But the next day, our water was back to a magnificent trickle. We took shallow baths in it, luxuriating in the warmth.

  I went to bed cheered that night, feeling things had taken a turn for the better. My parents had gone to a wedding. Nora had made us flan, kissed with anise and doused in burnt sugar. I slid under my covers and watched Vicki’s eyes tick rhythmically across her book pages, until a sweet sleep swallowed me in.

  I was jolted awake by a loud thwack at the other end of the corridor. I sat up straight. Vicki was fast asleep in her bed. It was dark, but the eerie glow of the moonlit fog spilled its silver on the floor. My father’s voice skipped down the corridor, over the tiles. “Sin zapatos?” he said. “You’re going out like that? Without shoes?”

  “Yes, I am,” came my mother’s reply. “Did you ask my opinion when you decided to get pie-eyed and leave me to wander around that idiotic party like some idiot mujercita … so that I had to get some stranger to take pity on me and bring me home? No. So here’s some news for you, hombre. I can walk the streets of this city whenever I want and however I want to. Barefoot if I feel like it. I am going out.”

  “Go out then! Ciao!” and I could hear my father stumble through the room, grabbing at walls.

  The front door crashed shut. Then there was a silence, pregnant and laden as the eye of a hurricane.

  I slipped out of bed, tiptoed to the door, pulled it open, and leaned into the hall. It was quiet. I squinted into the light. There was a mark on the far wall where my mother had thrown her philosophy book. The volume lay sprawled on the floor. Suddenly my father turned the corner and hung there, one shoulder against the portal. He was looking at me, trying to focus.

  “Myaaah!” he said, and flicked his hand up and down like a puppet with a floppy glove. “Nothing! Nothing! Tsk tsk tsk! Imagínate! She went out sin zapatos!” He pushed himself away, tottered into his bedroom, and flung himself on the bed.

  I ran to the living room window and pressed my face up against the pane, searching the street for my mother. I heard her before I saw her. The slap slap slap of bare feet. There she was, launching into the Lima night, disappearing into the white curse with the tail of her nightgown behind her. Missile afterburn.

  It was the year of the exit, the out-the-door flounce being crucial: the climax, the pageant, the show. Papi was going for freedom. Mother was dodging despair. Our two anchors were dragging free, dancing along an ocean bottom, headed for opposite shores.

  Entrances were more humble. The quiet creak of the door, the shuffling retreat to a back room, the sheepish faces at breakfast. As if nothing had happened. As if the nightmare were over. As if the children didn’t know, hadn’t heard. As if the playwright weren’t a madman with a single formula: Exit stage right, in a rage. Enter stage left, forgetful. Do it again, night after night, though your audience be numb, your critics seething.

  Often, the true acting came between shows. The averted eye. The pretense that all was right in our cloven world. We went about school, Papi went about work, Mother went about the house, and our meals together were the essence of sobriety, the soul of civilization, the model of will.

  How much power can anyone wield in a marriage? How could either of my parents change the other one’s soul? I have pondered those questions all my life, it seems, even as I grew older and my own marriage faltered, fell in on itself, imploded at last with a hole in its heart. In the best of circumstances—in a good match between people of a single culture—merging two lives is an unruly task. It was hard to know whether Mother and Papi were merely struggling with contexts or were a bad match, period. We pondered their incompatibilities, cringed at their scuffles, wondered who would emerge victorious. I knew sooner or later one would prevail. A winner would force the hand. A loser would submit. It was the way of the world. The natural order of things.

  IT WAS AT about this time that I learned something else about power: that try as you might, you didn’t always know what was up for the grabbing, you couldn’t always be sure who your enemies were.

  George and I were in our lot one spring afternoon, whacking baseballs with our bat, when we heard Papi’s voice call for us over the retaining wall. He sounded cheerful, excited even. We ran to see why.

  Next to him in the front of our walkway stood Juan Díaz, my father’s pongo, the messenger boy from Cartavio. His hair was gummed down, his face splayed in a grin, his bicycle propped by his side.

  “Look who rode six hundred kilometers all the way from Cartavio, Georgie!” Papi said with genuine warmth.

  George dashed across the street, cut across the grass, and leapt into the laughing man’s arms. “Juan Díaz!” he yelled. �
�You said you’d come see me someday!”

  “Sí, mi amigo,” the man said. “I keep my word.” He was small, wiry. His lips were thin and wide, near purple; his cheekbones angled and ruddy; his eyes tilted high like a puma’s. He set Georgie down and looked at me.

  “Hola, Juan Díaz,” I said.

  “Marisi.” He nodded at me.

  “You rode all the way from Cartavio?” I asked him.

  “He said he would!” George crowed.

  “Sí. It took me days, but I did it.”

  “You are like the chasqui!” Papi told him, planting a whop on his shoulder. “Running messages for the Inca, from Cusco all the way to the four corners of the Tahuantisuyo!”

  “Juan Díaz,” I said, a seed of hope rising in my chest, “is Antonio coming, too?” I remembered that he and Antonio were friends. Although it had been almost three years since I’d seen Antonio, I loved him still.

  “No, no,” the small man shook his glue-slicked head. “Antonio come to Lima? No es posible. Not if his big-bellied wife has anything to say about it.”

  “He’s married now?” my father said, smiling. “Well, well. I guess he’ll never leave Cartavio now.”

  “One child in his woman and one on his hip. He’s not going anywhere soon,” Díaz said, gloating.

  “I’ll leave you with the children, Juan,” my father said. “I’m going inside to finish up some work. Stay, why don’t you, for some almuerzo.” He waved and went into the house.

  George and Juan Díaz threw the baseball after that and spun around on the bicycle. I stood at the edge of the lot, trying to imagine Antonio with a wife and children, feeling the jealousy in my nine-year-old heart. George was at play with his own special friend; they had forgotten about me entirely. I drifted back to the house, dreaming idly, considering whether, if I couldn’t have Antonio, Cousin Nub would consent to marry me someday. They both seemed so far away now.

  At five o’clock, after a late-afternoon lunch, after Nora had served Juan Díaz a heaping plateful of arroz con pollo in the kitchen and the household had retired for a brief siesta, I wandered into the garage, where my father kept his electric train set. We were not allowed to touch the trains when he wasn’t there, but we could turn on the light and look to our heart’s content. I loved to study the idyll laid out on that table: green topiaries, arched bridges, tunneled hills. There was a red brick station with a platform, a glass pond, two plastic swans, a spired church, a green schoolhouse with a porch. Nothing in it looked Peruvian. Perhaps it was Swiss, buffed to a sleek perfection. There were no people to give us a clue. The town had the look of large-scale abandonment, as if all its souls had departed on an imperative so unequivocal, so swift, that it had not even begun to factor the absence. The doors to the church and the school were unlocked, and they swung open on hinges to admit any passerby, any thief. The chairs at the railroad station waited for travelers to nestle back into them, check their watches, worry their paper schedules. The park bench by the pond awaited the return of an old man who had sat there minutes ago before snatching up his newspaper and strolling out of view.

  “Marisi.”

  I jumped back. The lightbulb that hung over the table did a poor job of illuminating the dank corners of the garage. I squinted to see who was there. Trunks and suitcases were stacked in one corner, rusted machinery in another, cardboard boxes lined the walls.

  “Psst. Over here.” It was a man’s voice, calling at me from a shadow on the far side of the kitchen door. I leaned in and saw him.

  “Juan Díaz,” I said with relief. “You scared me. What are you doing there?”

  “Can you see me?” Me ves?

  “Yes. But where—”

  “Why don’t you come here, get a closer look?”

  I walked along the table, skimming one hand along its smooth green edge. I could see his face and his shoulders. There was a dull glow in the back of his eyes. He did not blink.

  “You saw me give your brother a ride on my bicycle?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never got a chance to give you one, Marisi. You saw how Georgie laughed? You saw what a good time he had?” He looked stiff, unnatural, and there was an odd timbre to his voice. It was high. Higher than I remembered it, and buttery.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, come here, bebita. I have something for you. Antonio told me you’d like it.”

  “Antonio did?” I came closer.

  “Yes, niñita, Antonio. He told me about you. About how wise you are for your years. How old are you now, nine? Ten? Qué inteligente. Qué graciosa. Qué bonita. Ven acá, muñeca.” Come here, dollface.

  I saw what he had for me when I turned the corner and faced him. He was holding his man thing, moving it lazily in the palm of his hand. It sat there, insolent as a bullyboy: straight, thick, hard. It pointed at me the way a gun marks an arcade animal.

  “You see my caballito?” My horsey? “Come, sit on it, gordita. Take a bouncy ride.” His voice was light, but his face was stern, his neck tense, rigid as carved mahogany.

  “No, Juan Díaz,” I said.

  “Come play with me, niña. Sit on me. How can you say no? You didn’t say no to Antonio.”

  I shook my head and slid back along the outskirts of my father’s town. My throat was dry, my knees soft.

  Suddenly, he was hurtling toward me. He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me to the floor. “I don’t want to play with you!” I screamed. The cement was cold. I could feel its grit under my skirt. He held me down and I struggled against him, pushing his knees with my feet. His lever was wagging in my face, a flailing part on a heavy machine. I reached up and took hold of it with both hands. He gasped.

  And then I pulled down with all my might.

  He bellowed and rolled over, clutching at his groin. I scooted back and brushed the hair out of my eyes. Then I scrambled up the steps to the kitchen door, pushed past, and shot through the house into my room.

  I SAT ON my bed alone and trembled. I did not scream. I did not call for help. My brain inched forward, plowing through muck. What had Antonio told Juan Díaz? Had the truth, harmless as it was, done this to me? I had touched my friend once. I had shown him a place on my body. But that was all. Had a simple account of the facts been enough to send Juan Díaz after me? Or had Antonio embroidered the truth? Had he made our glancing encounter more than it was? Or, as I prefer to think, had Juan Díaz done the embroidering?

  You didn’t say no to Antonio. That was true. I hadn’t. Antonio had told me no. Put it away, he had said, and then he had spoken of a greater force.

  I kept my eyes on the door, expecting the messenger to burst in and wrestle me to the floor again. But time passed and nothing prowled the corridors save my own jangled mind. The toys George and I had played with that morning were still arrayed on the bed: a rifle, pink bullets, a bat. I stared at them, contemplating the message that had just been delivered. Had one man twisted another’s words? Or had my friend woven a tale so distorted, so ugly, that the messenger had sat there for years, stunned by this freak of nature, this child, this apotheosis of perversion? Had the two just laughed and slapped the table? Can you believe it? That little elf?

  There was another possibility: That an event that had seemed natural three years before, devoid of anything but the simplest curiosity, had multiplied of its own accord. That my curiosity—however innocent—had violated something so forbidden, so unfathomable, that a sick air would follow forever. Pandora’s box. Lift that tiny top, stretch those baby fingers, pull that little skirt, then giggle and walk away. But what billows behind is toxic. What seems barely fleeting grows.

  I had always known—from every scrap of myth and scripture that had been planted in my brain—that even seemingly inconsequential things had consequences. An apple could cast you from the garden. Not just you, but all your generations to follow. Here, peek at this, let me peek at that, and the toxins flow, evil multiplying on evil, hunting you down three years later. A man on a bicycle comes t
o collect.

  Who can say where children get their resilience? Who can say how we put terror behind us and move down the road? I claim no special quality here beyond a blessed numbness, a realization that life was well outside my control. Fathers took new jobs, grandmothers died, parents squabbled, houses shrank, energy bubbles collided, poisons oozed, Campbell turned out to be Clapp, lions slipped out of their cages. The gift was to carry on.

  So it was that when George whacked open my door and said, “Come on, let’s go!” I sighed and trotted after him, pulling our tin-pot armor behind. Juan Díaz was gone. He had left during the siesta. “Funny,” my mother commented, shaking her head, “I was so sure he was going to ask your father for a job. It goes to show: The man is prouder than I realized.”

  I told nobody then or thereafter, curbing my tongue when Juan Díaz was referred to again and again for the rest of my childhood as the quintessence of old-fashioned loyalty: his bicycle ride of love. I did not want to reveal my complicity—the fact that I had showed myself to Antonio, the risk that Juan Díaz could expose me, the possibility that Antonio may have betrayed me—all those bits of a darker truth.

  I put those complications behind me, did what any good warrior would do. I ran out to our vacant lot and marched into the battlefield again.

  JUST AS LATIN America swung into an anti-capitalist, anti-yanqui era, George and I entered a new phase of our own: We insisted on playing American games only. We had no idea that the political climate in Peru was as inhospitable to the United States as it was. We didn’t realize that Peru had had it with the colossus up north. Three years before, the Central Intelligence Agency had brought down a leftist government in Guatemala, and Peruvian intellectuals were seething about that. Two years before, Fidel Castro had led a band of revolutionaries into southeastern Cuba to gather popular support for an overthrow of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. America was getting too cocky for its Latin neighbors. Insurrection was in the air. In Mexico City, Che Guevara was whipping up a fervor, planning a guerrilla-led revolution against the capitalists, which he hoped would spread like wildfire from Central America down through the Andes to Argentina.