American Chica

by Marie Arana

  We knew nothing of this. It was odd, then, that we chose this moment to flex our American muscle, leave the Conquista behind, play cowboy. We had exercised, in our own fashion, considerable calculation in this change: We did it to throw our weight around, show our superiority. We were quite successful in this. We were more American than the Americans: more swaggering, more obstreperous, more cowboy than anyone who dared venture onto our little patch of Avenida Angamos. There is one more thing, so clear in retrospect, so unregistered then: I was playing two worlds off the middle. At the Roosevelt School, I was muy Peruana, careful not to speak English well, hooting at the lumbering Anglos. But once we hit the street, I was a yee-hawin’ rodeo, playing Anglo for all I could get.

  “I’ve chawed Big Red,” I’d boast to Albertito Giesecke, the angel-faced boy who dreamed of becoming a priest. “I’ve chawed it and spit it. Real far. Betcha I could hit cow caca if it were a block away. I gotta cousin who larned me how!”

  “Our grandpa’s a cowboy,” we’d crow at anyone who would listen. A cowboy abuelo! A living Doc Holliday! He owns a piece of Norteamerica that stretches out as far as the eye can see. He has cattle. He has horses. Drives a big shiny car. Wears a big broad hat. We’re better than you.

  Our arrogance flourished even as everything else seemed to fizzle: As my parents’ feuds became more public, as Mother scolded Papi openly at parties, as he defied her by sloshing around another drink, as my abuelita grew weary of the gringa porfiada, as yanquis in general became pariahs, as Fidelismo began to rise, as the economy plummeted, as graffiti screamed from the wall of our empty lot—The United States is a vampire nation! A gun-slinging pishtaco, peddler of rock-and-cola, sucking its victims dry.

  My mother, on the other hand, was getting more and more patriotic. On the morning of May 8, 1958, she woke us with a directive. “Children, get dressed. We’re going to the airport. The Vice President of the United States is arriving today.” I climbed into a dress with crinoline petticoats, as frilled and feminine as a tutu. Then George and I headed outside. Tang was there to take us.

  “How do you know the vice president?” we asked Mother as we drove north along the coast.

  “I don’t,” she said. “I just want you to see him. He’s a person like you and me. I want you to be proud you are Americans.”

  The road was lined with Lima’s poor. They had come out of their dusty chacras to see the capitalist gringo ride by in his motorcade with his red-white-and-blue to the wind. The airport was choked with people, jostling through halls like tots on carnival day, swilling refrescos and chewing on chicharrón. They eyed my mother as she trooped past in her tailored wool suit. I puffed out my chest to better display my frippery.

  She elbowed her way to an open balcony and lined the three of us up at the rail. Vicki and George were on one side of her, I on the other. “There,” she said, pointing. Then, shading her eyes like a general at a parade, she said it again. “There. That, children, is our Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon.” A plane came into view.

  It was a giant machine, highly glossed, brightly painted, sporting the stars and stripes on both sides. It wheeled over Lima, flew in, touched the tarmac without so much as a tremor, and glided to a stop before us. There was a roar in the crowd, as people pressed forward to see.

  I stood on my toes and leaned over the rail as the airplane door opened and a man in uniform stepped out. Then two more Americans came through the door. The first was a man in a suit, his hairline a sharp, black V. “Ves?” shouted a woman behind me. “El Gringo Nixon!” The crowd surged forward again, and I marveled at the figure in the distance. The man was a fairer version of my father.

  I felt myself bouncing against the rail as I stood there wondering at the likeness, a light bounce at first, then like a jib in high wind. Something was ramming me forward. I turned in time to see my mother raise her purse and slam it down on the person behind me. He was on his knees, a man in rags, thrusting himself into my crinoline, grinning poison into the sky.

  “Vayate cholo!” she shrieked. Go away!

  She pounded his head with her purse until he scudded back on his knees and scrambled to his feet. He was leering, pants open. The crowd backed away. A woman giggled nervously.

  “Vayate, loco!” my mother screamed again. She was red in the face, wild.

  “Gri-i-i-in-ga!” the man screeched back at her, leaning out like a gargoyle, then rearing and flaring like a cobra preparing to strike.

  “Let’s go!” Mother pulled us by the elbows and stormed away. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Jesus God! I’m sick of this place.”

  As we sped to the safety of Tang, I looked back through the crowd. The man was babbling to himself, pulling up his trousers, paying the oglers no mind. People were laughing and pointing at the overheated gringa with her fancy, crestfallen children. Instinctively, I began to cry. Being a girl had become dangerous work in my corner of the hemisphere.

  Being American was perilous, too. That day we learned what Peru really thought about gringos. Wherever Richard Milhous Nixon went, he was menaced. My father’s people came into the streets with stones in their pockets, empty Coca-Cola bottles, putrefying garbage. They spat on him, chased his big, black cars through the streets, flailed their fists, launched their Pachamama arsenals, filled the air with rage. One stone grazed his neck. Another hit one of his secret servicemen in the face. When he laid a wreath fashioned to look like the American flag at the monument of South America’s liberator San Martín, jeering student demonstrators tore it up.

  No one had to explain what that meant. George and I dragged into our dirt lot chastened. There was such a thing as too much power.

  AS COOLER WEATHER approached, we saw the cement trucks come and go from our lot across the street. We weren’t allowed to play in it anymore. They were digging out dirt, filling the hole with concrete, but they never finished the apartment tower that was pictured on the signboard. Techo Rex wasn’t building much, either. The Arana brothers were finding precious little to do as the economy shriveled, socialism spiraled, and American business began pulling out of Peru. By now much of the Arana family had been recruited to make Techo Rex viable. Tía Eloísa was typing the correspondence. Tía Chaba was keeping the books. Tío Pedro began looking for projects in the hinterlands. Tío Víctor proposed they erect tract houses, because they were easily built, instantly rented. Papi approached his former bosses at Grace and eked out a contract to help build a dam.

  In Abuelita’s house, conversations turned more and more to the hacienda my grandfather had just inherited from Tía Carmen. Owned originally by my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana, the Hacienda Nogales was tucked into a far valley in Huancavelica, where the Andes began their ascent to the skies. The hacienda entered the lives of the Lima Aranas almost as a revelation, so little did they know about the secretive Pedro Pablo or about the history of the hacienda that had now come into their possession. Although it was assumed that it once had been the property of Pedro Pablo’s wife, my reclusive and eccentric great-grandmother, Eloísa Sobrevilla Díaz de Arana, all that was really known was that it had been her refuge as Pedro Pablo traveled about the country, marshaling his political career, and that he had paid little attention to it during his lifetime. Nor had their children been much attached to it. Both my abuelito and Tía Carmen had been sent to school in Lima at very young ages and had returned to Nogales only at rare intervals. So when my great-grandmother died in 1912, the house with all its land and peones began an almost century-long decline. My great-grandfather, who preferred to live in the hustle and bustle of Lima, ignored it, and no one thought much about it until 1926, when Pedro Pablo died. Instead of bequeathing the hacienda to his son, however—to my abuelito, as was the custom—Pedro Pablo had willed it to his daughter, a spinster with no other prospect of an income. What he could not have foreseen is that Tía Carmen would marry a parasite who abused the peones, sold off whatever was valuable, and bled the hacienda dry. Now the question was, in the
late ‘50s, could it be made into a productive enterprise again? Could it grow crops and boost the family coffers? It made for endless debate about what would be most profitable: Sugar? Asparagus? Cotton?

  Try as they might, the brothers couldn’t engage their father’s attention on the question. He looked pleased momentarily when Tía Carmen’s lawyer called on him to say the land was legally his, but once the man was done, Abuelito simply thanked him, turned, and mounted the stairs to his room. It did not really interest him.

  One Sunday, we all came to wish Abuelita a happy birthday—even Mother was there. She hadn’t called on the house in years, but we had been passing by and Papi had insisted she come in. In any case, the grown-ups were well into one of those conversations about the hacienda, when suddenly there was a slow thumping on the stairboards. They paused and turned around. To our shock, it was my grandfather coming down to join us. He descended cautiously, placing two feet on each step before he proceeded to the next. He gripped the banisters on either side, inching his mottled hands along, eyes fixed on his shoes. When he reached bottom, he headed for his wing-backed chair. He didn’t look up, didn’t say a word, but Tío Pedro jumped up to take an elbow and navigate him. He looked tired and small. Hair sprouted from around his ears.

  He sat in his chair, put an elbow on each armrest, and carefully brought the fingertips of both hands together so that they met. He separated and touched them, opening and closing, as if he had something to say. But the dialogue continued its tinny course—claro que hay una ventaja con caña, pero es difícil que de en la sierra; pues tiene un gran mercado; el asparrago también seria bueno, no?—with my aunts and uncles working hard to make Abuelito’s advent seem ordinary. Finally, my grandfather’s hands stopped moving, and he looked over them into my mother’s face. The room fell silent.

  “Why do you despise me?” he said in a high, squeaky English, with a voice I seldom heard. My abuelita shot a look around the room. She had no idea what he had just said. No one translated.

  My mother’s eyes grew wide, and her face, which until that moment had been the picture of boredom, took on the color of a ripe guava. “I don’t …” she sputtered. “But I don’t …”

  He lowered his eyes, clutched the sides of his chair, and, with great effort, drew himself to his feet. He turned and shuffled away.

  “Pero, hijito!” Abuelita said, in her jolly tone, although the party had grown stone-cold sober. “You come all the way down here and then you say something in English—something none of us understands—and now you’re going back up again? Stay, Victor! Have a little glass of sherry. Have some cake!”

  He raised one hand and fluttered it, keeping his eyes on his shoes.

  “Despise him?” my mother said in the car on the way home. “Despise him? How could I possibly despise him? How could anyone on this earth think your father despicable?”

  “He’s an old man,” said my father. “Who knows what’s on his mind.”

  I asked what despicable meant, but I needn’t have. I soon met the word again, in a context that made its meaning abundantly clear.

  I was in the house of Albertito Giesecke. I had developed a crush on the boy, had wangled my way into playing chess in his house one winter afternoon, when his mother invited me to tea. The Giesecke name was fairly well known in Lima for Albertito’s grandfather. More than twenty years before, he had flown over Machu Picchu to confirm Hiram Bingham’s “discovery” of that mystical mountain city.

  Albertito’s father seemed Peruvian in every respect to me, although I’d been told that the flying grandfather was an American and that he was famous for brave expeditions. Albertito’s father had gone to Papi’s preparatory school, Villa Maria. They had been friends. He indicated where I should sit at the table and then peered at me while he smoothed a napkin over his tie.

  “So,” he said, “you’re Jorge’s daughter?”

  “Sí, señor,” I responded, and sank my teeth into an alfajor, savoring its sweet caramel center.

  “Claro, pues, you look like an Arana,” he said.

  He studied me as his wife asked me about the Roosevelt School, as she chattered on about the garúa, about how it was impossible to breathe when fog locked in over the city. I thought perhaps he was admiring my good manners. I had had excellent lessons from Abuelita on how a lady should conduct herself at table, even if I didn’t employ that training all the time. I was being a perfect little señorita.

  Finally, Señor Giesecke wiped his thin lips on his napkin, leaned across the table toward me, and spoke in a clipped English. “You know, I’ve always wondered whether your father was related to the cauchero.”

  “The cauchero?” I said. “Oh, you mean the Arana who lived in the jungle? The rich one with all the rubber? People are always asking me that. My aunts and uncles say no.”

  He laughed merrily and took a long, noisy slurp from his cup. “Of course they would say no,” he said then, clacking the cup back in the saucer. “I would say no myself, even if it were one hundred percent true. He was a nasty man, Julio César Arana. A monster. Uy-uy-uy! Pedro, José, y Santa María! He was totally despicable.”

  THAT SAME WINTER, I began ballet classes. Mother had noticed my tendency to exaggeration—“It’s the soul of an artistic temperament!” she assured my father—and responded accordingly by enrolling me in the British Academy of Dance. As far as she was concerned, there would be no skimping on any form of education. It was a mansion with high ceilings on Calle Esquilache in San Isidro. There, I took to ballet as if I’d been born to dance, stretching out at the barre, growing thin as a whippet, gliding in mirrors, pausing in doorways like a haughty diva with a neck as long as a swan’s. This was a new kind of power, a fine ammunition.

  My teacher was a diminutive Englishwoman. On the first day, she waddled into class like an undernourished duck, toes pointing at opposite walls. But once music rippled up and slid into her limbs, she became agile as a nymph: smooth-browed, tulle-winged, all of her grammar in her bones. I ached to be like her, worked hard to imitate the sinews of her tiny body.

  I returned from class one day filled with important news. I’d been cast as a bluebell in The Nutcracker’s Waltz of the Flowers. I pranced in the door, whipped a heel onto the dining room table, and spun chainés through the hall. Mother laughed and clapped her hands. I went to bed more pleased with myself than I’d been in a long time.

  But at two o’clock in the morning, Papi swung in through the front door, lit to the gills. Mother had been sitting in the living room waiting for him, her cigarette glowing in the dark. The crescendo of their exchange was what woke me—first came the Valkyrie, then came the basso. A two-part invention. With cymbals.

  The first dish flew into the floor of the hallway. The second punched a hole in the living room wall. Vicki and I sat up. George came in, rubbing his eyes.

  “They’re at it again,” he said.

  “I know,” said Vicki. “Don’t worry. Sit here with us. It’ll be over soon.”

  We sat there listening, watching the light flicker on the walls. Cars were moving along Avenida Angamos, even at that hour of the night.

  “I’m fed up, Jorge! You know what that means? Fed up!” and the walls reverberated with another explosion.

  “Ay, por Dios!” croaked the answer, and we heard the shards under his shoes.

  But it didn’t stop. The upstairs neighbors clomped down to complain. Mother stormed past into the street, flagged down a taxi, and directed the driver to my grandparents’ house. “Espérate,” she told him as he gawped at her night clothes—wait—and then she stepped out of the cab and climbed onto the ledge under my uncle’s window. “Víc-tor!” she sang into the night. “Ayúdame.” Help.

  The next thing we knew, Tío Víctor was standing in our bedroom doorway, his silhouette sharp against the blaze of the hallway. He was shaking his head.

  The sight of him—black against the fulgor of light—is etched into memory like a chord before the key modulates, like
a sign that the tempo must change. There was no fire, no corpse, no wounds, but I knew this time things had gone too far. Until then we children had been spectators at a private drama. We had seen curtains rise, curtains fall, costumes change, and then we had watched our players strut out again, slick back their hair. My uncle’s silhouette changed everything. We were pathetic. We were disgusting. The pretense was pointless now. People knew.

  Our parents scrambled to make the unfortunate scene up to us. One languid Sunday afternoon, Papi drove us out the bumpy Carretera Central to Peru’s mecca of roast chicken, a ranch two hours outside Lima, La Granja Azul. With us was our cousin Cito. He was six foot two and buckram straight, a clone of his father, the distinguished and extravagantly mustachioed comandante Tío Salvador. We took a table in a tiled courtyard beside a flowering garden, under the crest of a looming mountain.

  The chicken arrived in heaping rattan baskets, fragrant and steaming with cumin and achiote, flanked by crisp yucca fries and a piquant sauce of ají. The grown-ups drank Pilsen; the children, chicha morada. It was a lotus-eater’s banquet, an orgy of forgetting. Peruvian style.

  There was much to enchant us. Family stories wove their sultry magic, curling into our brains like a drug. It seemed that Tío Salvador, who was one of the most skilled sword fighters in all Peru, had recently challenged someone to a duel and nicked someone with his florete. It was in all the newspapers. They were thrilled about this, brought up the story of the monkey and the anteater, and reminisced about Papi’s godfather, an old roué who’d been shot in the back on his way into his mistress’s house.

  George and I were captivated by those stories and lingered long after lunch to hear them, but the conversation soon turned to subjects less interesting to us: how four new trucks with the Techo Rex logo were sitting idle in Lima. Bored, we decided to leave the adults to their lamentations. We hadn’t been this close to Pachamama in a long time. We decided to head up the mountain behind us.