American Chica (13 page)

By the time we reached her, she was addressing Billy, who, at eight, was almost as tall as she was. He was sober, grim-mouthed, standing there with his chin thrust out, a pointed promontory in a freckled field.

“Come, gringo,” she told him, “hold my braids while I see into tomorrow. One in your left hand,
papito,
one in your right. Good.”

For the next few moments, Billy looked himself, a simple boy in a noonday game. He took the braids and his face relaxed, so that for a fleeting second he looked like his sweet-eyed mum, the gentle Scots lady who lived next door. Then suddenly it was as if a charge was shooting through him. His back arched. The
bruja’s
braids undulated like snakes. Carlitos shimmied back into Margarita at the sight of them, but the girl pushed him away and stood erect, her eyes wide, mouth in a tight, thin line. Billy, too, seemed frozen from head to toe; only his arms moved tortuously, in waves that appeared to issue from the witch’s hair. George and I shifted from foot to foot, turning nervously and searching each other’s face to see who would cut and run. But we’d witnessed these things before, and though I could see George’s face furrowed with worry, I could also see determination in his stance. He stood his ground in line. Quickly, I squirmed in behind.

“Ya, ya,” the
bruja
said to Billy, her voice high and silky as a little girl’s. “You have the face of a leopard,
papo.
Eyes of a puma. Heart of a bird. The spotted face will never change. The other two you yourself must change. See like the bird, gringito. Make your heart beat like a puma’s. You must work at this. Work.”

Billy dropped the braids, let out a grunt, and stumbled back against George. I took the big boy’s wrist and pulled him behind me. He wafted back like a feather.

George stepped forward and grabbed the woman’s braids. Her eyes focused and then squeezed shut. Her chin was still as granite. George did not move.

After a while, her lips began to pulse as she sucked on her delicately moored teeth. She ceased to look like a witch, more like a rag doll, her braids jutting comically from behind.

“Come another day, boy,” she said at last, shaking her head. “I see night, I see stars, I see a path. But nothing more. The spirits in you are sleeping. We must not wake them now.”

I loved George with every bone in me. He had a noble brow,
straight and clean, and hazel eyes that squinted up with a golden glow. His lips were full and rosy, pouting from his face like guavas. He was as agile and impish as I was lumpish and slow. He’d walk on garden walls like a trapeze artist; swing bananas from his pockets as if they were pistols; lob balloons full of water from a second-floor window. All I could do, in my fat little self, was look on his antics and giggle. If I could have had but one wish from the
bruja,
I would have asked her to make me like him. Seeing him now, disoriented and fortuneless, I could feel my heart slide through my chest.

“Marisi! Georgie!” I heard a woman’s voice call out from our garden. It was Claudia, the cook; she was circling the house looking for us. Anxiously, I stepped forward and took the heavy hair. The witch’s eyes were mantled with clouds, and I wondered if she could even see me. But she wasted no time in telling me what she saw.

“A root is stirring under your house,” she whispered. “It is thick and black, with branches that grow while the condor sleeps. You will think the leaves pretty. You will pay it no heed. You will wake every day like the condor and fly. But,
chica,
someday that vine will reach your window. It will fly inside and grab you by the throat. Prepare yourself.”

For days after that, the
bruja
’s words played in my head. What could they mean? A
vine?
Under my
house?
The image crept into my dreams. I found myself reaching for my neck in alarm. I imagined black snakes, as fat and tense as a witch’s braid, making their way up our pristine walls in the cover of dark, reappearing each night infinitesimally longer, imperceptibly thicker. Up, with no one believing it but me. Up, with everyone draped on their beds in slumber. Up, and there, before an open window, the sorry wretch of a girl, clenching the covers, gaping at shadows, fighting off sleep to keep the thing back.

Eventually, I had to tell. My mother seemed to take the news
in stride. She listened thoughtfully to what I had to say, opening her eyes wide to ingest every word. None of this is true, she told me quietly, after all of it was out. None of it. No such thing will ever happen to you.

But that night I heard her pace my parents’ bedroom and shout the whole thing out to my father.
These people
this! she said.
Those people
that!
Those people
were demented, sick, obsessed. Wasn’t it enough to pass their
brujerías
on to one another? Why did they have to go around poisoning her children as well? Mother had sent my big sister’s
ama
packing some months before when Vicki had recounted some of the stories the young woman had been spinning. Mother reminded my father of that now. “You remember what she was telling Vicki? That spirits of the dead crawl through the earth! That they enter the trunks of trees! That they slither through branches to grab at the living! She was saying it to our little girl!”

“Ah,
bueno,”
my father responded, plumping the pillow and readying himself for sleep. “You fired that ama, all right, but you can’t very well fire a street vendor.”

“We’ll see about that,” my mother said, with a voice that made me shrink from the keyhole and slink to my bed in dismay. Getting rid of the witch wouldn’t help me at all. Not at all. What I needed was someone to
get rid of the vine.

The next morning, I slipped into the garden and scoured the perimeter of the house for anything that looked like a creeper. Pretty or not, I pulled it up, tore it to pieces, and threw it onto a wheelbarrow. George helped me, giving long opinions on whether or not a flower or a weed might pose a danger. Our house stood on concrete stilts, giving us good opportunity to crawl beneath and check the situation thoroughly. Apart from candy wrappers we had put there ourselves, there was nothing suspicious. Certainly nothing headed for my window.

At noon, Mother emerged from the house, walked resolutely
through the gate, and headed for the witch herself. George and I lurked behind the side walls, peeking through the gate to see our mother’s blond head bob up and down in a rich display of anger. The neighborhood cooks and gardeners shuffled out to listen to the gringa speak Spanish: “No
mas brujería, m’entyenday?”
she said, wagging a forefinger. Next to her willowy heights, the witch looked small and harmless. “Take your fruit away,” my mother said with finality. “We will not buy from you again.” The witch lowered her head and stared at the ground. Her lower lip hung down and her teeth moved in and out, in and out. But when my mother spun around and marched back to the house, the witch’s eyes clacked around again like dull balls in a pinball arcade. “Mango!” she screeched, finding our faces in the iron gridwork.
“Tráeme la boca!
Bring me that mouth!
Hay mango!”

“Watch,” I said to George, as we stumbled away. “This will only make it worse.”

LOOKING BACK,
I see that if I had a system of beliefs as a child this was it: the
bruja,
the
loco,
the look in any number of
amas’
eyes when they spoke about the dead reaching for us with long, green fingers. I do not remember attending church. If priests were disseminating the word of God—and there was every evidence that they were there in Cartavio, scurrying from barrio to barrio in long brown robes—those men were not speaking to us. If Mother was telling us stories of Moses and Jesus—and most assuredly she was, judging by the little booklets that still sit on my shelf, colored in by my childish hand—those men were not speaking to my soul.

I cannot speak for George, whose spirit has always been greater than mine. I only had to look at him to understand what I should be feeling about a wounded animal, a beggar, a stranger at the gate. I cannot speak for Vicki, whose brain has always
been better furnished than mine. I only had to ask her to tell me more about the
pishtacos
to hear long disquisitions about how it was all poppycock, the unfounded ravings of ignorant minds. But for me, the Indian
leyendas
were religion. They were my church, my commandments, my faith. I worried them in the way my Lima aunts fingered their rosaries. I knew that my mother disapproved of those tales, and yet I suspected that, as with much she appeared not to know about the Peruvian world around me, this was simply a language she did not understand.

The
bruja
’s warning about the vine shot through me with all the urgency of a Virginal sighting at Fatima. There was a fat black root under my house and someday it would wring my throat. The admonition was far more vivid than any litany of saints my Catholic father could recite for me or any hymn about rocks my Protestant mother could sing. It would be a long time before I could laugh at the
bruja
’s warning. I was convinced I’d find the vine at my window. I was sure I’d look up one night and watch it twitch its little black head and fly in at me. I may have learned to laugh at the
bruja
’s words but, to this day, I cannot stand to have anything rest on my neck.

THE ONE WHO
taught me how to use Peru’s
leyendas
was Antonio. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, eighteen years old, one of seven servants in our house. From the moment my conscious world had other people in it, Antonio was the one I wanted to look at, be with, know. He was tall for an indigenous Peruvian, high-browed, straight-necked, with skin the color of cinnamon bark. His forearms and shoulders were hard from years of heavy lifting. Since twelve, he had taken odd jobs in the factory and the hacienda: heaving cane, lifting vats, packing paper, working in the houses of the rich.

He didn’t have the pocked face of a cane-cutter: no scars
digging into his nose and cheeks, no welts inflicted by high cane when a field-worker’s machete slashes into the
corte
and angry stalks spring back like thorned swords. Antonio’s face was smooth. His eyes, black as a monkey’s. Ringing the straight, flat line of his mouth was a high ridge—almost purple—that I loved to look at, longed to trace with my finger, imagined from the window of my room whenever I heard him talking to our
mayordomo,
Flavio, or laughing with Claudia, the cook. His mouth was like a wale on ripe fruit.

But the thing I most loved about Antonio was the way he talked to me—as if I was someone worth talking to—and the way he listened. No matter how busy he was, no matter how many chores my mother gave him, he always had time for me, spinning about when he heard my voice squeak, “Antonio!
Espérame!
I have something to ask you!”

I asked him trivialities, concocted to allow me to cast my eyes up at him, stare at the trickle of sweat on his chest, ponder the contours of his face.

From the day Flavio had brought him to the house and introduced him as his nephew, my mother had singled him out as a bright young man. “That boy is smart,” she would say, looking down at him from my window. “He has a future, and a mind for something better than this garden.” I would watch her scratch her head and think what she might do for him: Teach him how to converse in English, do sums? Read to him from Van Loon’s histories or Plutarch’s
Lives,
as she did for us? Just as long as he doesn’t go far, I’d pray. As long as he stays right there, by the window.

I loved him in the extravagant way children love grown-ups of the opposite sex. It is a need born early, our hunger for romance. We love our uncles because they are not our fathers, because they are familiar enough but essentially strangers: free, unpredictable, wild. We love our mother’s friends because they have
pretty faces, because their smiles invite us to, because their eyes seek us out whenever we enter a room. I loved Antonio because he was handsome; because he was good; because he appeared to love me back; because, when I considered the way he turned to look at this midge of a human being, when I saw the light in his eyes, when he put down his tools to pay attention, I knew that I was his; and that fact made him fully and incontrovertibly mine.