American Chica (15 page)

He dusted off the back of my dress and we walked together into the garden.

I PRACTICED USING
my
qosqo
after that. I pointed it up at the dark when nightmares startled me out of sleep. I stood at the
window and aimed it down into the garden to stop vines from taking root. I scanned trees with it, on the chance that
pishtacos
were lurking there, waiting to spring.

Antonio’s lesson worked; I became less worried about the
loco
and the
bruja,
and, for the time being at least, all the bad forces in the world seemed manageable, the chaos devoured, the black light spit away.

Four decades later, as I look back on that seminal lesson, I still wonder what concatenation of history and conscience predisposed me to be sure I was there to learn it. And to be drawn as I was to Antonio. These things cannot be attributed to chance.

Divine chance, perhaps. As in the story of my friend, Eddie, a “Blackamerican,” as he likes to call himself, who set out a few years ago to find out who his ancestors were. Family lore had it that his great-grandfather had been a slave and had been manumitted in the courthouse of a little town in Virginia. Eddie made his way there cross-country on a motorcycle, filled with a wronged man’s fury, determined to see the proof for himself. What he found took him by surprise. It was true that his great-grandfather had been a slave on a white man’s plantation and that the master had taken the slave down to the courthouse to free him. But the words on the official document changed Eddie’s life forever. There on paper, clear as could be, was evidence that the white man was not only the black slave’s owner, he was his father, as well. The slavemaster had taken his black son down, acknowledged their blood tie, signed the papers, and given him his freedom. When my friend got back on his motorcycle for the ride home, he did it with the eerie understanding that he would never again feel something so simple as pure, racial anger. He was black. But he was also white. He was master; he was slave.

I am recalling that story now because it has everything to do
with links and connections. Just as Eddie understood that he had been called to Virginia to learn an essential lesson about his anger, I was called to Antonio to learn a lesson I absolutely would need to know. It was a question only the
leyendas
could answer: Where does the evil go?

6

—

P
OLITICS

La Politica

W
HERE DO THE
poisons go? If it was a question for the spirit, it was one for the real world, too. The rage of the Second World War—the blood lust, the hatred, the killing—stopped, but its black light continued. Like amperage moving along the earth’s surface, it galvanized air, tripped minds with a different fervor. In Peru there was an eerie escalation. The new president, José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, had legalized the long-vilified leftist party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, and a socialist zeal quickened the air. Prices rose. Tempers mounted. The Peruvian military, which the Aranas and Cisneroses had always been wary of—which, from time immemorial, had seen itself as the guardian of prosperity—began clanking its guns.

By late 1948, Peruvian soldiers were taking to the streets to tamp down the leftist euphoria. It had not been the first time. In an uprising in Trujillo sixteen years before, the APRA had massacred a group of army officers and the military had struck back, arresting or executing anyone they could identify as communist.
The liberal tone of Bustamante’s presidency had the army on edge again. Unions were making demands. Inflation was spiraling. Grim-faced men in uniform began to be seen outside the presidential palace, on street corners, chasing “left-wing hooligans” down streets. As Mother returned from the United States with Vicki, George, and her violin in tow, she noted the graffiti on the road from the airport:
Hay un bobo en el palacio!
the red letters screamed. An idiot has broken into the palace! Who was it? The president himself.

By October 1948, the military had seen enough. General Manuel Odría stomped into Lima’s Plaza de Armas and announced an end to the socialist foolishness. No one so much as blinked an eye. Coups d’état were not new in Peru. Since the turn of the century, the country had seen more military coups, in fact, than democratic elections. General Odría sent Bustamante packing, moved himself into the presidential palace, and announced that he would give Peru a proper election. But seven years later, when I was standing on an empty crate, declaiming mythology to Antonio, the general was still there. The communists and anarchists had fled to the hills, or out of Peru. Their leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, had taken asylum in the Colombian embassy in Lima, and the general’s soldiers were clomping up and down with submachine guns to make sure that he stayed inside.

The fever did not abate. The early 1950s were boom years for red dreams: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were weaving guerrilla visions in Latin American jungles, and the Peruvian left was champing at the prospect of overturning a grim and oppressive cycle. There was a long tradition of exploitation in Peru. It had begun under the Inca with the
mita,
a system in which peasants were made to contribute years of labor to the state. They were told their work would bring glory to the empire of the sun. When the Spaniards conquered Peru, they adopted the same practice,
forcing the peasants into their own version of the
mita,
this time for the glory of the crown. Things had not progressed much in the one hundred twenty years of the Republic. The villagers in the countryside now were being lured to work for new masters on the sugar and cotton plantations; they did not volunteer their most productive years for free, as their ancestors had done before them, but they accepted pittances: a few
soles,
a thatched roof over their heads, a ration of meat and a little rice. Antonio and his peers were part of that cycle: boys who had grown up watching their fathers rise from their mothers’ beds at midnight and trudge out to a mine or a field or a factory, to push cane through a
trapiche
until dawn. When their turn came, boys would take up that trek with their fathers, a hard route traced by every generation in the grinding Peruvian wheel of fortune.

The eloquent Haya de la Torre, born into one of the
buenas familias
of Trujillo, was convinced he could reverse the treadmill. While George and I were running from house to fence, keeping an eye on the
bruja
and the
loco,
Haya de la Torre was doing business out of the Colombian embassy compound, preaching revolution to men like Antonio. He railed against the gradual handover of land to “rapacious” American companies like W. R. Grace—particularly in his home province of La Libertad—the very corner of Peru where my father was raising American smokestacks.

The sugar and paper haciendas of W. R. Grace were prime targets for the anticapitalist forces of Haya de la Torre’s APRA. The company, which had grown rich in Peru as an exporter of bird dung, was now a major trader between North and South America. It owned Grace Line, the first steamship company to operate between the Americas, which dominated all shipping back and forth over the equator, and Panagra, the premier air carrier of the Americas. The Grace family had gone from guano to paper, from tin to railroads, and from a modest start in a
ship chandler’s shop to ownership of an airline and a shipping fleet.

Grace was like any other major U.S. venture in Peru. In some ways, it brought improvements. It provided steady work in an unstable time. It delivered expertise. It built towns, set up schools, established clinics. But Grace was not in the country to do charity work. It was there to do business. Peruvian hands were cheap and Peruvian resources were plentiful. There was sugar, paper, copper, steel, oil to be had—in quantities unrivaled in other parts of the world. And, without too much fuss, a company—like a military general—could stride into the main square, start up an industry, and put the profits into whatever pockets it chose.

For Grace, as for any capitalist giant in Peru in the ‘50s, APRA socialists spelled trouble. The Apristas recruited actively among the young in the cities and then spread discontent in the countryside, persuading field-workers and factory laborers of their rights, building the union rolls, spinning visions of a great Utopia. My father’s bosses in New York were well aware of the nervousness the socialists were sowing in the Peruvian hinterland. There was nothing happening in the north of Peru that was not also happening in places like Detroit and Chicago. But in Peru, the stakes were higher, the situation more explosive. The protections of the law were not always guaranteed—who knew if the police would be able to stand up against an angry strike, an anarchist incursion, a massacre, a revolution? And if the law did prevail, it might take a fascist turn, in the direction of a military state.

The powers that be at W. R. Grace, in their sleek Manhattan offices on Hanover Square, understood as well as any distant colonial power that the way to manage their holdings in Peru was to place bright locals in governing positions. My father was a prime candidate to run their empire and impose a shinier, American version of the
mita:
He was a U.S.-educated engineer
with an American wife and solid Lima connections; a Peruvian with one foot in the old oligarchy and the other in a growing camp of young, future-minded pragmatists who hoped to sweep their country into a bright, new age. The gringo bosses would come and go from New York or, at most, sit for a few months in Lima offices. A few of the younger gringos would come and go from the
casa de solteros
next door. But when it came to managing day-to-day affairs on the ground where the cane was being cut, the sugar was being processed, the paper was being milled, and the rum was being drawn into vats, it was my father who was in charge.

The gringos at Grace had another advantage they had not even bargained for: my mother’s little empire at home. If the Peruvian adage is true—that all politics is decided in the kitchen—it was being proven under our own roof in Cartavio. All the intelligence W. R. Grace needed to maintain a grip on its factories was coming from our
mayordomo,
Flavio. It was Flavio who revealed to my mother how much of a hold the APRA had on the people of Cartavio, and it was she who passed that information up the company ranks.

Flavio was a formal man, straight-backed, in his late thirties, a flinty
indígena
who prided himself on knowing how to run a house, serve a meal, please the most discriminating guest. But one morning, when Papi was away in Lima, Mother found him crouched behind the radio in the
comedor,
trembling in the corner, sweat drenching his face and hair.

“Flavio!
Qué te pasa?”

“I had to come tell you,
señora.”
His voice was high and mewling, like a child’s.

“What?” and she swung open the kitchen door, looking for Claudia. “Claudia? Antonio? Where is everyone?”

“No one is here,
señora.
Just me. Claudia is in Chancay with my mother. I told my nephew to stay away as well. The others
are in the village.” He whispered the words, knitting his fingers in front of his mouth. She drew close to listen.

“Why are you there on the floor, Flavio? Why are you so afraid? What’s happened to you?”

“I don’t want them to see me through the windows,
señora.
If they find out I’m here …”

“What are you talking about,
hijito?
Who are
they?”

“The
obreros, señora.”
The workers. “And the union people.”

Flavio spun out the story for my mother, describing the men who had come from Trujillo to meet with the workers while the people in the big houses slept. The hacienda’s
obreros
were not being paid enough, they’d been told. The
norteamericanos
were sucking them dry. Rich Peruvians like my father were helping them do it. There was much grumbling—
mucha queja
—in the air. And danger. Soon there would be a strike.