American Chica (16 page)

“They’ve forbidden you to come to our houses?” my mother said. “Why?”

“Because the organizers are strong,
señora,”
Flavio rasped. “They call this a revolution. They say that those who are not one hundred percent on their side are the enemy. I am not one hundred percent,
señora.
I care about you and the
señor.
I didn’t want you to wake up this morning to an empty house without an explanation. Especially with the
Ingeniero
in Lima. But the truth is that they could kill me for this.”

“Go, Flavio,” Mother said. “You’ve done enough. Don’t put yourself in any more danger. The children and I will be fine.”

He went, scooting out the back door on all fours, pushing himself through a hole in the garden wall and then running head-down into the cane field behind. But he came back that night and every night after that to feed Mother new information.

When Papi returned from Lima, Mother told him everything. He knew just what to do.

“Fiesta,” he said. “Pan
y circo.”
The people would be made an offering.

He organized a
pachamanca
in Cartavio’s main square and invited the entire hacienda—every worker, every vendor, every
loco,
every wife and child. He ordered up
valses criollos, música serrana, selva
drums: every kind of dancing from Andean to Amazon. He brought in a feast: goats and ducks and potfuls of savory dishes. And Cartavio rum. Lots of it. As much as a town could guzzle.

Late one Sunday afternoon, the tables were set up on the square by the central market, the band struck its first chord, and the aroma of roasted flesh began to wind through the streets. At first, the only ones there were the engineers and their wives, sipping, stepping about, glancing nervously over their shoulders. But house by house, the workers and their families began to file out. In their best shirts, with lavender oil matting their hair.
“Hola, amigo. Qué tal? Cómo te va?”
First a little plateful of
cabrito.
Then a little taste of the
carapulcra.
A
traguito
of rum. Before long the square was full. With sugarfire warming its veins, Cartavio began to dance.

There were, some
ingenieros
admitted later, people there they’d never seen before, skulking around the edges like hyenas around a kill. But the music, the food, and the rum were working for W. R. Grace that night.
Ay, ay, ay ay! Canta y no llores!
Papi was making the rounds, slapping backs with one hand, wielding drinks in the other. Before long, Cartavio was full of belly-bouncing laughter, a roaring, squealing bacchanalia. When Mother looked out into the bobbing mass, she saw Flavio, drunk as a skunk, hopping through the night on one foot.

For a while labor relations were better. A party glow buzzed over Cartavio like a sputtering neon halo. But it didn’t last long.
When the strike did come, it was fast and fierce. Because of Flavio’s intelligence reports, however, the company gringos knew about it and were prepared. They called for the Peruvian government to step in and keep the peace. Cartavio’s Peruvian managers, many of them confirmed anticommunists—some of them sons and daughters of the forty-family oligarchy that ruled Peru—found themselves in the nervous custody of the police and the military. Papi was put under house arrest.

He wasn’t there for long. The police
teniente
in charge, Pepe Canales, turned out to be a former student from Papi’s engineering classes at Lima’s police academy. The moment he saw him, he gave him a hearty
abrazo.
Then, when an army colonel was sent in with troops, he turned out to be a pal from the Club Regatas—a drinking buddy from the monkey-and-anteater days. Papi was told he could do whatever he pleased.

The head engineers walked into the abandoned factories, started up the machines, and kept the production lines going, doing the labor of a hundred peons.

But the climate changed when Papi went into Trujillo to report on the strike to the prefect of the province of La Libertad. Police
teniente
Canales paid a visit to my mother. He was trembling, jittery as a macaque as he marched up to us in the garden and left the gate wagging behind. Flavio had already told Mother the most recent news: The morning before, the
teniente
had risen from his comfortable bed, pulled on his brass-buttoned uniform, had a good breakfast, and headed out for his car. There, he found a slashed tire and a note slipped under his windshield wiper. The note told him to take a good look at the rubber. Unless the policeman left Cartavio, the next slash would be in his throat.

“Buenas tardes, señora,”
he said as he approached us. His hands were jammed deep in his pockets, jangling their contents with the impatience of a crap-game croupier. I could see through the gate to his uniformed men outside.

“Everything all right?” he said. “How are you and the children?”

“Fine, Lieutenant,” my mother said dryly. “We’re fine.”

“Don Jorge is not here, is that right?”

“No. He’s in Trujillo.”

“And the servants are holed up in the village, I suppose?”

“Yes. No one has come,” my mother lied.

“Ah,
ya,”
he said, and dropped his eyes to where we sat in front of her, our hands idle in our laps. We stared at his uniform, the shiny medals, the raised lettering on his shirt pocket.

“And look who’s here!” he said with false jollity, bending down toward George so that we could see beads of perspiration spring onto his brow. “Mi
compadre! Mi amigo!
Cartavio’s shortest police officer! You want to come with me, Georgie? You want to do the rounds with my men? Ride in my car? It would make your father so proud, no?”

Mother’s mouth dropped open.

George jumped to his feet, eyes shining with the vision of himself behind the steering wheel of the lieutenant’s car.

“Sure you do!” the
teniente
almost screeched.
“Claro que sí!”

The men out front stopped talking to one another. They froze in rapt attention. A hand slipped around the tall spike of the gate.

My mother stood slowly, her face suddenly notched with concern. George read the anxiety in her eyes. Just as slowly, he moved back from the big man, stepping from relish to dread.

“Come on!” the
teniente
called, in a voice that was higher than his own. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go grab the wheel!” Canales lunged forward and grabbed George’s arm, and his men at the gate shifted like cogs in a gearbox. Mother seized George’s other arm. I scuttled back on the grass, propelling myself by the heels of my boots. My brother’s eyes were pinched, and I could feel myself ready to cry.

“No,” Mother said firmly. “No. He’s not going anywhere. He has other things to do. The boy stays with me.”

“Hyeh, hyeh!” the police chief barked. “Stay here? When he can come on rounds with the
guardia civil?
Those ‘other things’ can wait,
señora.
You will come with your father’s old student.
No es cierto,
Georgie?” Isn’t that right?

The man pulled on George. My mother pulled back. She had concluded by then that this was no lighthearted invitation. The lieutenant had not come to share pleasantries and ask George on an impromptu outing. All this—the late-afternoon visit, the men at the gate, the car in the road—was part of a careful plan. They were here because the son of Don Jorge, a little half-gringo, would make a good buffer, a portable human shield. With the child of the
jefe
in his arms, the policeman could be sure the rebels would leave him alone. It was suddenly apparent to Mother that he was prepared to kidnap her son for that assurance, if necessary.

They tugged at him like that, the man babbling his baby talk, the woman clutching her child, until she threw two adamant arms around George and, in so doing, pinned herself to the policeman’s chest. George began to cry. So did I. Then the wind changed, the men at the gate called out to their chief, and he retreated hastily, tripping backward along the walk like a marionette dancing offstage.

Out in the street, a car door slammed shut. Mother took us indoors, shaking.

I mark that day as the threshold of a new awareness. Until that moment, I had always feared ghosts. I had been afraid of the night, of dark forces, of the dead, black light. It had never occurred to me to fear mortal men. But I could see from the grimness of my mother’s eyes, from the way she clasped George to her chest, that ordinary humans were just as terrifying—that we had survived a struggle as deadly as any bout with El Aya Uma. That a policeman who professed to be a friend of my father
might steal my brother away as smartly as “The Thirsty One” could rip a head off a neck.

This lesson in the way the world worked was more troubling for another reason. I had been shown
leyendas
to live by, been given an instrument to deflect evil; Antonio had taught me how to call up
historias,
turn a
qosqo
against the night, or against a curse, or even against a root that was growing under my house. But something told me that I could not have sucked the black light out of
Teniente
Canales, spit it out into a stone. If he had not decided to let go of my brother, if he had not been called away—for whatever reason—some terrible thing might have befallen us. For all my father’s bright swagger—for all our big house and lush garden and eager servants—there would have been nothing we could do.

When Vicki came downstairs from her room, her curly hair tousled and her eyes weary from reading the book tucked under her arm, she found the three of us sitting on the sofa, silently staring ahead. She rubbed her eyes with her fists, yawned, slumped into a chair, and opened her book again. We sat for hours, it seemed, like that: my mother stroking George’s hair, George looking through the window, I glancing down at the place in my cotton dress where I figured my umbilical to be.

When Papi came home, he said Canales would never have hurt us. “Of course not! My old student from the police academy? My friend? Never!” But I heard him double-bolt the doors, move chairs under the knobs, just in case. The next day, Flavio told Mother that the note under the
teniente
’s windshield had turned out to be an empty threat. When the sun had appeared that morning, Canales got up with his throat intact.

Within a few days the strikers relented. Politics had promised them a workers’ paradise but had left their bellies growling. They missed the rations of meat—a kilo a day—their rice and beans; and however inadequate their cinder-block housing was, they
wanted Grace to bring back the water, turn the electricity on again. And so our little world went back to normal. The laborers returned to the factories, the engineers to their desks, Flavio and Claudia to our kitchen, Antonio to our garden, and the APRA slipped off to hungrier enclaves. Leaving a vague uneasiness behind.

When Peru finally elected a socialist president in 1985, thirty-one years later, the country would be a different place. Haya de la Torre would be dead, Papi would be raising factories on other shores, police lieutenant Canales would be living on a fat pension, and the godchildren of the Apristas, fierce communist guerrillas calling themselves The Shining Path, would slash through the mountains, leaving thirty thousand corpses in their wake.

Peru would be one of the world’s last strongholds of communism. It would have more to fear than its ghosts.

IT WAS, IN
every sense, the age of politics. Mother began to worry about her children’s place in the world. How far could we possibly get along in it without the right education? She was firmly against shipping us to private schools in faraway Trujillo or Lima. The farthest she would send Vicki was to the nuns at a nearby convent, but the only things the girl seemed to be studying there were stories even more terrifying than the ones the
indígenas
had told us: tales about purgatory and damnation. Finally, it was decided that Vicki should have a tutor and that her tutor should come to the house.

Her teacher was Miss Paula Roy, an American missionary whose spindly body and fried hair were remarkably like the image of Ichabod Crane I had seen in one of Vicki’s books. Miss Roy was just the kind of teacher my eight-year-old sister liked. Tough, exacting, yet surprisingly willing to spend long hours
yammering about the most girly aspects of some obscure English novel.

Miss Roy was capable of surprising even me. “This is for you,” she said the day George turned six. She handed me a small, painted dog standing precariously on stilts. Out of his mouth, in a jaunty display of canine camaraderie, hung a sloppy pink tongue.

“Here,” Miss Roy said, bending over ceremoniously and peering at me over her glasses. “Let me pin it on you.”

I wore it that afternoon and every other from then on, until the day one of the American
solteros
pointed at my chest and shouted, “Goofy! That’s Goofy you’ve got there, honey!”