American Chica (20 page)

The crushing power of Pachamama. Earth mother. I had heard about her from Antonio: She was the substance from which all things were made, from which all life arose, to which all would return. He’d hold rocks aloft in the garden. “You see this one, Marisi?” he’d say. Then he’d talk about its relative density, color, weight. He’d tell me what was in it: life’s dust, desiccated flowers, excrement, crushed butterflies, stillborn babies, winged monsters, flesh of snakes, bones of men, fallen monuments, fused together in Pachamama, waiting for regeneration, whenever the
apus
willed. Stones had energy and we, as earth’s creatures, could call forth their ancient, cumulative power, if we were wise enough.

I figured my father was on excellent terms with Pachamama. How could he not be—a man who moved the earth, raised
factories, turned cane into so many permutations? He was surely smiled on by the
apus.
Engineers as a whole were beloved in Peru.
Doctor Arana,
the workers and townspeople called him,
El Doctor Ingeniero,
with a reverence they reserved for priests. A status was accorded engineers that far outweighed any status accorded physicians or lawyers. Engineers pushed aside Pachamama, raised things up from her, the way the Inca had raised temples at Sacsayhuaman. They were rock movers, stone fitters, empire builders, with rare knowledge and intricate minds. They were respected, admired in Peru—so much so that the Republic had made presidents of them.

In any case, when I, the engineer’s daughter, returned from the balconies of Lima to the well-turned soil of our garden, I was glad to be coming home. On the long trip from the capital to Cartavio, we seemed to be shucking modernity. The massive concrete and wood facades were replaced by single-family dwellings, the city was replaced by smaller and smaller towns, until there was hardly a town at all, just the spine of Pachamama. Then Cartavio sprang toward us, in all its full flower.

Antonio seemed happy to see me. I was a Christian now and told him so, brandishing the prayer cards that my grandmother had given me, with the Virgin and Santa Rosa in richly draped gowns. He nodded happily and told me that he, too, prayed to the Virgin. “She’s part of it, yes. A big part of it.” He took out his own prayer card: It was a greasy slip of paper, worn and yellowed by use, with a picture of Jesus’ face, eyes cast heavenward and red heart in evidence, rays blazing from his chest. “Everything fits together, Marisi,” he said, as I followed him back to the garden. “Because everything springs from the stuff beneath our feet, these rocks. The Virgin and the Christ are from Pachamama just as you and I are from Pachamama, just as that tree over there is, and that smokestack above the tree is. They all
have a place on this earth.” He held out a handful of dirt, and grinned.

I had much more to learn from Antonio, and I turned to those lessons eagerly. For every recitation I gave him about Abuelita’s house and the wondrous events that had transpired in it, I was traded a lecture about centers of energy. Apart from my
qosqo,
the most powerful seat of my soul, there were the
chaki
in my feet, the
sonqo
in my heart, and the
nosko
just at the point where my forehead meets my hair. If I could concentrate all my being into these sites, Antonio said, I could use them to fend off evil or to sense things a human couldn’t ordinarily sense. I might conjure a message from Pachamama herself, rising up through the bowels of the earth, passing up my
chaki
to my
qosqo
to my
sonqo
to my
nosko,
at which point a flash of comprehension would tell me what I needed to know. “Someday, when all the people of this world gain wisdom,” Antonio told me, “the Pachakutekk will come.”

“The Pachakutekk?” I asked him.

“Yes, Marisi, that is when the world will turn. If we are good enough, kind enough, the world will have the right sort of Pachakutekk. Evil will fly to the stars and we will live on Pachamama in peace.” Until that point, Antonio added, the earth would rumble and turn, but not in a happy way.

The earth rumbled and turned not long after, and, as he had said, not in a happy way. I was sitting at the piano with my mother one evening, when she announced quite suddenly that she wanted to send Antonio away.

“He has a good head, that boy,” she said. “I want to get him out of this nowhere place. Give him some
mundo.
Send him to school.”

My heart plunged. Send Antonio to school? Away from Cartavio? What would I do without him to talk to about
brujas
and Pachamama and the power of my
qosqo?
I felt a wave of
black light advance toward me, recede, then advance again with a terrible energy.

I put my feet squarely on the floor and concentrated every cell of me. Come into me now, Pachamama, help me. Up the
chaki
to the
qosqo
to the
sonqo
to the
nosko.
Suddenly the front door whirled open and my father stood there, framed in the doorway as the trees swayed behind him in the dark.

“We’re leaving Cartavio,” he thundered. “Tomorrow we pack.”

So it was I who left Antonio, not the other way around. It was a strange kind of Pachakutekk, but the world was definitely turning. W. R. Grace had decided to send my father to more ambitious climes: Paramonga, where the Americans were not only spinning out sugar and paper, they were racing into the plastics age.

Flavio, Claudia, and Antonio busily helped us pack. There was hardly time to say sad good-byes, for my father’s replacement was on his way to take over the house. On the morning that we boarded Don Pepe’s Chevrolet to leave, I found Antonio squatting by the front gate, waiting to see me. He was wearing a clean white shirt, and his straight, black hair was brushed back against his head. When he stood, I shot into his arms. He pressed me to him and then drew away, handed me a round, black pebble, and said he would never forget the things I had taught him. “Take this bit of earth, this little piece of Pachamama,” he said. “Send your worries into it. And when you speak,
gordita,
I promise it will speak to me.” I turned it in my hand, its shape as sleek and cunning as the blue telephone my father had tricked me with in Lima. “Yes,” I said.
Sí.

THE ROAD FROM
Cartavio to Paramonga led through Chan Chan, the thousand-year-old metropolis of the Chimu kings, a labyrinthine mud remnant of an empire that had once stretched between the Andes and the sea, along seven hundred miles of
Peruvian coast. The Chimu were a powerful, rigidly class-conscious people who cherished their engineers, abused their peons, butchered their thieves, fashioned canals, and loved jewelry. When the Inca armies swept into Chan Chan in 1470 and carried off its bespangled king, Minchancaman, the Inca inherited a vast repository of Chimu knowledge, from complex hydraulics to the forging of gold. But the Incas would not remain victors for long. When the Spanish conquest of Peru began in earnest half a century later, the mighty Incas were reduced to servants, and the mighty city of Chan Chan was abandoned to the desert wind. Now, from the roads, it was barely discernible, a long hump in the yellow sand.

We drove past the iron-girded mansions of the city of Trujillo, with their elaborate white
portales
and carved mahogany balconies. It was an ancient city, founded in 1534 by the pig-farmer conquistador Francisco Pizarro to honor the Trujillo of his birth, a town in Spain’s Extremadura. By the 1800s, when the elegant liberator José de San Martín had made it the capital of the province of La Libertad, many of Peru’s richest families had settled there. It was also there—in the 1930s—that the first stirrings of Peruvian socialism were felt as Peru’s poor wandered wide-eyed down Trujillo’s avenues, lined with resplendent homes. The revolutionary spirit of Trujillo was now stalking all Peru.

We continued south on the Pan American Highway, that dust-blown ribbon of asphalt that someday would connect Alaska to Chile and memorialize the trip primitive man had made thirty thousand years before. As we sped south of Trujillo, south of the Moche Valley, south of the Huaca del Sol y de la Luna, the land grew bleak and harsh, a terrain as implausible as it was alluring, as pocked as the face of the moon. The cordillera of the Andes raced by on our left, coal black and sinister. To our right, wind-combed bosoms of sand shivered their way to the sea.

Drop four people into Peru, the saying goes, in four different places, and though they may touch down a few hundred miles apart, they will think themselves in four corners of the world. The country is not large—never more than five hundred miles across at any point, and twelve hundred miles deep—tucked into the west coast of South America, where the breast of the continent swells. It is only three times larger than California. Yet, for all its compactness, Peru is a model of earthly diversities: icy Andean peaks, dense Amazon jungle, relentlessly chapped deserts, and a coast that glistens under the rough surf of the Pacific.

The five of us stared out at that coast as it spooled by our windows; we babbled randomly, not searching one another’s eyes. It strikes me only now, as I think back on it, how little I had been told about my family’s trip to the United States. It had happened only a few months before, but after George’s boots and hat had been displayed, his holsters and toy guns—after I’d been handed a candy or two and a recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
HMS Pinafore
—I pursued no further information. I don’t remember asking about my American grandparents, who remained, until the moment I set eyes on them, inexplicable mysteries, cataloged under the wrong name. I cannot say whether or not it was a willful refusal to explore their experiences; perhaps it was because I was resentful, or hopelessly ignorant, or because I was content to be the kind of Peruvian who doesn’t think beyond what she sees,
chica mesquina,
provincial to the core. Or perhaps it was because I worried that in some way the gearwork had shifted, that my parents had come home new, and that changes were bound to be for the worse. Or perhaps the rest of my family
was
talking about that faraway fantasyland; I just didn’t want to hear it. All I remember is my father and Georgie chatting aimlessly in the wide front seat next to Don Pepe, while Mother, Vicki, and I chatted aimlessly in the rear—
hombres en frente, mujeres atrás,
Peruvian style. I don’t recall hearing a word about their travels.

George and I had hoped Don Pepe would catch up with our cousin Salvadorcito, a twenty-year-old naval cadet on leave who had captained the truck that carried our things from Cartavio that morning. He was the only son of Tío Salvador, our quixotic uncle, who, a few years earlier, had deposited the anteater and monkey with my father in Lima. Perhaps only to us, Cito seemed more adventurous than his eccentric father. The last we had seen of him, he had looked adventurous indeed—sitting astride Mother’s piano, bouncing down the road with his skinny elbows flapping like a
gallinazo’s,
one hand pointing to the horizon.

But Cito was nowhere to be seen on that vacant highway. Our loud game of “I Spy” collapsed into a long, contemplative gaze out the window. Sand. A whorl of dust. A pile of stones. Four poles and a sagging roof of straw. A cross thrust into a mound. Vicki read. Mother slept. Papi yammered about politics with Don Pepe. George looked out at Peru with a twitch tugging his face—one more thing he had brought back from America, apart from his cowboy gear. Six hours later we flew past a field of marigolds. It was as bold a signal of our approach as we could have wished for, but we continued to stare at the orange expanse like astronauts caught in a warp.
“Veinte minutos más!”
cried our driver, and then, quite suddenly, Paramonga filled our heads with a burst of astringent perfume.

We passed from flowers into fields of ripe sugarcane, each thick stalk raising a white-plumed banner of welcome. On the side of the road, where the blacktop sliced into the dirt, big-skirted
cholas
trudged with their children, trailing puffs of yellow dust from their heels and turning to peer at us from fossil-hard faces. A high-walled ancient
fortaleza,
once home to the Chimu, whirred past us on the left and then we saw the large white board with the crisp green lettering:
HACIENDA PARAMONGA.

It was different—very different—from Cartavio. In Cartavio, Grace had built an elaborate town, with a central plaza that held
a mayoral mansion; a local government office; a looming, colonial church; a police headquarters; and the
señorita’s
school. The workers’ cinder-block housing had been built around that square, like spokes off a giant wheel. To one side of the plaza had been the market, where farmers could sell their meat and produce. The chief engineers’ houses, where we lived, had been a paradise well apart from the hubbub, behind a high wall. In Cartavio, the roads had been improvised, the cane cut away, the dust tamped down, and surfaces slicked with molasses, so that a raw sweetness filled the air.