American Chica (35 page)

There was another possibility: That an event that had seemed natural three years before, devoid of anything but the simplest curiosity, had multiplied of its own accord. That my curiosity—however innocent—had violated something so forbidden, so unfathomable, that a sick air would follow forever. Pandora’s box. Lift that tiny top, stretch those baby fingers, pull that little skirt, then giggle and walk away. But what billows behind is toxic. What seems barely fleeting grows.

I had always known—from every scrap of myth and scripture that had been planted in my brain—that even seemingly inconsequential things had consequences. An apple could cast you from the garden. Not just you, but all your generations to follow.
Here, peek at this, let me peek at that, and the toxins flow, evil multiplying on evil, hunting you down three years later. A man on a bicycle comes to collect.

Who can say where children get their resilience? Who can say how we put terror behind us and move down the road? I claim no special quality here beyond a blessed numbness, a realization that life was well outside my control. Fathers took new jobs, grandmothers died, parents squabbled, houses shrank, energy bubbles collided, poisons oozed, Campbell turned out to be Clapp, lions slipped out of their cages. The gift was to carry on.

So it was that when George whacked open my door and said, “Come on, let’s go!” I sighed and trotted after him, pulling our tin-pot armor behind. Juan Díaz was gone. He had left during the siesta. “Funny,” my mother commented, shaking her head, “I was so sure he was going to ask your father for a job. It goes to show: The man is prouder than I realized.”

I told nobody then or thereafter, curbing my tongue when Juan Díaz was referred to again and again for the rest of my childhood as the quintessence of old-fashioned loyalty: his bicycle ride of love. I did not want to reveal my complicity—the fact that I had showed myself to Antonio, the risk that Juan Díaz could expose me, the possibility that Antonio may have betrayed me—all those bits of a darker truth.

I put those complications behind me, did what any good warrior would do. I ran out to our vacant lot and marched into the battlefield again.

JUST AS LATIN
America swung into an anti-capitalist, anti-
yanqui
era, George and I entered a new phase of our own: We insisted on playing American games only. We had no idea that the political climate in Peru was as inhospitable to the United States as it was. We didn’t realize that Peru had had it with the colossus
up north. Three years before, the Central Intelligence Agency had brought down a leftist government in Guatemala, and Peruvian intellectuals were seething about that. Two years before, Fidel Castro had led a band of revolutionaries into southeastern Cuba to gather popular support for an overthrow of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. America was getting too cocky for its Latin neighbors. Insurrection was in the air. In Mexico City, Che Guevara was whipping up a fervor, planning a guerrilla-led revolution against the capitalists, which he hoped would spread like wildfire from Central America down through the Andes to Argentina.

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.