American Chica (37 page)

She paused a bit to let it sink in. “The mountain didn’t do this to you, honey. The
indios
might tell you that, but it’s not true. They say the
duendes
this, the
pishtacos
that. Listen to me: You fell because it was the will of God. Sometimes God knocks us back a bit to remind us we’re not as big and mighty as we think.”

I studied her face.
“Señor
Gonzalez said the
apus
would be mad if we dug up the dead. And Grandpa Doc said there were injuns on Elk Mountain who believed the same thing.”

“Well, sometimes people say that for very good reasons. ‘Don’t touch the bones,’ they say, ‘or spirits will punish you.’ The truth is that if I died, and you saw someone picking the teeth out of my head, you probably wouldn’t like it very much. So we say, No, don’t do that. And to make people really pay attention, we make threats. Shout it.”

“Is that what you and Papi do?”

“Why?”

“Because you shout at each other all the time.”

She looked at me hard. Then she bent down and kissed my forehead.

“I shout because something is bugging me. I’m not sure what. Your father drinks because he thinks it’s
macho.
He’s actually a very good man. We have trouble understanding each other sometimes, Mareezie. We’re different people, with different heads.”

“But you just said you’re from the same mountain, and to the same mountain you’ll go.”

“Yes.” And then she tipped back her head and laughed, her eyes like periwinkle petals. “That is true, my precious angel. We are. And we will.”

Much after my fall, thirty years to the month to be exact, a gringo archaeologist dug an Inca princess out of the Nevado Ampato, a snowy peak twenty thousand feet high and one hundred thirty miles south of Cusco. The mummy was five hundred years old, but the girl had been no more than twelve when her family had carried her up and offered her to the mountain
apu.
She had long black hair, according to the man who found her, a ballerina’s neck, a sun-dried brain. They found the frozen remains of a chicken lunch and
chicha
in her stomach. She was wearing a yellow
aksu.

Juanita the Ice Maiden, they called her. Her flesh was freeze-dried to her bones. The gringo archaeologist brought her down, thawed her out, and one day she showed up under glass in Washington, D.C. Surely this would provoke the gods.

But nothing happened. The sun rose, the sun fell, moons came and went, and no retribution occurred. If ghosts were at work, they were taking their time. If God was at work, His mill hadn’t finished the job. The girl was feeding museum revenues, not buds on the slope. God and the
duendes
were playing a game. Something had changed the course.

Lying in that hospital bed, looking at the ceiling, I understood my fall exactly in that way. Something had interfered; something had changed the course: The
apu
had caught sight of my mother probably at the very instant she had given me up for dead. I had flapped my arms like a rag doll; she had turned her back. But it was that very motion, her whirling around, that had stopped the
apu
cold.

He saw her hair spin out like a pinwheel. Presented with that evidence, he realized I was not some ordinary child whose sacrifice would have no consequence. I was special; I had power. He could see that from the light that radiated from my mother like a cloudless morning. Inca gods had always found the color of the sun irresistible, as yellow-haired Pizarro came to know so well. If, between God and the
apu,
I had been rolling toward some serious blood payment, Mother’s gold had just bought me time.

LIES. I WAS
getting very good at them. Making up stories to explain what I couldn’t possibly know. Inventing excuses for my troubles in life. There is, after all, something indescribably rewarding in telling a good lie. You create your own truth. It is the essence of power. You do what you can.

I went back to school after a week’s convalescence, attending
Nutcracker
rehearsals with black stitches sprouting from my pate. “Maybe you can do something other than dance,” said the English ballet mistress, eyeing my head with dismay. “Maybe you can play the piano?”

“I want to dance,” I said adamantly. “I want to be onstage. I want to wear my costume.”

“Then you shall,” she said, and patted me on the head. “Fine.”

“You can play the piano?” said a ball of a girl, her face filled with admiration.
Tocas?

“Yes,” I said grandly. “Call me and I’ll play for you over the phone.”

When she called that night, I was ready.
“Hola,
Cristina. I’m walking over to the piano now. I’m sitting down on the bench. I’m adjusting the sheet music. Chopin.
Valse, opus 64.
I’m flexing my fingers. Ready?”

“Ready,” she squealed.

A record spun on our turntable. I lowered the arm. Arthur Rubenstein began to play.

“Hear me?” I said.

A brief silence in the receiver, and then her amazement gushed through the wire. “You can talk and play at the same time?”

“Sure. The
teléfono
is tucked in my shoulder. I do this all the time for my cousins in America.”

“Caramba,
Marisi. I had no idea you were so good.”

I turned the dial up slightly, made the music
più mosso.
And then I lifted the arm off the album. “There, I can’t play for long,” I said. “My injuries, you know.”

Lies. I was so good at them. More to the point, I loved them so. Why not? If I could slip from English to Spanish, from boys to ballet, from pledging American allegiance to swearing on life I was a Peruvian, from church to church, from Campbell to Clapp—why not from role to role, truth to truth? Lies. Thank you, God. You gave me a skill.

“My mother is pregnant,” I told
Señora
Arellano’s class.
Espera bebe.
Margarita had just announced that her mother was expecting, and the teacher was making happy cooing noises in her direction.

“Really?”
Señora
Arellano’s sweet face turned to me and she leaned a large bosom into her desk.
“Qué maravilla.
We’re expecting not just one baby in this class. But two.”

The next Saturday morning, Margarita banged her skinny little fist against our door and my father answered.

“Buenos días, señor,”
she said, her eyes big as Ping-Pong balls. “Is the
señora
having a baby?”

“Buenos días,
Margarita. Who told you that?”

“Marisi. She told us in school the other day. She said so in class.”

“Well, then, Marisi did not tell you the truth.”

“She lied?”

“If that’s what she said, she lied.”

After a stern lecture, Papi took me outside, called our friends over, and denounced me right there in our lot. “Listen, all of you. Marisi’s mother is
not
having a baby, and I’ll thank you to say so in school. When Marisi tells you something in the future, I want you to be skeptical. Tell her she can’t be trusted. Tell her you’re aware of her reputation. She needs to learn that lying doesn’t pay.”

I became the leper of Avenida Angamos. At first I was furious with Papi, but with the passing of every day I cared less. “See my sister?” Vicki announced to her friends in the school playground. “She lies. Don’t you, Marisi? Isn’t it so?”

“Yip,” I said, and giggled inside, imagining I’d just told a lie. But no one else was laughing.

“That
over there is not our
only
house,” I whispered to the ambassador’s son, standing under his fuchsia gateway and pointing down the street. “We have houses all over the world. One in
Cartavio, one in the United States of America, one in a little village in Switzerland. With swans. We just don’t like to show off.”

“Liar!” he screamed, and slammed the door.

“Marisita,” my abuelita said, “what part are you dancing in
The Nutcracker?
I’m coming to see it, you know.”

“The star,” I said recklessly. “Clara.” She’d bustle into the Teatro Municipal with red roses and a fancy box of chocolates and learn the truth soon enough.

I didn’t see Abuelita as often as I wanted to. She and Mother were hardly on speaking terms, and Mother no longer attended family gatherings. After my grandfather had descended the staircase to pose his question about whether or not he was despicable, Abuelita had decided the gringa’s presence was too hard on his nerves. But one day, after we’d been in the Lima house for almost two years, Abuelita showed up for George’s birthday.

She appeared in a belted navy blue dress, a single strand of pearls around her neck. Her shoes were pointed and high, her nails a deep claret. She walked in on a cloud of jasmine, handed Georgie her present, dropped into the chair closest to Mother, slipped her dark glasses into her purse, and squeezed the clasp shut with an annunciatory
snap.

“You know,” she said in a low voice to Mother, “a woman I know got into a brawl with her husband. He’d been out having drinks with his friends. (Men are like that, Marie. Especially if they have
sangre ligera.
Especially if they’re people of a certain class, accustomed to light hearts and a certain gregariousness. Even Alexander the Great got a little
borracho
between the wars.) Well, the woman was unreasonably angry, frustrated with her marriage, fed up
hasta aquí.
So she threw a plate across the room. You know what happened? It hit him in the head. The next thing she knew, her husband was dead.” Abuelita opened her purse and rummaged around in it. “All because of a few nips,” she added.
Unas copitas.

My mother watched the older woman draw out a handkerchief, unfold it, shake it into the air like a frail wing, refold it, and set it on her lap.

“That will not happen to your son,” Mother assured her. “I might throw a dish at a wall if he makes me angry, I might leave him, I might take the children and run away, I might do a million things. But I am not a stupid woman, Rosa. I will not kill him.”

My grandmother looked into her eyes for a very long time, sighed deeply, and shook her head up and down, indicating that she believed her.

Less than a week later—after I forced Margarita to snitch a can of ham from Sandra’s bomb shelter, after a skinny brown Santa Claus ran by sweating in the December heat, after Drosselmeyer tucked a nutcracker under his arm and went to a party, after the Mouse King was chased across stage at the Teatro Municipal, after I waltzed through the starring girl’s dreams in my blue petal costume—Mother proved that what she had told Abuelita was true.

Her arsenal was not pointing at my father. It was pointed away.

It happened like this: Papi stumbled in after an all-night bender with the
hombres.
Mother took her battle station by the Christmas tree, a flashing, revolving colossus of electrical wizardry he had fashioned from graduated Hula Hoops. At the very moment when porcelain might otherwise fly, she drew back and kicked the thing over. When the twenty-five hoops scattered their red and green across the floor—when the crash-bang clitterclatter had won his undivided attention—she set down her terms. “That’s it, Jorge. I’ve been in your country fourteen long years. No more. I’m going home.”

10

—

I
NDEPENDENCE

Sueños Norteños

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
I’d been in the United States awhile that I understood how stifling Peru had been for my mother: a closed world, our
mundo mesquino,
which, as a Peruvian, I thrived in and loved. There were family rules I’d always understood instinctively: Mind tradition, go into business with siblings, give preferential treatment to relatives, stay in the neighborhood, call on your grandparents every Sunday for tea. Eccentrics were forgiven—sword fighters, recluses, extroverts, wayward sons with illegitimate children. But neglect was inexcusable. A wife was supposed to look up to her mother-in-law, seek advice about children, plead for assistance if her man became unruly. Not mark her own turf, as my mother had done.