American Chica Read online

  OUR HOUSE STOOD on the corner of prime real estate, behind the offices of head engineers but far enough from the factory to allow us to ignore the less pleasant aspects of a churning industry. Finished in white stucco and shielded by manicured rows of tropical botanica, the house loomed above its compound walls like a castle behind a barricade. Flowers cascaded from its ramparts. In the garden, trees pushed forth pineapples, lucuma, bananas, and mango. An iron gate shut out the world. Behind the gate and the wall and the garden, the house itself was impervious to vendors, to factory workers, to ordinary Peruvians, to the sprawl of humanity that struggled a few hundred feet from its door.

  The house was skirted by a capacious veranda. Inside, it was filled with high-ceilinged white rooms, heavy doors, yawning keyholes, arched passageways, Spanish tile. The living room—the sala—was dominated by my mother’s ornate ebony piano. The master bedroom lay behind it, on the other side of a carved double door, so that when those doors were thrown open, the entire sala was surveyable from my parents’ bed—a bizarre feature, but houses in outlying haciendas were often capricious and irregular. Through an open arch, you could go from our sala to the dining room, which held two massive pieces of furniture—a table and an aparador, carved with undulating scallops and garlands. The kitchen was stark, a workroom for servants, stripped down and graceless. A cavernous enamel sink—pocked and yellow—jutted from the wall. There was a simple blue table where we three children and our servants took meals. The kitchen door led to a back atrium garden. On the other side of that, behind a wall, were the servants’ quarters, a shabby little building that could sleep six in two spare rooms. There was a stall with a spigot where our mayordomo and amas could wash, a storage area, and a concrete staircase that led to their rooms. To the left of those stairs, under a shed of bare wood and chicken wire, were the animal cages. At four, I was told very clearly—as my older brother and sister, George and Vicki, had been—that I was not allowed in the servants’ quarters. The cages were my demarcation line; they were the point beyond which I could not go.

  Our own rooms were upstairs, well away from our parents’ bedroom and out of the circuit of revelers when a party was afoot. After dinner, which we regularly took in the kitchen, the amas would trot us upstairs and bathe us, struggling with their small arms to balance us in the tubs. We would loll about in our pajamas thereafter. There never seemed any urgency to get us to bed, which was just as well because all three of us were terrified of the dark, afraid to look out the windows at tree branches, so well had our amas taught us that pishtacos were perched there, slavering and squinting in.

  Had we overcome our fears and looked out those windows onto Cartavio’s main residential street beyond our own house, we would have seen five other houses of the first rank, equally grand, equally walled. Behind them, a row of modest ones for the lesser company families. Our immediate neighbors were the Lattos, freckle-faced Scots whose brogue-filtered Spanish made George and me horselaugh into our hands. Their eight-year-old son, Billy, was the undisputed object of Vicki’s affection. He was a straight, good-looking boy with an easy smile. He would direct his grins freely to Vicki, but George and I—who thought ourselves far more appealing than our prickly sister—had to work hard to draw his charms: We’d stand on our heads, swing from trees, make fools of ourselves if we had to, for the incomparable joy of gazing on his teeth.

  As a young child, my days unfolded in the garden. It was, as every garden in that coastal desert is, an artificial paradise: invented, deceptive, precarious. Without human hands to tend it, the lush vegetation would have dried to a husk and sifted down into an arid dune. For years, I did not know how tentative that childhood environment was. Walled in, with green crowding our senses and the deep sweetness of fruit and sugar in the air, I felt a sense of entitlement, as if my world would ever be so richly hung. But it was an illusion, and many had labored to create it: to make us feel as if we were emperors of a verdant oasis on the banks of the Amazon just north of the Andes, where the green was unrestrained.

  Fooled, happy, ignorant, George and I would splash in the duck pond our father had built for us. Or we would play with the animals we kept in the cages out back where the servants lived. We’d pet the rabbits, feed them fragrant verbena. We’d put chickens on the backs of goats and shriek with laughter as the bewildered creatures scrambled around in circles, the goats wild-eyed under their unruly riders, the chickens pounding the air.

  George was my hero, my general, my god. He was as bright and beautiful as I was fat and slow. He could prance and swagger as well as any cowboy in Mother’s storybook litany of Wild West valiants. He would hector; I would follow. He’d do mischief; I’d do cover-up. He’d get caught; I’d confess to everything. He’d be spanked; I’d yank down my pants. He’d yawp; I’d bawl louder. And so we spent our days, crawling under the house, devising schemes to scandalize the mayordomo, scare Claudia the cook out of her wits, or pester Vicki, whose prissy ways cried out for redress and revenge. If only to force her to look at us over an eternal rim of books.

  After lunch, after my father had come home, gazed at his wife’s Hollywood face, dozed off, and gone back to work, Mother came to the kitchen looking for us. First she’d put George in bed for his nap, then she’d lead me to her room for a musical siesta.

  My mother did not tell us much about herself beyond the fact that she had been a violinist when she and Papi had met in Boston. She was different, odd, that much I knew: porcelain-fair, near translucent, throwing off a kind of shimmer wherever she went. She spoke a halting Spanish, every bit as strange as that of our Scots neighbors; I recall peering into other people’s faces to see if it would make them laugh. Often, it would. But she did not mix much with Peruvians if my father was not about. She was not a social person. She seemed more inclined to spend time with her children than with women her age. Then again, she was so unlike any other woman in Cartavio. What distinguished her most from them was the way she moved, like no Peruvian I’d ever seen—straight ahead, gliding—a motion that led from the rib cage, not the hips. It was the kind of walk that tells you little about a body. Her clothes told less: They were loose and silky, more likely to drape from her shoulders than reveal her essential lineaments. She did not own a tightly belted, bust-hoisting, hip-flaunting dress, like those the Peruvian señoras wore.

  Very early, somehow—I don’t recall exactly why—in the same way that I dared not imagine what was beneath her frocks, I learned not to ask about her life before she married Papi. The sweet mildness of her demeanor, like the silk of her clothes, masked some indeterminate thing beneath. There was a hardness behind her glow. An ice. I felt I could quiz her to my heart’s content about music, which came to be the language between us. But beyond that—like the point beyond the animal cages—lay a zone I was not supposed to know.

  Her past was the only thing Mother was stingy about. Attentive to her children to the point of obsession, she doted on us, worried about us. Every headache was the start of some dread calenture of the brain. Every bellyache, the possibility that we were teeming with tropical parasites. I could make her ooze with love by telling her that I had eaten a wild strawberry from the roadside: She would be anxious for days that I had contracted some rare, Andean disease, taking my temperature at every opportunity, padding into my bedroom at night to lay a cool hand on my brow. Nowhere was her love more evident, however, than in the way she imparted her music to her children. It was, for her, a constant vocation. Any drama, any spectacle, any mathematical conundrum had a corresponding phrase of music, a melody that might frame it more effectively than words. It was as if she needed to convey the vocabulary and syntax of music to us as urgently as she needed to impart English. She would teach all three of us the language of music to some degree, but with time it became clear that I was the one she had chosen to be the beneficiary of this particular gift, and it was through music that she ultimately spoke to me most directly.

  At siesta time, she’d recite long strings of po
etry from memory for me. Or she’d try singing me to sleep—hopeless enterprises, since I found her poetry and songs more seductive than any prospect of slumber. Outside her room, I spoke Spanish. But inside, we were range-roving Americans, heirs of the king’s English, and Mother unfolded that world in verse: Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Gilbert and Sullivan’s pirates and maidens, Stephen Foster’s dreamers and chariots, Robert Burns’s banks and brae, George M. Cohan’s flag and salute, Irving Berlin’s moon and champagne.

  I would lie big-eyed, starstruck, as she spun visions of a faraway country where cowboys reigned, valleys were green, wildflowers sprang from the feet of great oaks, water was sipped—unboiled—from streams, opera houses were lined with red velvet, and sidewalks winked with radiant flecks of mica. “You’ll see it all someday, Mareezie,” she’d say of her melody-filled historias. “You’ll see it for yourself.”

  She would sing, then peek to see if I had drifted off. Into the fifth or sixth song, I knew to pretend. I’d burrow my ear into the place between her shoulder and her large, firm breast, reach an arm across her white throat to feel her corn-silk hair, and feign a deep, heavy breathing. When she stopped singing, I’d open one eye and see that she was asleep.

  She was a beautiful woman. Big-boned yet slender. Her forehead was deep, unlined, nearly browless, which gave her the look of a perpetually startled doll. She painted her lips to a fullness they did not have, and, when they were in repose, you could see their thinness beneath the color. It was a beguiling mouth, sloped slightly to one side, so that if you positioned yourself to her left you saw someone pensive, to her right, someone playful. “My slop-pail mug,” she called it, leaving me to wonder, in my narrow Peruvianness, what any one of those inexplicable American words—slop, pail, or mug—could possibly have to do with that lovely face. When she smiled and showed the little space between her two front teeth, it was enough to break my heart.

  I loved to watch her sleep, for there was a vulnerability in her face then that was not there when her eyes were fixed on me. Ordinarily, her stare was as hard as a statue’s, unreadable, until something brought her to the verge of anger, at which point her blue eyes would turn a harrowing shade of green. It was a color I did not like to see. But her most disturbing features, by far, were her violinist’s hands, which were large and square, with meaty, muscled fingers that seemed to belong to another body, not to the delicate queen who lay on the wide carved bed.

  When I had had my fill of studying her, I’d slip carefully out of her arms. I’d tiptoe off to wake up George, and in no time we were out in the garden with pockets full of bread—free of parents, free of the snoring mayordomo and the amas. Alone. Ready for our daily ritual with El Gringo.

  More vivid than any other sound in memory—the crow of the cock at dawn, the cooing of mourning doves—was the rhythm of his advance. A tap, thump, drag—ominous and regular—as he made his way down the street. We would stand under the lucuma tree and listen for his step, cock our ears toward it, feel the hairs rise against our collars as it approached.

  El loco, we’d whisper—the madman—and watch the black grow large in each other’s eyes. By the time we’d made it under the verbena, he was rapping the white stucco with his knuckles, bone-hard and sharp as weapons. When he reached the gate, we’d see the whole man. Eyeless. Rags like leathery wings. A purple stump where a foot should have been. Dried sugarcane for a crutch. When he threw back his head and let the sun fill his eye sockets, a wail would rise from his chest like the keen of a wounded animal. And then a stream of words, sliding at us in a high whinny so that we’d have to strain to catch it. Out, you little bastards! And he’d wham the fence with his makeshift staff. Out! Or I’ll call on the pishtacos! They’ll pluck you from that bush and eat your pygmy hearts!

  El Gringo, people called him. The American. Somehow, we believed he was one, although all evidence was to the contrary. He was small. Almost as small as we were. Dark. Like us.

  Weren’t all Americans as big, blond, and clear-eyed as our mother? We had serious reservations about her—she was so otherworldly, so ill-at-ease, so unwilling to conform, so mad in her own way—but it was terrifying to think she’d end up crazed and blind, staggering through some remote Andean backwater looking for her luminous land. Holding our breath against his stench, we crept out with our bread, dropped the offerings one by one into El Gringo’s grimy sack—buying our mother’s future, keeping the pishtacos at bay. Then we raced away, gasping and squealing, to our crawl space under the house. From there we would watch as he hobbled off to the neighbors. And we would worry.

  But there were afternoons when my mother would sing and I’d actually fall asleep. Then it would be her turn to slip away.

  One day, I woke to see the double doors wide open and her sitting in the sala, cameolike, her profile outlined against the wood of her piano.

  She was not alone.

  She was poised on one side of the sofa—its back toward me—her arm stretched out along its spine. Across, in the other corner of the same sofa, was a man. I did not know his name. His arm, like hers, was stretched along the back, and it was long and ruddy, with a halo of down against the skin. Their fingers were close. But did not touch.

  The casa de solteros, the bachelors’ quarters, was across from us. There, a rotating corps of young Americans and Northern Europeans came for Third World adventure and a shot at the boom. They were rough-hewn, long-legged. Almost as golden as my mother. More often than not they were war veterans—ex-army engineers—rail-hanging habitués of the bottle, with tales of hard-won battle.

  “Over here, let me tell you how I nearly got greased at Midway!” one would shout over a brimming glass of rum at one of my parents’ garden parties. Off they’d go, weaving legends, each one braver than the last.

  I liked these solteros. I liked them because they seemed to be at the white-hot core of a kid-hearted craziness that overtook the grown-ups from time to time. I liked them because of their laughter. I liked them for their sweet smell of Cartavio rum. I liked them most of all because, when their long limbs ambled through our gates, the sky would open and my mother’s eyes would dance.

  The man sitting with my mother was a soltero. Of that I was sure. Whether or not they’d been talking, I could not tell. I rubbed my eyes and focused closer. My mother had a sweet, peaceful expression on her face. The man looked at her, perfectly calm, and said something I could not hear.

  Suddenly, her outstretched hand flew to her forehead, and her long, thick fingers rested there for what seemed a great while, her eyes cast down. Then he stood, bowed awkwardly, and walked away.

  It was a fleeting gesture, that manual flutter from chair to brow, but I can see it still, engraved in memory like some irrevocable omen. Up, press. Presto, fermata. A passage that sounds again and again, as if its notes should lead to something else, some other movement. But that something else bows and spins and floats away. Off. Up. Out of sight, never to be explained.

  My mother’s hand floated down. She turned her face to the open doors of the bedroom and looked deep into my eyes. A pause, and then a radiant smile. “You slept this time!” she said. Her voice was so full of joy that my heart slipped a bit. There was no cause for joy in my napping. It had been a terrible lapse on my part: I had not awakened George. I had slept through our rendezvous with El Gringo. I had not given the beggar his sacramental scraps of bread. I had not kept the ghouls away. I had not protected my mother from a stone-blind fate.

  Her blue eyes were looking at me now with such love, though, I had to grin back. I flung myself off the bed, slipped into George’s old boots, and marched into the afternoon.

  I asked about the stranger on the sofa many times in decades to come—even caused a harrowing scene with my questions—but she only shook her head and said she had no recollection of him. “I can’t imagine who you saw there, Mareezie. I just can’t imagine.” Until I thought perhaps the whole thing had been a dre
am, and the man another ghost in my head.

  2

  —

  FATHERS

  Padres

  TWENTY YEARS BEFORE I leaned out the window and saw my parents laugh their way into the garden, my father’s father, the redoubtable Doctor Ingeniero Víctor Manuel Arana Sobrevilla, stopped coming down the stairs. He and his wife, Rosa Cisneros y Cisneros de Arana, and four of their six children lived five hundred miles away from our Cartavio hacienda in an old colonial house on Calle San Martín in Miraflores, a sleepy district on Lima’s outer lip, where the city trailed out to the sea. Their home was dark and knit with steep, narrow staircases that led where we children were afraid to go. In room after room of musty armoires and heirlooms, life hung like a relic, like a bat in an airless cave.

  No one acknowledged that there was something deeply wrong in this. That a brilliant man, highly educated, traveler of the world, would progressively trim back his life until he no longer stepped foot outside his house, until he was a specter up the stair.

  My father cared for his father, did not dare to wonder at the strangeness that had driven him up into a little room, far from kin. He was attentive to his mother, quick to assure her that her pantry would not run dry and humiliation would not drag them under. In the ‘30s, at the height of the global Depression, when it was clear that somebody had to be sent out to work, my father, the eldest of the six children, was the first to volunteer. For years, my grandfather stayed on the second floor, venturing down only for a special lunch, a family tea. Otherwise he was high up, behind a door: seldom seen. Meanwhile, perched on the wine-red brocade downstairs, my grandmother—my abuelita—sat and worried about how she would pay the maids, raise a family, face Lima.