American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [100]
They did exactly as I said. They cleaned me and trussed me and strapped me to Babieca. And then the two of us rode out to meet the Moors. They were terrified when they saw me, clutching their breastplates at the very sight of my hair on the wind. “But she was dead!” they cried out. “They told us she was dead!” And then they scattered like crazed cockroaches. Vanquished.
“Of course you like to play those games,” Abuelita crowed as she poured tea for us one evening. “You two are probably very good at them.” Papi had taken me, George, and Vicki to our grandparents’ house for what would become our traditional Sunday visit. Mother had excused herself and stayed home.
“It’s in your blood, you know!” Abuelita continued. “Don’t forget that your great-great-great-grandfather (el bis bis bis bis!) General Joaquin Rubin de Celis de la Lastra was the first Spaniard to fall in the Battle of Ayacucho. You might even say that the fall from his horse marked the independence of Peru!”
“And how about Pedro Pablo Arana? El bis of the other side!” Tía Chaba chimed in, one eye on my shrinking grandfather, her hair piled high in a twist. “He led three hundred rebels on horses! Cataplún, cataplún! Swooping down from the mountains to fight the corrupt military tyrants!” She rapped the table with her beautiful long red fingernails, as if they were hooves. She flashed her eyes inside exquisitely drawn lines of kohl. Vicki grinned triumphantly.
Power. It was a family thing.
AS THE ARANA brothers were making their bid for power, establishing Techo Rex offices in Lima, importing the latest American engineering equipment, plotting like Cheops to erect something monumental, every law of thermodynamics was being played out within the confines of our house. Push was coming to shove. Electricity was filling the air. Even the nervousness that once coursed through George now snaked, through some Newtonian concatenation of converted energy, across the house to creep into Mother. Her brow was perpetually dug with Trouble, her eyes gun-barrel gray. Her fingers were chewed back, raw. I no longer saw them dancing along the neck of a violin or drawing on the wand of a bow. She seemed limp, lifeless, moving through rooms as if she no longer knew where she was. Looking for cues that weren’t there.
She seldom went out. Far from the gringos in the haciendas and free of the obligations of a teacher, she was afloat in an alien city, hovering above the ruckus like gossamer on the fly.
She tried to bear up by reading philosophy. The books were barometers of her mood: Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Will Durant’s The Lessons of History. The themes were will, control, subjugation: off a broad brush, on a large scale. When we’d walk in from school we’d see her reenter in stages: the chin up, the quick blink, the realization that we were standing before her, and then our mother descending the staircase of her mind, peering down at us from some far landing of consciousness. She was there, but she was somewhere else, too, like a lynx with its nose in the wind, sensing trails that could call her away.
Something had wormed deep into Papi, too, but it was Trouble of a different sort. He was home later and later. Out with old school friends. Out with engineers. Out with club mates. Out with old friends he met at the bar. Out.
There were endless excuses, dragged forth in the wee hours of morning. Words that slithered under doorjambs, over pillows, wedging their way into dreams. In all, there was a sense of intemperate crescendo, as when opera swings into a devil’s dance. The slurred opening, the long growl, the hammering on the door, the plangent trill of my mother’s voice when he staggered in under the influence, “This is what macho means, eh, Jorge?” Is this what Lima men do? They bickered at night, they sneered in the morning, they rolled their eyes heavenward, he lurched