American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [106]
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