American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [109]
But at two o’clock in the morning, Papi swung in through the front door, lit to the gills. Mother had been sitting in the living room waiting for him, her cigarette glowing in the dark. The crescendo of their exchange was what woke me—first came the Valkyrie, then came the basso. A two-part invention. With cymbals.
The first dish flew into the floor of the hallway. The second punched a hole in the living room wall. Vicki and I sat up. George came in, rubbing his eyes.
“They’re at it again,” he said.
“I know,” said Vicki. “Don’t worry. Sit here with us. It’ll be over soon.”
We sat there listening, watching the light flicker on the walls. Cars were moving along Avenida Angamos, even at that hour of the night.
“I’m fed up, Jorge! You know what that means? Fed up!” and the walls reverberated with another explosion.
“Ay, por Dios!” croaked the answer, and we heard the shards under his shoes.
But it didn’t stop. The upstairs neighbors clomped down to complain. Mother stormed past into the street, flagged down a taxi, and directed the driver to my grandparents’ house. “Espérate,” she told him as he gawped at her night clothes—wait—and then she stepped out of the cab and climbed onto the ledge under my uncle’s window. “Víc-tor!” she sang into the night. “Ayúdame.” Help.
The next thing we knew, Tío Víctor was standing in our bedroom doorway, his silhouette sharp against the blaze of the hallway. He was shaking his head.
The sight of him—black against the fulgor of light—is etched into memory like a chord before the key modulates, like a sign that the tempo must change. There was no fire, no corpse, no wounds, but I knew this time things had gone too far. Until then we children had been spectators at a private drama. We had seen curtains rise, curtains fall, costumes change, and then we had watched our players strut out again, slick back their hair. My uncle’s silhouette changed everything. We were pathetic. We were disgusting. The pretense was pointless now. People knew.
Our parents scrambled to make the unfortunate scene up to us. One languid Sunday afternoon, Papi drove us out the bumpy Carretera Central to Peru’s mecca of roast chicken, a ranch two hours outside Lima, La Granja Azul. With us was our cousin Cito. He was six foot two and buckram straight, a clone of his father, the distinguished and extravagantly mustachioed comandante Tío Salvador. We took a table in a tiled courtyard beside a flowering garden, under the crest of a looming mountain.
The chicken arrived in heaping rattan baskets, fragrant and steaming with cumin and achiote, flanked by crisp yucca fries and a piquant sauce of ají. The grown-ups drank Pilsen; the children, chicha morada. It was a lotus-eater’s banquet, an orgy of forgetting. Peruvian style.
There was much to enchant us. Family stories wove their sultry magic, curling into our brains like a drug. It seemed that Tío Salvador, who was one of the most skilled sword fighters in all Peru, had recently challenged someone to a duel and nicked someone with his florete. It was in all the newspapers. They were thrilled about this, brought up the story of the monkey and the anteater, and reminisced about Papi’s godfather, an old roué who’d been shot in the back on his way into his mistress’s house.
George and I were captivated by those stories and lingered long after lunch to hear them, but the conversation soon turned to subjects less interesting to us: how four new trucks with the Techo Rex logo were sitting idle in Lima. Bored, we decided to leave the adults to their lamentations. We hadn’t been this close to Pachamama in a long time. We decided to head up the mountain behind us.
We trudged up the gray dirt, staring down at our feet, scouring the trail for evidence of a benevolent apu. The mountain was barren, a