American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [111]
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