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By Root 762 0

registering our adolescent habits with alarm. His first week home was the easiest. The bills all got paid. Mother arranged for a vacation from the dress shop, and the two of them took to the kitchen to turn out criollo feasts. By the second week, she was back at work, and he was angry that his wife was waiting on other women in such a common establishment. The indignity of it. The insult. No woman in his family had ever had to do that. Never mind that she liked having her own money, that she was savoring the freedoms it gave her. He was plunking the Johnnie Walker on the table, cursing America’s crudeness, prowling the house like a jaguar in a cage. By the second month, they were bickering about new bills, about Peruvian versus American mores, about how each of them misused the other language’s preterite past. By the third month, Papi’s bags were packed. Before winter was hard upon us, a bitter wind would blow him out the door again.

He’d be back. The cycle was nothing new. It had happened the year Castro took Cuba. It had happened the spring a spy plane was shot down over Russia. It had happened the autumn of the first Catholic President. It had happened the summer East Germany built a wall. It had happened just after we watched our chief executive’s head explode into the streets of Dallas.

But the evidence, as I say, was in the details. I was looking for love with a grandmother’s charge on my shoulders, and it was finally in still, small voices that I found it. I heard it in the mornings when he came home, in the everyday pitter-patter on the other side of my wall. At dawn, when my parents were alone in their room, when the world had not encroached with its borders and geographies and biases and resentments, they would talk for hours. It was a light chatter, filled with dreams and amusements and a mutual concern about us. Mother would tell of her life, Papi would tell about his, and each would listen to the other, with little exclamations of delight. There was nothing earthshaking about this. They were stark polarities, my parents: irrepressibly different, adamantly themselves, but ardently, irrefutably in love. Abuelita had not been right about them. She hadn’t had any experience by which to judge their hard-won union. I didn’t have to tell them they should live together. They were who they were—nonconformists, independent. Doing fine with a hemisphere in between.

So have they been for well over half a century of marriage, for day after day of their turbulent fusion. Long after Abuelita’s plea in the coffee shop, my parents have chased each other from America to America, pursuing their love along the corridors of time: As Grandpa Doc flew into the blue after Grandma Lo. As pairs of eagles wheeled through the sky to remind me of them. As the dust of my abuelitos moved through God’s mill. As Antonio spawned future generations in the cane fields of Cartavio. As Juan Díaz disappeared into the hills of Pachamama. As Vicki became a professor of literature and big sister to thousands. As George became a psychiatrist, mender of broken minds. As I sprang capriciously from ballet to opera to books. The two halves of my parents stayed together.

That is the wonder of this tale.

EPILOGUE

VENICE MAY HAVE its Bridge of Sighs, but there is another one in Lima—Puente de los Suspiros—and every time I return to Peru, I find myself drawn to it, as if it holds some secret, some deeper meaning about life and love. It is not the imposing suspension bridge my father so admires: the kind of steel colossus that makes him slam on the brakes, pull the car over, get out and stare. Nothing like the Verrazano, Golden Gate, or Chesapeake Bay. And certainly nothing like that intricately wrought, melancholy structure that juts between palace and dungeon over the northeastern waters of Italy. This is a modest trestle, spanning a dry little gorge in the historic district of Barranco. Cut from wood a hundred years or so ago, it is short and square and simple. It was not built to inspire voyagers to nobler ground or brave new worlds. It is where