American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [29]
Out, she says. The hell out. Parrying with a new tone of her own.
Out. The direction she knows best. As in out for all those other Americans like her, who reach thresholds, vault fences, hurl themselves out, out, out, in a centripetal rush away.
She bolts down the stairs with the baby (thwap, thwap, thwap) on pink feet, and my father follows. Past his parents’ door, past the eyes of his mother’s ancestors peering from canvases, trammeled to walls. She opens the front door and hesitates in the frame; the baby looks back at him, rubs her eyes under a curl of golden hair. He rushes up, spins his wife around by her shoulders, and slaps her across the face.
When she tells me this part, she says, He spun me around by the shoulders. When he tells it to me later, the story acquires a detail—the smack on the head. He is full of old anger about it. Not against her, not even against himself, but against the wavering in the bridgework, the tic in the colonnades. I doddle my head at the both of them. I know what you mean, I say.
He manages to get her back up to their room again. He makes her some promises, vows the situation will change. The next day he secures an invitation from prim Tía Carmen. I can see what you’re going through, Jorge, she tells him. Look, I spend so much time on my hacienda. Why don’t you move into my Lima house?
Mother goes about my grandparents’ rooms quietly, retrieving her things: a toy here, a teacup there. Abuelita is heard intoning from another room, La gente tiene boca para hablar! Mouths are for speaking! But neither says a word.
The next night, my father inaugurates a protest all his own: He staggers in well after midnight. High as a spire.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN my mother and my grandmother—I know it now after all these years—was not one between woman and woman. It was the difference between an Anglo’s daughter and the mother of a Latin male. It was a difference between men and men.
The mother of a Latin male is the mother of a Latin male no matter what her class or education. The Mexican migrant worker was not about to surrender her boy to some clutch of strangers from whom he would learn alien notions of bonding and independence. No. A Latin macho must be gradually nurtured, sedulously cultivated, carefully groomed. It doesn’t fall to the father or some other hombre to shape him, as it does in Danville, Virginia, where, in all likelihood, that well-meaning gringo principal is still shooing boys onto a playing field to learn a thing or two from a man. In the mundo Latino, the task falls to the mother.
Latin man. Latin lover. The Anglo world doesn’t have a clue. Ask a North American to imagine the Latin lover, and she will conjure a priapic lothario, an inexhaustible inamorato with the brain of a bullock. She will imagine—because this is the northern equivalent—a man nudged to those arduous heights by other men like him, a kind of clubby, winking acceptance of goatishness passed down from grandfather to father to son.
Ask any Latin woman who has walked down an avenida in Buenos Aires or a dusty barriada on the outskirts of Caracas, and she will tell you a Latin man doesn’t need a gaggle of like-minded males around to make a piropo to a woman. A construction worker on the streets of Lima will follow her for blocks, sing in her ear, tell her how her face is breaking his heart. He doesn’t sit by the side of the road, whistle from a distance, make catcalls in a chorus.
In its proper Latin context, a Latin woman does not begrudge a man his street flirtations. They are inevitable, harmless, easily ignored—in ways, reassuring. Love, seduction, amor proprio: these things are taught to men by women in Latin America. It is the mothers who do the teaching. And, in the tutelage, a fabric is maintained.
The myth of the Latin man is all about lovemaking. About libido. In truth, there are subtler motivations at work. Latin men worship women. They are trained to. Mothers admit sons to