American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [32]
Old Tía Carmen came and went less and less often. She stayed up in the hills, on the hacienda where her mother had hidden away. Eventually, she married an ill-tempered fortune hunter with expensive tastes and a greedy heart. With his fangs deep into her inheritance, he was drawing out all the rest of her: health, strength, the vitality of her remaining days.
Mother and Papi continued to live in Tía Carmen’s languid corner of Lima, where the streets were lined with shade trees, bougainvillea spilled from rooftops, and fog smelled of jasmine. There was a grocer nearby, and a coffee shop. Mornings brought a procession of vendors: the knife grinder with his high, sad whistle, the bread man with gold-rimmed teeth, the fruit ladies with their brightly striped skirts and braids. In the afternoons, a russet-faced girl hawked tamales. There was a sleepy aspect to this life. One might have assumed there was peace of a kind.
But the truth was a different story. Just as the world slid into its version of a pleito and the Cold War bit in, Mother began greeting the mornings with panic. She was pregnant again. She had never been one to look back, but she was thirty-four, about to be a mother for the second time, and her independence had turned into bewilderment. She felt forsaken, alone. At twenty-nine, Papi had left the bridge-building position at the Department of Public Works. He was working three jobs to meet the high cost of living: as rookie engineer for the American company of W. R. Grace, as greenhorn professor at the Colegio de Ingenieros, and as an instructor at the Academy of Police. He had no time to dote on her.
A letter to her parents struck a plaintive note. I’m expecting another child, she wrote, and am dreading the humiliations of another public birth in this city. I’m walking the streets like a banshee. All I can think of is you.
In the spring of 1948, when the answer to that letter came, for the first time in two and a half years my father noticed the postmark. It was not from Seattle. It was from Rawlins, Wyoming. He swallowed hard, said nothing. She opened the envelope, drew out the contents: Two tickets home. Two one-way passages.
For three months, Mother and Vicki were gone. The first two months were spent awaiting the birth; the third, recovering from its ordeal.
Mother’s second child entered this world not like a descendant of la Conquista—crown first, courtiers all about—but like a ferret with its teeth in her entrails. It was a difficult birth, breech. In Lima, when Papi received the telegram about his boy, he celebrated many times over, with multiple corks on the fly.
It would be different if I were with Jorge’s family now, Mother said to her mother one afternoon when the two of them were alone. You can’t imagine how difficult his mother is.
Yes, dear? her own mother said simply, tugging spectacles down her nose.
She kept taking Vicki away from me, making me feel as if I were some barn animal. She doesn’t like me. I don’t know why. She’s not like any mother I’ve ever known. More like a jealous girlfriend. I think she’d be happy to drive me out and get her son back in her clutches again.
Aw, come on, said my grandfather, walking in from the other room.
Darling, said my grandmother to him, listen to her. Hear what she has to say.
No. I’m not listening to another word. Takey, he said to my mother, using the name he had called her since infancy, that woman is related to you now. He nodded toward the children. She is part of your life.
Later that week, Mother boarded the plane to Lima with three-year-old Vicki clutching her skirt. A violin nestled in one arm, a male infant in the other.
5
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GODS AND SHAMANS
Dioses y Brujas
THERE’S MORE TO this world than it tells us. I’ve always known it. I’m haunted by an unseen dimension in which everything has roots, logic, and reasons—a tie to another point in time. I believe this with a child’s certainty: That there are demons and angels. That there is kismet. That stars