American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [33]
Connections are everywhere, if I can track them. Here’s one: A geological force called “man” fashions a rocket from minerals on the side of a hill. There is iron, a little nickel, a bit of potassium, some zinc. The minerals are the residue of his ancestors’ bones. He shoots them skyward, opens a hole in the stratosphere, and hundreds of years later the dust of his forefathers—with its ancient loves and antipathies—rains down on his descendants. They don’t see it, they don’t know it. But it sifts gently over them; it settles.
As a child I saw the obvious parallels: Jesus and sun gods, witches and Buddhas. What was Jesus if not inti, the Inca thresher of earthly light? What was a witch if not hunger, a longing for order, a hand in the dark? What were the New Testament, the Torah, the Koran, the Upanishads if not guiding legends, historias to lead us through? Even Gautama Buddha, in his infinite wisdom—in the shade of a tree, on another side of time—practiced the magic of the Inca: Take in the evil, shoot it into a stone. Breathe it in, breathe it out. Until enlightenment comes.
I had equations for everything. If my grandfather was not descending the staircase, it was because a force was pulling him up. If I was drawn to a loco, it was because madness tinged my blood. If I could feel both gringa and Peruvian, it was because I juggled two brains in my head. If the image of my mother and a stranger was burned into memory, my mind was trying to show me something my eyes couldn’t see. The possibilities of connections were legion, and they set me to staring at ceilings with plans. There were inheritances to track. Ramifications to hunt. Vines to follow.
Little wonder that for the rest of my life I have studied the string that ties my parents together and shackles them back to their pasts. I want reasons for what drew them together, for turns they took from the roads they’d known. As a teenager, I was lured by their story in the way any child would be. But in the years of hearing and rehearing it, I have seen that it holds more than logic: There is a prayer in its recitation, and a lesson at the end of the prayer.
WHEN MOTHER RETURNED to Lima with her three precious charges—Vicki, George, and her violin—she found Papi living with a monkey and an anteater. They were occupying the roof of the Avenida Mariátegui house, clambering down the stairs from time to time to scare the maid, Concepción, or to send one of my father’s drinking buddies howling out the door in a hallucinatory rant. The monkey was dun brown, tall as a seven-year-old, with beady black eyes and a bark like the squeak of a hinge. The anteater was an aging caudillo, surveying the rooftops of Lima with an attitude, flicking his tongue from his snout.
It had taken no more than a month for a manly mayhem to overtake Tía Carmen’s place. A gathering spot for Papi’s companions—his engineering students from the Colegio, police initiates from the academy, and solitary gringos from W. R. Grace—the house had become more drinking establishment than home, more fraternity than the sleepy colonial address my mother had left behind.
Papi’s uncle, Tío Salvador Mariátegui, a tall, gloriously whiskered, bemedaled naval comandante, had brought the monkey and anteater from one of his forays into the Amazon. It was said that he had conquered the tributaries of that great river as thoroughly as he had the hairs of his extravagant mustache, a magnificent handlebar that swooped out and back with rococo flourish. Less than a decade later, in 1958, Tío Salvador would pack up three hundred years of his ancestors’ armor, pin innumerable medals onto his admiral’s uniform, and set out to become emperor of Andorra, a tiny principality in the east Pyrenees. But for now, it was jungle animals he ruled. The unlikely twosome he’d brought onboard the ship had entertained the sailors