American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [37]
“Watch,” I said to George, as we stumbled away. “This will only make it worse.”
LOOKING BACK, I see that if I had a system of beliefs as a child this was it: the bruja, the loco, the look in any number of amas’ eyes when they spoke about the dead reaching for us with long, green fingers. I do not remember attending church. If priests were disseminating the word of God—and there was every evidence that they were there in Cartavio, scurrying from barrio to barrio in long brown robes—those men were not speaking to us. If Mother was telling us stories of Moses and Jesus—and most assuredly she was, judging by the little booklets that still sit on my shelf, colored in by my childish hand—those men were not speaking to my soul.
I cannot speak for George, whose spirit has always been greater than mine. I only had to look at him to understand what I should be feeling about a wounded animal, a beggar, a stranger at the gate. I cannot speak for Vicki, whose brain has always been better furnished than mine. I only had to ask her to tell me more about the pishtacos to hear long disquisitions about how it was all poppycock, the unfounded ravings of ignorant minds. But for me, the Indian leyendas were religion. They were my church, my commandments, my faith. I worried them in the way my Lima aunts fingered their rosaries. I knew that my mother disapproved of those tales, and yet I suspected that, as with much she appeared not to know about the Peruvian world around me, this was simply a language she did not understand.
The bruja’s warning about the vine shot through me with all the urgency of a Virginal sighting at Fatima. There was a fat black root under my house and someday it would wring my throat. The admonition was far more vivid than any litany of saints my Catholic father could recite for me or any hymn about rocks my Protestant mother could sing. It would be a long time before I could laugh at the bruja’s warning. I was convinced I’d find the vine at my window. I was sure I’d look up one night and watch it twitch its little black head and fly in at me. I may have learned to laugh at the bruja’s words but, to this day, I cannot stand to have anything rest on my neck.
THE ONE WHO taught me how to use Peru’s leyendas was Antonio. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, eighteen years old, one of seven servants in our house. From the moment my conscious world had other people in it, Antonio was the one I wanted to look at, be with, know. He was tall for an indigenous Peruvian, high-browed, straight-necked, with skin the color of cinnamon bark. His forearms and shoulders were hard from years of heavy lifting. Since twelve, he had taken odd jobs in the factory and the hacienda: heaving cane, lifting vats, packing paper, working in the houses of the rich.
He didn’t have the pocked face of a cane-cutter: no scars digging into his nose and cheeks, no welts inflicted by high cane when a field-worker’s machete slashes into the corte and angry stalks spring back like thorned swords. Antonio’s face was smooth. His eyes, black as a monkey’s. Ringing the straight, flat line of his mouth was a high ridge—almost purple—that I loved to look at, longed to trace with my finger, imagined from the window of my room whenever I heard him talking to our mayordomo, Flavio, or laughing with Claudia, the cook. His mouth was like a wale on ripe fruit.
But the thing I most loved about Antonio was the way he talked to me