American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [47]
Within a few days the strikers relented. Politics had promised them a workers’ paradise but had left their bellies growling. They missed the rations of meat—a kilo a day—their rice and beans; and however inadequate their cinder-block housing was, they wanted Grace to bring back the water, turn the electricity on again. And so our little world went back to normal. The laborers returned to the factories, the engineers to their desks, Flavio and Claudia to our kitchen, Antonio to our garden, and the APRA slipped off to hungrier enclaves. Leaving a vague uneasiness behind.
When Peru finally elected a socialist president in 1985, thirty-one years later, the country would be a different place. Haya de la Torre would be dead, Papi would be raising factories on other shores, police lieutenant Canales would be living on a fat pension, and the godchildren of the Apristas, fierce communist guerrillas calling themselves The Shining Path, would slash through the mountains, leaving thirty thousand corpses in their wake.
Peru would be one of the world’s last strongholds of communism. It would have more to fear than its ghosts.
IT WAS, IN every sense, the age of politics. Mother began to worry about her children’s place in the world. How far could we possibly get along in it without the right education? She was firmly against shipping us to private schools in faraway Trujillo or Lima. The farthest she would send Vicki was to the nuns at a nearby convent, but the only things the girl seemed to be studying there were stories even more terrifying than the ones the indígenas had told us: tales about purgatory and damnation. Finally, it was decided that Vicki should have a tutor and that her tutor should come to the house.
Her teacher was Miss Paula Roy, an American missionary whose spindly body and fried hair were remarkably like the image of Ichabod Crane I had seen in one of Vicki’s books. Miss Roy was just the kind of teacher my eight-year-old sister liked. Tough, exacting, yet surprisingly willing to spend long hours yammering about the most girly aspects of some obscure English novel.
Miss Roy was capable of surprising even me. “This is for you,” she said the day George turned six. She handed me a small, painted dog standing precariously on stilts. Out of his mouth, in a jaunty display of canine camaraderie, hung a sloppy pink tongue.
“Here,” Miss Roy said, bending over ceremoniously and peering at me over her glasses. “Let me pin it on you.”
I wore it that afternoon and every other from then on, until the day one of the American solteros pointed at my chest and shouted, “Goofy! That’s Goofy you’ve got there, honey!”
“Gufi,” I repeated. An English word I didn’t know. I hunted down Vicki and asked her what it meant. She rolled her eyes, set down her book, and swung around to face me.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because one of the solteros called this gufi,” I said, pointing to my dog.
Vicki’s eyes widened. She let out a loud guffaw and thumped her pillow with a fist. “Oh, that’s good! That’s really good!” she squawked. Then she was up and flinging herself onto her bed, flailing her legs and laughing wildly. Finally, she turned to look at me again, red-faced and panting.
“That’s what that dog is really called?”
I nodded yes.
“Goofy means stupid, you twirp. Es-tú-pi-da.”
Vicki was clearly leagues ahead of George and me as far as learning was concerned. She always would be. But the day came when Mother dressed us up in sober clothes, put us in the company Chevrolet with our jolly chauffeur, Don Pepe, and sent my brother and me off to the new Escuela Primaria, a school that had just been built to my father’s orders, off Cartavio’s main square. The school was meant to serve every child