American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [5]
Had we overcome our fears and looked out those windows onto Cartavio’s main residential street beyond our own house, we would have seen five other houses of the first rank, equally grand, equally walled. Behind them, a row of modest ones for the lesser company families. Our immediate neighbors were the Lattos, freckle-faced Scots whose brogue-filtered Spanish made George and me horselaugh into our hands. Their eight-year-old son, Billy, was the undisputed object of Vicki’s affection. He was a straight, good-looking boy with an easy smile. He would direct his grins freely to Vicki, but George and I—who thought ourselves far more appealing than our prickly sister—had to work hard to draw his charms: We’d stand on our heads, swing from trees, make fools of ourselves if we had to, for the incomparable joy of gazing on his teeth.
As a young child, my days unfolded in the garden. It was, as every garden in that coastal desert is, an artificial paradise: invented, deceptive, precarious. Without human hands to tend it, the lush vegetation would have dried to a husk and sifted down into an arid dune. For years, I did not know how tentative that childhood environment was. Walled in, with green crowding our senses and the deep sweetness of fruit and sugar in the air, I felt a sense of entitlement, as if my world would ever be so richly hung. But it was an illusion, and many had labored to create it: to make us feel as if we were emperors of a verdant oasis on the banks of the Amazon just north of the Andes, where the green was unrestrained.
Fooled, happy, ignorant, George and I would splash in the duck pond our father had built for us. Or we would play with the animals we kept in the cages out back where the servants lived. We’d pet the rabbits, feed them fragrant verbena. We’d put chickens on the backs of goats and shriek with laughter as the bewildered creatures scrambled around in circles, the goats wild-eyed under their unruly riders, the chickens pounding the air.
George was my hero, my general, my god. He was as bright and beautiful as I was fat and slow. He could prance and swagger as well as any cowboy in Mother’s storybook litany of Wild West valiants. He would hector; I would follow. He’d do mischief; I’d do cover-up. He’d get caught; I’d confess to everything. He’d be spanked; I’d yank down my pants. He’d yawp; I’d bawl louder. And so we spent our days, crawling under the house, devising schemes to scandalize the mayordomo, scare Claudia the cook out of her wits, or pester Vicki, whose prissy ways cried out for redress and revenge. If only to force her to look at us over an eternal rim of books.
After lunch, after my father had come home, gazed at his wife’s Hollywood face, dozed off, and gone back to work, Mother came to the kitchen looking for us. First she’d put George in bed for his nap, then she’d lead me to her room for a musical siesta.
My mother did not tell us much about herself beyond the fact that she had been a violinist when she and Papi had met in Boston. She was different, odd, that much I knew: porcelain-fair, near translucent, throwing off a kind of shimmer wherever she went. She spoke a halting Spanish, every bit as strange as that of our Scots neighbors; I recall peering into other people’s faces to see if it would make them laugh. Often, it would. But she did not mix much with Peruvians if my father was not about. She was not a social person. She seemed more inclined to spend time with her children than with women her age. Then again, she was so unlike any other woman in Cartavio. What distinguished