American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [50]
The air inside was black and damp. Though the classroom smelled of paint and cement, the closet smelled old, as if a thousand years of muck and llama grease had accumulated there.
“Georgie?” I whispered, my chest still heaving with aftersobs.
“I’m here,” came his reply, thin and frightened.
I groped my way toward him and crouched down on the floor, letting my eyes get accustomed to the dark. A shaft of light from under the door illuminated our feet.
“Look,” he said. “Look there.”
I followed the gray of his profile to a place on the highest shelf, over our heads, over the boxes and books. There in the shadows, gleaming white, was a human skull.
That was how we became our mother’s pupils. We did not go back to Señorita’s classroom. From then on, whether at the dining room table, in the garden, on car trips, or on the rocky shores of the Pacific, we were beneficiaries of Mother’s perpetual tutelage. School became an all-day, year-round affair. To make it official, our notebooks—Vicki’s included—began shuttlecocking back and forth from the Calvert School, a private, nondenominational institution in Baltimore that made its curriculum and materials available not only to the three of us in our Peruvian hacienda but to children in “the farthest outposts of civilization.” The Calvert system boasted that it had been known to be delivered by dogsled, camel, even parachute. Every month, a box with the Calvert logo—a boy’s silhouette—would arrive on a truck from the port of Callao, and we would open it with relish, removing each neat blue notebook, each spiral-bound textbook, each colored pencil with awe. Sometimes four months would elapse between our completing the work and an “evaluator” from that school passing final judgment on it, but every day it was Mother who sat us down, got out her teacher’s manual, and drilled or tested us. Arithmetic, world history, English grammar, botany. If we visited a Chimu ruin, we’d go home and read up on Egypt and Greece. If we ran into the house with beetles as big as my shoes, she’d have us pinpoint the species, draw the insects into our notebooks, and guess where they figured in the food chain. Sitting at the piano would lead to a lesson about a Massenet tone poem. Scooping the dirt with a cup had its logical progression to fractions and math. If we begged for stories, we got them, from Roman to Norse. There was nothing so complicated that we couldn’t be made to understand it. There was nothing so simple that it couldn’t be wrapped in grand themes.
Mother was no academic. But her dedication to our cognitive welfare was nothing short of fanatical. She ordered books from the Calvert catalogs and devoured their contents. She looked things up in a fever. She presented them with flair. Not until much later did I realize that the last-ditch aspect of my education was one of the most political lessons I’d ever been given. I had not been brown enough to be welcome in Señorita’s schoolhouse. Mother would not surrender us to a gentrified boarding school. If I couldn’t have a democratic experience, I would be subtracted from a Peruvian context altogether. Mine would be an American indoctrination, in a language I hardly used outside. In the process, I’d learn to see the world through a foreign scrim, feel apart. I’d begin to become the creature of a place I’d never smelled or seen—the product of a cloud-built school, where rootlessness was at the heart of the curriculum, isolation at the edge of the page.
IF HISTORIES ARE right, Peru has always been a racial powder keg. The Inca lorded it over the Moche, and, when Spain stumbled into Peru, the Spanish lorded it over the Inca. To be an indio under the conquistadors was to be subhuman. An Indian could be made to work—even be made to pay—for the misfortune of being born brown: The indigenous were taxed by the crown, made to pay tributos “for the Queen’s protection,” and the church’s job was to keep meticulous records