American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [53]
So, that was it. This was where I was to be civilized. This was where I would be hosed down, pounded out, ironed flat, until I became the tidy little prig they could take on grand tours to paradise. Baptism? I hunched my shoulders and squinted around. We’d see about that.
In the three months I was in that house, my father’s lively younger brothers were seldom present. Tío Pedro, the handsome one, was in the navy, off on sea adventures. Tío Víctor, an architecture student at the university, was coming and going from Tingo Maria, cutting a road through the jungle. Tía Rosa, the pretty, almond-eyed sister, had just been married to a dashing, mustachioed German.
I was put in the daytime care of twenty-four-year-old Tía Chaba, the one with the face of Cleopatra, the wit of Cantinflas, and the brain of the Biblioteca Nacional. I was put in the bed of my Tía Eloísa, whose nature was sweet and whose skin was as matte and white as a geisha’s.
Tía Chaba was as entertaining as she was beautiful. She told jokes, did tricks, had strong ideas about art and literature, and liked a lively argument. She had a wild laugh, a way of making me pay attention to her by screwing her face into a terrifying mask, like a high-haired harridan in a Peking opera. Her brain was a slick machine, and she liked people to know it. When she wasn’t explaining the world to some visitor in the sala, she was reading a book a day, recording each one in her notebook, with critical notes on the side.
Tía Eloísa, a few years older, was pretty, too, but in a quieter way. She was a measured lady, with elaborate rituals. When she let me into her bed at night, she folded the blanket back carefully, so that I would sleep on it, not on the sheet; she didn’t want our bodies to touch. Her eyes, which were the color of bright jade, were like tiny jewels, slanted slightly at the corners, making her look Japanese. Her movements were gentle, deliberate, and she turned her neck slowly, as if her face were Venetian glass. Her voice came from somewhere deep in her chest, and it was surprisingly masculine; one word of hers could shush me to a whisper. “So that your grandfather can read,” she’d say, or “write” or “study” or any number of occupations that required me to keep my noise levels low. I was told that Tía Eloísa had stopped going to school when she was seven, because she had refused to come out from under her bed. There were no truancy laws to make a girl go. But she had been taught diligently by her aunts, given strict orders to copy out the classics, memorize poetry, do lessons from textbooks. She was well-read, curious, and could give her little sister Chaba—who had torn through parochial schools and outsmarted every nun—a good run at the dinner table. But she was shy with men, reclusive, happiest within the walls of her father’s house.
Abuelita was a thoroughly social Limeña. She loved a good party, liked to dress up in her velvets and satins and wend her way across the capital to a socialite’s wedding or tea with her cousins, the Ponces. Uninclined to do this alone—and married, as she was, to my grandfather, a virtual hermit and the antithesis of the bon vivants she was raising her children to be—Abuelita would go in the company of her daughters. They would clack down the stairs and out the front door in their high heels, with French silk whispering around them, veil-hung toques above their well-carmined smiles, leaving me in a trail of perfume.
Had I been a different, better child—had I been Vicki, for instance—I might have learned something from this clever and urbane household. Had I been George, I would have charmed my way into the little pots of sweet manjar blanco that sat on my grandmother’s shelves. But I was small-minded and vain, more interested in Napoleonic wars of independence than in any genteel opportunities this place had to offer. With good reason, the house came to view me as harshly as I viewed it.
“Write my full name,” I commanded Eloísa, snitching fine parchment from my grandfather’s desk. She scrolled out all the