• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Eat,” Chaba said, and was gone.

What followed then can only be described as a pitched battle, complete with scrawking chair legs and heavy grunting. I left the room. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. Tío Víctor called me to come sit in his lap. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. I screeched, threw myself on the floor, and threatened to call the police. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. I ran to the kitchen and pleaded with the maids. Chaba ran to her room, brought out her belts, wrestled me back in my chair, and strapped me in. When the family gathered for high tea, I was still there, fast asleep, my face in the rice.

“What on earth is going on?” my grandmother thundered.

“She was playing passenger on a plane,” Chaba crowed, taking the stairs like a dancer. Abuelita shook her head, called out to the maid who hovered at the kitchen door with her apron twisted into her fingers, and told her to set me free.

In truth, Tía Chaba was the most exciting woman I knew: big-eyed, boisterous, smart. She could see the future and do magic. “I’m a wicked witch!” she’d screech. “Don’t you cross me!” and then she’d tickle me with her long, red fingernails until I could hardly breathe. Being the youngest in her family, and the most resilient, she had been assigned as the baby-sitter. It was my parents who had gone off and abandoned me. My predicament was not her fault. But because she had consented to be my jailer, she would be made to pay.

I took to her things with the scissors. I locked myself up in her room. I called her a bruja when she ran after me with a hot curling iron, trying to impose order on my hair. I gasped and clutched at my chest when she walked through the door. There were flank attacks and aerial salvos, hit-and-run and pincers. There were strafes and blasts and fusillades, with battle raids and booty.

Finally one morning, as I was watching my Tía Eloísa carefully wrap her long-nailed toes in cellophane before she slipped on her sheer silk stockings, she turned and asked me, “Why are you so cruel to your Tía Chaba, Marisi?” and it dawned on me that I’d lost the war.

I let them take me off and baptize me after that, realizing that somewhere along the way I’d been labeled a problem, worse than the bad-mannered pagan my father had left behind. The one thing I did not want was a brisk court-martial on his return.

They taught me my prayers, trussed me up in a white wool suit tailored by my grandmother’s own hand, took me to La Parroquia—a stone leviathan in the heart of Miraflores—splashed me with holy water, and pledged me to Jesus and Rome.

When my father and mother came to the gate to collect me days later, I was clean, beatific, and curly. The essence of tidy prig.

7

—

EARTH

Pachamama

THERE IS A story the guides in Machu Picchu like to tell, about a carefree traveler who took a stone from the trail to Inti Punku—the sacred gate of the sun—and carried it back to her home in Bremen. Or Salt Lake City or Lyon; the homeland varies, depending on who is listening. In any case, the woman descended the Andes, returned to her comfortable home on zo-und-zo-platz, parked the stone on her coffee table, and watched her life turn into a nightmare.

Her husband died in freak circumstances: He was sweeping their second-floor balcony, when suddenly the whole structure—German-made! perfectly constructed!—collapsed into the street, crushing his skull. Her daughter was bitten in the face by a mangy dog, behind their house, in the alley. The police claimed that they hadn’t seen an attack that ferocious in years. When the woman began to get dizzy spells, falling to her knees in her own living room, her head brought eye-level with the stone, she understood why a curse had befallen her.

She wrapped up the little gray rock, addressed it to the tour office in Cusco, and mailed it to the Peruvian guide who had taken her up the trail to Machu Picchu. For the week he had it, the stone played havoc with the guide