American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [58]
“The Pachakutekk?” I asked him.
“Yes, Marisi, that is when the world will turn. If we are good enough, kind enough, the world will have the right sort of Pachakutekk. Evil will fly to the stars and we will live on Pachamama in peace.” Until that point, Antonio added, the earth would rumble and turn, but not in a happy way.
The earth rumbled and turned not long after, and, as he had said, not in a happy way. I was sitting at the piano with my mother one evening, when she announced quite suddenly that she wanted to send Antonio away.
“He has a good head, that boy,” she said. “I want to get him out of this nowhere place. Give him some mundo. Send him to school.”
My heart plunged. Send Antonio to school? Away from Cartavio? What would I do without him to talk to about brujas and Pachamama and the power of my qosqo? I felt a wave of black light advance toward me, recede, then advance again with a terrible energy.
I put my feet squarely on the floor and concentrated every cell of me. Come into me now, Pachamama, help me. Up the chaki to the qosqo to the sonqo to the nosko. Suddenly the front door whirled open and my father stood there, framed in the doorway as the trees swayed behind him in the dark.
“We’re leaving Cartavio,” he thundered. “Tomorrow we pack.”
So it was I who left Antonio, not the other way around. It was a strange kind of Pachakutekk, but the world was definitely turning. W. R. Grace had decided to send my father to more ambitious climes: Paramonga, where the Americans were not only spinning out sugar and paper, they were racing into the plastics age.
Flavio, Claudia, and Antonio busily helped us pack. There was hardly time to say sad good-byes, for my father’s replacement was on his way to take over the house. On the morning that we boarded Don Pepe’s Chevrolet to leave, I found Antonio squatting by the front gate, waiting to see me. He was wearing a clean white shirt, and his straight, black hair was brushed back against his head. When he stood, I shot into his arms. He pressed me to him and then drew away, handed me a round, black pebble, and said he would never forget the things I had taught him. “Take this bit of earth, this little piece of Pachamama,” he said. “Send your worries into it. And when you speak, gordita, I promise it will speak to me.” I turned it in my hand, its shape as sleek and cunning as the blue telephone my father had tricked me with in Lima. “Yes,” I said. Sí.
THE ROAD FROM Cartavio to Paramonga led through Chan Chan, the thousand-year-old metropolis of the Chimu kings, a labyrinthine mud remnant of an empire that had once stretched between the Andes and the sea, along seven hundred miles of Peruvian coast. The Chimu were a powerful, rigidly class-conscious people who cherished their engineers, abused their peons, butchered their thieves, fashioned canals, and loved jewelry. When the Inca armies swept into Chan Chan in 1470 and carried off its bespangled king, Minchancaman, the Inca inherited a vast repository of Chimu knowledge, from complex hydraulics to the forging of gold. But the Incas would not remain victors for long. When the Spanish conquest of Peru began in earnest half a century later, the mighty Incas were reduced to servants, and the mighty city of Chan Chan was abandoned to the desert wind. Now, from the roads, it was barely discernible, a long hump in the yellow sand.
We drove past the iron-girded mansions of the city of Trujillo, with their elaborate white portales and carved mahogany balconies. It was an ancient city, founded in