American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [59]
We continued south on the Pan American Highway, that dust-blown ribbon of asphalt that someday would connect Alaska to Chile and memorialize the trip primitive man had made thirty thousand years before. As we sped south of Trujillo, south of the Moche Valley, south of the Huaca del Sol y de la Luna, the land grew bleak and harsh, a terrain as implausible as it was alluring, as pocked as the face of the moon. The cordillera of the Andes raced by on our left, coal black and sinister. To our right, wind-combed bosoms of sand shivered their way to the sea.
Drop four people into Peru, the saying goes, in four different places, and though they may touch down a few hundred miles apart, they will think themselves in four corners of the world. The country is not large—never more than five hundred miles across at any point, and twelve hundred miles deep—tucked into the west coast of South America, where the breast of the continent swells. It is only three times larger than California. Yet, for all its compactness, Peru is a model of earthly diversities: icy Andean peaks, dense Amazon jungle, relentlessly chapped deserts, and a coast that glistens under the rough surf of the Pacific.
The five of us stared out at that coast as it spooled by our windows; we babbled randomly, not searching one another’s eyes. It strikes me only now, as I think back on it, how little I had been told about my family’s trip to the United States. It had happened only a few months before, but after George’s boots and hat had been displayed, his holsters and toy guns—after I’d been handed a candy or two and a recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore—I pursued no further information. I don’t remember asking about my American grandparents, who remained, until the moment I set eyes on them, inexplicable mysteries, cataloged under the wrong name. I cannot say whether or not it was a willful refusal to explore their experiences; perhaps it was because I was resentful, or hopelessly ignorant, or because I was content to be the kind of Peruvian who doesn’t think beyond what she sees, chica mesquina, provincial to the core. Or perhaps it was because I worried that in some way the gearwork had shifted, that my parents had come home new, and that changes were bound to be for the worse. Or perhaps the rest of my family was talking about that faraway fantasyland; I just didn’t want to hear it. All I remember is my father and Georgie chatting aimlessly in the wide front seat next to Don Pepe, while Mother, Vicki, and I chatted aimlessly in the rear—hombres en frente, mujeres atrás, Peruvian style. I don’t recall hearing a word about their travels.
George and I had hoped Don Pepe would catch up with our cousin Salvadorcito, a twenty-year-old naval cadet on leave who had captained the truck that carried our things from Cartavio that morning. He was the only son of Tío Salvador, our quixotic uncle, who, a few years earlier, had deposited the anteater and monkey with my father in Lima. Perhaps only to us, Cito seemed more adventurous than his eccentric father. The last we had seen of him, he had looked adventurous indeed—sitting astride Mother’s piano, bouncing down the road with his skinny elbows flapping like a gallinazo’s, one hand pointing to the horizon.
But Cito was nowhere to be seen on that vacant highway. Our loud game of “I Spy” collapsed into a long, contemplative gaze out the window. Sand. A whorl of dust. A pile of stones. Four poles and a sagging roof of straw. A cross thrust into a mound. Vicki read. Mother slept. Papi yammered