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By Root 721 0

neighborhood: The soltero house where the bachelors stayed was next door. The Pinedas, a mild-mannered couple with a loco son, lived two houses down—we could see the gigantic boy through their window, being spoon-fed by an Indian girl. There were five boys our age in the neighborhood, all available for afternoon fun. A number of ladies in multilayered, many-colored skirts hawked bread and fruit in the mornings. No vines grew under us. Our house sat squarely on Pachamama, tight against rocks and earth. From the second-floor windows we could monitor the sweet-smelling factory on the other side of the compound walls. Just beyond the tangle of iron, the black smokestacks, and the flat trucks with their mountains of cane, we could see a gargantuan molasses pit: a still, black lake where the fragrant residue of cooked sugar lay, thick as quicksand. But our perch was urbane as well as strategic: If we stood out under our archway, in front of the door that was shaped like an Inca tumi, we could see all the activity at El Club.

One morning, as we stood there, we saw the birdlike woman who tended the gardens around the club pool come running out to the street where a huachimán stood guard. She was panting, hunching her shoulders like a nervous crow, clutching her big black skirt in her hands. She shouted something to him that we couldn’t hear and pointed a clay-reddened finger back through the club entrance. She seemed to be imploring him to go back through the portal with her.

We heard later that they had found a dog floating in the pool that morning, its neck twisted clear around as if it were a chicken being readied for dinner. Word raced through the service ranks up and down the boulevard that it was Tommy, the loco boy, who had escaped from his house the night before, attacked a village dog, wrung its neck, and flung it into the Bowling’s placid waters to float there with its eyes popped out like limpid gooseberries. “Oh, that’s so silly,” Mother said, when we told her what we’d heard, but all day long we saw servants gathering on street corners, whispering to one another and casting accusatory glances at the unfortunate boy’s house. Never mind that the door was locked: He had flown out a window. Locos could do that. Never mind that the dog was too heavy to wrestle and throw: The boy had acquired superhuman powers in the light of a full moon. The boulevard’s grapevine was atremble with gossip, and the señoras in fancy houses all hurried out to lend the servants an ear.

Nothing was ever resolved about that ill-fated dog. Rumors raged through the hacienda for one day and night, and then they evaporated like tiny bubbles, leaving a different sheen in the air. If nothing else, the incident proved we had embarked on new terrain in Paramonga. Cartavio, our old home, had been a place where we only learned about the world when it strode into our garden. In Paramonga, fences were permeable, real life close by. We were part of a thrumming world.

Although Paramonga offered a new, more-social life than Cartavio’s, I could see that there would be no Antonio in it. The gardens in front and back were tight little clusters of flower beds. There was no earth to turn, no animal pens, no servants’ quarters apart from a single whitewashed apartment out back where, we were told, a surly old cook once had lived. Our amas and cook had been hired for the house by the company, and they came and went from the hillside shacks; I hardly knew their names.

There were some marked improvements, however. During our first week, Papi brought home a German shepherd and told us it was to make up for the friends we had left behind. We called him Sigurd, like the Nibelung hero of Mother’s stories, and we thought him by far the best gift we’d ever had.

He arrived full-grown, in a crate on the back of a mud-caked pickup. It took three men to lift him and carry him into our garden. The crate was smaller than the dog, and he hunched inside, growling through wooden slats, slavering at the hapless indios who struggled under the angry cargo. We stood on the balcony