American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [66]
“Mo lo!” the Peruvian children would mimic as he hobbled home in the dark. All gone.
Doesn’t fit. Like who? Like the Dane who lived next door in the lemon-yellow casa de solteros? He had come years before, bright-faced and handsome, bragging of pink-assed women. At first he was one of the ordinary ones, shuttling out to the factory in the morning and sucking on rum at night. Until one fine day when he began to drool, drop things, and spin through the rooms with his hands on his head. They took him to a hospital after that. “Nerves,” they whispered, “something to do with his spine.” Then they brought him back to the house beside us, and he was all fixed, shiny as a new steel tool.
But one afternoon George and I looked up from our cowboy wars and saw the gringo flinging tables and chairs through his second-floor window, wriggling wildly, pausing only to hang his head out over the sill and gurgle at the pile below. When they edged upstairs to grab him, they said the man had gone crazy. When they took him off and opened his head, they found a fistful of worms inside.
We Peruvians have a name for that. Taki Onqoy: a plague of worms that fills a body with an irresistible urge to wiggle. The mountain Indians had been known to invoke the Taki Onqoy against the Spaniards for all the agonies they had brought to Peru. The Spaniards danced and writhed until they flung themselves into the rivers—a useful thing to have happen to foreigners, a curse to slam them back where they belonged.
Back where she came from. All these years later, I am still drawn up tight by that phrase, with a fury I can hardly contain. Who was to say that Carlos Ruiz’s mother with her roots tracing back to Segovia belonged in Peru? Or the king’s conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, for that matter, an illegitimate pig farmer from the Spanish fringe—did he have a birthright to the land of the Inca? If Señora Ruiz and Pizarro had pioneer birthrights, as my Peruvian family claimed to have, did they have one any more than my gringa mother?
Before that moment in the tepee with Carlos Ruiz, I did not know that my mother was an outcast in my father’s country. I knew that she was different, that she and my grandmother were at odds with each other, that she seemed awkward in Peruvian settings, that people giggled at the way she spoke. It wasn’t that she was reviled in any way for how she looked, for the color of her skin. Not at all. Light complexions were admired in Peru, and her alabaster skin seemed an asset: a credit to my father. He had married a blanca and in so doing whitened future generations of Aranas. It was good to be pale. What I learned from Carlos Ruiz that afternoon was that the problem with us was not about skin. It was not about language. It was not about money. It was about being American. It was about seeing my mother, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a cartoon yanqui: the big-boned, clumsy, loud-mouthed, bragging, dim-brained, swaggering kind.
MY ANGER EVENTUALLY subsided, but it never quite went away. There was much to signal the growing antipathy against Americans in Peru. I could stand at my window and watch it. The way the guard at the club across the way picked his teeth when he stared at the solteros; the way the guest-house servants laughed into their hands when a visiting New Yorker pulled away; the way the señoras fell silent and swiveled their heads as my mother walked past. I didn’t realize it then, but I know it now: My world shrank a few sizes when Carlos Ruiz confided his secret. I pulled back, became a distant satellite to the boys’ club, and began to wish George would spend all his time alone with me, digging into the loam of Pachamama—contemplating the wonders of dirt—as Antonio had taught me to do.
Papi must have seen that I needed to be aired out and pushed into the open of Paramonga, because he announced one day that he had arranged