American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [67]
If the weather was good and the horses were willing, Señor González would let us ride to the fortaleza, the pre-Colombian adobe fortress on the other side of the Pan American Highway, about three miles from our house. It had been raised in the early 1400s by the Chimu, the most powerful people to rule Peru before the Inca. As wide as a city block, the fortaleza was an enigmatic hulk, built to house Chimu eminences and the warriors they had conscripted to defend against Inca invasions.
I loved that tiered leviathan. I loved the way it hoisted itself out of a jaundiced earth, smelling of urine and gloom. I loved to run its dusty maze—room after room of pocked floors and walls. Life was good when George and I could jump off our yeguas, pat them on the nose, hand Señor González the reins, and scamper up that sunbaked scarp.
The purpose of the fortaleza, as far as we could tell, had shifted from stronghold to cemetery. Burial vaults yawned at us as we clambered through the labyrinth, yielding up skulls and femurs that had been tossed there by fellow thieves. Our servants had told us how robbers had ransacked those graves in years gone by. Some called themselves scholars, others were fortune hunters, still more were just thugs, angling for easy money. They had come from far and wide, slinking in through the night, plunging picks into Pachamama, pulling out Chimu bones, killing one another in the process, but they emerged from that place with wonders: Capes made of hummingbird wings. Gold nose hoops. Towering headdresses. Earrings with gems the size of our fists. “They’re either sitting in a museum or adorning some rich man’s table in San Francisco,” Papi commented. They were long gone, in other words. But we didn’t believe him. We searched anxiously for fuegos fatuos, will-o’-the-wisps that Antonio had told me would waft out of the soil if treasure were buried below. When we didn’t see them, George and I would thrust our hands in anyway for the simple joy of rooting around that dirt. But the only thing we ever unearthed was bone. We’d study it, keep it if it interested us, fling it aside impatiently. Veterans of the dig.
“What do you think you’re doing?” said Señor González, as he puffed up after us one day. A look of disgust twisted his face when he saw us handling the remains. “What in God’s name—”
“I need these,” I said, yanking the teeth out of a dusty skull. “For my collection.”
“I have more than you do!” sang George, jangling his pockets.
“Que Dios los perdone,” said the saddle-faced señor. “And may the apus be looking the other way.”
“The apus?”
“The spirits of these mountains. They won’t like that you’re heckling the dead. Hurry it up and let’s go. I don’t need any more bad luck than I already have.” He swung into the sun and headed back down, hitching his shoulders as if a chill air had suddenly swept the fortaleza, rubbing his sleeves.
We found a dead rodent as we clinked and rattled our way down that day. George picked it up and thrust it in his pocket along with the teeth. “For Doctor Birdseye,” he said. “Maybe he’ll give us a good price.”
Birdseye was a norteamericano scientist who had come to Paramonga to advise the paper engineers on new ways to cook down bagasse, the woody pulp of processed sugarcane. Paramonga was on the verge of being one of Grace’s greatest successes, marking a company shift from merchant to innovator. Whole warehouses of sugarcane byproducts were whirling from the engines, from toilet paper to corrugated boxes