American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [71]
I started to cry. “It was me!” I squawked to George. “I did it! I made it shake. It was all my fault!”
He looked at me as if I had lost my mind.
No one else listened to me. Neighbors rushed down the boulevard, assessing the damage. Papi went to the factory. A soltero checked on my mother. The servants lit candles and clasped us to their chests.
When I was carried back to my room, my things were as I had left them. Except that the little black stone was on the floor.
There is a part of me that still believes I caused that earthquake. Maybe that is why of all the quakes I lived through in my first six years of life (almost two dozen, according to seismological records, some of them far more violent), this is the only one I can recall. I try to muster a memory of the others—the screeching, the running for clear ground, the tinkle of glass. But all I can summon are the hours between dark and dawn of that one night. After I was deposited on my bed, I sat there stiffly, monitoring my navel, cupping my hand over its little void. A number of adoring faces approached to soothe me, but I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes. The amas brought me linden tea. My mother put a cool rag on my fevered skull. At midnight I fell into a deep sleep. All night and all the next day I remained in bed.
On the second morning, Señor González rode up to tell us that he had found Sigurd in the molasses pit, belly up and floating.
THE EARTH WAS always moving in those days. Pachamama was temperamental, moody, shifting her weight heavily beneath us, tossing from side to side. My mother and father were pricked with that same petulance, contemplative and sullen since our move from Cartavio. Since—for that matter—their return from the United States.
I did not identify these things at the time, of course, but that frame of mind is easy enough to locate and retrieve now that I find it cataloged in the same drawer with a lifetime of other vague dissatisfactions. A tight-lipped foreboding moved through our house and, were it not for earthquakes and molasses-coated carcasses and the providential distraction of childish games and of scrabbling in ancient graves, we might have turned to it, pointed, and remarked.
I cannot tell you what actually happened, what incidents signaled the widening gap between my mother and father. Even now, after much reflection, not one specific event rises to mind. I knew it by the way they moved. Or didn’t. The hand that no longer slipped around her waist. The way he propelled himself away from the dinner table. The tic in her brow when he said he hoped his mother would come visit the children. The flare of his nostrils when she drew old letters from the bed table and left the room. The melancholy way she played Palmgren on the piano. The rush of bubbles when he poured himself another rum and Coke. The click of her shoes coming back from a party alone. The sight of his men carrying him home by the elbows after a night of drinking. The angle of Tía Chaba’s glance when she came for a weekend visit. It was as if all Pachamama’s convulsions had joggled them loose.
Shaky days. The earth beneath us was putting on a show, wriggling our toes. “Por fin!” Tía Chaba told us our Spanish forebears had cried when they set boots on Peru. At last! “Terra firma!” Little did they know we descendants would spend the rest of our days quivering on our legs. “Stand your ground!” Mother taught us the gringos had said at Lexington. It was a phrase that sounded very silly to our ears. “The firm ground of result,” she quoted the sainted Churchill, whose name she had given her son. And George Winston and I fell to giggling.
We knew, if no one else was admitting it, that there was nothing firm about Pachamama. I remember being struck by the way northerners look up at the sky when they’re told disaster is coming, but of course it makes perfect sense: It’s from air and water that their dangers come. In Peru,