American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [72]
In those years of tectonic uncertainty, we talked constantly about earthquakes. The rumble of a passing truck would set us to grabbing our chairs, cocking our ears, making ready to scamper away. Some of Paramonga’s residents were so practiced in the subtleties of geologic motion that I could see them from my window—the bread vendor, the street sweeper—staring down at their feet, shouting “Temblores! Temblores!” when the rest of us couldn’t feel a thing. George and I would sidle around the garden, feigning a palsy, screaming that we could feel a terrrrrremoto, and then we’d fall to the ground, laughing maniacally, rubbing our faces in dirt.
Papi motioned us to him one evening when he overheard us talking about such things and told us about a quake that had rocked Lima when he was a young man of twenty. Not with the bebecita tremors of our own experience, but with a jactitation that could rip cities asunder. He had been standing on a high floor in a federal building in downtown Lima, waiting to get his driver’s license. Frustrated and anxious to get back to work or school—for those were hectic days—he stepped from side to side in the long line, eyeing the government goon at the counter, muttering curses under his breath.
All of a sudden, the floor began to undulate. He braced himself against a post and took a good look around him, trying to get a sense of what was going on. Where two walls joined, he saw a corner of the room open, each wall shrugging in an opposite direction, leaving a gap in between. As plaster dust drifted past, he looked outside to a patch of blue sky. Below it, suspended, was the church of San Francisco with its bells swinging frantically in its towers. He said that the walls of the building stood cleaved like that for what seemed an eternity to him, the din of bells in his ears and the image of the church etched hotly on his brain. Then the walls closed shut just as neatly as they had opened, and the building seemed none the worse for wear. The bureaucrats slid the government desks back to where they had been, they straightened the president’s portrait on the wall, and before he knew it some hatchet-faced functionary was pointing at him and yelling, “Next!”
In the world of the Inca there are tidy explanations for these things, as tidy as the lectures my cravated grandfather would issue on torque, or as tidy as the earthquake quotient my father would diligently build into his structures no matter where they happened to be. According to the Inca, the earth is made up of energy bubbles—one apu’s domain is here, another’s there—and it is only natural that the earth should react violently when energy bubbles cross. Two force fields meet and you have confrontation. Simple as that. But the ability to take that phenomenon to a higher level—to go from shaking to awareness, from confrontation to enlightenment—is a goal we terrestrials seldom reach.
The crossing of my parents’ force fields was now entering a volatile stage. They had been drawn together at first by a fierce and inexplicable magnetism; they had fallen in love, married, had children; and now they were rolling back in their separate energy bubbles, startled by the ways they had changed. My mother was no longer free, untrammeled, able to pull anchor, move off, and reinvent herself, as was her American way. She was in a small place, with small-minded people and unfamiliar traditions, who found her independence bizarre. As for my father, he was in limbo—living in the country of his ancestors, speaking his language with his children, continuing to act as if he were fully Peruvian, but his house was an alien territory.
Not only was each of them now