American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [94]
Well and good. But a French calque got in the way in America and made life miserable for Mum. Clap, c’est à dire, clapier, a brothel, or more to the point, clapoir, a venereal sore. To wit: Le diable, en visitant le clapier, a trouvé un clapoir dans une partie de son corps que je ne veux pas mentionner ici. In other words, not very nice at all.
Or, to put a sharp point on it, see the 1828 edition of Webster’s: Clapdoctor: one who is skilled in healing the clap. But if the name had been good enough for six generations of Clapps in America—a very nice oral surgeon among them—why wasn’t it right for my mother? No, no. That explanation would not do. But the issue was never addressed openly.
Other questions hung in the air like malodors the family was too polite to acknowledge. “Now that you’ll be living in Lima, Marisi,” my abuelita asked me on our first day back, as if I were a full-grown señorita, “where will you be attending church?” The sheer force of the question, when I repeated it to Mother in our pensión on Avenida Ricardo Palma, drove her into the next room. Even my soul, it seemed, would be their battlefield. I had heard Mother complain that Abuelita had had no right to baptize me a Catholic behind her back. She had tried to do it with Vicki, Mother said, and failed; the only way George had ducked it was by having the good sense to be born in Wyoming.
When, on our second day back in Lima, Abuelita announced she would pick me up at the pensión and take me to mass, Mother countered by saying she had already enrolled me in the American Union Church. No one seemed a bit concerned that I would burn in hell if I shuttled between churches. I had heard a priest say so myself. But the dispute clearly wasn’t about hell. It was about will.
“What do I do that makes your mother dislike me so much, Jorge?” Mother whispered one day. They had taken to pulling each other into the next room and speaking in ill-tempered voices.
“Nothing specific,” he replied. “But you’re a gringa, honey. Your presence offends her.”
“Somos culturas distintas,” my abuelita declaimed about the difference between Lima and Rawlins. We are two very different cultures. But I could see she meant hers was better.
Within a week, my parents found a place to live. We slipped into our new quarters on Avenida Angamos as if it were something familiar, but there was an otherness to it. A change. There was nothing grand about the house. Certainly it was not the sprawling colonial construction we were used to, with leaping arches out front and servants’ quarters in the rear. I hadn’t understood it when my parents had decided it over the kitchen table in Rawlins, but Papi was resigning from W. R. Grace to start an engineering firm in Lima. It was a dream the Arana brothers had, a bond that would honor their father. At thirty-eight, when he finally handed Grace his resignation, Papi was the oldest, most beribboned, most successful of Abuelito’s three sons. For him the launching of their new engineering company, Techo Rex, was the fulfillment of an obligation. For my uncles, Víctor and Pedro, far younger men with skyscraping ambitions, it was a leap at wealth. For us children, prosperity had long been delivered—we’d tasted the good life already—and change meant something else. In real terms, we had ceased to be wards of a rich gringo company: We had less money, less prestige, less protection against the harsh winds of Peruvian politics. Less power. We were in a small house, facing the cinch of a city life, sensing an ebb to things.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the ranks of our servants. There was one where there had been six. Nora was nineteen, a shy girl with a pretty face and a thick black ponytail. She scrubbed and swept and cooked and shopped, but she barely touched our conscious lives, bustling to and fro with all the exigencies of her day.
Our home was the first floor of a stone