American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [98]
THROUGHOUT CHILDHOOD AND down to this day, George would always be our psychiatrist, the seismograph of the family—his delicate emotional tissue warning us of subtle shifts in our terrain. His little yellow pills were working so well now that he was no longer twitching, walleyed, and fearful. The medicine man in Boston had brought back his beautiful face. The pills were a six-month treatment for stress, so effective that my brother had become valor itself, running through traffic, jumping from treetops, rappelling the neighborhood walls.
He was so boisterous that the ambassador’s boy would not play with us. His maid shook her head no at the gate. Too busy with a tutor, she said, or at a party, or splashing about in his bath.
But there were others willing to join us in the dirt lot under the imagined tower: Barbara, the helmet-haired Swiss, whose toenails were scrubbed clean as shells. Roberto, Margarita’s brother, a scamp who won points by intercepting secrets Vicki was scribbling on paper, stuffing in cans, and pulleying to her friend upstairs. Albertito Giesecke, who refused to kiss me because he’d given himself to God. Sandra, the Japanese-American, whose U.S. Army father was stockpiling Swift Armour hams in a bomb shelter he’d carved under their house. Margarita herself, who sat on a curb and watched us carry on, her egg-ball eyes abulge. George had had no trouble convincing her to kiss him. I had seen them go at it in the lot, behind the retaining wall.
“Let’s play Pizarro,” George said one day, coming out to the lot with a bowl on his head. “All I need is a lanza and a caballito.” He picked up two lengths of wood. “Here,” he said, and put one between his legs: “My horse.” Then he swung the other above his head like a crazed conquistador at the apocalypse: “My weapon.”
Conquest became our game in that viceregal city. We returned to it day after day the way a gambler staggers into a casino to finger a table’s felt. Buy the chips. Win the kitty. Win a war, win a kiss, win Peru. You want to taste my sword? Thwap. You die. I draw and quarter you the way they drew and quartered Tupac Amaru. The way they strapped his limbs to four horsemen and charged. The way they pickled his penis.
I put aside qosqos and apus and energy bubbles and Antonio’s black stone for a piece of la conquista. Perhaps it was my school-books that convinced me, with their lavish praise for Pizarro and splendid woodcut illustrations of his subjugation of the Inca. Perhaps it was the city that beguiled me, with its concrete palaces and pomp. “You see this magnificence?” Papi said as he strode through the Plaza de San Martín, his arms thrown up into the air, his torso turning like Caesar before Rome. “This is our patrimony. This is your birthright. Your forefathers built Peru. Your great-grandfather lived over there in his last days, on the top floor of the Hotel Bolívar. Every day he put on spats and a waistcoat and walked to El Club Nacional for a copita de jerez with his friends. Our family lived in these streets. You see these lampposts on the square? I helped build them myself when I was fifteen years old and an apprentice at an artist’s foundry. Your world is here. Your history is here, Marisi. You are the heart and soul of this country.”
La conquista. In a day when the world was for the taking. When the Huari conquered the Moche, and the Inca conquered the Huari, and the Spaniards conquered the Inca, and the Arabs poured into Spain, and the Vandals overran Rome. What could be more exhilarating than to spring into alien land unexpected? Take it. Claim it. Put a flag on it. Until something more powerful comes along.
“I command you to stop!” Canute said to the sea. But the waves lapped the sand as they’d always done. Ah, but there’s always something greater. Call it God. Call it Death. One should take things while one can.
Fewer than two hundred men took the Inca. They trekked from Tumbes to Cajamarca with horses, a little gunpowder, and swords. They captured an