by Marie Arana
Mother’s mouth dropped open.
George jumped to his feet, eyes shining with the vision of himself behind the steering wheel of the lieutenant’s car.
“Sure you do!” the teniente almost screeched. “Claro que sí!”
The men out front stopped talking to one another. They froze in rapt attention. A hand slipped around the tall spike of the gate.
My mother stood slowly, her face suddenly notched with concern. George read the anxiety in her eyes. Just as slowly, he moved back from the big man, stepping from relish to dread.
“Come on!” the teniente called, in a voice that was higher than his own. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go grab the wheel!” Canales lunged forward and grabbed George’s arm, and his men at the gate shifted like cogs in a gearbox. Mother seized George’s other arm. I scuttled back on the grass, propelling myself by the heels of my boots. My brother’s eyes were pinched, and I could feel myself ready to cry.
“No,” Mother said firmly. “No. He’s not going anywhere. He has other things to do. The boy stays with me.”
“Hyeh, hyeh!” the police chief barked. “Stay here? When he can come on rounds with the guardia civil? Those ‘other things’ can wait, señora. You will come with your father’s old student. No es cierto, Georgie?” Isn’t that right?
The man pulled on George. My mother pulled back. She had concluded by then that this was no lighthearted invitation. The lieutenant had not come to share pleasantries and ask George on an impromptu outing. All this—the late-afternoon visit, the men at the gate, the car in the road—was part of a careful plan. They were here because the son of Don Jorge, a little half-gringo, would make a good buffer, a portable human shield. With the child of the jefe in his arms, the policeman could be sure the rebels would leave him alone. It was suddenly apparent to Mother that he was prepared to kidnap her son for that assurance, if necessary.
They tugged at him like that, the man babbling his baby talk, the woman clutching her child, until she threw two adamant arms around George and, in so doing, pinned herself to the policeman’s chest. George began to cry. So did I. Then the wind changed, the men at the gate called out to their chief, and he retreated hastily, tripping backward along the walk like a marionette dancing offstage.
Out in the street, a car door slammed shut. Mother took us indoors, shaking.
I mark that day as the threshold of a new awareness. Until that moment, I had always feared ghosts. I had been afraid of the night, of dark forces, of the dead, black light. It had never occurred to me to fear mortal men. But I could see from the grimness of my mother’s eyes, from the way she clasped George to her chest, that ordinary humans were just as terrifying—that we had survived a struggle as deadly as any bout with El Aya Uma. That a policeman who professed to be a friend of my father might steal my brother away as smartly as “The Thirsty One” could rip a head off a neck.
This lesson in the way the world worked was more troubling for another reason. I had been shown leyendas to live by, been given an instrument to deflect evil; Antonio had taught me how to call up historias, turn a qosqo against the night, or against a curse, or even against a root that was growing under my house. But something told me that I could not have sucked the black light out of Teniente Canales, spit it out into a stone. If he had not decided to let go of my brother, if he had not been called away—for whatever reason—some terrible thing might have befallen us. For all my father’s bright swagger—for all our big house and lush garden and eager servants—there would have been nothing we could do.
When Vicki came downstairs from her room, her curly hair tousled and her eyes weary from reading the book tucked under her arm, she found the three of us sitting on the sofa, silently staring ahead. She rubbed her eyes with her fists, yawned, slumped into a chair, and opened her book again. We sat for hours, it seemed, like that: my mother stroking George’s hair, George looking through the window, I glancing down at the place in my cotton dress where I figured my umbilical to be.
When Papi came home, he said Canales would never have hurt us. “Of course not! My old student from the police academy? My friend? Never!” But I heard him double-bolt the doors, move chairs under the knobs, just in case. The next day, Flavio told Mother that the note under the teniente’s windshield had turned out to be an empty threat. When the sun had appeared that morning, Canales got up with his throat intact.
Within a few days the strikers relented. Politics had promised them a workers’ paradise but had left their bellies growling. They missed the rations of meat—a kilo a day—their rice and beans; and however inadequate their cinder-block housing was, they wanted Grace to bring back the water, turn the electricity on again. And so our little world went back to normal. The laborers returned to the factories, the engineers to their desks, Flavio and Claudia to our kitchen, Antonio to our garden, and the APRA slipped off to hungrier enclaves. Leaving a vague uneasiness behind.
When Peru finally elected a socialist president in 1985, thirty-one years later, the country would be a different place. Haya de la Torre would be dead, Papi would be raising factories on other shores, police lieutenant Canales would be living on a fat pension, and the godchildren of the Apristas, fierce communist guerrillas calling themselves The Shining Path, would slash through the mountains, leaving thirty thousand corpses in their wake.
Peru would be one of the world’s last strongholds of communism. It would have more to fear than its ghosts.
IT WAS, IN every sense, the age of politics. Mother began to worry about her children’s place in the world. How far could we possibly get along in it without the right education? She was firmly against shipping us to private schools in faraway Trujillo or Lima. The farthest she would send Vicki was to the nuns at a nearby convent, but the only things the girl seemed to be studying there were stories even more terrifying than the ones the indígenas had told us: tales about purgatory and damnation. Finally, it was decided that Vicki should have a tutor and that her tutor should come to the house.
Her teacher was Miss Paula Roy, an American missionary whose spindly body and fried hair were remarkably like the image of Ichabod Crane I had seen in one of Vicki’s books. Miss Roy was just the kind of teacher my eight-year-old sister liked. Tough, exacting, yet surprisingly willing to spend long hours yammering about the most girly aspects of some obscure English novel.
Miss Roy was capable of surprising even me. “This is for you,” she said the day George turned six. She handed me a small, painted dog standing precariously on stilts. Out of his mouth, in a jaunty display of canine camaraderie, hung a sloppy pink tongue.
“Here,” Miss Roy said, bending over ceremoniously and peering at me over her glasses. “Let me pin it on you.”
I wore it that afternoon and every other from then on, until the day one of the American solteros pointed at my chest and shouted, “Goofy! That’s Goofy you’ve got there, honey!”
“Gufi,” I repeated. An English word I didn’t know. I hunted down Vicki and asked her what it meant. She rolled her eyes, set down her book, and swung around to face me.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because one of the solteros called this gufi,” I said, pointing to my dog.
Vicki’s eyes widened. She let out a loud guffaw and thumped her pillow with a fist. “Oh, that’s good! That’s really good!” she squawked. Then she was up and flinging herself onto her bed, flailing her legs and laughing wildly. Finally, she turned to look at me again, red-faced and panting.
“That’s what that dog is really called?”
I nodded yes.
“Goofy means stupid, you twirp. Es-tú-pi-da.”
Vicki was clearly leagues ahead of George and me as far as learning was concerned. She always would be. But the day came when Mother dressed us up in sober clothes, put us in the company Chevrolet with our jolly chauffeur, Don Pepe, and sent my brother and me off to the new Escuela Primaria, a school that had just been built to my father’s orders, off Cartavio’s
main square. The school was meant to serve every child of every race, from every walk of life in that complex socioeconomic gridwork we called a hacienda. It was meant precisely to ease the political divide between the workers and the bosses.
“When you walk in,” Papi said that morning as he surveyed us with warm approval, “look at the lettering over the door. My design.” He poked his solar plexus and crinkled up his brown eyes with such good humor that I was convinced his connection with that place was a good omen.
I was wrong.
We were put in a large classroom with what seemed to be children of mixed ages. They were all from the cinder-block houses. There was no Billy or Carlitos or Margarita. Our neighborhood friends had been sent off to the nuns or sent away to Trujillo. There was nobody here we knew.
“Mocosos,” a big boy said as George and I sat down. Snotnoses.
“Mataperro,” George shot back at him. Thug.
We’d never been in a room with so many children. The teacher was a plain young woman with bright lipstick and a sheath-tight skirt. She introduced herself as “Señorita,” made us each stand and say our names, and told us that she would brook nonsense from no one. “Somos una clase de i-guales,” she said. We’re a class of eeee-quals. But try as Señorita might with her ruler and her chalkboard and her stentorian announcements, I couldn’t help but gape at the rich spectacle about me. It seemed anything but equal to me.
There was a girl in front with hair so perfectly curled that it seemed to spring from her head like a doll’s: straight out the hole, down the back, and coiled tight at the ends. Her dress was butter yellow, crisscrossed with blue lines. A white belt burst into a perfect bow in the back. Her shoes were smudged with dust. But they were topped with the most heartbreakingly beautiful lace socks I had ever seen: woven with ribbons as blue as the sky-kissed lines of her dress. Just at the point where the sock met her brown skin, the white lace shot out and over, like a frill under a duchess’s chin.
I looked down at myself. Plain blouse, round collar, breakfast stain. Skirt swelling at the belly. Not a pretty sight.
Señorita’s bullhorn voice was coming at us over our desks. “WHO knows how to write their name?” The doll’s hand shot up, as did everybody else’s in the room, including mine.
A round boy in the corner was stuffing chunks of dulce de camote into his mouth in full view of the teacher and then holding a pencil to his lips, as if that could hide the machinery of his chewing. The candy was making his black hair stand on end, and making my mouth water.
“WHO knows how to write the colors—azul, rojo, verde?” Fewer children raised their hands, but when I looked around and saw George punch the air, I put my hand up, too, and waved extravagantly.
On the other side of the class a gaunt girl leaned forward, her left arm stiff against her waist. One of her legs was shackled in metal, and two black straps girded the ankle and knee. I strained over my desk to see her foot, but a sharp thwack of the ruler against the chalkboard brought me up straight. Señorita had her eyes on me.
“Yes?” she said. “Yes?”
I looked at my hands.
“Not paying attention is rude. Sí? Staring is rude. Sí?” She said this, although she was plainly staring at me. “Do you suppose this is a circus, Señorita Arana?” she went on. “Or do you suppose this is a school?” Her bright lips stopped here and puckered.
“Es una escuela,” I said, with a voice as tiny as an Andean flute. Two dozen faces were trained on me.
“Good,” she said. “You may be the chief engineer’s daughter, but you have no privileges in my classroom, you understand?” she added, and gave me a parting glower. “Now, class. How many of you can add?”
Far fewer hands sought the air, but seeing George’s there, I floated mine up, too. The bully between us snorted.
“Aha,” the señorita said, surveying us. “I see. And now, the final question, the big question, the one that will tell me if I have a future Pythagoras in here: Who among you can multiply?”
Here, as she uttered the magnificent word—mul-ti-pli-car—she flung out her hands like a priest at a mass benediction. Her head was back, her white teeth bared, a feverish expectation in her eyes.
My arm shot up. I could not have stopped it if I had tried. Multiply! My hand was banner high, triumphant. When I looked around, it was the only one there.
The boy beside me exploded into raucous laughter.
“Now, Guillermo,” said the teacher. “Now, now. How do you know our young friend here doesn’t know her multiplication tables?” She was bouncing her ruler against her palm. “Cómo lo sabes, ah?”
Her red mouth spread into a smile, and she pulled her green sweater over her wide hips like a duck ready to waddle into water. “Come here, gorda. Come up here and show Guillermo your bright little engineer’s brain.”
I pushed myself out of my chair and looked over at George. His lips were frozen in a perfect O, his eyebrows suspended in the air. Staggering forward, I followed the señorita to the chalkboard, like a rogue to the gallows. She picked up a piece of chalk, rested it against her chin for a moment, then scratched two numbers onto the blackboard with a flourish of her elbow: 4, and then 5. Last, she punched an X between them with such fury that my knees began to give.
“Here,” she said, and thrust the chalk toward my paunch. “Tómala.” Take it.
I stood there paralyzed, the chalk poised between my fingers like a bloated caterpillar, fat and white and venomous.
“You ready, my little ingeniera?” she said.
I shook my head no. A tittering came from the class.
“What, you can’t remember your multiplication tables, princesa?”
I shook my cretin head again. The snickers grew louder.
“Or maybe you never knew?” The red mouth broke into an ominous leer, an army of teeth perched behind.
I lowered my chin into my chest as my classmates slapped their desks and chortled with glee.
“She’s a liar!” roared Guillermo. “A fat, ugly liar!”
It was too much for George. He stood up and threw a mean punch into Guillermo’s abdomen. It folded my critic in half.
But Guillermo came up like a barracuda, grabbed George by the hair, and pulled him down, chairs and desks falling over in a clatter. The boys slugged and huffed, twisting every which way on the floor. The lame girl winced. The candy eater gawked. The doll face pressed her fingers to her temples. Finally, Señorita’s long green arm yanked George out by the collar, and her big voice bellowed, “Enough! Ya! Basta!”
“Guillermo! You sit down,” she said. “The rest of you, too. And you,” she snarled at George, “I’ll show you what happens to troublemakers. Everyone take note! Fíjense what happens to this uppity boy!”
She trotted George—still dangling from her hand—over to the closet, opened the door, and thrust him in. She turned the lock with a click and whirled around. “Go to your seat, chica,” she snapped, waving disdainfully at my chair.
I sat down and silently vowed not to move, not to open my mouth, not to bring any more attention to myself. To be as small as I could be.
The señorita was having us copy words into our notebooks, booming them out syllabically and then printing them on the board. I hunched into that work with intensity, laboring to copy the shapes she was forming.
But through the sounds of scribbling and coughing and shifting in chairs, I thought I heard something else. I listened closely. It was a muffled whimper, and it was coming from the closet.
All of a sudden, a wave of despair washed over me. George was in there weeping, and I was out here thinking of nothing more than my wretched self. My belly started to jump: up and down, bounce, bounce. Suddenly the skin on my face was spreading out, pulling tight. I threw back my head, gulping down air. What happened next, I cannot say, except that a sound like my father’s factory whistle came out of the deepest pit of my gut, long and piercing and full of alarm.
There was a sharp pull at my
elbow. As I sniffled and blinked, I could see that the teacher was pushing me toward the left side of the room. She opened the closet, shoved me in, and slammed the door behind me. Click.
“Cállense!” she shouted. Quiet! “And the rest of you take note! These children get no special treatment here. If it happens to them, it can happen to you! Fíjense bien!”
The air inside was black and damp. Though the classroom smelled of paint and cement, the closet smelled old, as if a thousand years of muck and llama grease had accumulated there.
“Georgie?” I whispered, my chest still heaving with aftersobs.
“I’m here,” came his reply, thin and frightened.
I groped my way toward him and crouched down on the floor, letting my eyes get accustomed to the dark. A shaft of light from under the door illuminated our feet.
“Look,” he said. “Look there.”
I followed the gray of his profile to a place on the highest shelf, over our heads, over the boxes and books. There in the shadows, gleaming white, was a human skull.
That was how we became our mother’s pupils. We did not go back to Señorita’s classroom. From then on, whether at the dining room table, in the garden, on car trips, or on the rocky shores of the Pacific, we were beneficiaries of Mother’s perpetual tutelage. School became an all-day, year-round affair. To make it official, our notebooks—Vicki’s included—began shuttlecocking back and forth from the Calvert School, a private, nondenominational institution in Baltimore that made its curriculum and materials available not only to the three of us in our Peruvian hacienda but to children in “the farthest outposts of civilization.” The Calvert system boasted that it had been known to be delivered by dogsled, camel, even parachute. Every month, a box with the Calvert logo—a boy’s silhouette—would arrive on a truck from the port of Callao, and we would open it with relish, removing each neat blue notebook, each spiral-bound textbook, each colored pencil with awe. Sometimes four months would elapse between our completing the work and an “evaluator” from that school passing final judgment on it, but every day it was Mother who sat us down, got out her teacher’s manual, and drilled or tested us. Arithmetic, world history, English grammar, botany. If we visited a Chimu ruin, we’d go home and read up on Egypt and Greece. If we ran into the house with beetles as big as my shoes, she’d have us pinpoint the species, draw the insects into our notebooks, and guess where they figured in the food chain. Sitting at the piano would lead to a lesson about a Massenet tone poem. Scooping the dirt with a cup had its logical progression to fractions and math. If we begged for stories, we got them, from Roman to Norse. There was nothing so complicated that we couldn’t be made to understand it. There was nothing so simple that it couldn’t be wrapped in grand themes.