by Marie Arana
It didn’t occur to me that I was anything but a boy’s equal. I was my mother’s daughter, ready to pit myself against boys if I had to, ready to grin at them openly, as I’d seen my mother grin at the solteros, facing them squarely when they strode down the streets, tipping their hats her way.
But there was a dichotomy at work, and it would take a long time for me to understand it. As much as I was a gringa, chasing through that neighborhood in the wake of my big brother, I was also studiously acquiring a Peruvian femininity. It came in subtle ways: During one of Tía Chaba’s visits, when she stepped into the garden, leaned over, and hissed in my ear—“Marisi, cross your legs, hijita; you’re showing the world your very soul.” Or, “Don’t sit there with your mouth hanging open like a lizard; close it until you have something interesting to say.” Or hearing an engineer’s wife gossip at my father’s table—“Oy, por Dios, Jorge, have you seen that criatura the Martinez girl has turned into? She walks like an hombre, waves her hands about like a chola, props her fists on her hips, and spits out ear-singeing groserías.” So that by the time I was grown, I knew there were two women I could be—the Latina or the gringa—and that at every juncture I would need to choose one. I picked my way through life, deciding to try one identity and then the other. I transformed myself into an all-American in high school; became Peruvian again in college. I was a good Latina in my first marriage, going to the altar with the first man who ever touched me, hanging my future on his, never reaching for him in bed. And then I was a good gringa in my second, throwing out all the rule books and following my heart. But all that came later, after Paramonga. Long after I discovered a thing or two about boys.
It was in George’s club that I learned boys were clannish. They loved the company of other boys. Backslaps and fellowship. The code of the gang. For these things they were willing to undergo any humiliation, suffer any outrage. To be in. But if it was true for them, it was also true for me. I longed to be part of a team, to wield a little power. Were kisses the price of admission? Caramba! They could kiss me all day long. My hair was too long, my dresses too girly, God hadn’t bothered to fit me with a hose, but that hadn’t seemed to stop me so far. Kisses? Sure. I could do that. I’d get by. I’d belong.
“Okay,” I said to Manuel briskly. “Follow me.”
The buck-toothed boy came through the flap of the tent meekly and watched as I tramped to the center and sat on the grass, cross-legged.
“Now what?” he asked, his skewed eyes focusing.
“Sit here and let me see if I like you,” I said, and motioned to the space before me.
He sat down and I studied his face. “Look,” he whispered nervously, and put a hand in his pocket. “I have something I can give you.” He pulled out a caramelo in red wrapping and offered it to me. His face was mottled with expectation.
“What flavor?” I asked.
“Strawberry.”
Candy. I hadn’t anticipated bribes. My power was beginning to seem infinite. I could hear the giggles and guffaws outside.
“Fine,” I said, and put out my hand. He dropped the warm cube in. “You tell anyone about this and you’re gone,” I said. “Ciao.”
“And the kiss?” he said. El beso?
I put out one foot. “On my shoe.”
He obliged.
“Okay. You’re in.”
He scrambled to his feet and burst outside with a whoop.
Three more filed in, one at a time. I extracted a variety of treasures from them: a green marble, a Coca-Cola top from the loco boy’s garden, a fifty-centavo piece. The kisses were minor obligations: my elbow, my wrist, a hand, and with each, the promise to never tell.
The last was Carlos. He came in, peering up through his lashes.
“You want to be in this club?” I said, narrowing my eyes as he sat.
“Sí.”
“Bueno. You have to do two things. First, the kiss. And then you give me something.”
“Give you what?”
“What do you have in your pockets?”
“Oh.” He checked. There was nothing there.
I looked him up and down, taking my time to think. Outside, the boys were crawling up, trying to eavesdrop. I could hear George wrestle them back.
What could I get the boy to give me? And then I thought of Antonio.
“I know,” I said. “Tell me something. A story. But it has to be true, it has to be secret, and it better be quick.”
He frowned, smoothing his cowlick. “Okay,” he said.
“Un beso primero,” I said, and pushed my lips out for a kiss.
He didn’t hesitate. He sucked air, leaned in, pecked me on the mouth, and sat back down.
“And now, el secreto,” he said calmly, folding his manicured hands together in his lap while I caught my breath and wiped his kiss onto my forearm. “It’s something I heard my mother say to my father. And it has something to do with you. She said your mother is weird. Rara. She talks funny, doesn’t fit. She should get on a boat and go back to wherever she came from. She doesn’t belong in Peru.”
I could feel heat rise through my chest, fly up my neck, and lodge in the back of my throat. A boy staggered through the flap, fell, and rolled in at us, red-faced and cackling, but I hardly registered him at all. Carlos stood, brushed himself off, and walked out of the tent. “She said yes,” he announced to the others, assuming consent when I’d sat there with my mouth hanging open like a reptile.
Doesn’t belong in Peru? What did that mean exactly? Did she fit any less than anyone else in that makeshift hacienda? There was a carnival of misfits here: Tommy the loco, the long-legged solteros, and—por el amor de Dios—how about Wong?
Step inside a corner bodega anywhere in Peru and you were likely to see a Chinese face behind the counter. Step inside Paramonga’s shabby little bodega china and there would be Wong, his colossal head trailing a goatee to his abacus the way a genie trails a wisp to its lamp.
“Qué quiele? Tulón?” You want a turrón? And a long, bony finger would point to the tall glass jar with its colored chunks of nougat. “One sol buys five!”
“How about flan?” we’d call out, just to tease him. Just to ask him for something we knew he didn’t have.
“Mo lo!” he’d bark back in Cantonese. “All gone.”
Wong, we had been told, was from the village of Huarmey. His parents had been coolies from Shanghai. Slavery had been outlawed for almost a century in South America, but a new “Chinese law” was in place when his family was lured to Peru. The sugar and guano moguls paid one pound sterling for Wong’s father, half that for his mother. The two made the nine-thousand-mile voyage to Callao in the hold of a ship with four hundred others like them. By the time they stepped into the cane fields five months later, they knew they should never have come. Wong’s father had to be shackled to keep him from trying to make a run for the sea. His mother took an overdose of opium and lay down by the sugar shoots to die.
Old Wong grew up, married, had sons. But he stayed in Paramonga, peddling his dried food and sweets, clinging to the cane field as tightly as a locust husk—as shriveled as the shrimp and tau-err-tong that filled the barrels of his shop.
“Mo lo!” the Peruvian children would mimic as he hobbled home in the dark. All gone.
Doesn’t fit. Like who? Like the Dane who lived next door in the lemon-yellow casa de solteros? He had come years before, bright-faced and handsome, bragging of pink-assed women. At first he was one of the ordinary ones, shuttling out to the factory in the morning and sucking on rum at night. Until one fine day when he began to drool, drop things, and spin through the rooms with his hands on his head. They took him to a hospital after that. “Nerves,” they whispered, “something to do with his spine.” Then they brought him back to the house beside us, and he was all fixed, shiny as a new steel tool.
But one afternoon George and I looked up from our cowboy wars and saw the gringo flinging tables and chairs through his second-floor window, wriggling wildly
, pausing only to hang his head out over the sill and gurgle at the pile below. When they edged upstairs to grab him, they said the man had gone crazy. When they took him off and opened his head, they found a fistful of worms inside.
We Peruvians have a name for that. Taki Onqoy: a plague of worms that fills a body with an irresistible urge to wiggle. The mountain Indians had been known to invoke the Taki Onqoy against the Spaniards for all the agonies they had brought to Peru. The Spaniards danced and writhed until they flung themselves into the rivers—a useful thing to have happen to foreigners, a curse to slam them back where they belonged.
Back where she came from. All these years later, I am still drawn up tight by that phrase, with a fury I can hardly contain. Who was to say that Carlos Ruiz’s mother with her roots tracing back to Segovia belonged in Peru? Or the king’s conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, for that matter, an illegitimate pig farmer from the Spanish fringe—did he have a birthright to the land of the Inca? If Señora Ruiz and Pizarro had pioneer birthrights, as my Peruvian family claimed to have, did they have one any more than my gringa mother?
Before that moment in the tepee with Carlos Ruiz, I did not know that my mother was an outcast in my father’s country. I knew that she was different, that she and my grandmother were at odds with each other, that she seemed awkward in Peruvian settings, that people giggled at the way she spoke. It wasn’t that she was reviled in any way for how she looked, for the color of her skin. Not at all. Light complexions were admired in Peru, and her alabaster skin seemed an asset: a credit to my father. He had married a blanca and in so doing whitened future generations of Aranas. It was good to be pale. What I learned from Carlos Ruiz that afternoon was that the problem with us was not about skin. It was not about language. It was not about money. It was about being American. It was about seeing my mother, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a cartoon yanqui: the big-boned, clumsy, loud-mouthed, bragging, dim-brained, swaggering kind.
MY ANGER EVENTUALLY subsided, but it never quite went away. There was much to signal the growing antipathy against Americans in Peru. I could stand at my window and watch it. The way the guard at the club across the way picked his teeth when he stared at the solteros; the way the guest-house servants laughed into their hands when a visiting New Yorker pulled away; the way the señoras fell silent and swiveled their heads as my mother walked past. I didn’t realize it then, but I know it now: My world shrank a few sizes when Carlos Ruiz confided his secret. I pulled back, became a distant satellite to the boys’ club, and began to wish George would spend all his time alone with me, digging into the loam of Pachamama—contemplating the wonders of dirt—as Antonio had taught me to do.
Papi must have seen that I needed to be aired out and pushed into the open of Paramonga, because he announced one day that he had arranged for Señor González, the hacienda’s horse trainer, to bring us his tamest mares, teach me and George basic equestrian skills, and take us out three mornings a week for a good look at the topography we lived in: the cane fields, the rocky shoreline, and the arid stretches that circled the hacienda. George and I would emerge from the house after our morning lessons and find the gentle creatures waiting for us by the gate, fanning their tails in wide arcs. Señor González would be perched on the fence, his face lean and hard as a saddlebag, his eyes framed by a fretwork of lines.
If the weather was good and the horses were willing, Señor González would let us ride to the fortaleza, the pre-Colombian adobe fortress on the other side of the Pan American Highway, about three miles from our house. It had been raised in the early 1400s by the Chimu, the most powerful people to rule Peru before the Inca. As wide as a city block, the fortaleza was an enigmatic hulk, built to house Chimu eminences and the warriors they had conscripted to defend against Inca invasions.
I loved that tiered leviathan. I loved the way it hoisted itself out of a jaundiced earth, smelling of urine and gloom. I loved to run its dusty maze—room after room of pocked floors and walls. Life was good when George and I could jump off our yeguas, pat them on the nose, hand Señor González the reins, and scamper up that sunbaked scarp.
The purpose of the fortaleza, as far as we could tell, had shifted from stronghold to cemetery. Burial vaults yawned at us as we clambered through the labyrinth, yielding up skulls and femurs that had been tossed there by fellow thieves. Our servants had told us how robbers had ransacked those graves in years gone by. Some called themselves scholars, others were fortune hunters, still more were just thugs, angling for easy money. They had come from far and wide, slinking in through the night, plunging picks into Pachamama, pulling out Chimu bones, killing one another in the process, but they emerged from that place with wonders: Capes made of hummingbird wings. Gold nose hoops. Towering headdresses. Earrings with gems the size of our fists. “They’re either sitting in a museum or adorning some rich man’s table in San Francisco,” Papi commented. They were long gone, in other words. But we didn’t believe him. We searched anxiously for fuegos fatuos, will-o’-the-wisps that Antonio had told me would waft out of the soil if treasure were buried below. When we didn’t see them, George and I would thrust our hands in anyway for the simple joy of rooting around that dirt. But the only thing we ever unearthed was bone. We’d study it, keep it if it interested us, fling it aside impatiently. Veterans of the dig.
“What do you think you’re doing?” said Señor González, as he puffed up after us one day. A look of disgust twisted his face when he saw us handling the remains. “What in God’s name—”
“I need these,” I said, yanking the teeth out of a dusty skull. “For my collection.”
“I have more than you do!” sang George, jangling his pockets.
“Que Dios los perdone,” said the saddle-faced señor. “And may the apus be looking the other way.”
“The apus?”
“The spirits of these mountains. They won’t like that you’re heckling the dead. Hurry it up and let’s go. I don’t need any more bad luck than I already have.” He swung into the sun and headed back down, hitching his shoulders as if a chill air had suddenly swept the fortaleza, rubbing his sleeves.
We found a dead rodent as we clinked and rattled our way down that day. George picked it up and thrust it in his pocket along with the teeth. “For Doctor Birdseye,” he said. “Maybe he’ll give us a good price.”
Birdseye was a norteamericano scientist who had come to Paramonga to advise the paper engineers on new ways to cook down bagasse, the woody pulp of processed sugarcane. Paramonga was on the verge of being one of Grace’s greatest successes, marking a company shift from merchant to innovator. Whole warehouses of sugarcane byproducts were whirling from the engines, from toilet paper to corrugated boxes to gin. The engineers already knew what to make with the residue: polyvinyl chloride, one of the plastics of the modern age. Paramonga had become the sort of showcase presidents visit, and Birdseye was one of its stars.
He was a naturalist, a botanist, a biochemist, a pioneer of cryogenics, and “an all-round genius,” according to my papi. But more important, as far as we were concerned, he was a pushover for us.
He was small, spry, and wizened, with shocks of white hair sprouting from either side of his head. When he caught sight of us, his eyes would grow bright, almost numinous, and he’d wave us forward to hear his thoughts about some natural wonder. On his first day in the little house beside the Bowling Club, Birdseye had announced that any and all children were welcome in his home. “Especially welcome,” he added with a twinkle in his eye and a shiver of his wild mane, “if they bring me good business.”
Business meant animals of any kind, dead or alive. Insects, small mammals, snakes, lizards, birds—it didn’t matter—he would buy them from us for a few centavos and add them to his working lab. His lab, he told us, might be working on anything, so it was best to haul it all in. He never knew when inspiration would come. On an expedition to Alaska, studying the habits of bears, he had thought of a way to quick-freeze fresh vegetables. Years
later, when we saw his colorful Birds Eye bricks lining the frozen-food aisles of U.S. grocery stores, we realized that the work he was doing out in the field, including Peru, had ended up making him a very rich man. But at the time, he seemed little more than a madcap Merlin with pint-size associates. And a can full of cash on his desk.
When we got home, we left our horses with Señor González and traipsed down the street toward prosperity and the Birdseye house. It was a one-floor structure with a towering casuarina tree flaunting its bright yellow flowers by the front door. No gate, no fence. Every time we saw that door we marveled at the fact that we were approaching it immediately from the street. Until we’d laid eyes on Birdseye’s house, the only portals we saw so directly were the doors of indigent shacks. The place was open, permeable, accessible from any side. In the back, where the sweet-natured Mrs. Birdseye spent most of her days, there was a flower and orchid garden. Peacocks wandered through, unfurling their tails and flouncing about like Inca conquerors. Parrots chattered in the trees. Birds, animals, people like us, could drift onto Birdseye property freely. An aura of welcome surrounded the place.
The manservant who answered the door received us warmly and led us to Dr. Birdseye’s massive garden table—a green slab of wood cluttered with sticks, instruments, glass, and a large tin can. The doctor was perched on a high chair behind.
He was gray in every aspect except for his eyes, which were sharp blue and glistening. Through the glass of his spectacles they seemed large and material as planets. There was a slight hunch in his spine from bending over tables too much, peering into a gallery of lenses he kept in a box on a shelf. As we approached, I saw that he was in his threadbare white lab coat, buttoned right up to his chin.
“My assistants!” he called out when he saw us, flinging his small arms wide.
George produced our rat, brandishing him by one foot.