by Marie Arana
I turned the book in my hands. Indians of the Great Plains, the cover announced. I opened it. “What part would you like me to read?” I asked.
“Any page,” he said. “Pick one.” He sat back and crossed his hands behind his head.
I flipped through, looking at pictures. Somewhere near the middle, there was one labeled Medicine man with a rattle, or words to that effect. The witch doctor was peeking out of a tepee, holding an artifact. In the foreground, an Indian brave in a loinflap ran down to a river with his hair spread behind him like wings. The text was interesting enough, something like this: After the last steaming and sweating ceremony, the Indian plunged into water during the summer, or into a snowbank in winter. Thus purified, he was ready to make an offering to the Great Spirit or seek a sign from the Great Beyond.
I stared at the words and considered my situation. I could read this aloud and be waved into the English stream. It was clearly as simple as that. Or I could play possum, as Grandpa Doc liked to say. Put one over on the prig.
I snapped the book shut and set it down on the table. “I can’t read this,” I said, and looked up.
“You’re not even going to try?”
I shook my head. “Too hard.”
“Well, read this, then,” he said, and slid another book at me. It was thin and bright as a candied wafer.
I picked it up, leafed through. Then I smoothed it flat on the table in front of me. “Jane … puh-plays … wi-i-ith the … ball.”
“I see,” he said, after some pages of this. “I thought as much. That will do.” He scribbled a long commentary into my file.
I was put into Señora Arellano’s class and, for what seemed a very long time, my parents were none the wiser. I toted my children’s illustrated Historia del Perú, memorizing the whole litany of Inca rulers until I could recite their Quechua names with all the rattletybang of gunfire.
And Margarita Martinez paid attention to me.
THERE IS A STORY they tell in Cajamarca about four sons from an honorable family that knew the value of honesty, the pleasures of hard work, and the worth of a job well done. The first son set out to build houses. The second became a general in the army. The third founded a bank. The fourth went east and made hats. Time passed, and the hatmaker fell in love with a green-eyed woman. He asked her father for her hand. But, as fate would have it, her father rejected him. It wasn’t only that the commerce of straw hats wasn’t grand enough. The suitor’s skin wasn’t fair enough, his eyes not clear enough, his language not elegant enough, and, to seal the rejection: Of all his brothers, he was told, he had the least clout.
The hatmaker wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was intent on winning the green-eyed lady. First, he took stock of his situation. There was nothing he could do about his shade of skin, the brilliance of his eyes, nor the cleverness of his tongue, but he certainly could do something about his clout in the world. He swindled a mansion out of his first brother; he killed the general and took over his men; he kidnapped the banker and created an empire. And when he was done, the green-eyed woman was his.
So what is the moral of this story? The answer out of Cajamarca is: Do what you can. You can’t change skin, can’t fix tongues, can’t brighten eyes, but power is for the taking. Steal it, lie for it, kill if you have to. You can win the girl with the interesting eyes.
Looking back, I understand what was happening—though I certainly didn’t understand it at the time. Mother had made a bargain with Papi: He could take the risk of resigning from Grace and joining his brothers, he could even put us in a smaller house, but the first cut of his salary would go to the Roosevelt School, and her children would be educated as Americans. She hadn’t factored in the realities of that decision. Roosevelt was where the prosperous Americans were. It was where the sons and daughters of diplomats, industrialists, bankers went to be schooled. Had I continued to be a little princess of the Grace regnancy, I might have had some currency there. As it was, we had become children of diminished circumstances—we never said so, never complained—but the knowledge that we had lost our power did not come without its consequences. My instinct was the Cajamarca instinct: Do what you can. Get it back.
I had no power among rich Americans. I could fool them, however. Trip them up. Dodge their game. I would lie for it, cheat for it, dance fast if I had to. I would get the girl with the bulgy eyes.
Although I fooled my way into a desk next to Margarita Martinez, I didn’t turn out to be a particularly good friend to her. We played together when we could, but she was far too interested in dolls for my taste. Her house was down the avenida and around the corner from ours, much grander, with a host of servants trailing her down the street. She hadn’t been able to get into the fancy Catholic girls’ schools for some reason, and her father—a restaurant owner—had done what he could. He wangled her way into the Americans’ school. She was timid, something of a priss on the playground, and I enjoyed lording over her far more than I should have. I made her do things my way.
I cannot say what was in my brother’s or sister’s heart, but an appetite definitely stirred in mine. I found myself looking around, assessing what kind of power was available to me. There did appear to be some: With Peruvian children at Roosevelt, I bragged I was really a gringa. With gringos, I crossed my eyes and retreated into Spanish. With sissies like Margarita, I played queen. I did what I could.
But there was something else, far more potent. As I settled into that Lima house, with its front door smack on the street, I began to decode a system I had never even suspected in the haciendas, for all that the hierarchy was obvious. I began to see that not only did the rich gringos wield a good share of the power in the city—this was all too apparent in their houses, their cars, their clothes, their toys—I could also see it was the fairer Peruvians, the ones with less visible Indian blood, who ruled Peru. The more Spanish blood in your veins, the more power you had. Maybe I had an advantage here; maybe I could reap the benefit. Nobody was posting signs about it or sending the less fortunate to the other side of the tracks, but the evidence was everywhere: The Indians were the servants, beasts of burden, construction workers, street hawkers, beggars. The mestizos—people of mixed race—were the shopkeepers, office workers, scrappy entrepreneurs. From time to time I would see a Chinese or Japanese woman behind a counter, or a tall black man in a uniform guarding the doors of a fancy hotel; the variations were relatively few. But the highest caste of all—the landowners, intelligentsia, the moneyed classes—were almost always los blancos, the whites. Clearly, my grandparents weren’t rich. But, even though my grandfather had hightailed it upstairs and forfeited his career, the two had a respectable position in Peruvian society. They had inherited a hacienda in the mountains when Tía Carmen had died. They had a comfortable house in an attractive neighborhood of Miraflores. We also had something we could never lose: We were gente decente. From the good families. As my grandmother was fond of saying, somos puros Hispanos—we were Spaniards to the core.
I had had some exposure to the power of skin: I had been of a questionable race in my mother’s country. For all our material slippage, I remained a member of the upper class in my father’s country. I did not use this information immediately, but I logged it away, in the spirit of one-upmanship. It was the coin of the realm.
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.
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br /> 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 empire that ruled more than twenty million: the Tahuantisuyo, mighty domain of the Inca. How? Certainly not because they were any more clever; the Inca had reached a level of civilization that Spain itself did not know. The lords of the Andes were orderly: They fed their people, irrigated their deserts, built impregnable fortresses, ruled with an iron hand. Certainly not because that straggly regiment of 168 was powerful enough to stop a sea of natives. Had the Inca wanted to, they could have swallowed the dogfaces whole. Drunk their blood. Why didn’t they? Here it is: Because they felt a magic at work, some undefinable force of destiny. Black light. Open the qosqo: take it in. Spain strutted through Europe, bragging about its military victory, but this was no victory. No. The truth was all there in that city, slow though I was to see it. Peru was no product of conquest. It had been forged from transcendent surrender.
Our little band ran through the neighborhood day after day after school, enacting the Spanish side of the story. I marched out to the empty lot with cardboard strapped around my knees, a tin pot on my head, a garbage cover in one hand, a strong stick in the other. I was Don Pedro the Cruel. I was Boabdil. I was El Cid, ready to die, hungry for revenge.
It was hard work, this autoindoctrination. This ad-lib curriculum in power. Often, I just scraped by. One of my lions broke out of its cage one day, surprising me and my men. I had been sleeping by the fire, sated with rum and skewered heart. The roar was faint at first, like the rumble of a distant huayco—rock grinding on rock—and then I woke to see the animal coming at me through the hall. He was massive, blond, padding across the tile with his shoulders churning. His head hardly moved at all.
I snatched my cloak and wrapped it tight around my arm. My guard staggered back, a fringe of straight hair flopping against her forehead. She fell into an empty vat. The clatter awoke my minister, who stood and dusted off his robes. His eyes widened when he saw the approaching cat, but he didn’t spring out with his bludgeon; he slinked behind my couch like a ferret into a hole, afraid. I went forward to meet the beast, swinging my sword—Tizona—above my head. Then a most magical thing happened. The lion stopped and stared at my advance, as if my very form were mesmerizing. He snorted once, raised his magnificent brow, and sent his eyes from side to side.
I strode up, grasped him by the mane, led him back to his cage in the adjoining hall, and thrust him in. When my brother rattled in with his armor clanging about him, ready to defend me, I turned and raised two fingers to signal that I had been blessed by the shield of God. Then I slapped the fur from my hands.
We went into the desert after that, in search of the counts of Carrion. They had committed dastardly acts against me and their wives. Me, they had betrayed with talk, with oily, insidious promises they had never made good. Their wives, they had nearly killed. They had lured them out to a meadow, offering words and wine. But once there, they had kicked them, lashed them, stripped them, and left them there to die. I had heard of these cowardly deeds from my scribe, who read me the news from a scroll of blood-smudged parchment.
I rescued the wives and bound their wounds while George rode on to give the fleeing counts their due. He found them just outside Valencia, sniveling by the retaining wall, seeing the reflection of their absurd little selves in the shine of their conqueror’s eyes. They threw their hands over their heads. When I galloped up in my chariot with their women huddled against my legs, they surrendered to my chains.
I died some days later, but not before I made plans. I gathered my men. Embalm me, I told them. Find Clam-Hand Wooten, bring him here in the silver bullet with the flying dogs on the sides, tell him to fix up my face, scarred now from so many battles. Then strap me to Babieca. They balked at this, thinking my horse would sense that I was dead and buck me into the dirt by the side of some carretera. But no, I said, Babieca is loyal, he will carry my corpse. Do all this, men, then point the horse toward the battlefield. Send him against King Cúcar, with my body on his back.
They did exactly as I said. They cleaned me and trussed me and strapped me to Babieca. And then the two of us rode out to meet the Moors. They were terrified when they saw me, clutching their breastplates at the very sight of my hair on the wind. “But she was dead!” they cried out. “They told us she was dead!” And then they scattered like crazed cockroaches. Vanquished.
“Of course you like to play those games,” Abuelita crowed as she poured tea for us one evening. “You two are probably very good at them.” Papi had taken me, George, and Vicki to our grandparents’ house for what would become our traditional Sunday visit. Mother had excused herself and stayed home.
“It’s in your blood, you know!” Abuelita continued. “Don’t forget that your great-great-great-grandfather (el bis bis bis bis!) General Joaquin Rubin de Celis de la Lastra was the first Spaniard to fall in the Battle of Ayacucho. You might even say that the fall from his horse marked the independence of Peru!”
“And how about Pedro Pabl
o Arana? El bis of the other side!” Tía Chaba chimed in, one eye on my shrinking grandfather, her hair piled high in a twist. “He led three hundred rebels on horses! Cataplún, cataplún! Swooping down from the mountains to fight the corrupt military tyrants!” She rapped the table with her beautiful long red fingernails, as if they were hooves. She flashed her eyes inside exquisitely drawn lines of kohl. Vicki grinned triumphantly.
Power. It was a family thing.
AS THE ARANA brothers were making their bid for power, establishing Techo Rex offices in Lima, importing the latest American engineering equipment, plotting like Cheops to erect something monumental, every law of thermodynamics was being played out within the confines of our house. Push was coming to shove. Electricity was filling the air. Even the nervousness that once coursed through George now snaked, through some Newtonian concatenation of converted energy, across the house to creep into Mother. Her brow was perpetually dug with Trouble, her eyes gun-barrel gray. Her fingers were chewed back, raw. I no longer saw them dancing along the neck of a violin or drawing on the wand of a bow. She seemed limp, lifeless, moving through rooms as if she no longer knew where she was. Looking for cues that weren’t there.
She seldom went out. Far from the gringos in the haciendas and free of the obligations of a teacher, she was afloat in an alien city, hovering above the ruckus like gossamer on the fly.
She tried to bear up by reading philosophy. The books were barometers of her mood: Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Will Durant’s The Lessons of History. The themes were will, control, subjugation: off a broad brush, on a large scale. When we’d walk in from school we’d see her reenter in stages: the chin up, the quick blink, the realization that we were standing before her, and then our mother descending the staircase of her mind, peering down at us from some far landing of consciousness. She was there, but she was somewhere else, too, like a lynx with its nose in the wind, sensing trails that could call her away.