Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  Joel then wrote to say he wanted to hitchhike to South America to visit us and was trying to come up with a clever scheme to get school credit for it, like Ronald had. He hoped that might even allow him to graduate. Joel asked our mother to write a letter to Berkeley High “affirming that I am going to school down there for 1 semester taking the required courses.” I have no idea if she ever ended up writing that letter, but I do know that Joel never graduated.

  * * *

  Argentina turned out to be only a two-month stopover for us, a place to figure out our next move and for my mother to hurriedly type up her Chile recollections (later published as a book, Nothing Is as It Should Be: A North American Woman in Chile). With Allende’s socialist Chile destroyed, my mother decided Peru now had the greatest promise for revolutionary foment.

  III.

  PERU

  Wondering who will read this diary besides me. Wondering whether I will live a long time, wondering whether I’ll live to see the revolution either here or in the USA, whether I will have a little part in it, a big part, whether I will die fighting.

  —Carol Andreas, 1974

  Jauja

  EVERYONE AROUND ME screamed. A few days before Christmas 1973, my mother, Jean-Pierre, and I were on our way from Lima to Huancayo, a medium-sized city in Peru’s central highlands. Our overstuffed train was winding along the highest tracks in the world, hugging the side of a mountain on the western slopes of the Andes, when it hit a boulder. It jumped the tracks, stuttered wildly, and then came to a screeching halt, barely avoiding a long, disastrous tumble down the mountain.

  In those terrifying seconds after the impact, all my eight-year-old brain could think of was the order of French fries I had just placed. I screeched, “Ay caramba, mis papas fritas!” and our whole car burst into laughter.

  During the chilly hours that we patiently waited by the side of the tracks for another train to come, my mother and I struck up a conversation with Angelica, a teenage girl with thick, long, braided black hair. She was maybe sixteen, and said she came from Jauja, the first capital of Spanish Peru and the cultural capital of the central highlands. A small town of mostly Indian inhabitants, it was only a short bus ride from Huancayo, and Angelica made us promise to visit her and her family.

  Now that her Spanish was passable, my mother’s plan was to try to get a job teaching sociology at the Universidad Nacional del Centro in Huancayo once the semester started in April. That way, she hoped, she could embed herself in the community and get involved in local political struggles. But that was still months away, and so we decided to visit Jauja. Before boarding the bus we shopped at Huancayo’s Sunday market. My mother bought me a beautiful white, brown, and black alpaca sweater, and Jean-Pierre bought me a wood flute and a little pouch as a good-bye gift. He would be returning to Lima. My mother had lost interest in him, perhaps because he was ultimately more into taking photos than talking politics. I would miss Jean-Pierre and his fancy Nikon, especially since we didn’t have a camera of our own, though I would not miss having him in the room with my mother and me at night.

  With my mother by the side of our derailed train crossing the Peruvian Andes, December 1973

  Once again I had my mother all to myself, at least for the time being. Things were less complicated when it was only the two of us. She didn’t ask me what I thought about Jean-Pierre or his leaving—she never asked me about any of the boyfriends who came and went—but maybe she could sense that I liked it best when we were taking care of each other on our own.

  * * *

  With my new gifts after visiting Huancayo’s Sunday market, December 1973

  In Jauja, nestled in Peru’s Mantaro Valley almost two miles above sea level, all the buildings wore red-tile roofs and most were made of adobe. Only part of the town had electricity, and even there the current was unstable. Banners in the streets decried the electricity problem. Cultivated hills, some dotted with crumbling Inca ruins, surrounded the town.

  We checked into a small hotel close to the town plaza and were given a narrow room with one small bed. The hotel had no heat or hot water, but our room was clean and cheap. It was the day before Christmas. I spent hours playing soccer in front of the hotel with other neighborhood kids, and at night lit firecrackers with the hotel owner’s son. Most of the kids were friendly enough, except for the bully who teased me and called me gringa because of my long hair. My mother was still refusing to let me cut it.

  With my mother near Jauja, January 1974

  On Christmas Day, drunken men, young and old, were dancing in the streets. They reminded me of Rosa’s husband, Mauricio, back on the farm in Chile. I hoped he and Rosa and the family were safe. And I couldn’t help thinking of my own, assuredly sober father, so far away, who was no doubt having a very different kind of Christmas celebration. I imagined he would want me there with him, acting out his dream of the happy family.

  Angelica’s home turned out to be only a few blocks from our hotel, above a little restaurant her family owned on Junin Street. There were only maybe half a dozen small tables, and the mostly male customers seemed to come to drink Pilsen as much as to order food. My mother and I introduced ourselves to her family the day after Christmas and then came back every day thereafter. We ate all our meals there, usually the daily soup with garlic, potatoes, and rice. There was no menu; one simply ate whatever Angelica’s mother, Emma, cooked that day.

  I quickly became friends with Angelica and enjoyed hanging out at the restaurant. A week later, my mother and I moved in with Angelica’s family; it was cheaper than staying at the hotel, and they had plenty of room for us. Hildo, Angelica’s older brother, had just left to join the army, so we rented his room, its large windows looking over neighboring rooftops. Pigs, chickens, and rabbits lived in the muddy backyard. We had a table and an electric lamp, so my mother had a place to write in her diary or type away on her little manual Olivetti. My mother paid the family seven hundred soles a week for room and board. We still had some of the savings she had brought with us from Berkeley over a year earlier, but we were apparently close to broke, though she never shared her money concerns with me.

  While we lived with Angelica and her family, my mother tried to work with me on my reading and writing, but I stubbornly resisted and was easily distracted by all of the people coming and going from the restaurant. I joined the neighborhood kids in water-balloon fights on the streets, trips to the outdoor market, and of course kicking a soccer ball around. I learned to pester foreign tourists, hoping to earn some spare change; I would offer to translate for them when bartering with vendors. Jauja became my playground, a world with no real rules or parental oversight. As my mother jotted down in one of her diary entries from January of 1974, “Peter drove by in a truck with a bunch of strangers. What’s he up to?! Wonder if we’re going to a party tonight?”

  As I made friends across town, though, my focus was always on Angelica. I missed Pedro on the farm in Chile, but in Jauja, Angelica was my world. I was devoted to her, despite the fact that she had a boyfriend, Daniel. She, in turn, was happy to play big sister, something I’d never had. Angelica adored me and I adored her. She saved some of her most radiant smiles for me. She took me everywhere with her and had more luck than my mother did getting me to work on reading and writing lessons.

  Angelica even managed to cure me of sarna. I had not been able to stop itching. My mother called it “the itch” because at first we had no idea what it was. I had blisters, redness, and intense itching on my fingers, with the webbed areas between my fingers oozing a clear pus. Turns out I had become a breeding ground for tiny mites. The local doctor told us I had something called sarna and gave us a white powder to put on it. We looked up sarna in our Spanish-English dictionary: scabies, otherwise known as mange. It was contagious, but my mother somehow managed not to get it from me. The mites were completely attached to me as their host. I was miserable. We tried new lotions and soaps. “The itch” still wouldn’t go away. Then Angelica rubbed chil
i peppers into the soft skin between my fingers. That did the trick, and I was finally cured.

  With Angelica in Jauja, January 1974

  Angelica always took me with her to the movies on the weekend, but that was mostly an excuse to meet up with Daniel. There was only one movie theater in town, on the corner of the town’s central plaza, and there was little logic to what it played—an old Western, a kung fu flick, a sappy romance. I didn’t care. When Angelica was grounded for sneaking out to see Daniel, I chose to stay home with her and skip the shows. When Daniel tried to visit Angelica, her father kicked him and screamed at him and chased him away from the house. He didn’t want any man near his daughter. Daniel, tall, muscular, and handsome, was twice the size of Angelica’s pudgy and potbellied middle-aged father, but he always respectfully backed off. Sometimes Angelica gave me a love note to secretly pass on to Daniel, and it made me feel important that she trusted me to be their accomplice. I’d smuggle the note out the front door past Angelica’s oblivious father, dart around the corner and hand it to Daniel waiting a block away, and then bring a note back to Angelica, who would give me a warm thank-you kiss on my forehead before disappearing to her room to read it. When she then reappeared with a new note, I’d slip back off to Daniel. Angelica’s father never caught on.

  * * *

  One afternoon, Angelica took me to the church and cemetery for a funeral. When I came back, I ran to my mother, promising her that when she died I would keep fresh flowers on her grave. “Mommy, you should have seen all those graves with all those flowers. You like flowers, so I’ll make sure to put flowers on your grave, too.”

  My mother paused, startled. “Oh, Peter, I appreciate the sentiment, but hopefully that won’t be for a while yet. Besides, I want my body to be cremated—you know, burned to ashes—so I won’t need to have a grave at all.”

  “But then where will I put the flowers?” I asked, disappointed.

  My mother laughed. “Let’s not worry about that right now. But in the meantime you can give me flowers whenever you want.”

  Ever since my mother was missing for those weeks after the military coup in Chile, I’d been worried that she was going to get herself killed. “Sometimes you have to die for a good cause,” my mother had said to me when explaining Allende’s death, which didn’t help. Seeing my alarm, she continued: “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to die like Allende anytime soon. It’s possible, I suppose, but I’m not planning on it.” Perhaps she never realized how terrified I was that she would suffer a violent death, but this was just one more example of her parenting philosophy. My mother never really treated me or spoke to me like a child. I liked that equality, that responsibility, that respect, even as I craved reassurance. And we did take care of each other, especially when sick, though she got sick a lot more than I did. One Jauja diary entry read, “Sick in bed today with diarrhea like I’ve never had before. . . . Peter is bringing me things I need and even dumped my shit pan, with a hanky tied to his nose.”

  * * *

  By the middle of January, the town was gearing up for the annual Tunantada festival, when they celebrated the patron saints San Sebastián and San Fabian. Caught up in the excitement, my mother and I watched as the crowds gathered. Prominent men from the community, called chutos, began to clear the streets of people to make way for the bands. The chutos wore small rounded black hats with brightly colored cloth strips around the base, white shirts with matching scarves, elaborately embroidered vests, and knee-length pants. But most distinctive were their painted masks of animal skin and fur. I was captivated by their masked faces. The chutos were not smiling; they never smiled. There was something solemn and serious about them even as they danced about. They danced in high leather boots, almost bouncing along the ground, for hours, only stopping for the occasional drink of chicha or beer at one of the many street stalls set up for the occasion.

  Among those who joined the festivities were dozens of men dressed in elegant dark-colored Spanish-colonial costumes, wearing masks of paper with painted-blue eyes. Half were dressed up as women. At first this confused me—I thought they really were women and didn’t entirely believe my mother when she insisted they were actually men. How weird, I thought, that men would impersonate women. When I asked her why these were not real women, she explained that women were not allowed and that this showed how sexist the society was.

  With the chutos in Jauja, January 1974

  There was also a band playing, with its members outfitted in neat, dark business suits, all the same material and color. They played brass instruments and huge wooden harps. The music was penetrating, complicated in its rhythm and melancholy in its mood. The musicians paused to eat and drink as the day went on, but seemed tireless as they walked along solemnly in a group until late at night. By this time, the streets were heavy with the smell of alcohol and urine, and drunken men slept in doorways.

  On the second day of the celebration, an enormous crowd gathered in the Plaza de Yauyos. My mother and I watched the spectacle, seated in stands with Angelica and her family. Chutos, mounted on donkeys, prepared to show their strength in a gruesome duck-beheading contest. I didn’t realize what was happening until two ducks were strung up by their feet on a wooden beam. I watched in horror as the chutos, riding underneath, took turns pulling at the ducks’ heads. The frantic ducks somehow managed to elude death for a long time. I was horrified, but also mesmerized, and could not turn away and stop watching. The victorious chuto—the first one to successfully pull off a duck’s head—removed his mask to receive the applause of the crowd. He then proudly presented the duck head, dripping with blood, to his wife, who held it up high as she emerged from the crowd to dance with him. The whole grotesque scene suddenly made me much less enamored of chutos. We left before finding out the fate of the second duck.

  That night, my mother, as unsettled by the duck-beheading scene as I was, returned with me to our room, where we curled up to read a book together. Lying there with her as she read to me from the Spanish edition of Tom Sawyer we had picked up in Lima, I clung to her. We both needed an escape, just the two of us, even if only for a little while. We had joined the festivities to feel part of the community, but at the end of the day we felt more than ever like outsiders. We were the only ones who seemed at all disturbed by the gruesome contest.

  Over the past few weeks my mother and I had settled in with Angelica’s family but didn’t feel entirely comfortable in Jauja. The real problem was that it wasn’t clear how this layover in Jauja fit into my mother’s larger search for the revolution—a search that had been suddenly thrown way off course by the military coup in Chile, leaving her drifting in political limbo. She hoped there might be revolutionary potential in the Peruvian highlands, where the large indigenous population remained marginalized and impoverished, with centuries-old grievances dating back to the Spanish conquest. But at the moment, there was no revolutionary rebellion. Still, even if my mother couldn’t find the revolution, it didn’t take her long to find a revolutionary.

  Ocopilla

  ONE EARLY AFTERNOON in late January, a young man came by the restaurant while we were eating lunch. Raul was short, trim, and stocky with thick dark hair. He wore a fake black leather jacket and black plastic-framed glasses with tape wrapped around the edges to keep the stems in place. One lens was chipped and cracked in the corner. Raul’s father had, long ago, been married to Angelica’s mother. Raul was a first-year chemistry student at the Universidad del Centro in Huancayo, and earned his living doing street theater. He came to the restaurant because he had his eye on young Angelica, but he became distracted by the gringa writing away in her diary at a corner table. My mother lifted her head, noticed Raul’s stare, and smiled. That’s all it took to prompt him to walk over and introduce himself. They were instantly attracted to each other. Raul hardly knew a word of English, but my mother’s Spanish was by now good enough to keep up a conversation. He was twenty-one, though he told my mother he was twenty-five. She was forty-on
e, almost twice his age.

  The two of them spent the entire day strolling through the streets of Jauja. She came home so late that night that I was crying when she walked through the door.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Where were you? It’s the middle of the night. I thought you might have been arrested or robbed or something.” I was angry, but mostly relieved.

  “Oh, Peter, don’t worry so much about me, and don’t be so rigid and authoritarian like your father. Let your mother enjoy herself a little bit, okay?”

  Raul came over the next day. He helped my mother translate her résumé into Spanish and wrote poetry on her little typewriter. Wary but curious, I watched him intently. Raul caught me looking at him while he typed and gave me a wink. “Your mother is a truly extraordinary woman, and you’re an extraordinarily lucky boy to have her as your mother,” he said.

  I felt like replying, Yeah, and you’re lucky she’s so into you, I’m sure it won’t last, but I didn’t say anything. Besides, Raul seemed to be more into making declarations than having any sort of conversation. And I wasn’t all that eager to talk to him, either.

  The next day, Raul and my mother took a leisurely hike around the picturesque lake nearby, Laguna de Paca. She had promised to take me there but ended up going with Raul instead. Raul kept showing up, day after day. The family said nothing, but Angelica leaned over and whispered in my ear at breakfast one morning, “You should know, Raul is a little crazy and dangerous.” I cringed but didn’t know how to reply. How could I warn my mother, when she had fallen so deeply and easily for him? She wouldn’t even be able to hear me. Her eyes held a glazed intensity.