Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  All of Raul’s skits shared a theme: the poor and powerless getting back at the rich and powerful. He portrayed endless versions of this dynamic: peasants playing tricks on the landlord; Indians taking revenge on the Spanish; local workers ousting the foreign companies; guerrillas defeating the military and their Yanqui imperialist backers; a bank robber getting away with the cash and giving it to the poor; and squatters cleverly evading eviction by the government authorities. If my mother was watching, Raul tried to incorporate a feminist theme: an abused wife kicking out her drunkard husband, for example. In these David vs. Goliath stories, Goliath was always a blundering bully outsmarted by the little guy. The crowds roared with approval.

  The police were less enthused, though, and often tried to break up Raul’s performances because he didn’t have a permit. More than once they arrested him for ignoring their warnings, and my mother and I had to bail him out. When they kept him overnight, we brought him warm blankets. He was also arrested for disorderly conduct in the park after getting into a fistfight with evangelicals. My mother was proud of Raul; she thought he was brave and heroic. And I suppose he was in a way. I just hoped he would never turn his fists on us.

  One day, when the police showed up to stop Raul’s performance in the plaza, people in the crowd started heckling them to go away; they wanted the show to go on and for the cops to leave Raul alone. The crowd tightened around Raul, making it harder for the police to get to him. Then the wall of people parted suddenly so Raul could escape. As he ran away, he turned and thumbed his nose at the police, yelling, “Look, my fellow humble citizens of Huancayo, here come the sellout servants of the rich doing their dirty work, but they can’t catch me, not this time!” The crowd clapped loudly and cheered him on.

  * * *

  “How would you like to be part of my skits?” Raul asked me one day, a month or so after we had moved in with him. “We could develop some skits together, do them on weekends, be a team.”

  “Yes, yes, I’d like that.” I was flattered Raul wanted to include me. It sounded like much more fun than watching him from the crowd.

  My mother didn’t object, unconcerned that the police might now come after me, too. Raul started to incorporate me into his skits, usually as the bad guy—the Rockefeller, the boss, the landlord, or some other hated gringo authority. Raul’s character was the underdog who won in the end. We would practice in our room the night before each performance.

  Several months after we started doing acts together, El Correo, Huancayo’s daily newspaper, published a picture of Raul and me performing a skit in the park with a crowd around us, with the caption noting that the police “discouraged such unauthorized public activities.” This made my mother beam with pride. She told me, “Maybe you’ll grow up to be a revolutionary actor like Raul.”

  Our acts were successful enough that Raul decided we should take the show on the road for several weeks, traveling by bus to Huancavelica, Ayacucho, Cuzco, Puno, and Lima. Although I was apprehensive about traveling around the country alone with Raul, mostly I thought of it as a fun and adventurous road trip. With our earnings, we paid for our bus tickets, food, and lodging. To save money on hotels and maximize time for our performances during the day, we always took overnight buses when possible. Along the way, we sent telegrams to my mother, keeping her updated on our travels. One from me dated July 8, 1974, read, “We travel Wednesday to Lima direct from Puno. Mama I am fine. It’s my birthday. I like Cuzco. With love.” What I didn’t tell her about was the young woman whom Raul met on the bus and cuddled with all night on the ride from Huancavelica. As we were getting off the bus early the next morning, Raul sheepishly told me, “Don’t worry, that was nothing. No need to say anything about it to your mother. Promise me, okay?”

  Performing street theater in Huancayo with Raul and a recruit from the audience, 1974

  I nodded. I was enjoying the traveling and performing, and didn’t want anything to spoil it. Anyway, I didn’t want to upset my mother, and I was always a little afraid of Raul.

  I loved the travel, and the idea that our performances were bringing in enough to pay for the trip made me feel grown up and self-sufficient. Our time onstage, acting in front of all those crowds every day, from city to city, turned our little duo into the center of the world. My role as the villain was always good for a laugh, ridiculous as it was for a little kid to play a Rockefeller. Raul patted me on the back after each show, always pleased no matter the quality of the performance or the size of the crowd. I was an enthusiastic, uncomplaining sidekick, which Raul appreciated. We bonded daily as we sat together before each show to paint our faces white, sharing the jar of makeup, black pencil outliner, and tiny round handheld mirror. We checked and touched up each other’s faces before starting our act, and shared the grimy towel to wipe off the oily mask after the show.

  Raul again said to me that he wanted to be my father and wanted me to think of him as my father. But to me, a father meant protection, comfort, security—and Raul was none of those things. Raul was more like my buddy and traveling companion who happened to also be my mother’s lover.

  When Raul and I returned from our road trip a few weeks later, my mother greeted us warmly, gathering us both in her arms. She had bought me a gift for my ninth birthday: a set of little books with stories about the Chinese revolution. For Raul, whose birthday was the same month, she’d gotten a book about Lenin written by Trotsky, and signed it, “Until the final victory. I’m your woman, you’re my man, we have only one heart. Carola.” Raul bought me a pair of white jeans for my birthday, which instantly turned gray. Though my mother’s birthday wasn’t for several months, Raul had bought her a gift as well with some of our road-trip earnings: the collected works of Che Guevara. As he gave her a book on guerrilla tactics, Raul said affectionately, “My Carola, this will help prepare you to become a guerrilla.”

  Piojos

  AS SOON AS I started school in Ocopilla in April 1974, the lice arrived. I tried to draw in my notebook while lice fell from my hair onto the page and crawled around in circles, as if they were trying to get my attention. I thought maybe they were falling off my head because it was so crowded there was not enough room for them all. I imagined bloody fistfights as the tiny monsters fought over the land, a white landscape of thousands of tiny eggs.

  At first I was startled, but the falling lice became so routine, I barely noticed them. I would have been embarrassed, but many other kids at school had their own personal colonies of piojos.

  My mother spent many a late-evening hour patiently combing the eggs out of my hair with a special fine-tooth comb, the affectionate grooming routine reminiscent of monkeys picking insects off each other. We tried everything, special soaps and shampoos, even resorted to kerosene, leaving an awful smell in my hair that lasted for days. But nothing worked.

  My mother probably spent more time combing lice eggs out of my hair than she did cooking. Even if she had wanted to cook it would have been much too difficult. All we had was that single-burner hot plate and no fridge. So a meal at home usually meant crusty bread and jelly for breakfast, along with tea or coffee. After school, my mother and Raul were often at a political event. My mother paid a neighbor to feed me those nights. The meals were better than at home, but still pretty basic—typically a bowl of rice or noodle soup, a piece of bread, and a main course consisting of a mix of rice, potatoes, and meat.

  Esteban, his wife, Julia, and their two daughters treated me like family. Esteban was especially nice to me when he was sober, but he always smelled like sweated alcohol. One night, Esteban announced that he had a cure for my lice problem. It had worked on his kids. Did I want to try it?

  His two girls giggled but wouldn’t say what it was. “It works,” they promised.

  After dinner, he took me out back to the muddy, fenced yard where the family kept their goats, chickens, and ducks.

  “Lower your head,” he instructed. “I need to douse your hair. Stay still; don’t move.” I did as he
said, bending over as far as I could in the dark. A lukewarm shower of sticky salt water landed on my head, and my senses swarmed in the unmistakable smell. Nothing stinks quite like urine, and there is nothing quite like having a pot of pee dumped on your head. “Now, rub it in real good,” he said. Tentatively, I reached up and massaged the urine into my lice-infested scalp. “Harder! Use both hands.” So I wouldn’t offend him, I rubbed the pee into my head with gusto.

  I began to stand up, but he stopped me. “You need just a bit more,” he said. There was no pee left in the chamber pot, so he unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and released a hot stream right on my head, taking care not to miss any spots. I was so drenched that even my ears were full. “There, that should do it.”

  Gagging, I desperately wanted to rinse my hair and wash off my salty face. But he stopped me again. “Now, let it set there for a little while,” he said. “It has to soak in.” And so I sat patiently, pee drying on my eyelids, waiting for the minutes to tick by.

  It worked exactly as promised. It turned out that the lice living on my head were even more disgusted than I was. A few weeks later, though, they were back in full force—perhaps because the other kids at school still had lice—procreating and laying eggs more enthusiastically than ever. But I didn’t ask Esteban for another “treatment.”

  Was Jesus a Revolutionary?

  AS MUCH AS they loved each other, my mother and Raul could argue about pretty much anything, especially if it had to do with politics. Their political wrestling matches simultaneously infuriated and invigorated them. Some lasted for hours, at any time of the day, with brief rests in between.

  “I hate Christ,” Raul suddenly declared one day.

  He didn’t seem to be trying to pick a fight, but my mother could not resist responding. “It isn’t necessary to hate Christ to struggle against the evils of Christianity.”

  And off they went, a verbal fistfight between atheists. Was Jesus a proletarian or not? Was he really against the rich and powerful? Was he really a pacifist? If you believed in Christ, could you still believe in Lenin? “No,” said Raul. “Yes,” said my mother. If you defended Christ, were you a reactionary? “No,” insisted my mother. “Yes,” insisted Raul. “So that means you think I’m a reactionary?” she asked Raul, incredulous. He huffed and didn’t reply.

  My mother told Raul it was nice that Jesus wanted his disciples to wash each other’s feet.

  “Teaching humility—always it’s the poor who are supposed to be humble,” Raul replied dismissively.

  My mother shot back, “It isn’t realistic to expect people to throw away all their lifelong religious beliefs in one jump. It’s politically smarter to attack the Church and its doctrines than to attack Jesus and his life.”

  “I don’t care about convincing old people; it’s young Peruvians who need to learn to hate Christ and all that he symbolizes.”

  “Oh, Raul, don’t be so dismissive. Have you actually even read the Bible?”

  Instead of answering, Raul declared, “Just remember what Marx said, religion is the opiate of the masses.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to be learned from the Bible.” Perhaps my mother was feeling defensive about all those childhood years she had spent memorizing Bible verses at church.

  One weekend afternoon, Raul took a bunch of familiar religious songs and substituted the names Marx, Lenin, and Mao for Jesus. He thought it was a creative way to try to convert Christians to the revolutionary cause. Pleased with himself, he proudly showed the doctored song sheets to my mother when she came home, confident she would be impressed by his brilliant idea. He was hoping to sing the songs as part of his acts and maybe even sell copies on the street.

  But it completely backfired. My mother was not only unimpressed, she was mad. “You’ve turned Marxism into a religion!”

  Raul was stunned. “Carola, it’s just a tactic to politicize the masses.”

  “No! It merely perpetuates the cult of personality. Simply substituting Marx for Jesus is not progress toward the revolution, Raul.”

  Angry, Raul lit a match under the song sheets until they caught fire right in the middle of the room. My mother and I both jumped up.

  “Raul, you’re crazy,” she screamed at him, stomping out the fire, ashes from the burned sheets floating up and spreading across the room. “You could have burned the whole place down.”

  My mother and Raul also quarreled, always without resolution, about what my mother called the “root causes of machismo” and the “origins of female oppression.” Frustrated by my mother’s persistent focus on “the woman question,” Raul sometimes lashed out, telling her that as a North American, she was “la hija del imperialismo”—the daughter of imperialism. She would then counter, “Well, Raul, always remember that you are not the most oppressed person in the world because you’re not a woman.” He never worked out an effective response to that line.

  One Saturday, several months after we moved to Ocopilla, their debate about female oppression lasted the entire day. They argued on the walk into town to take a hot shower, they argued while we were in the shower together, and they argued on the way back. It was as if I wasn’t even there. That day, they got so mad at each other over their differing interpretations of female oppression that they decided to part ways on the walk home from our shower outing, Raul kicking at rocks in the road and storming off. When my mother saw that I had started to cry, she put her arm around my shoulders. “Oh, Peter, don’t get upset, everything will be fine with Raul. And if it isn’t, well, we’ll still be fine.”

  After Raul returned home a few hours later the argument picked up where it had left off and continued into the night. As they tried to make up, my mother told Raul sincerely, “I understand that you’re just trying to get revenge against the Yanquis.” She then added, “Getting to know me is your way of getting to know white imperialist society and seeing the enemy up close.” I’m not sure that really made either Raul or my mother feel better, but they did stop arguing, at least for that night. Maybe they simply got too sleepy to keep at it.

  A particularly sensitive topic was the size of my mother’s breasts. One night Raul made the mistake of noting how different my mother looked, undressed, from those large-breasted blond “American” women who posed nude on the calendars that hung on the wall of many of Peru’s small street-corner restaurants and stores. Raul tried to reassure her: “My massaging your breasts will get your juices going and make your breasts grow.”

  He surely meant this kindly, perhaps even lovingly, but my mother was incensed. “You suffer from the cult of breast worship, just like my ex-husband did.” She launched into a lecture about “the breast fixation of European and North American society, and of those societies affected by colonialism perpetrated by the West.” Raul didn’t apologize, but the next day he did integrate the “cult of breast worship” into one of his street theater skits as a critique of machismo, thinking it would please my mother, who was watching. Her diary entry that day indicates she was at least amused even if not entirely convinced about Raul’s sincerity.

  My mother and Raul even fought about flying saucers and the influence of extraterrestrials on history. Raul insisted that alien intervention and their introduction of advanced technologies was a good thing for human progress.

  My mother criticized him for his naive faith in technological fixes, assuring him he’d grow to understand as he aged.

  Raul blurted, “Carola, I have a confession. I’m actually from the planet Omvi and I’m more than three hundred years old.”

  My mother couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, let’s see how aliens make love,” and that was the end of that argument.

  Except that it sparked another argument. My mother’s period had just started, which she thought was no concern and should not get in the way of their lovemaking. But Raul pulled away and turned over. My mother took offense. “Menstruation should never inhibit a woman from being sexually fulfilled. What, m
en get to decide what time of the month to make love?” She then grabbed for the nearest towel to put underneath her—which happened to be my towel hanging from my bedpost. I reached up and yanked the towel back, startling her.

  “No, that’s my towel, use your own,” I insisted, no longer pretending to be asleep. At this point I had been awake for hours, staring at the long winding cracks in the ceiling in our moonlit room while listening, as I often did, to my mother and Raul go on and on.

  “Peter, you’re not supposed to be awake.” My mother tried to sound cross, but she laughed. “Just go back to sleep. Don’t worry, I promise I’ll wash your towel in the morning. Now give it to me.” I covered my ears with my pillow and tried not to think about my towel, hoping I might finally be able to fall asleep.

  My mother and Raul also fought about more mundane matters, especially money. Raul was always either broke or almost broke, despite his earnings from street theater. Any money that my mother gave him from her rapidly shrinking savings would instantly disappear; he could not resist splurging on eating out. My mother was paying for things more and more, like going to restaurants and movies, which she increasingly resented.

  Raul took it hard when my mother told him he should be more self-sufficient and more careful with money.

  “I got along fine before—without you, your money, your bourgeois habits,” Raul told her loudly late one night as we were getting ready for bed. My mother had scolded him for spending so much on dinner that evening. Raul then angrily promised her, “Oh, don’t worry, I will work hard, day and night, to repay the money I robbed from you as your gigolo.”