Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  “Just stop yelling, please,” my mother said, putting her hand on Raul’s shoulder to calm him down.

  He shook her away. “I won’t lower my voice for anyone!” he screamed, kicking the bed for emphasis. “And certainly not for a bourgeois woman who wants to be treated like a flower.”

  The next day my mother wrote in her diary about Raul: “For the first time I really have been feeling maybe he’s prostituting himself to me.”

  Even when my mother and Raul could not reconcile their arguments in person, they left poems and love notes for each other, reaffirming their eternal devotion. They made an agreement to die together. She wrote in her diary: “We have a pact to either die together in the revolution or walk into the sea together when we’ve outlived our usefulness,” and that “We are both certain of dying a violent death, and it could happen any time, but we have big dreams and plans for the future and keep pursuing them as we can.” I’m not sure how I fit into my mother’s confident prediction about dying violently, but reading those lines now I’m relieved I never had to find out.

  Ataura

  “SHOULD I MARRY Raul?” my mother asked me one day while writing in her diary.

  “No, Mommy.”

  She closed the diary and looked over at me. “Why not?”

  “Raul is mean.”

  Raul had been bossing me around and barking at me more and more. Now that he and my mother were getting more serious, he seemed to want me to know who was in charge. I had never really challenged his authority, but I had also never truly treated him as a father figure, which he probably resented. Within just a few months, Raul had gone from being a buddy to a bully. And it’s not as if I could avoid him, given our living situation.

  Tensions came to a head one afternoon when I was pestering my mother to buy me a new soccer ball; my old one had worn out quickly from overuse. Raul took off his leather belt and folded it in two. “I need to teach you a lesson, like my father taught me: you need to treat adults with more respect and do what you’re told. Now that you’re my son, I’m going to treat you like a Peruvian, not like a spoiled American. Now lean over.”

  I stood next to my bed, frozen in disbelief. I looked at my mother, but she simply stared out the window, refusing to interfere in Raul’s plan to punish me. She had never spanked me, had never disciplined me in any way at all. But maybe because she wanted Raul to think of himself as my father, we had to accept his way of doing things. The betrayal bit deep—my mother had taken Raul’s side against me. “Raul is your papi now, you need to listen to him more and treat him with more respect,” she said. I gritted my teeth in anger, saying nothing, just wanting to get the punishment over with.

  Raul asked my mother not to stay in the room and watch, suggesting that she should go run some errands. To my astonishment, she didn’t protest, just picked up her purse and headed out. Maybe that was what this was really about—for Raul to see if my mother would stop him, for him to test his power over her as much as his power over me. I’m sure my mother was happy not to have to witness what was about to happen, though she could probably still hear my cries out the window as she walked away down the street in front of our house.

  Raul never disciplined me again—perhaps he thought he had made his point clear enough with that first lashing—but the sting of his belt stayed with me. I was sure my father never would have done that. No, if he had been there, he would have tried to protect me. And he would have given me a new soccer ball.

  Raul wrote me a poem and gave it to me the next day. Maybe it was meant as an explanation, or an apology, or both, but it did nothing to make me feel better about what had happened.

  You are a man imprisoned in a body of a boy

  Your psyche is suffering from my violent neurosis

  Your fragile mind

  is dealing with the explosive contradictions of your parents

  Sometimes you are crying an inferno of blood

  over our fragile relationship

  But you always have dreams

  of love and to be loved in your nine years of age

  My strength is only a mask

  Carola is the ideal companion

  And you are the final object

  of the explosion of our contradictions

  You are the clock of sand in our love

  You are always in our dreams

  And in our egocentric love

  we ignore you

  And you Peter child man

  Always forgive us with love

  Although I was more fearful of Raul after that whipping, what I didn’t realize at the time was that my mother was worried, too. In her diary she admitted: “Raul is so heated that he could kill me at some point. At the very least he will make me suffer a lot. But there is so much positive between us, I can’t run away.”

  * * *

  My mother chose to marry him, instead, though she had no illusions that they would live happily ever after. She wrote a note to Raul right before the wedding: “The price of love is suffering. And until the Revolution comes, love is the most valuable thing in life. We’re destined to suffer together.”

  Raul and my mother were married in the tiny village of Ataura, not far from Jauja. For a small fee, the local doctor signed off on the marriage health certificate that same day without even asking to examine them. This was where Raul’s parents were married, and where Raul’s birth was registered. Here, my mother and Raul had carved their names into the trunk of a tree right after they had met. We all piled into Raul’s uncle Felipe’s pickup, along with Raul’s mother and brother, for the short drive to Ataura. My mother wore her regular light-colored cotton slacks but made sure to put on her favorite shirt for the occasion—a colorful, handmade Indian one she had bought at the market in Jauja—and it was too late to change out of it when Raul whispered in her ear, with a laugh, that his mother had complained to him earlier that she hated that shirt. Raul wore dark blue pants, his everyday boots, and what my mother called his “guerrilla shirt,” tan and green with lots of little extra pockets. I put on my school uniform—the dressiest clothes I had—but removed the school insignia pin.

  The small wedding ceremony took place on the second floor of the mayor’s office in a well-preserved old building, elegantly decorated. Through the big shuttered windows, we could see the whole village, nestled into the hill and nearly hidden behind flourishing eucalyptus. Immediately in front of the building was the open plaza, empty except for a couple of dogs sleeping and an old lady selling chicha. On the walls of the mayor’s office were portraits of town fathers, including one of Raul’s great-grandfather. We sat in front of the mayor’s table—covered by red cloth with ALCALDE written in large embroidered letters in yellow—while the mayor, a small, wrinkled balding man with a whispery voice, read the marriage laws and then asked individually, “Do you still want to get married?” They then signed the registry. It was over in just a minute or two, and then we broke out the champagne. I kissed my mother again and again and took my first gulp of alcohol, which to me tasted like a strong, unsweetened version of 7-Up. I was glad that she seemed so happy on this day, even as I dreaded her being married to Raul.

  After the ceremony, we went to Mama Juana’s house in Jauja. Mama Juana was Raul’s grandmother, and, as was typical of traditional Jauja women of her generation, she wore dark, homespun-wool clothing, including a long dress and a tall white straw hat wrapped with a strip of black cloth. She cooked a huge dinner of roast guinea pig, corn and avas (a flat bean), sweet potatoes, and duck salad. Dozens of guinea pigs lived on the dirt floor in the kitchen, making little squealing noises and scampering about, eating vegetable peels and whatever other food scraps were discarded from above—fattening up before they themselves became a meal. Mama Juana had killed a few of the biggest for this special occasion.

  A hard, superstitious old lady with tough skin and a crackly high-pitched voice, Mama Juana had more affection for her three shaggy dogs than for people. She did not like leaving her house, cer
tain that the neighbors were casting evil spells on her. She spent much of her time puttering around, muttering to the chickens and guinea pigs, and tending her fires. Mama Juana was not happy at all about the marriage and refused to attend the wedding. Raul wasn’t grown up enough to be married, she said, and she was worried that all he and my mother ever did was argue.

  But Mama Juana’s sharp tongue softened when we arrived. At dinner, she made a toast, wishing Raul and my mother well. She concluded with some words of advice for both of them: “Carola, please make sure to wash Raul’s smelly feet every day, and Raul, please make sure to take good care of Carola when she becomes old and ill.” My mother and Raul smiled politely and thanked her.

  We stayed that night at Mama Juana’s. After the day’s excitement, I couldn’t fall asleep. For a while I watched a large white rat crawling across the rafters above my head. Eventually, curious about the noise coming from Mama Juana’s room, I tiptoed into the hallway and peered through the crack in her bedroom door. Seated on a pile of sheepskins, surrounded by her dogs, a bottle of aguardiente, several candles, and a pile of coca leaves, Mama Juana was singing to herself. During the last lines of her song her voice broke and she fell into weeping. I was mesmerized, convinced that she was a witch casting strange dark spells.

  * * *

  For all the passion and romance in Raul and my mother’s relationship, in the end, getting married was just about the paperwork. My mother was running out of money, and to finalize the property settlement agreement with my father, she had to go back to the States. Otherwise, the plan was to stay in Peru indefinitely. If Raul wanted to go with her, they had no choice but to be married. Although I didn’t realize at the time how serious my mother’s money problems were, I did know she wanted to settle things with my father. And that probably meant I’d finally be able to see him again, too.

  We were set to depart for Miami on December 10, exactly one year after arriving in Peru. But there was one complication. As described in a November 1974 diary entry, Raul’s medical tests at the U.S. embassy turned into an unexpected and somewhat awkward hurdle.

  Raul had a “semi-positive” reaction to syphilis tests in Lima (embassy doctor), and was there for days getting more tests. Finally was cleared but still isn’t sure what he has (had) or why and we’ve had weird discussions about it all. One doctor told him it’s possible he’s “too active sexually” and his symptoms are related to “constant stimulation.” He returned from Lima determined to control his sexual life more carefully, I reacted with fury, and in the end we fell into heavy loving like always. Peter wakes up in the morning and looks at us cuddling in each other’s arms and remarks (out of boredom, jealousy?), “oh damn, every day it’s the same!”

  As we prepared for our departure, my mother helped me get up to speed with my writing in English, even as she was trying to fight off a bad cold. She wrote hundreds of sentences in English for me, with lots of repetition and easy progression of ideas so I could figure things out easily. I would go over these, again and again, and then try to write sentences of my own in English, which was more difficult, so I used some of the same words from my mother’s sentences to form new sentences. This was pretty boring since it did not involve much originality, but I kept at it.

  To break the monotony, I penned my first poem, all in English, and proudly gave it to my mother right before we left Peru.

  I am poor and rich

  And life is sometimes sad

  And sometimes marvelous

  For me it’s both

  The bathroom is full of shit

  My mother is sick

  My teacher never comes

  And to me they all call me gringo

  All the older kids in the barrio beat me up

  I’m nine years old

  I’m first in my class

  My shoe is torn

  Life is sad, dammit

  My mother is teaching me English

  And that’s good

  Chau

  After reading my poem, my mother smiled, folded it, and gave me a kiss on my forehead. “Thank you, Peter, I’ll make sure to keep this.” I would find it in her diary four decades later.

  IV.

  VISITING AMERICA

  As you know, Professor Andreas has been active in the communist movement in South America for the past two years. Since the overthrow of the Allende regime in Chile last September, she has fled to Peru but her whereabouts there is unknown. . . . She has prevented me from having any contact with my son since she left Michigan shortly after losing her court case here nearly four years ago. . . . [U]ntil a solution to the visitation and custody rights for Peter, there shall be no settlement on any jointly owned property. After the Peter problem is resolved there will be no problem on property. I only hope that my son’s mind and body is not being destroyed in the meantime.

  —Carl Andreas, letter to his lawyer, July 1974

  Christmas ’74

  MY FATHER LIKED to call the long custody battle “the Peter problem.”

  “The Peter problem,” he wrote to his lawyer, “is the only thing standing in the way of settlement.” My mother wanted money from the divorce and my father wanted me—he refused to budge on money until my mother gave in on custody. And so they had a stalemate for years until we came back from Peru at Christmastime in 1974.

  Having no idea where my mother was, my father would fire off a letter to his lawyer, Lawrence Warren, who would then contact my mother’s old Detroit lawyer, Walter Denison, who would then try to track her down in South America.

  My mother’s lawyer alerted her that “your husband has made several allegations about you being connected to revolutionary groups in South America and if you could give us some type of resume as to your activities, we would be appreciative, as it may be necessary for us to secure some affidavits on your behalf.”

  My father despised lawyers, especially their fees; he called them “parasites” and “bloodsuckers.” He was eager to solve the “Peter problem” without going to court. “Lawyers are the only winners in court” was one of my father’s favorite one-liners. Through Selma, my mother’s aunt in Kansas, my father offered a financial settlement sometime in 1974—on condition that I would be returned to him—and that included holding back 20 percent as a sort of security deposit until my eighteenth birthday, “to assure that Peter would not be absconded once he was returned to Michigan.”

  My mother balked when she heard the offer. She told everyone that my father was “trying to buy Peter.” In a way, I suppose he was. My mother desperately needed the money, so she decided to fly with Raul and me to the U.S. at the end of 1974. Her plan seemed straightforward enough: we would visit her father in Kansas for the Christmas holidays, I would see my father and Grandma Andreas for a few days accompanied by Joel, she would get the money from the property settlement, and then she and Raul and I would return together to Peru. But it did not work out that easily.

  * * *

  My father could not stop sobbing.

  “Don’t do that, Daddy, don’t cry,” I said, hugging him harder. I had eagerly anticipated this reunion, having thought about it for years, but had not anticipated all the tears. I had never seen my father cry before.

  My father’s new wife, Rosalind, explained that they were happy tears, and enveloped us both in her arms. She was some fourteen years younger than my father and had a blond beehive hairdo that made her look almost as tall as him. My father had met her a few years earlier at church during a visit to see Grandma. Rosalind, who had no children of her own, had recently divorced her minister husband after he revealed he was gay. Now, hugging my father and me together, she was not only my father’s new wife but also my new stepmother, a role she seemed happy to embrace.

  A few weeks earlier, my mother, Raul, and I had flown from Peru to Miami, the cheapest flight to the U.S., then traveled by bus to North Newton, Kansas, getting there in time for the Christmas holidays. I pestered my mother to let me stay with my father and Rosal
ind at Grandma Andreas’ house. My mother and Raul were staying at Grandpa Rich’s house nearby. North Newton could not have been more different from Peru: flat, clean, quiet, orderly, and sparsely populated by soft-spoken and neatly dressed pale-skinned people.

  My mother only agreed to let me stay with my father because Joel would be coming from Berkeley for the holidays. I was thrilled; I had not seen Joel since my mother and I had left for South America more than two years earlier.

  “Hey, Peter, look how big you are,” Joel exclaimed with a grin, hugging me warmly. He still looked like the Berkeley hippie I remembered, with long hair and black bare feet. He cast aside his previous brotherly indifference and seemed as genuinely happy to see me as I was to see him.

  As I sat next to my father at dinner, I noticed that his soft dark hair that I had remembered so vividly was now starting to turn gray, especially his coarse sideburns. I reached up to touch them and asked him why they were so much grayer than the rest of his hair. “Oh, that’s just my gray matter,” my father replied with a sly smile.

  Grandma looked more frail and thin than I remembered her, but was as pleased as ever to play the gracious host. For dinner, she made ham, green beans, and her famous scalloped potatoes. She brought out a homemade cherry pie for dessert, which we all ate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. I had missed Grandma’s cooking and inhaled my meal faster than anyone else at the table.

  After dinner was bath time. I hated baths, but this was a special occasion and I did not want to make a fuss. I was grimy and sweaty from days of traveling. Afterward, Rosalind dried and combed my hair. “Part it on the left,” I instructed her. “Boys in Peru never part their hair on the right.” I was asserting a new identity I was proud of even though Peru was thousands of miles away. I hoped she didn’t notice all my lice eggs; if she did, she didn’t say anything.

  We were up early for Christmas. I was eager to open my gifts—this was my first real Christmas in years—but Grandma insisted we first all hold hands and sing “Joy to the World” and then read the Christmas story. I waited as patiently as a nine-year-old boy could, but the number and size and variety of the shiny bounty under the tree was calling to me. My mother was terrified that my father would try to “buy me off” with presents—and she was right. I was showered with them like never before, and could not have been more thrilled: a rubber ball, watercolors, Magic Markers, scissors, a radio with headphones, a backpack, cowboy boots, a silver Timex wristwatch, a blue corduroy shirt handmade by Rosalind, navy socks, and a pair of Levi’s. As soon as I unwrapped the Levi’s, I tore off my old gray school pants in front of everyone and pulled on the new jeans. I wore them all week, even to bed. I could not stop staring down at my wrist and admiring the shiny new watch—my first.