Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  Comas

  A MONTH OR so after our escape from the U.S. and return to Peru, my mother began to question her relationship with Raul. “Should I leave him?” she asked me.

  I don’t know what answer she thought she’d get, but to me there was no question. “Yes, please, Mom. Do it,” I urged. But I knew it was unlikely.

  That evening at dinner, she was picking at her food, heaving deep sighs. Raul was out of town, so it was just the two of us.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  She gave me a sad smile. “Well,” she said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide.”

  I put my fork down. I couldn’t swallow the food in my mouth.

  “Hypothetically, of course,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about all the different ways I could do it—pills, razors.”

  I couldn’t even look at her.

  She continued. “Suicide is a human right. Besides, the people left behind usually manage fine. Look at Violeta Parra.” Parra was a famous Chilean singer who had killed herself in 1967. “Gracias a La Vida” (“Thank You, Life”), one of her best-known songs, was one of my mother’s favorites.

  I stared helplessly at my plate. I had long been terrified by the possibility of my mother suddenly dying. I’d imagined a violent, gruesome death. I’d imagined her tortured by the police. When she left on errands, I sometimes smothered her with good-bye kisses, telling her that they would help keep her alive.

  “And if I die anyway?” she once asked.

  “Well, then, the kisses will make sure you’re reincarnated.”

  It had never occurred to me that my mother’s death might actually be self-inflicted. I grew quietly angry. How could she even think, let alone say, these things? How could she contemplate leaving me alone to fend for myself, after all that effort to get me back from my father? After I had abandoned a secure life for her? After she had forced me to choose between her and my father, even if it meant agreeing to my own kidnapping? My fury began to bubble, but I said nothing. I continued to stare a hole through my untouched food. My mother was so self-absorbed in her woes that she seemed completely unaware that her talk of suicide was upsetting me.

  My mother sighed again. “Okay,” she said, “I have to tell you something.”

  I glanced up at her. “What?”

  “I found something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I found an old letter to Raul from some woman named Julia.”

  “Who’s Julia?”

  “Some classmate of his from those English classes he was taking in Denver.” Her voice cracked. “It’s a love letter.”

  She pushed her chair away from the table, knelt on the floor next to the bed, and stuck her hand beneath the mattress. She pulled out the crumpled letter. “See?” She waved the letter in my face. “I found it in one of his books. It’s several months old, written when we were in Denver. This woman says she’s pregnant.”

  With that, she turned from me, got into bed, faced the wall, and cried. I looked at her for a long time, wondering if I should go to her. But I didn’t. I was still too angry at her for even mentioning the unthinkable possibility of suicide. I did not feel like comforting her; I felt like shaking and slapping her. Looking back at that moment, I still feel that same anger today: a mother should never tell her ten-year-old child that she’s thinking about killing herself. And my mother was well aware of how terrified I already was of the possibility of her suddenly dying. A diary entry around that same time read, “Peter was very affectionate saying goodbye today. He’s always afraid I’m going to die, even when we just separate for a few hours or a few days.”

  When my mother confronted Raul about the love letter days later, he somehow convinced her that Julia was not actually pregnant, that the wording in the letter meant she was worried she could get pregnant if they were to have sex—and that’s why she didn’t want to have an affair with him. My mother bought the story. Perhaps the alternative was simply too hard for her to take.

  * * *

  We were in the middle of moving to Comas, a grimy slum extending up the bare rocky hills from the highway north of Lima. There was not a blade of grass or a tree in sight. Nowhere on earth, I thought, could be more different looking than the lush, wooded neighborhood with sprawling homes and two-car garages I had left behind in Michigan. The drab terrain matched the drably dressed inhabitants, as well as the perennially gray skies. The highway at the base of the hills was jammed with traffic, people, and storefronts.

  Our home in Comas, like all the others in the area, was a one-story utilitarian brick and cinderblock house. A large patch of bare dirt served as an enclosed backyard; everything we tried to plant in it—grass, vines, flowers, vegetables—died instantly. Not even weeds could grow. It made my mother depressed.

  Raul told her to cheer up. “Someday it will look just like Berkeley, with flowers and trees.” This made my mother laugh, but it didn’t make her feel any better about Comas. As she described it in her diary, “Comas is the ugliest place in the world—pure dust and cement and trash and garbage.”

  Still, Comas was a real step up from Villa El Salvador. In Comas, we at least had electricity, even if it was erratic. And we had plumbing, although the water only came on for an hour or so a day—usually early in the morning, but it was never predictable. The sewers were constantly bursting, and sewage could run down the long road to the highway for days at a time. We boiled water to make it safe for drinking. We had no phone, but there was a public pay phone seven blocks away. There were few streetlights, so walking home or going out at night still brought with it the fear of being mugged.

  The house in Comas belonged to Raul’s family—which meant it was rent-free, the main reason we were there. The whole family had lived in the house years earlier, until Berta finally got tired of her husband’s drinking and of the steep mile-long walk up the hill from the bus stop. So she and the kids moved to the sand dunes on the outer edge of Villa El Salvador.

  Raul’s father and sister still lived in the small front part of the Comas house, but the rest had fallen into disrepair. It took us days to make it livable. The place was full of dust, grime, trash, and bugs. Ten years’ worth of garbage and junk had been building up in the backyard. The kerosene stove needed to be fixed, and it was a challenge for us to learn how to use it.

  After we cleaned the place up to make it more habitable, two of Raul’s younger brothers, Lucho and Carlos, moved in with us. My brother Joel and his girlfriend, Gabrielle, freshly arrived from the U.S., also decided to take a room. They had spent three months taking buses and hitchhiking through Mexico and Central America, all the way down to Lima from Berkeley. I had been eager to reconnect with Joel and hear all about their long trip south to join us. With no road from Panama to Colombia, they had hitched a ride on a boat carrying contraband goods, and were dropped off somewhere along the Colombian coast—essentially smuggled into Colombia, along with the contraband, since they had no entry stamp in their passports. They were robbed twice en route, including once in Bogotá when some kids grabbed Joel’s glasses right off of his face and then sold them back to him for a few pesos the next day.

  Joel’s stories reminded me of when Ronald had showed up at our home in Santiago in early 1973 and told us all about his adventures traveling through the remotest parts of southern Chile. But unlike Ronald, Joel seemed genuinely enthused about seeing us and planned to stick around. My mother and I were more than happy to have him and Gabrielle move in, making us feel more like a family. Having Joel there also made me feel less stuck between my mother and Raul. Joel and Gabrielle even took me traveling with them on a three-week trip through Peru and Bolivia. It took no pleading on my part for my mother to agree to let them take me along. To save money we hitchhiked, mostly catching rides on the backs of trucks, lying flat on our stomachs on top of the open-air cargo and holding on tight while winding up and down narrow mountain passes, day and night. We got all the way to La Paz, visited Lake Titicac
a on the Bolivian border, and also made it to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. It was the only time I had ever traveled with Joel.

  When we returned, Joel and Gabrielle earned money teaching English part-time. Joel also worked with a local publisher to have his Incredible Rocky comic book translated into Spanish. Gabrielle, meanwhile, got caught up in a New Age mystical cult, growing increasingly absorbed in self-discovery and spirituality. A few months later, when she ran off with one of the cult members, Joel didn’t seem all that upset about it.

  The house in Comas was large enough that I even had my own room, though it doubled as the living room during the day. Raul’s father and sister kept to themselves in the front rooms and we rarely saw them. Raul’s mother, Berta, dropped by now and then, and sometimes chastised my mother for not washing and ironing Raul’s clothes. My mother gritted her teeth and listened to her politely rather than argue. Nothing she said would have changed Berta’s mind anyway, and she didn’t want to fight with Raul about his mother.

  That April, I started school six blocks away, halfway down the hill between the house and the highway. I was ten years old, enrolled in the fourth grade. Classes were from 1:00 to 6:00 p.m., but the teacher would often let us out an hour early. No one took school all that seriously, and I was happy to have the extra playtime. The most important thing was to always arrive at school on time—the penalty for getting there late was having to clean up all the piss and shit that missed getting into the holes in the ground in the bathroom.

  My mother and Raul with Raul’s mother, Berta, 1976

  The biggest challenge was not my schoolwork, since there was little of it, but keeping my dark blue uniform clean. On weekends, I washed my school pants over and over again by hand because I only had one pair and no washing machine. My mother said it was important that I wash my pants myself, “like all men should.” The neighbors let me borrow an iron to press them.

  Before and after school, I played for hours with the neighborhood kids—usually soccer, or spinning tops, or marbles on the dirt street right in front of the house. Unlike at Meadowbrook Elementary, there was no school playground, but the streets and alleys of the neighborhood provided a playground of sorts, where one could always start or join a game. Like in Ocopilla, it didn’t take long to get in on the street fun, especially if one had a decent soccer ball to share. We had no television, but I went to the house of a family up the block to watch TV on their little black-and-white set—mostly reruns, with Spanish subtitles, of American shows like Bonanza and The Beverly Hillbillies. My mother did eventually get a radio, which we quickly regretted because Raul would get up early in the morning and blare it, singing along loudly, while everyone else was trying to sleep.

  Just like at the Berkeley commune, chores were carefully divvied up. At each meal, the quality of our food depended on who was cooking and was always complicated by our having no refrigerator or oven. But we all took turns going to the nearby street market every morning where we could buy most everything we needed. Whoever went to the market got to drink a surtido—a blender concoction of mixed tropical fruits, sometimes with vegetables and herbs. A surtido especial contained raw eggs, milk, and various fruits mixed in a blender. As a special treat on Sundays we often made ceviche—raw fish marinated with lemon, onion, and red pepper, served on lettuce with a whole sweet potato. We’d also sometimes boil two or three red-purple ears of corn for several hours, let the water cool, then add sugar and lemon to it. This made the popular drink chicha. We hardly ever had desserts other than fruit, but from time to time we bought sweets from street vendors—ice cream bars and chupetas (fruit-flavored ice); or we’d buy a box of manjar blanco, a sweet, creamy paste made by boiling sugar and milk for many hours, and fight over it until it was gone.

  The trickiest and most important chore was filling the water containers every morning. The person responsible had to make sure to wake up early, open the faucets, place the water containers underneath, then wait patiently for the water to come on; it could be anytime between five and seven in the morning. Oversleeping meant the whole house would go without water. And falling back to sleep with the faucets open while waiting for the water could be disastrous. One morning when I was on faucet duty I nodded off with the faucets on, and while everyone else was still sound asleep the entire house flooded. By the time everyone woke up and figured out what had happened, the water on the concrete floor was already at least an inch deep.

  One day a week was designated as a “free day,” meaning no one had assigned house chores and duties, but what this meant in practice was that nothing actually got done. This especially frustrated my mother. She wrote in her diary: “No one bothered to sweep or fill the water containers or do dishes yesterday since we had agreed it would be each one for himself or herself for one day, and Peter never ate anything after breakfast and was complaining of being hungry at midnight when there was nothing in the house to eat.”

  The house in Comas was a sickly place. It seemed like someone was always coughing, sneezing, throwing up, or running to the bathroom, and my mother seemed to have it worst of all. She mostly had colds and stomach problems, but once, during a bad bout of hepatitis, her skin turned yellow for weeks. I took special care of her during those weeks, bringing her surtidos from the market, and she gave me a new set of drawing markers in appreciation. At least for those weeks, I was intensely aware that diseases rather than dictators were the biggest threat to my mother’s life. It was at moments like these that I felt most needed by her—that while my father and Rosalind wanted me to live with them, my mother truly needed me to live with her.

  * * *

  Like everywhere else we had lived, one thing never changed in Comas: my mother and Raul argued and argued, and then argued some more. The only real change was that the fights kept escalating, the next one building on the one before it. A typical entry in my mother’s diary from that time: “We talked and loved and fought literally all night long.” Or: “Raul says I’m an ultra-feminist and no one will have me (but he still will, he says, only his conditions and concessions vary from moment to moment).”

  At least my mother and Raul had their own room now, so the rest of us had some insulation from their yelling. But Raul’s younger brothers contributed to the tension. Carlos, twice as round and half as smart as Raul, sparked a fight one afternoon when he blurted out, “A man needs to beat his wife if he wants her to really love him.” My mother shot Carlos a look to let him know he had just declared war on women. I’m not sure if Carlos really believed what he said or if he was just trying to provoke her. But even Raul, seeing that look on my mother’s face, jumped in to take her side.

  “You idiot,” Raul yelled at Carlos, slapping him dismissively on the head. “It’s no wonder girls don’t want to go out with you.” Carlos laughed it off and walked away.

  But that was a rare moment; most of the time Raul and my mother were on opposite sides of the shouting. And unlike in the past, it started to get physical, though I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until I read through her diary entries from this time:

  We fight violently. He threatens me with death by bullet (first time). I attack him physically to show him I’m not afraid, and he responds with violence. I tell him I will never accept bringing a gun into the house because even though I promise to love him forever I don’t want to risk an impulsive moment in which he uses the gun to demonstrate his fury.

  One Saturday when my mother and I came home together from the market we found Raul sobbing in bed, surrounded by the thousands of dollars in cash we had brought with us to Peru from my mother’s property settlement agreement with my father. Raul and my mother had hidden the money in the house and were drawing from it sparingly to live on. After a particularly explosive argument with my mother, Raul had decided to take off with all the money while no one was home. But at the last minute, he changed his mind and broke down crying. My mother sat there for a moment on the bed in stunned silence. “What’s going on, Raul? What are you doing with
all the money?”

  “I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it,” Raul sobbed. “I was going to leave. But I couldn’t do it. See, I love you too much to do that. Now I know I can never leave you.”

  Raul and my mother kissed and made up by the end of the day, put the money back in its hiding place—a hole in the wall hidden by their bed—and decided that the solution to the imbalance in their relationship was to find manual jobs, because Raul’s problems were “typical of lumpen proletariat” and hers were typical of “petty bourgeois intellectuals.” My mother told Raul, “Remember, according to Mao, it takes many years to grow out of bad habits.”

  But at the same time that Raul and my mother were reaffirming their love to each other, she was expressing more and more doubts about their marriage in her diary, sometimes concluding that it was only a matter of time before it ended: “It makes me feel weak to think about moving again, uprooting Peter again”; “I don’t feel personal defeat, but I do feel that I’ve been on a romantic binge that was doomed from the outset.”

  My mother never did get a manual job in Comas, nor did Raul for that matter, but our block elected her its representative for the neighborhood Comité de Lucha organized by the Partido Comunista del Peru, already known informally as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), and would transform into an armed insurgency years later. My mother was proud to be chosen; it made her feel like she had truly become not only an accepted member of the community but a political leader. Raul couldn’t believe they had selected my mother, a foreigner, as their representative, and teased her about it, and this of course only added to the tension in the relationship.

  As things worsened between Raul and my mother, I became more open about urging her to leave him. I associated living in Peru with all of my frustrations with Raul, and began to complain about it. I tried to tell her that I wasn’t rejecting the choice to leave Michigan, but my denials were halfhearted, and she knew it. My complaints hurt my mother to the core. As she confessed to her diary: