In the past, my mother and Raul’s heated late-night political debates ended in equally heated lovemaking, but now that was happening less and less. One late night my mother got upset that Raul was masturbating in bed, and this fight turned into a screaming match that woke me up.
“I’m sure Lenin masturbated,” Raul barked.
“I’m sure he didn’t do it in front of his wife,” my mother screamed back in tears, pounding on Raul’s chest with her fists. “You’re just another male pig.”
* * *
And then, to my immense surprise, she finally left him. Our Huertas experiment in extreme rustic rural living came to a sudden end after Raul accused my mother of being “politically backward” because she put feminism first and solidarity with the working class second. He accused her of being merely a “petty bourgeois feminist” who had no place in his revolution. My mother responded bitterly that she was actually doing nothing for the feminist cause, that she was even putting up with his exploitation of her, as evidenced by the fact that she was doing most of the cooking and other work around the house.
Raul snapped, “If I’m exploiting you, why don’t you leave me?”
So she did. A few days later, while Raul was out of town, my mother told me to pack my bag.
“Aren’t we waiting for Raul to come back?”
“He’s not coming with us this time,” she replied, biting her lip as if she couldn’t believe she’d let the words escape.
“Where are we going?” I asked, trying to contain my excitement.
“Back to the States, probably Denver. We’ll never really be able to leave Raul unless we leave Peru.” She then added, “The school term in the U.S. begins at the end of the month. You can even start classes on time for a change. Wouldn’t you like that?”
That’s all I needed to hear. I crammed my clothes into my old duffel bag as fast as I could; there was just enough room for three or four shirts, a couple of sweaters and pairs of pants, and some underwear and socks. My mother and I always traveled light—we still used the same duffel bags we had brought with us when we first came to South America almost four years earlier—which was especially handy now that we were making a quick exit. We took a taxi to Huancayo and boarded the overnight train to Lima.
My mother cried quietly as the train swerved back and forth through the high mountain passes. I held her hand and put my head on her shoulder. “Mommy, please promise me it’s for real this time. Promise me.”
She kissed my head and nodded. In her diary, she noted that “as soon as we left, Peter helped me stay firm, made me promise not to change my mind again—told me it had to happen someday.”
When we arrived in Lima we checked into the Hotel Europa, a cheap but clean and airy hotel near the train station where we’d stayed several times before. We bought the least expensive one-way plane tickets to Miami, which left a few days later. I was eager to start our new Raul-free life back in the United States.
But when we returned to our hotel that evening, Raul was there, waiting for us in the small lobby. It hadn’t been hard to guess where we’d be. My mother and I stopped cold in our tracks and I grasped her hand. Raul looked up at us with tears in his eyes. He stood, but neither he nor my mother took any steps to close the gap.
“Okay,” she said to him from a distance. “You can come into our room. Since you’re here. But you’re not getting into bed with me.”
That night, while I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to sleep, Raul spent hours begging my mother to change her mind.
“Please,” he kept saying. “I can’t live without you. I’ll kill myself.”
“Raul,” my mother said. “We both know this isn’t working.”
“I’ll devote the rest of my life to making things right,” he said. “I’ll even come back to the U.S. with you if you want.”
“No,” my mother kept saying. Her mind was made up. I couldn’t believe it.
I was amazed and relieved in the morning when she kissed Raul good-bye. “I love you,” she cried into his shoulder, “but I can’t live with you.”
Raul and I never spoke to each other that whole long night, but at the end he gave me an awkward hug, telling me, “It’s now up to you to take care of your mother.”
We left Peru for good.
VI.
MILE-HIGH HIDEOUT
The truth is that I am not a North American woman or Latin American nor European nor Asian. I’m a woman of the world trapped in Denver. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for the economic crisis. Waiting for total repression. Waiting for the definitive encounter. Waiting for the revolution in Peru. Waiting for Peter to become an adult. Waiting for the birth of the Revolutionary Organization of the Women of the World.
—Carol Andreas, Denver, 1980
South Bannock Street
NOW THAT WE were back in the States, hiding from my father, my mother legally changed her name to Andrea Gabriel—combining her old last name, Andreas, with Gabrielle (she liked my brother’s ex-girlfriend’s name), and shortening both. Maybe the police would still come knocking at our door, we thought, but my mother would at least make it a little harder to find us by changing her name.
It took us a few days to travel by bus from Miami to Denver, where my mother still had some friends and where Ronald was now living, though we would rarely see him even after we were in the same city. It was now late August 1976. I had just turned eleven the month before. My mother was determined to start a new life, on our own this time, away from Raul and hidden from my father. We would end up spending seven years in Denver, longer than anywhere else I’d ever lived. I wanted to visit my father and Rosalind, but less than a year after the kidnapping, I knew that was impossible. So I resisted the urge to contact them.
Whenever I broached the question of seeing my father, my mother would say, “I really don’t know, Peter. It might be a while. You need to be old enough so that your father doesn’t try to get you again. And if he knows we’re back and where we live he might still legally go after me for taking you out of the country like that. We’re already taking enough of a risk that he could track us down.”
“Maybe in another year?”
My mother shrugged.
“Two? More?”
“Let’s just wait and see. But we have enough other things to worry about right now.”
We rented a first-floor apartment in a large, run-down brick house on South Bannock Street on Denver’s west side. The house was originally built for a single family but had been carved up into six one-room apartments. It badly needed a paint job, especially the front porch, where the wood was almost bare. The yard was overgrown, neglected by everyone except the neighborhood dogs.
Our apartment was one long room on the first floor. It had once been an adjoining living room and dining room, but we never used the sliding pocket doors. The kitchen, along the wall at the back of the room, was marked by a beat-up table with two metal chairs. My mother threw a colorful tablecloth over the table. “Good as new,” she declared.
Below the front window, an old faded-green velour couch doubled as my bed. The fabric was worn down in places and entirely worn off on the armrests. Beside that couch stood my mother’s bed, the foot nearly touching the front entrance. Against the wall opposite her bed, my mother’s Olivetti sat on a small oak desk, her growing collection of books stacked in piles on the floor. This included the forty-five volumes of Lenin she had bought right after we moved to Denver. She was going through them all, making dozens of pages of notes, in order to write what she called “the feminist critique.” I didn’t really know what that meant; to me they were mostly notable for taking up too much of our floor space. I hoped she was a fast reader.
The bathroom, shared with the other apartment on the first floor, was squeezed under the staircase across the narrow hallway. We could barely stand up straight in the shower stall or sit on the toilet without bumping our knees against the sink. The floor consisted of layers of peeling greenish linoleum. The f
our tiny apartments upstairs, mostly occupied by single, elderly men, all shared one bathroom and a kitchenette.
The house sat on the corner of the block, with the yard open to the sidewalk and street. Our landlord, Mr. Anderson, a friendly, plump man in his sixties with thick silver hair tucked neatly under his baseball cap, offered to take $25 off the rent as long as we kept the yard poop-free, mowed the grass, pulled the weeds, cleaned the shared bathrooms, and swept the hallway and front porch every so often. It was also my job to collect the rent checks once a month from the others in the house. So our rent was $50 instead of $75 per month, utilities included.
Flaws aside, at least our new home was cheap and furnished. And it felt downright cushy compared to anywhere we had lived in Peru. Even though we shared a tiny bathroom like we had in Ocopilla, it was only with one small family. There was hot water, which ran all day long. Without Raul there, we had peace and quiet around the clock. The neighborhood was a bit run-down, but it seemed safe enough; certainly nothing like Comas or Villa El Salvador. So I no longer worried that my mother might die at any moment. She was still hoping to be part of a revolution, but Denver seemed manageable compared to Chile or Peru.
Yet my mother wasn’t really as happy as I was to be back in the States. She missed Raul, sometimes crying into her pillow at night. I tried to take his place, explaining how we’d take care of each other, just the two of us. She would pat me sweetly on the head. But I couldn’t stop her from dreaming about him—or fighting with him in her sleep—and I didn’t realize they were still writing long, detailed letters to each other through our first months in Denver.
Soon after we moved into our Bannock Street apartment, we adopted a puppy from the local shelter. Her given name was Tinkerbell, which we immediately changed to Incabell, and then just Inca. She was either a husky–German shepherd mix or a Norwegian elkhound, but it didn’t matter to me; Inca was the most beautiful dog I had ever seen. Like Dingo and the other dogs we’d had, Inca was low maintenance; we simply let her out the front door to roam the neighborhood and do her business. But unlike Dingo, who was presumably still with Raul back in Huertas, Inca was happily tick-free and healthy. Unlike the local market in Comas, Denver grocery stores stocked plenty of dry dog food.
My mother also decided to get us a little green parakeet we named Maya, who lived in a tall wooden cage we hung from the kitchen ceiling. Then we adopted Lucifer, a stray black cat. Inca and Lucifer got along just fine, and so did Inca and Maya. But Lucifer and Maya were not such a good match. The problem was that my mother liked to leave the birdcage door open so that Maya could fly around the room. She said the poor bird needed some freedom and it was cruel to leave her caged up all the time like a prisoner. Maya seemed to enjoy her freedom, but so did Lucifer, who one day leapt up and swatted Maya down. It was a fatal blow. When I found the little bird on her side on the floor, breathing heavily, I knew immediately what had happened and yelled at Lucifer, who seemed very proud of himself. There was nothing I could do but watch poor Maya breathe her last breath. We never really forgave Lucifer for killing our bird, and perhaps that’s why when he got out one day he never came back. Eventually we got another parakeet, which we named R2-D2, and my mother continued to leave the cage door open. One day, R2-D2 flew out the window, never to return.
A few months after we came to Denver, my mother managed to squeeze an old, scratched-up upright piano into the room, along the wall by her desk. She had gotten it for a good price from neighbors. More than anything else, that piano helped me understand that, at long last, we would no longer be living out of our duffel bags.
I didn’t even know my mother could play the piano. But she had taken lessons while growing up in Kansas. She mostly played traditional songs from her childhood, even religious hymns, despite her declared atheism. But my mother’s favorite was the folk song “De Colores,” the unofficial anthem of the farmworkers movement. She seemed happiest when she was sitting at that piano, tapping the keys and singing to the world at the top of her lungs. However far off the revolution might be, she wasn’t letting herself give up. And soon enough she’d find plenty of local political causes to adopt.
My mother also picked up a record player at a garage sale and bought a dozen or so used LPs, including some by her favorite Chilean singers, Violeta Parra and Victor Jara, as well as Nina Simone and Keith Jarrett. We played these albums over and over again, especially on weekends. My mother also made waffles on weekends. She was a purist when it came to waffle toppings: just real maple syrup and butter, not the fake stuff, and nothing else. No matter how sleepy I was, I always got up with her. She hardly ever slept in, so if I wanted waffles, I had to eat them at the crack of dawn. Afterward, I went straight back to bed.
The only thing we splurged on was a car, our first since the failed Chevy laundry-van experiment. My mother bought an old Datsun station wagon with a new lemon-yellow paint job so sloppy that it even covered the black rubber trim and bumper. The yellowy foam popped through the tears in the black plastic front-seat cushions, but it drove fine. The car meant that on occasional weekends we could drive up to the mountains with Inca. After years of getting around by overcrowded public transportation in South America, it felt luxurious to have such freedom to travel, to simply jump in the car and be able to go wherever we wanted.
Like most other places my mother and I had lived, the Denver apartment had a mouse problem. Usually, I was responsible for washing the dishes, except when my mother offered to do them in exchange for me setting and emptying the mousetraps. My mother sympathized with the mice, even admired them, comparing them to guerrilla insurgents, but she couldn’t handle how the critters were always chewing up her newspaper clippings. So she decided they had to die, as long as she had nothing to do with it. I didn’t mind disposing of the bodies, since it took less time than washing dishes.
Our neighbor on the first floor, Diane, was a round and short single mother on welfare. She lived with her two young kids, Jesse and Olivia. Whenever my mother invited Diane over for tea, I would play with Jesse, who was a year or two younger than me. Years later he would end up in prison. There was a lot of turnover in the upstairs one-room apartments. One elderly tenant, who was so frail and quiet that we often forgot he was even there, died suddenly one night, apparently from a heart attack. His was the first dead body I’d ever seen. When the ambulance wheeled him out, the landlord paid us to clean out the room. The place had a distinct musty and stale old-person smell. The old man had hardly had any belongings, only a suitcase of clothes and a pair of tan Frye cowboy boots sitting by the side of the bed, begging to be worn. After a moment’s hesitation, in which I imagined him taking them off right before dying, I claimed them. It did feel creepy wearing a dead man’s boots, but they fit perfectly and were the nicest pair I’d ever had. They were certainly a huge upgrade over the old beat-up boots I had brought with me from Peru. I wore them daily until I finally outgrew them.
About six months after we moved to Denver, the smallest upstairs room, right above the front porch and bordered on three sides by windows, opened up. When it didn’t get rented again right away, my mother decided it was finally time for me to have my own room and for her to have some privacy. It would cost an extra $25 in rent per month. I was ecstatic.
Not much more than a single bed would fit in there, and it would be hard to keep that room warm in the winter due to all the leaky windows, but it was like having my own apartment. There was enough space for a nine-inch black-and-white TV that we bought at a garage sale. My mother had finally given in to me having a TV, especially since it wouldn’t be in the living room. I had long outgrown Speed Racer, but Battlestar Galactica, with Starbuck and Apollo fighting the evil Cylons, was even better. And it was on that tiny TV that I, like many other kids in Denver, became a diehard Broncos fan during the 1977 season when they made it to the Super Bowl for the first time. Slowly but surely, I was becoming an American kid again, rediscovering my love of television and replacing my previou
s love of fútbol with American football. And just as I had successfully pestered my mother to get me a soccer ball in Peru, now I convinced her to buy me a Wilson football made of real leather.
* * *
My mother got an odd assortment of part-time jobs, none of which seemed to last very long. She worked at a cardboard box factory for a few months and then at a hummingbird-feeder factory. At one point she worked as a maid at the Denver Hilton and as a janitor at Denver General Hospital. She also waited tables, first at Mary Lou’s Café on Broadway, where she would slip me an extra large piece of cherry pie, and later at the 1st Avenue Café. She also spent a couple of months driving vehicles at a car auction but got fired for stalling them too many times. She was never a very good driver, especially of manual-shift cars. Though these jobs helped pay the bills, none of them had anything to do with my mother’s radical politics, beyond keeping her connected to the working class.
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