American Chica (19 page)

“What’s that?” I said, thwacking the last word with a spoon.

“That,” said Eloísa, “is your mother’s maiden name. Campbell. The name of your grandfather in North America. Someday you will learn to write it—as all Spanish ladies do—after the name of your father.”

“Mmm,” I mumbled distractedly, and went off to practice saying Campbell out loud.

“Mother,” I whispered into the blue telephone that night so that no one in the house would hear, “are you listening? I learned how to say your name.”

One day, Tía Chaba was called on by an art student she had met through friends. The young man was shown into the drawing room and received by my beaming grandmother, as was the custom. Hearing his voice, I clambered down the narrow stairs to have a good look at his face. What I saw delighted me: a wide open forehead with eyes as clear as amber.

“Aha,” the guest said, and I pranced up to kiss him, as I had been taught to do. It was love at first sight, a tumbling, rushing love, warmed by the red in his hair and the lavender scent of his neck. I reached up and wormed my way into his lap.

Tía Chaba ceased to exist. I could hear her gab on, as if she were chewing the hem of a distant curtain. I was happy to sit in her suitor’s arms, still as a heap of stone.

“I’m not a Peruvian,” I said finally, in as large a voice as I could muster.

“What’s that?” he said, rewarding me with his face. My aunt’s chatter came to a sudden stop.

“I said: I am not a Peruvian.”

“Marisi,” my grandmother said sternly, “what nonsense is that? What have you been taught up there in Cartavio? Of course you are a Peruvian. You’re as Peruvian as can be. Haven’t I always said that of all my three grandchildren, you’re the one with the Cisneros face?”

“I’m not like them,” I whispered coyly, and shrugged toward my bewildered grandmother and aunt. “I’m not.” Then, with a twisted little smile I was sure would punt me leagues ahead of Tía Chaba in his heart, I added, “I’m an American.
Un yanqui.
My name is Campbell.”

“I see,” he said, and raised his eyebrows. “How
very
interesting.”

I took that cue to scramble out of his lap and snatch my blue machine from behind my aunt’s chair. “Here is my telephone to the United States. Watch.” I spoke into the mouthpiece, switching to English for grander effect. “Hello, Georgie? Hello, hello! How are you? Don’t forget to bring me some … cream cheese!” It was the nectar my mother thirsted for: the Philadelphia kind.

“Ah,” the painter said tenderly. “How cosmopolitan you are.”

“Marisi,” my tía said in a sprightly voice, her black eyes as tipped as a cat’s, “why don’t you tell Diego what American city you’re from, now that he knows you’re a
yanqui?”

I opened my mouth and stalled, trying to spin cities out of my brain. I couldn’t think of one.

“Qué graciosa, la Marisi,”
my grandmother sang out. How cute she is. It was the signal that my show had come to a crashing finish. I was about to be sent from the room. I lost all decorum and begged the man to take me home with him.

The women laughed in high little cachinnations, the kind with a razor’s edge.

“Well, why don’t you at the very least walk me to the gate?” the amber-eyed man said, concluding that his visit was over, too. We walked down the steps together. But there, the most remarkable thing happened. The gate swung open and Don Pepe’s gray Chevrolet shot past, whizzing down Calle San Martin so quickly that I barely caught a glimpse of my mother’s gold head as it sped out of view.

I made a dash for it. The painter lunged after me, and we both clattered down the street like city hounds after spoor. But he soon overtook me, lugged me back to the black iron gate, and handed me to my aunt. Perspiration was running down his face. “Here is Miss Campbell,” he said ceremoniously in English, wheezing and swabbing himself with a handkerchief rank with turpentine. “She thought she saw her mother.” Then, parenthetically, in Spanish, “As sad a
gordita
as I’ve ever known.”

That was the day my war began.

“Being a
yanqui
does not make you better,” Tía Chaba sniffed, once she’d gotten over the scare of losing me to the streets. “The
norteamericanos
have nothing over us.”

“A motley race,” my abuelito added in English, dipping his toast into his tea.

The days that followed were punctuated by remonstrance and retaliation. I stomped upstairs, took out my grandmother’s pinking shears, and lopped off one side of my hair. There was a flurry of dismay when I leaned over the banister and presented my edited conk, but nothing like the breast-beating admissions and apologies I thought I so richly deserved.

“You know, her mother has never taken her to church, never taught her her prayers,” I heard my grandmother say to my aunts one morning, as I lurked unseen on the stairwell. “Can you believe it? What kind of mother is
that?”

I couldn’t hear my aunts’ responses, but my grandmother’s voice was high-pitched, loud, and I could hear every word. “The
woman is so willful. Doesn’t she realize she has an obligation to teach a child? If children don’t have proper religious educations, how can they hope to be anything other than monkeys in Manú? Have you taken a good look at that girl? Is that how gringo children are? Wild?”

That afternoon, my Tía Eloísa draped a black lace mantilla over my shorn hair and drew me into the household chapel on the second floor. It was a tiny niche with a carved altar, a towering plaster image of the Virgin Mary, and a small crucifix. A wood Jesus draped languidly from the cross. Two beautifully carved candles with miniature illustrations of flying angels stood unlit on each side. “I want you to repeat after me,” my tía said in a husky whisper, pulling me down on my knees. “Ave
Maria, madre de Dios—
”

“Mother of God?” I said. “Where is she? I didn’t know God had a mother,” I said.

“She was at the foot of the cross when Jesus Christ died,” my aunt went on, “kneeling before him, the way we’re kneeling right now. Let’s pray to her, Marisi. She listens to children. She’ll listen to you.”

“Did she listen to him?” I pointed up at the dead Christ.

“Of course she did, Marisita.”

“Well, it didn’t do him any good.” My aunt’s little eyes widened, and then her neck swiveled so that her powdered face turned up and shone white with light from the ceiling. She crossed herself, stood, and left.

I decided to stage a hunger strike. Folding my arms across my chest at the lunch table, I refused every dish that was set before me:
papa a la huancaína, sopa con albahaca y fideos, arroz verde con pollo, delicia de chirimoya.
All my favorites trooped by and lined up one by one, untouched. The grown-ups carried on, nodding and munching and savoring the delights with little sighs of pleasure.

“You’re not hungry, Marisi?” my grandmother said, dispatching a glimmering morsel of sweet
chirimoya.
“How very unusual.”

“Why don’t you go off and play, Marisita?” said Tío Víctor, just back from Peru’s interior and unaware of my state of siege.

“She will sit there until she finishes,” said Tía Chaba, and flashed me a gimlet eye.

The conversation droned on, analyzing everything from El Presidente’s war against the communists to the Chinese
chifa
with the best wontons. One by one, the adults dabbed their chins with ecru linen, excused themselves, and trotted off to siesta. Finally, there were only three of us around the table—Abuelito, Chaba, and I. Camped before me: a regiment of porcelain.

“Malraux’s
Espoir
is far superior to anything Camus has written,” Tía Chaba was saying, citing endless twists and turns that congealed in the air and floated past in dry wisps. “More alive, more potent, more
true,
don’t you think?” She was trying to engage my grandfather, who was chewing thoughtfully and studying his plate.

“We don’t disagree,
mi hija,”
he replied finally, “but I’m clearly willing to give
L’Homme révolté
more credit than you are.” He smoothed the damask under his hands.

He looked from her to me to her again. “It seems you’ve lost your audience, Chabela. No use wasting yourself, no?” He smiled sweetly. And then, with all aplomb, he rose, tipped his head toward me—“Con
tu permiso, Marisi”
—and tottered off upstairs.

“Eat,” Chaba said, and was gone.

What followed then can only be described as a pitched battle, complete with scrawking chair legs and heavy grunting. I left the room. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. Tío Víctor called me to come sit in his lap. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. I screeched, threw myself on the floor, and threatened to call the police. Chaba wrestled me back in my chair. I ran to the kitchen
and pleaded with the maids. Chaba ran to her room, brought out her belts, wrestled me back in my chair, and strapped me in. When the family gathered for high tea, I was still there, fast asleep, my face in the rice.

“What on earth is going on?” my grandmother thundered.

“She was playing passenger on a plane,” Chaba crowed, taking the stairs like a dancer. Abuelita shook her head, called out to the maid who hovered at the kitchen door with her apron twisted into her fingers, and told her to set me free.

In truth, Tía Chaba was the most exciting woman I knew: big-eyed, boisterous, smart. She could see the future and do magic. “I’m a wicked witch!” she’d screech. “Don’t you cross me!” and then she’d tickle me with her long, red fingernails until I could hardly breathe. Being the youngest in her family, and the most resilient, she had been assigned as the baby-sitter. It was my parents who had gone off and abandoned me. My predicament was not her fault. But because she had consented to be my jailer, she would be made to pay.

I took to her things with the scissors. I locked myself up in her room. I called her a
bruja
when she ran after me with a hot curling iron, trying to impose order on my hair. I gasped and clutched at my chest when she walked through the door. There were flank attacks and aerial salvos, hit-and-run and pincers. There were strafes and blasts and fusillades, with battle raids and booty.

Finally one morning, as I was watching my Tía Eloísa carefully wrap her long-nailed toes in cellophane before she slipped on her sheer silk stockings, she turned and asked me, “Why are you so cruel to your Tía Chaba, Marisi?” and it dawned on me that I’d lost the war.

I let them take me off and baptize me after that, realizing that somewhere along the way I’d been labeled a problem, worse than
the bad-mannered pagan my father had left behind. The one thing I did not want was a brisk court-martial on his return.

They taught me my prayers, trussed me up in a white wool suit tailored by my grandmother’s own hand, took me to La Parroquia—a stone leviathan in the heart of Miraflores—splashed me with holy water, and pledged me to Jesus and Rome.

When my father and mother came to the gate to collect me days later, I was clean, beatific, and curly. The essence of tidy prig.

7

—

E
ARTH

Pachamama

T
HERE IS A
story the guides in Machu Picchu like to tell, about a carefree traveler who took a stone from the trail to Inti Punku—the sacred gate of the sun—and carried it back to her home in Bremen. Or Salt Lake City or Lyon; the homeland varies, depending on who is listening. In any case, the woman descended the Andes, returned to her comfortable home on
zo-und-zo-platz,
parked the stone on her coffee table, and watched her life turn into a nightmare.

Her husband died in freak circumstances: He was sweeping their second-floor balcony, when suddenly the whole structure—German-made! perfectly constructed!—collapsed into the street, crushing his skull. Her daughter was bitten in the face by a mangy dog, behind their house, in the alley. The police claimed that they hadn’t seen an attack that ferocious in years. When the woman began to get dizzy spells, falling to her knees in her own living room, her head brought eye-level with the stone, she understood why a curse had befallen her.

She wrapped up the little gray rock, addressed it to the tour office in Cusco, and mailed it to the Peruvian guide who had taken her up the trail to Machu Picchu. For the week he had it, the stone played havoc with the guide’s life: His wife ran off with another man. His eyelids began to quiver. He couldn’t sleep. When he placed the stone on someone else’s desk one night, that person went home sick the next day.

The guide took the rock back up to Machu Picchu and handed it to a shaman, explaining the damage the thing had done, warning the wise man to be careful since the curse might fall on him now. The shaman turned the granite in his palm and nodded. He knew what the problem was. It was an
ariska salkkarumi,
he said, an unhealed stone from a bad man’s grave. It had absorbed too much evil. It simply needed to be prayed over, blessed, and returned to the earth, where it would be purified in the bosom of Pachamama. And so it was. The rock was reunited with its mother, the shaman lived on to do good works, the guide flourished, and the German tourist learned something about the real order of things.