American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood by Marie Arana

Author:Marie Arana
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307764591
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Published: 2011-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE EARTH WAS always moving in those days. Pachamama was temperamental, moody, shifting her weight heavily beneath us, tossing from side to side. My mother and father were pricked with that same petulance, contemplative and sullen since our move from Cartavio. Since—for that matter—their return from the United States.

I did not identify these things at the time, of course, but that frame of mind is easy enough to locate and retrieve now that I find it cataloged in the same drawer with a lifetime of other vague dissatisfactions. A tight-lipped foreboding moved through our house and, were it not for earthquakes and molasses-coated carcasses and the providential distraction of childish games and of scrabbling in ancient graves, we might have turned to it, pointed, and remarked.

I cannot tell you what actually happened, what incidents signaled the widening gap between my mother and father. Even now, after much reflection, not one specific event rises to mind. I knew it by the way they moved. Or didn’t. The hand that no longer slipped around her waist. The way he propelled himself away from the dinner table. The tic in her brow when he said he hoped his mother would come visit the children. The flare of his nostrils when she drew old letters from the bed table and left the room. The melancholy way she played Palmgren on the piano. The rush of bubbles when he poured himself another rum and Coke. The click of her shoes coming back from a party alone. The sight of his men carrying him home by the elbows after a night of drinking. The angle of Tía Chaba’s glance when she came for a weekend visit. It was as if all Pachamama’s convulsions had joggled them loose.

Shaky days. The earth beneath us was putting on a show, wriggling our toes. “Por fin!” Tía Chaba told us our Spanish forebears had cried when they set boots on Peru. At last! “Terra firma!” Little did they know we descendants would spend the rest of our days quivering on our legs. “Stand your ground!” Mother taught us the gringos had said at Lexington. It was a phrase that sounded very silly to our ears. “The firm ground of result,” she quoted the sainted Churchill, whose name she had given her son. And George Winston and I fell to giggling.

We knew, if no one else was admitting it, that there was nothing firm about Pachamama. I remember being struck by the way northerners look up at the sky when they’re told disaster is coming, but of course it makes perfect sense: It’s from air and water that their dangers come. In Peru, we look at the ground. We are worried earthlings, fitfully tied, creeping about on volatile real estate. We fret about impetuous floors. We shuffle when we dance. We keep an eye down when we do it. There is no Peruvian exempt from geologic upheaval: not the rich, the poor, the beautiful, the ugly. There is a bond of the abused in us, a certain fatalism that accrues to children who are shaken by the earth.

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