Peru
I read and read and read. I cannot read enough. There are not enough books for my hunger, I cannot keep up with myself. I read beyond my years, deep into the years ahead. I am unreachable in my book. I am alone and in company. No one asks you what you’re doing with a book in your hand. No one asks you if you’re okay. No one asks you anything at all.
I am eight. England and Argentina go to war over some tiny islands that no one has ever heard of. In assembly, in our striped dresses, shivering in the cold spring sunlight, we pray for the English soldiers in their fight against the Argentines. I come home, bury myself in my mother’s lap, confide that I think I may have prayed for someone to kill my father. My father has never fought a day in his life but my prayer feels like a betrayal. My mother goes to see the headmistress. The next day, and every day thereafter, we pray for both the English and the Argentine soldiers. No one in London wants to do business with an Argentine. For this, and other reasons, my father and his wife move to Lima, Peru, where she is from.
Empty space. I do not remember them leaving. I do not remember the house being packed up, my bedroom crated, my clothes folded, the axis of my life upended. I remember no longer seeing my father on the weekends, no longer traveling with him to European ski slopes, beaches, hotels. I remember him no longer picking me up from school, and I remember him no longer swerving through dark streets with the stars in the cold sky and me warm, wrapped in a duvet, in the back of his open-topped car to return me to my mother’s on a Sunday night. I remember wondering if he would forget about me or if I did something to make him leave. I remember waiting for him to call and tell me when he was coming back for me. I remember all the promises to visit and how often he broke them.
The house in Lima has a pool and a blazing white wall all the way around it and a garden with no grass but only cement and an avocado tree that drops leaves like canoes into the water. My father lazes on a lilo, slim as a lizard, with my sister on his lap, clinging like an organ-grinder’s monkey. She eyes me implacably, knowing she has won. She is his now, and I am the interloper.
I am given a friend who is not my friend but the daughter of someone my stepmother knows. She is dark, intense, with a blackbird’s wing of hair that swoops in front of her face. She is the daughter of the most famous writer in Peru. She is sullen. My father is not a famous writer and I worry that this is the problem between us. I don’t speak enough Spanish and she speaks no English but no one seems to have thought of this. We are left in the backyard. My adopted sister is at school and now I miss her. The girl with black hair walks carefully heel to toe all the way around the edge of the pool. I watch her. I ask her if she’d like a snack. She does not reply. I go inside. I watch her from the kitchen, still balancing heel, toe, heel, toe all the way around the pool’s edge, back and forth. Her lips are moving, her arms outstretched. She never looks up. Her housekeeper comes to collect her and she leaves without saying goodbye. At dinner my stepmother wants to know how the playdate went.
“She was nice,” I offer helplessly.
“Good,” says my stepmother.
The girl never comes back to play.
I visit Lima again and now the house is gone and now we live in two apartments that are on top of each other. If I want to see my father, I have to take the elevator. My adopted sister and I live in the lower apartment with the dogs and the married couple who cook and clean for my stepmother. William and Negrita are the dogs’ names. They are low and pointy. I don’t remember the married couple’s names. I sit in the white tiled kitchen on a Formica stool and spoon bowlfuls of earthy brown lentils and rice into my mouth. After lunch we may go upstairs. I push the gold button in the elevator because my adopted sister lives there so she always gets to. We press ourselves up against the plate-glass windows and breathe on them, making fog inside to match the rolling fog outside that drenches the oceanfront view. We wait for the afternoons when we will be taken to the club. There is a pool there, and a beach with waves that will knock you inside out and upside down and spit you back out on the beach like a peach pit. The beach is dotted with parasols made of dried palm fronds, and if you sit at a white plastic table they will bring you panqueques con dulce de leche, which are crepes filled with soft buttery caramel and then sprinkled with sugar, and they make my tongue ooze and I want all of them, there are never enough of them to make me stop wanting them. My father meets us there after work and he will let me order one more. Sometimes. Other times he will shake his head and click his tongue and flick the swimsuit elastic on my soft thighs. “No more, my love. You don’t want a fat tummy.” In his mouth, it rhymes with Mommy.
It is Christmas and we are dressed in matching smocked dresses but mine is blue for my eyes and hers is pale pink. There are more parcels than I have ever seen under the tree and I know to light my eyes up and tumble from one to the next and I miss my mother so much. The sash digs into my waist and I cannot breathe but I reach for another and another and another as though they were the oozing caramel pancakes and the sweetness could stuff the missing out of me. I take my dress off that night and find the fine imprint of the smocking spider-webbed across my chest.
We fly to a lagoon in Peru that my stepmother owns. We cannot take many things because they are too heavy for the plane. The landing strip looks like a forehead in the jungle. It is dark and full of rustling and men with torches help us out of the plane and toward jeeps parked beneath noisy trees. We slash through the darkness, bumping, in a blackness full of sounds. I hear water. We bump stop. We climb into canoes that tilt and sway and strange hands reach out to hold me, settle me. I sit, clutching my backpack, feeling the edges of my books digging into my thighs, tin cans pressing into my back. My father’s voice ahead. My stepmother calm, reassuring. We lurch and then smooth onto the dark water. Lapping, hissing from the shore. Houses with thatched roofs that cling to the edges of the water. One house sticks out of the water on stilts. It looks like Baba Yaga’s hut. I worry it will walk toward us, that there will be a witch inside it. Men crunch our boats onto the shore and we step out and sway-walk toward the thatched houses. I share a hut with my adopted sister. Our beds are low with nets spread over them. We undress in the dark, a dim flashlight between us that we have promised to conserve. I gesture to her to switch it off. We have been apart for so long we no longer speak each other’s languages. I climb beneath her white netting and we lie together shrouded and listen to the noises of the jungle.
There are other families here, friends of my stepmother. The famous writer and his daughter are here. We play cards hatefully in the Baba Yaga hut. My adopted sister watches, teeth small and white, misshapen like the tiny pearls my stepmother’s son finds when he dives in the lagoon. She laughs at everything I do. There is nothing fresh to eat here but fish. I drink only the sweet milk from tins. My father brings crates of this milk to trade with the men who walk out of the jungle. I drip it onto cereal. Sticky white drops that make a thick slurry. The cornflakes drown in sweetness. I have a headache all the time. I sweat and read and finish my books too soon. My blue shorts grow tight but I smile so no one will notice. No one does. I want to call my mother but there is no way to call from the jungle. I miss milk. I wait to go home. The adults laugh inside their own language and a haze of cigarette smoke.
I am ten. We go to the capital city of the Incas, my father, his wife, my adopted sister, and I. It is higher than I have ever been. We wear wool ponchos and cowboy hats and my stomach turns and churns from being so high in the clouds and from pressing my ear to the thin hotel walls to overhear their fights. My stepmother’s voice is as scratchy as the ponchos. I hear it crack and sob through the wall. The city is thin-aired with narrow streets and thick with sellers pressing brightly woven dolls, key chains, T-shirts into my small white hands.
We go higher still, to where the air feels so thin you could slash it with your fingernail. It feels like the membrane of an eyeball. We take the zigzag train up the mountain. It lurches back and forth, a slow concertina carved into sheer rock. It is inexorable, endless. I cling to the carriage to make it cling to the mountain. It is cold and bright and my lungs and eyes burn. There is nothing to see but mist. We are clutching an invisible mountain wrapped in a cobweb. My father wears his favorite jacket, the puffy one with the sew-on patches from his race-car days. It rustles when he talks. He is eager, clutching my adopted sister in his lap. He tells us the story of a fabled city to which the Incas fled from the Spanish invaders, lost to history for centuries until one man, an American explorer, determined to find it, beat back the jungle, and threaded a path through the needle-top mountains to the summit, where he stumbled on an entire silent city. This is a story I know, because there is always a maiden who has slept for a hundred years and always a knight who must force his way through the forest to find her. I cannot wait to see the castle and perhaps there will be a princess there, one that everyone else overlooked. This thought comforts me as I bite back the tides of nausea and the pressure that drums in my temples. My adopted sister wails and lies down in her mother’s lap. I sit up and look out and dig my fingernails into my palms to stop from crying out. My father nods approvingly. I taste bile in my mouth as we climb higher and higher but there is no turning back. My stepmother watches him. The mist drains into the bowl of the Andes. We are here. We are here. We arrive at the top, tumble out, unsteady. We stagger to the ticket booth on uneven feet. I am eager, desperate to prove to my father that I am not troubled by the altitude, and to see for myself what this lost city looks like. I follow my father, clicking his heels, hungry for Inca gold.
We step through the ticket booth and out into the damp sunlight. My father stops, breathes out, and places his hand on my shoulder. I frown. I look where he looks. There are no castles here. There are no spires, no vaulted windows, no locked doors, no cellars, no attics, no secret staircases veined with thorny vines. There is only a vast silent flatness with gray stones slung in long low walls. They thread the plateau, rising and falling. There are arches and terraces, rows and rows of small enclosures, walls rising and falling, climbing hilltops and cresting into a lookout, an altar, a temple. It seems bereft. An abandoned honeycomb. Strange lidless boxes of air wide open to the sky above. The citadel is nestled in green peaks that needle the clouds and the tight gray stones that lay quietly like obedience. I sigh in disappointment and the longing to throw up and lie down. My father squeezes my shoulder.
“I knew you’d love it.”
We spend the day picking through the pathways, the temperature rising, the roar of a river below, the sound of our guide and others like him naming our way through the ruins. Bathhouse, jail, tomb, drain, sentry, temple of the sun, vending machine. We peel off layers, we drink warm sticky drinks, we thread our way through ancient stones and roofless temples to the edge of everything under an aching sky. I am frightened of the edges, of the altars and the drops and the birds arcing overhead. My father moves quickly, asking questions, sharing answers with me, frowning to see my adopted sister sitting, resting in the shade of an archway, her face leaning against the stone, my stepmother shaking her head. Eventually, when the mind can hold no more, it is time for us to leave. We gather in the waiting room for the funicular to take us back down the mountain. It is cool in here, and the long day is ending. We dress quietly and here my father realizes he has lost his jacket. He asks us all in turn if we have it. We shake our heads. He pats himself down as though he has hidden it on his own body. He asks my stepmother why she does not have it. He insists he gave it to her to carry, perhaps even to wear. His lips go white. His eyes are small and black like Inca beads. I have never seen him like this. She was carrying it, she was in charge of it, how could she have dropped it, how could she have mislaid something so precious. The room grows smaller as he rages until he can barely fit in it anymore and he bursts away. We sit. We wait. I cannot look at my stepmother. I cannot believe she could lose something so precious. I cannot believe she would not take better care of my father’s love.
My stepmother slips on her dark glasses. My adopted sister dozes in her mother’s lap. I pull out my book. I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the top of Machu Picchu. There is a photo of me reading it. I am wearing a brown poncho and a cowboy hat. I am sitting cross-legged. I read about escape and the white man’s dominion over brown bodies while sitting on the top of a mountain to which, centuries earlier, more brown bodies fled to escape the white man’s fist. But I know none of this. I only know how to plunge my pain like a hot blade into the cool depths of the written page. I know how to submerge and disappear and every book I ever read has opened its pages to me with the promise that it will hold me, it will never abandon me, it will never let me go.
My father returns empty-handed. He does not speak to anyone for the rest of the evening. In silence we ride down that mountain, slide back to the hotel, to our rooms. He holds silence like a lost fortress and we wander around his ruin.
Years later, on a hot balcony overlooking a snake of traffic winding into Buenos Aires, I ask him about the jacket he lost at the top of the Andes. He looks thoughtful. He has forgotten about it. He tells me that he had cocaine in the pocket. He tells me he loved the jacket, with all its history, but he was more worried he’d lost his stash. He snorts, flicks his joint over the balcony, and stretches his back.
I am ten. It is my last night in Lima. My father no longer lives with my stepmother. He has his own apartment now. It is dim and made of wood and there is a black leather chair that swivels and tilts. He makes us hot dogs and rice and cheese, and he teaches me backgammon. I lose and lose and lose and he laughs at my tight face and I hate him. I am leaving the next morning and I cannot speak. I do not know when I will see him again and I know I must not ask him because it will make him stop laughing and he will turn his head away from me. I sleep on the sofa, balled up like a fist.
The next morning, he walks me onto the plane, buckles me into my seat, tucks a satchel in my lap, and hands me a thick old hardback book with gold writing on the spine. I recognize it from his bookshelf.
“Don’t look up till you get there,” he says.
He kisses me, smiles at the air hostess, who blooms, and walks off the plane. I watch him leave and now my eyes and the root of my tongue hurt but I must not feel them, because now I am going home to my mother whom I have missed without words but with my bones. The airplane lady puts a hand on my shoulder. I cannot feel it. I watch him walk tall across the tarmac. I keep my bag in my lap. I hold it like a bear. And then I begin to read. I read with the book propped up against the seat back while I eat everything that is put in front of me. Later, I stop to go to the bathroom where I pull out the little bag he has tucked in there for me. It is pale yellow and has an orange Inca symbol on it. Inside is a comb, a washcloth, a little mirror, and a tiny plastic rectangular box. I open it and there is a toothbrush head and the handle tucked beside it and wedged in between the smallest toothpaste I have ever seen.
I wedge my thick fingers in to get at it and then notice the tiny note that is stuck to the inside of the box. It is a piece of paper, cut to size, with a smiling-sun face and the word “SMILE” in my father’s writing. I lean my head against the wall of the plane and I cry till my heart is dry. I will not use the toothbrush in case I accidentally drop water on the note so I carefully replace it, wash my mouth out with water, rinse my red face, and walk back to my seat. The book is the true story of a man who makes a raft of balsa wood and sails from Peru to Polynesia to prove that centuries earlier other men had done this. I weep as I read, pushing the words down inside me, filling my well with stones. I finish the book by the time I land. It sits by my desk as I type this.
I return from these trips back to the arms of my mother. I have no words for what these trips have actually been like. I share what I know will please, the places traveled, lessons learned, the myths. I hold them up like seed pearls dredged from the bottom of a dark lagoon. I have no way to say, I missed you, I ached for you, and now I am here I miss him, and where must I stuff this missing now. I must protect them all from the ferocity of my feelings. So I stuff the missing into my belly and lecture anyone who will listen about the lost city of the Incas and the seafarers of Easter Island.
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From Lion. Copyright © 2025 by Sonya Walger; courtesy of New York Review Books.
