In Peru, the word “marciano” refers both to Martians and to a common
type of fruit popsicle.
My sister waved her finger in front of the webcam, showing us an engagement
ring. My mother shrieked and kissed the screen, leaving a waxy smudge above
my sister’s pixilated face. Once she calmed down, a very tall, blond man
appeared onscreen and gave us all a smile. “Hello, I’m Lars. Beautiful
Peruvian. Beautiful familien.” Then my sister announced that she
was coming home at the end of the month so we could meet her future
husband. She was cackling, as was my mother. On the call screen, she looked
like a woman talking to an old photograph of herself.
The moment the video call ended, my mother began planning, then
distributing orders. Suddenly she’d become an event planner. I got half the
tasks, my father the other. Mine included washing the car, switching out
the energy-saving lightbulbs with halogen ones, and Photoshopping a picture
of my sister and her fiancé onto a Norwegian flag, since Lars was
Norwegian, and printing it on good photo paper.
First, we had to clean the house. My mother started by washing the walls.
Next, she polished the floors with steel wool, then rearranged the
furniture, then called landscapers to clean up the garden. As my sister’s
arrival approached, my mother began spending hours online, looking for
cleaning tips and tricks she could use in each corner of the house. She
cleaned the doorknobs, the sockets and light switches, the faucets in every
sink. She even scoured the old copper kettle, which was always greasy and
smudged.
“I cleaned it with muriatic acid, come look.”
I was done helping her clean, and even more done with her coming into my
room to use the computer. While she was YouTubing ways to make bath towels
smell less like mold one afternoon, I coaxed her into watching a video
about Norway instead. Her curiosity kicked in right away, and soon she was
researching Norwegian and looking up facts about Norway. It seemed like a
good thing at first, a helpful distraction from housework, but my mother’s
Norwegian education quickly turned into an inferiority complex. Suddenly,
she found everything ugly, deficient, or vulgar: her country, her
neighborhood, her family, herself.
“Look, in Norway the buses don’t run on gasoline. They recycle garbage to
make fuel. With all the trash in the streets, here, think how much fuel we
could produce, but of course, this country couldn’t care less about
progress.”
My mother installed herself at my desk and went hours without leaving my
room. She’d completely taken over my computer. She spent days teaching
herself about Norway, scrolling through images of elk, the Aurora Borealis,
fjords, men in waders brandishing enormous salmon, other men dressed up as
Vikings. At first, the days she spent at my desk were so dull I thought I’d
go crazy, but soon her comments started to entertain me. I liked watching
her reactions and responses as she sat there, hour after hour, clicking
through her infinite sites.
“Look! I was trying to watch this video of snow falling, but all your naked
girls popped right up. I didn’t click any, because who knows what I’d see
next?”
Her innocence made me feel affectionate. The photos weren’t mine, I
explained; they were ads, meant to attract visitors’ attention. But, I
added, you should never open those pop-ups.
“So, what, I didn’t win that cell-phone raffle?”
“No, Mom. Pop-up ads are traps. Mostly they steal your email address and
use it to send you more junk.”
My mother knew you could be robbed in the street, but until now, she’d had
no idea you could be robbed in your own son’s bedroom. Even worse, she’d
had no idea that we lived in a country whose buses spat polluted filth,
whose trash was embarrassingly useless, whose society was corrupt and
macho, and whose capital city smelled like fish and mold. She’d never seen
that Cerro San Cristobal, which could have been a pine-covered Nordic peak,
was instead a dry, dirty hillock crawling with unnecessarily bright houses,
and that this was all she’d seen from her living-room window for years.
My mother’s collision with reality distressed her. For days, she barely
moved or spoke. She abandoned the computer and went back to her midday
shows, but she didn’t smile at the TV like she used to. I had to lure her
back to the computer. I suggested that she watch some PromPerú videos, or
look through its website, so she’d be able to tell Lars more about our
country, and before long she’d forgotten the Vikings and fjords. The video
flights over Machu Picchu delighted her, as did the video cruises across
Lake Titicaca. She was overjoyed to learn that the Amancae flower hadn’t
gone extinct; in fact, it bloomed on the pampas not too far from our house,
the ones she’d always assumed were overrun by riffraff, filled with shacks
or converted into garbage dumps.
My mother’s mood had transformed. She even looked better. She was visibly
content and excited, not only because my sister was coming home engaged,
but also because she was filled with patriotic pride. Whenever she talked
about our country’s tourist attractions—which, to her, were now imposing and grand, noble and ancient
—she brimmed with endorphins. Her eyes shone when she told me about our
unrivalled ceviche or the nobility of our hero, Miguel Grau. She spent days
at the computer again, watching videos about our native flora and fauna and
reading historical and scientific sites.
My mother hadn’t seemed this happy in a long time. The change stunned me
and my father. A few years before, she’d gotten sick, and we’d never been
able to find a diagnosis. Her head hurt, and she had wild swings in
appetite, from days she only ate tea and toast to days my father had to
bring massive orders of roast chicken home to keep her happy. She barely
slept, and woke me—never my father—in the middle of the night to keep her
company while she cooked and chattered about whatever crossed her mind.
Maybe all she needed was to get excited about something. Maybe the problem
was that her daily routine didn’t give her reasons to think about anything
new, or to learn about much beyond what her midday TV shows offered. Maybe
some excitement could have prevented the disorienting incident when she
disappeared and came back days later, filthy and exhausted, her body
covered with cuts, swearing that God himself had instructed her to return
to her family, whose love would be her refuge and her salvation.
***
At Sunday breakfast, she introduced the idea of the condor. My father and I
woke to the smell of freshly brewed coffee, unusual in our instant-coffee
home. My mother had returned from Mass with chicharrones, fried sweet
potatoes, and tamales.
“It won’t even be hard,” she told us. “The condors aren’t full-grown, and
they’re captive. They barely fly. And they’re used to people, besides.”
Dad didn’t reply. He concentrated on chewing his baguette, which he’d
stuffed with chicharrón and fried sweet potato. When my mother shut her
mouth, he took a sip of coffee and started picking at the bits of meat and
onions left on his plate.
“Well?” my mother asked. “Are you two going to help me?”
Her tone was nasal and intense. My father pushed his cup aside and turned
to me. I filled my mouth with tamal, but my mother was watching me so
intently my throat constricted and I couldn’t swallow.
“Look, sweetheart, that sounds a bit tricky,” my father said. “And risky.”
He poured himself another cup of coffee.
My mother pushed her chair back from the table and began clearing the dirty
breakfast dishes away. From the dining room, we could hear water streaming
into the sink, china ringing and breaking against the metal basin, the
pantry doors slamming open and shut. My father and I stood silently at the
table, like sentries. When my mother returned, she had a knife in her
hands. Between her sobs, she said, “You never help me. I take care of you,
I keep you happy, I show the whole world how close this family is. I’m
always the enthusiastic one. I’m the organizer. I make your lives run. I
devote my whole life to you, and now, when I ask you to do your sister a
favor, when I ask you to help show your daughter’s fiancé how welcome he
is, the two of you stand there, mute, like always. My whole life! Trapped
here with your unbearable silence.”
Dad locked his eyes on some spot on the table. I walked over to one of the
dining room windows and pushed it open. The air outside smelled like our
breakfast, like the breakfast the whole city ate every Sunday.
“Fine, Mom. Get all the things, make the calls, do the talking, and as long
as all we have to do is come with you, then fine. We’ll come.”
“Yes, yes, leave it to me. We’re only taking the little condor. It’s the
same size as a Christmas turkey.”
My mother set the knife on the table and went back to the kitchen. My
father was silent. After my mother fell asleep that night, he came to my
room and shook me awake. In a furious whisper, he said, “We do whatever she
wants! You’re her son. You could have said no, and it wouldn’t have made
her as angry as me saying it. Now what? What if the cops catch us? What if
the bird dies? Then what?”
***
She told us how to dress. Dark pants and a white shirt for Dad, a blue
nurse’s uniform for me, and a marine-blue skirt and eggshell blouse for
her. Dad carried the animal crate, I had the cooler with dry ice, and she
had a leather purse and, in one arm, a folder she’d filled with pictures of
birds and papers that looked like invoices and business correspondence.
We got to the zoo not long before it closed. She went to the ticket window,
talked to the manager, then signaled that we should go inside. When we got
to the administrative offices, she went in alone, telling us to wait for
her there.
She emerged after a few minutes, accompanied by the head zookeeper, a
middle-aged man who greeted us with a smile, then guided us through the
park. Dad and I walked behind them, and as we passed between the gardens
and enclosures, we noticed—maybe at the same time—that my mother was a
good-looking woman, front and back. She had a narrow little waist, and
curvy hips she hid under long housecoats at home.
The man radioed the keeper in charge of feeding the birds, who turned out
to be a kid younger than me. He showed up holding a long wooden pole, said
a friendly hello, and let us into the condors’ enclosure. Dad stayed by the
entrance, and Mom and I followed the kid through the condors’ little park
with its drying artificial lake, its craggy fake mountain made of cement
and rocks.
“The female’s not acclimating. See, there she is, hidden in her cave. Every
so often she comes out to eat and fly a little, but that’s all. The male is
better acclimated. He’ll fly, follow commands, keep the visitors
entertained.”
The female was indeed hidden in her cement cave. The male perched on a
metal bar that ran across the enclosure, observing us silently from above.
My mother had made us rehearse today’s steps over and over, to the point of
exhaustion, and now she directed me with barely a glance. Her features were
as still as her ID photograph, just a few muscles moving, a few words
slipping out.
I entered the female condor’s cave. She saw me, but she wasn’t bothered by
the invasion. I opened the cooler of dry ice and put it near her. My mother
produced a tiger-striped blanket and blocked the cave’s entrance with it,
holding it from the top like a curtain. The bird took a few steps, flapped
her wings gingerly, and lifted her neck. The only light in the dim cave
came from her gleaming black eyes.
The bird started getting drowsy, thanks to the gas from the dry ice. She
sat down, like a chicken roosting on her eggs. I watched her through the
white smoke, imagining her flying freely over the Andes. I imagined her
watching the world through the clouds, with no concept of the cages below,
no concept of humans at all.
Before she collapsed, the bird opened her wings slightly. I tugged the
blanket down, and light returned to the cave. My mother tossed me a sleep
mask. I lifted the bird carefully, stroking her satin feathers. I gathered
her wings and made sure the back of her neck was protected, then covered
her eyes with the mask, wrapped her in the blanket, and left the cave
cradling the bird in my arms. My mother had a stethoscope around her neck
now, and she approached us and mimed listening to the bird’s heart. Where
did a caged condor keep her heart? She gave me the stethoscope, and I tried
to listen. What I heard sounded like my childhood, when I’d press my ear to
the dining room table and bounce a rubber ball on the floor beneath.
Dad ran to us with the crate. He ran like a servant fetching something for
his master. As we settled the bird in the crate, I watched my father
closely. I looked enough like him that I was afraid the zookeepers would
realize we were a family, not a team of veterinarians, but it wasn’t that
thought making my hands shake and turning my sweat cold. It was the thought
of myself running like a servant someday, watched by a woman, carrying my
very own cage. Dad and I got in the back of the car. Mom stayed and talked
to the head zookeeper for a while, then took some papers from her folder.
The man signed, and they kissed each other’s cheeks in goodbye.
We headed home, the bird riding next to me in the back seat. The dry ice in
the cooler was still emitting carbon dioxide, which kept the bird asleep
the whole drive. In the front seat, my mother talked about the ways we’d
keep the bird happy, all the tasks left to prepare for my sister and her
fiancé’s welcome lunch. My father said nothing. Both he and I were as fed
up and exhausted as the crated bird.
At home, we tied a red-and-white cord around the bird’s foot to keep her in
the living room. She was waking up, and eventually she stood. We gave her a
few pieces of meat, which she ate after she’d resigned herself to the fact
that she was tied to a piece of furniture, barely able to take a few steps
on the newly waxed parquet floor. When she began beating her wings, we
brought more dry ice into the living room to calm her. My mother told me to
keep watch over her in the night, to bring food and water periodically, and
to clean it up right away if she shat on the floor.
When the house was dark and the neighborhood nearly silent, the condor flew
as high as the cord would allow. She perched on an armchair, dug her talons
into the upholstery, and made herself comfortable on the seat. I watched
her from the sofa across the room. I wanted to set her free. After a few
hours, I decided I could get closer. My presence didn’t upset her. She let
me run my little finger over her pitch-black satin plumage. I imagined her
lost in the city, perched on some building downtown, out of place among the
pigeons and roosters, longing for the Andean peaks to which she would never
return. I didn’t want to let her go. I didn’t want her eating trash from
the river, or filling her stomach with the dead.
***
Dad had already gone to get my sister and her fiancé at the airport. My
mother was putting the finishing touches on the dining room table, which
she’d set with linens from Huancayo, ceramics from Chulucanas, clay flutes,
and clay pots she planned to fill with the food staying warm in the
kitchen. Around noon, the condor woke up. The dry ice my mother had set
around the living room had completely disappeared. To get more, we’d have
to go to the industrial zone, across the city from where we lived. There
was no way we’d get back in time.
My mother raced to the computer and searched for some way to tranquilize
the bird so it wouldn’t attack our guest. She considered giving her a few
drops of her Rivotril in a chunk of meat, but she couldn’t figure out how
the drug would affect a bird. The condor was getting more and more
agitated, and we started worrying that the red-and-white cord around her
ankle, thick as it was, might snap. What if the bird wrecked our welcome?
Maybe, we thought, we could buy dry ice in the market. We could try the
ladies selling marcianos, or, if we were lucky, we’d run into an
ice cream cart on the way. My mother ran out of the house, leaving me in
charge of entertaining the bird. Remembering the zookeeper, I went to get a
broom, which I balanced between the coffee table and the couch. The bird
opened her wings and flew to the broomstick. She spent a while coming and
going, flying around the living room at a low height, but eventually she
returned to perch on the broom. As a reward, I offered her bits of meat
every time she returned to the broomstick, and the game kept her under
control.
My mother returned in a mototaxi, carrying a raffia bag filled with dry
ice. We scattered it around the living room, and soon the house filled with
white smoke. Then my father returned, and at the sound of the motor, the
dazed bird climbed off the broomstick and lay down in a corner by the sofa.
My sister and her boyfriend walked into the dining room. My father put on a
CD, filling the house with huaynos and instrumental versions of Creole
waltzes. Lars introduced himself without my sister’s help. He was a sweet,
extroverted guy, and he tried hard to speak Spanish with the family. The
white smoke in the living room surprised him, and he asked whether it was
Lima’s famous fog. My mother winked at me, and I went to get the condor.
The bird was only half-awake, but she leapt from my arms and perched at the
center of the table.
“It looks like fog,” my mother said, “but it’s just a harmless gas. It
comes from the ice for marcianos, and it keeps our ancient
Peruvian condor calm.”
The bird returned quietly to the living room, and we ate our lunch happily,
like tourists making their way through an exotic feast. A strange, new
happiness overtook us, as if we weren’t ourselves at all, but a group of
strangers who’d met on a tour, eating lunch at the best tourist restaurant
in some town we wished we’d never have to leave, on the last day of a trip
we wished would never end.
