American Chica Read Online Free PDF Page B

crew by morning.
    My father’s face darkens, the sailor’s softens. Here, let me look at that again, the gringo says, and reads the worn document a second time. When he looks up, the eyes have a different intelligence. Well, I don’t see why you can’t stay here one night.
    With that simple sentence, Jorge Arana takes a liking to America. Its food is bland. Its women rattle on incomprehensibly. Its afternoons rumble with thunder, torrents gushing from the sky. Its streets are all car horn and elbow. But there’s a wartime goodwill in the air: a winking camaraderie, a link with the hemisphere at large.
    Within a few days, my father is registered in MIT’s graduate division, paying two dollars a day for a rented room and two meals, struggling to decipher Boston’s expletives, sitting in a classroom with no idea what the professor has said. He has studied English for years in Lima, but he finds himself unable to produce it, helpless before the machine-gun fire of American slang.
    Jack Coombs, the man in whose apartment he lives, is a working-class Irishman with a colorful vocabulary and a powerful thirst for ale. Coombs is short, square; so is his “missus.” Together, they’re a monument to chance. The Coombses are gambling aficionados, their conversation focuses on horses and hazards, jockeys and odds. My father sits at their table with adictionary at his side, puzzling over the lexicon, marveling at the luck of his draw.
    What’s it like down where you come from, Horrr-hey? Coombs shouts between slurps of beer. Y’all wear feathers and stomp around barefoot?
    We wear shoes, Mr. Coombs. Nice leather ones. We’ve been ordering them from Paris since the sixteenth century, before your people ever set foot in this country, he bandies back. But only after he’s roared merrily and looked up the words in his book.
    Graduate school is hard, and his English isn’t good enough. His professors are direct: If he doesn’t get a perfect score on his engineering project, he won’t be granted a degree. The project is to be an invention, something no one on the faculty has seen before. Within the first weeks, he decides the form it will take. He’ll build an instrument that will gauge the load on a bridge. Not burdens on spans as they’re being erected; there are plenty of those contraptions around. No, his tool will test a suspension bridge that has gone up before anyone has had an opportunity to test it—a cable deemed unsteady, a structure everyone figures will fall.
    More than five decades later, I ask him about it. He is over eighty now, paunched and grizzled and gray, nearly blind in one eye, but I recognize an intensity, the deliberateness he must have had as a young man. He takes out a pencil, sketches it for me: a bridge cable and a delicate instrument that squats on it. The next time I visit, he has constructed a model. Here it is, he says, setting the device before me. There is a metal cable between two pulleys, weighted with burdens on either side. A triangular pincer presses down from above, displaces the cable in increments, mathematically measures the load. The model is made—as everything he now makes is—out of something altogether practical: a wooden fruit crate, neatly painted, smoothly sanded, clearly labeled with equations. He explains it meticulously. Myeighty-six-year-old mother leans forward, engrossed in its fragile balance. She’s platinum-haired, lovely. She’s holding a tangerine.

    THE FIRST TIME I SEE HER, he tells me, is through the frame of a window. He is inside a dormitory, she is walking along the Fenway, a gaggle of women around. He registers her as a color in a rainbow, one swift stripe on a variegated field. She is stately in her fern-green suit, hair smoothed into a golden roll, a brown feather quivering somewhere above. Her companions are fresh-faced girls. She is a decade older, seasoned, a different flux in the well of her eyes.
    He sees her often after that. Every day into