American Chica (9 page)

When Julio César Arana protested the allegations of human-rights abuses and the Peruvian government sprang to defend him, the charge then shifted from Arana to Peru, and then to all
Latin America.
To deny the truth is part of the Latin American character, a
British parliamentarian thundered.
It is an “Oriental” trait they possess, the curious belief that sustained denial is the equal of truth, no matter what the real conditions.

Eventually, Reginald Enock, a London barrister, took it upon himself to issue a final denunciation, tracing the evil back to its root, which, as he explained it, was Spain:
The occurrences on the Putumayo are, to some extent, the result of a sinister human element—the Spanish character. The remarkable trait of callousness to human suffering which the people of Spain—themselves a mixture of Moor, Goth, Semite, Vandal, and other such peoples—introduced into the Latin American race is here shown in its intensity, and is augmented by a further Spanish quality: The Spaniard regards Indians as
animals.

A Peruvian judge took offense and barked back in a Lima newspaper:
Quite funny, don’t you think,
he wrote,
that England, a country whose debt to history is the massive eradication of red-skinned people; a country that has commandeered plots, assassinations, rapes and assaults on Ireland for centuries and has released convicts and predators of the lowest level to mete out horrors in colonial Australia; a country that has dealt inhumanely with Jamaicans and Boers, conducted abominable witch-hunts in New England, and erected abominable camps in America; England, a country that today is forcing the venom of opium on Chinese people; that has obtained that substance with much violence and murder; that is perpetrating these very acts,
this very hour,
against the Hindus—I repeat, is it not
funny
that such a nation should elect itself an arbiter? That it should pretend to judge the work and destiny of a people who may be naive, but have high ideals of justice, who have never hidden behind hypocrisy and false Puritanism?

But it was like shouting into a wind; the campaign was too loud, too broad now.

My great-grandfather could not answer for the whole of
Iberia, the whole of Spain, the whole of Peru, the whole of Latin America. He could, however, answer as Pedro Pablo Arana: He was not one of the evil ones. It was a lie that would define us into the fourth generation.
We are not those people.

HOW COULD SOMEONE
feel so tainted by a cousin a cordillera and a river away? The gringa in me asks that in disbelief and wonder. Why did my great-grandfather feel such shame? When the scandal erupted and Julio César’s empire was exposed, Pedro Pablo left his governorship and called his son back from his northern idylls. Whatever money he had, and he had had plenty—enough to keep a mansion in Cusco, a hacienda in Huancavelica, a fine residence in Lima, enough to maintain my abuelito like a prince in America—his money was gone.

When Víctor Manuel Arana, twenty-five years old, hurried back from Maine, he set up an engineering atelier in Lima with the hopes of using his
yanqui
expertise, but he was on his own. There were no family coffers to help him get established. Worse yet, there were few customers at his door. Time did eventually bring one interested party: Rosa Cisneros y Cisneros, my abuelita—a mere thirteen and oblivious to the intricacies of the Putumayo scandals. As years passed, she became fascinated by the startled-looking young man with the dapper American clothes who came and went from the offices across Quemado Street. When my grandfather noticed the bright-eyed, bird-faced girl peering out her window, he returned the curiosity. Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, he approached her father, introduced himself, and was met with the question: Was he one of those Aranas? No, certainly not! Following Pedro Pablo’s directive, Abuelito pushed his relations away with such force that one day it propelled him in the opposite direction—out of society, out of career, up to a second-floor limbo.

I don’t have to look far to see how that force has had its effects on me. I am forged by family denials, fed by that long vine of history—a vine I’d one day be warned to examine. My great-grandfather was so ashamed to be an Arana that he disowned the entire extended family—a grave act for a Latin. My abuelito was so mortified by his father’s shame that he drove himself into the rafters. My father, knowing none of this, was so bewildered by his father’s quirkiness and his mother’s long-suffering acceptance of it that he reached for another life altogether. As for me: I ended up so divided between the two sides of my hybrid family that I boomeranged with a burning curiosity. The dominos clacked around—effects spilling from one generation to another—until they clacked round in a circle. Until I found Julio César. Until the last chip hit the first.

DENIALS ISSUED FROM
all quarters, not just from my family. Everyone rushed to wash their hands of any responsibility. The British and American investors in Julio César’s company claimed they had nothing to do with the slavery, the importation of Barbadian overlords, the killing, the maiming, the scars.

Julio César, in turn, claimed that the blood of thirty thousand rain-forest Indians was certainly not on him. The horrors, if any, had been played out far from his desk. How could he be blamed for the excesses of deputies who worked far below him? He hadn’t killed anybody. If he was responsible for anything, it was that he had brought Peru rubber glories, that he was defending the country’s frontiers.

The denials worked to a degree. The case against Julio César Arana fizzled. A decade after the scandals broke in the gringo world, the jungle state of Loreto elected him senator and sent him to Lima to work to keep control of the Putumayo. My great-grandfather Pedro Pablo by then was mired in poor health. He
had had to suffer the indignity of having his assets frozen. He had had to work hard to deny a business association. He had had to hear the news that Julio César was not only surviving the arsenals of a mean gringo justice, the man was advancing to the Peruvian senate, where Pedro Pablo himself proudly served. It was more than my great-grandfather could bear: He crashed down the family gate, lopped the tree off at the trunk, and insisted he had no relatives at all.

Pedro Pablo’s enormous effort to rid himself of the stain eventually did him in. He died in the care of my abuelita, the vibrant young woman who had bought the lie willingly, who had forfeited all social ambition, who would live out her days with his brilliant and brooding son. For a while, Pedro Pablo’s efforts succeeded. It seemed he had washed Julio César right out of the picture. The
cauchero
was not part of our lives. But he couldn’t erase history.

History eventually pulled Julio César Arana under, as one might expect the freight of thirty thousand dead souls would do. He left the senate, watched Peru lose control of the Putumayo to the Colombian army, and spent the last twenty years of his life in a wretched tenement in Lima’s Magdalena district, staring at walls, listening to the angry sea. His body grew emaciated, wraithlike, but God did not reach down to claim it. Over the years, it withered to a wisp.

Julio César died in 1953, neglected and destitute, never imagining that his son would make a quick bid for power a scant decade later. In 1960, Iquitos, that jungle capital with an itch for perversity, made Luis Arana its mayor. At some point during his tenure, a rumor started that the Mark of Arana had come back to claim even him: He was suspected of filching funds from the city coffers. One quiet morning in his gilded office, the mayor took a gun from his desk, lifted it to his temple, and blew out his brains.

4

—

M
OTHERS

Madres

S
O THAT IS
the burden of history that weighs upon the Aranas in the first half of the century. It is the burden that weighs on them still when, on August 6, 1945, just as Hiroshima disappears beneath a swiftly banking cloud, Jorge and Marie Arana land in the port of Callao. Mother is telling me the story of her arrival now, and I can see her old eyes grow deep green at the thought of that morning.

The two of them are standing on the deck of a homebound Argentine freighter, looking out at the swirling crowd. Mother’s belly is large with my older sister, Vicki, her face chalked with anxiety. She holds on to my father as she searches the landing, scanning brown faces for features like his.
There!
yells Papi, but when she wheels around to see, she cannot tell what he’s pointing at. A throng of strangers surges forward, waving arms at the floating steel.

The Aranas are there: Abuelito in his hat and cane, Abuelita in her waisted silk, all five of my father’s siblings trussed up in their teatime best. When the young couple descends the gangplank,
Abuelita steps forward to reach for the gringa across the swell of her first grandchild. She greets her warmly, moves her firmly to one side, and flings herself hungrily on my father. It’s perfectly natural—that show of partiality from a mother—but the message is unmistakable.

The house on Calle San Martin is another indication of how different Mother’s life will be. It is walled off from the street, its front door at the top of an ornate staircase, its interior a seemingly endless warren of rooms. There’s an atrium at its center; a chapel with a crucifix. The living rooms are dark with Victorian furniture and relics of a venerable past. Papi’s five brothers and sisters—all adults by then—still live in this colonial town house: children minding their parents, South American style.

These rooms are for you and Jorge,
says her mother-in-law, addressing her in the well-enunciated Spanish one reserves for a child. What is being shown her is my grandparents’ own bedroom, with an extra room on the side.

They move in, set up a nursery. It is, at first, a pleasant task. Clearly, my father is loved beyond measure. His progeny will be received with all the honor that an eldest male’s firstborn deserves. For Mother there’s the immediate problem of language: the wall of incomprehensible chatter that rattles from dawn until dusk. Papi is sympathetic. He’s lived through those puzzlements himself. But in the case of my mother, the social pressures are more acute: Here is a round pink foreigner with the verbal capacity of a backward child in a society that prizes, above everything, the turn of a graceful phrase.

Qué hiciste hoy, Marie?
What did you do today? The family’s eyes shift onto the gringa’s face at the dinner table, and her head whirls with the little Spanish she knows. She wants to say that she organized her drawers.

Limpié mis cojones,
she attempts, putting one vowel where another should be. I cleaned my balls. She wonders why they squirm in their chairs.

She’s as spoiled as a princess, as scorned as a cretin, and before September is upon them she moves through the house like a rabbit through flames. Her husband is back at his desk in the Department of Public Works, and she is marooned, untongued, expatriated, alone.