American Chica (4 page)

Her blue eyes were looking at me now with such love, though, I had to grin back. I flung myself off the bed, slipped into George’s old boots, and marched into the afternoon.

I asked about the stranger on the sofa many times in decades to come—even caused a harrowing scene with my questions—but she only shook her head and said she had no recollection of him. “I can’t imagine who you saw there, Mareezie. I just can’t imagine.” Until I thought perhaps the whole thing had been a dream, and the man another ghost in my head.

2

—

F
ATHERS

Padres

T
WENTY YEARS BEFORE
I leaned out the window and saw my parents laugh their way into the garden, my father’s father, the redoubtable Doctor Ingeniero Víctor Manuel Arana Sobrevilla, stopped coming down the stairs. He and his wife, Rosa Cisneros y Cisneros de Arana, and four of their six children lived five hundred miles away from our Cartavio hacienda in an old colonial house on Calle San Martín in Miraflores, a sleepy district on Lima’s outer lip, where the city trailed out to the sea. Their home was dark and knit with steep, narrow staircases that led where we children were afraid to go. In room after room of musty armoires and heirlooms, life hung like a relic, like a bat in an airless cave.

No one acknowledged that there was something deeply wrong in this. That a brilliant man, highly educated, traveler of the world, would progressively trim back his life until he no longer stepped foot outside his house, until he was a specter up the stair.

My father cared for his father, did not dare to wonder at the strangeness that had driven him up into a little room, far from kin. He was attentive to his mother, quick to assure her that her pantry would not run dry and humiliation would not drag them under. In the ‘30s, at the height of the global Depression, when it was clear that somebody had to be sent out to work, my father, the eldest of the six children, was the first to volunteer. For years, my grandfather stayed on the second floor, venturing down only for a special lunch, a family tea. Otherwise he was high up, behind a door: seldom seen. Meanwhile, perched on the wine-red brocade downstairs, my grandmother—my
abuelita
—sat and worried about how she would pay the maids, raise a family, face Lima.

She was a black-haired diva, a bantam hen on four-inch heels, clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage. Abuelita was a Cisneros y Cisneros, a New World aristocrat with an Old World pedigree: five centuries of paper, through the viceroyals to Spain. She was as warm and funny as my grandfather was cut and dried. As much a lover of parties as he was a captive of books. As charged with high voltage as the miles of wire he had sketched out for the electrification of Lima. Insofar as anyone knew, she loved her husband, respected and admired him, deferred to his authority. But when it became clear that her husband had gone into retreat, it was as if part of her had been pulled away with him. That traction was never evident in the adoration she showed him, or in the humor she displayed to the world at large, but it was deeply engraved in her face, where everything—lips, eyes, nose—had begun a relentless plunge south.

Abuelito was the essence of compunction. He was consumed by the idea of honor, pricked by some unnamed remorse. A former professor at Lima’s College of Engineers, he was cautious with family, aloof to associates, Olympian with students, and hyperborean
with the rest of the world. But for all the importance he was accorded in his household, it was almost as if he wasn’t there. If he was not standing at the top of the stairs in his three-piece suit, cravat, and cane, looking down on our upturned faces, he was alone and forgotten in his study—poring over one of the arcane science columns he wrote for
El Comercio,
formally attired in a vest, tie, and smoking jacket, which no one outside his family would see.

He was a small man and moved in small ways. He carried his head as if it were a fragile vessel, nestling it between his shoulders, turning it cautiously. He had lost much of his hair, most of which was confined now to a tuft of white mustache beneath a long, straight nose. When he peered over the banister, his eyebrows pulled into a high interrogative as if he were scanning the surface of a pond, on the lookout for danger. If he decided to descend to tea, he would then shuffle down, lost in thought, carrying a pad and pencil, scribbling words and formulas no one could fathom. He was at work on something, we were told; we were not to disturb him.

At table, he would lean over his food and eat slowly, his eyes seldom leaving the limits of the porcelain below. While my grandmother took the host’s place at the head, where she would hold forth brightly about the news of the day, my grandfather sat to one side—a sullen island of solitude—and dispatched whatever she placed before him. No one addressed him directly, although from time to time Abuelita would demand it—“Tell your papa now about that party you went to last night,” she would say to one of my aunts, or to us, “Tell your abuelo that amusing anecdote about” such and such—at which point his eyes would flicker and look around the table, momentarily stunned, before they dulled with whatever was being told him and he sank into reverie again.

He had been handsome once, as was clearly evident in the
portrait that hung in the
sala.
It showed a dashing young man, smartly dressed in high starch and a neatly pinned tie. His hair was shiny black and copious, parted in the center to reveal a broad, intelligent forehead. His eyes were deep and vibrant; his chin smooth and strong; his enigmatic smile shaded by an elegant mustache, turned up and twisted on either side.

I would stare long and hard at that portrait and wonder at the disparity between the man it depicted and the man I knew—or didn’t know. For me, my grandfather was defined by neverness. I never saw him drink. I never saw him smoke. I never heard him raise his voice. I hardly heard his voice at all. The rest of his household—a fizzy menagerie of irrepressible females and hyperkinetic young men—tiptoed about, hissing and shushing and pulling the draperies down, so that the
señor
could think.

He had started out to be a force in the country: an engineer with a will to drive Peru out of Third World poverty and into the modern age. He was the son of a prominent politician, educated abroad—as many in the upper class were—at the University of Notre Dame. But somewhere along the way, his star began to dim. He withdrew from his work. Few knew why, and among those who did, no one wanted to say. Come the ‘30s and a worldwide Depression, he stepped into his study, switched on the lights, and sat there for forty years.

At first, in the years between 1910 and 1920, he had established a consultancy, tried putting his erudition to work. He had rubbed elbows at the exclusive Club Nacional, was called on for major electrification projects. But just as a sixth child was added to his table, his career rumbled to a halt. He had no stomach for politics, no patience for hypocrites. He stopped looking for work, began having disagreements with clients, resentments against cohorts, a general falling-out. There was one further thing about him, infinitely more crippling: an extravagant sense of pride. His
children were well aware of his pridefulness, but they learned never to question it. My grandfather’s demeanor was lordly: He walked with his chin in the air. But it was a backward trajectory, a voyage inward, a solemn recessional, as if something had cankered his heart.

For nine years he was a professor in the Colegio de Ingenieros, but he was a hard grader, insular, difficult. He had no taste for the intrigues of academia, was doggedly loyal to the world he knew, not least his own college education in the United States. When one of his intellectual adversaries, Doctor Laroza, an equally dignified man who had studied in Paris, was made head of the Colegio, my grandfather wrote his employers a brief letter announcing his resignation. It was untenable, he said simply, to imagine that he could work under someone with whom he seldom agreed and who had trained—of all places—in France. Although my grandfather could hardly expect to support six children without a salary, his wife never questioned his withdrawal. The children were told not to bring it up. Abuelito rose every morning, dressed, retired to his study, descended for one meal, spoke little, and wrote for the rest of his life. He produced scientific treatises; trenchant articles; one book about the future of Peru, a copy of which sits in the United States Library of Congress; a valuable, unpublished thesaurus—all without ever leaving that room, tucked away at the top of the stairs.

As a result, my father, by the time he was fifteen, understood that responsibility for the family had fallen to him. He was an excellent student, ranked first in every school he attended, but when his schoolday was over, his workday would begin. He hopped the Lima tram to the Negri foundry, where he took attendance, paid the laborers, drew designs. He helped make the streetlamps that line the Plaza de San Martin. When Jorge Arana graduated from university in 1940 at age twenty-two, with a full
scholarship and honors, he’d been the family wage earner for seven years.

MY FATHER’S FIRST
job pointed him toward the Amazon jungle, the vast expanse of rain forest that lay north of the Andean cordillera. He was hired by Peru’s Department of Public Works as a bridge engineer—a good calling for a twenty-two-year-old. There was a bridge going up on the new road from Lima to Pucallpa, but its cables had snapped and the frames collapsed into the Previsto River. His job had been to recover the twisted beams, straighten them out, continue the foray into the jungle that the Spaniards had begun five centuries before.

He was living in his father’s house, shuttling to the north and back, helping support his five siblings, keeping company with a woman who was too often found in bolero bars, too easy to bed, too many shades darker than his own skin, when a chance came to change his course. Doctor Laroza, the director of the Colegio de Ingenieros, Abuelito’s former rival, offered him a scholarship to the graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, all expenses paid by the U.S. Department of State. The war in Europe was devouring gringos; American schools had been drained of young men. Peru had declared itself against the Axis, and it seemed the U.S. government was grateful for that. The country and the university were offering one place to a Peruvian engineer.
Em Ay Tee?
my father said to Laroza—MIT? Never heard of it.

A year passed. The war in the Pacific intensified, changing the very face of America. The heavy deployment of young Americans had not only depleted the gringo schools, it was shrinking the gringo workforce. Whatever jobs women were unable to fill were now being offered to foreigners. Peru itself was little fazed by the war, except for Japanese Peruvians, who were rounded up and
shipped off to internment camps in the United States—among them a family named Fujimori, whose ranks forty years later would produce a president of Peru.

In Lima, my father continued to come and go from the Peruvian interior, paying visits to his coffee-colored lover, appalling the family. Abuelita expressed disapproval.
La mujer no es gente decente!
She’s not the right kind!

Here is the point, I often thought as a child, when the gears might never have shifted, that I might never have existed, that my father might have taken another path. But four little cogs changed everything: The first was my grandmother’s censure of his woman. The second, the growing ennui of her charms. The third, a renewed offer of the scholarship. The fourth, a conversation at the Department of Public Works: His bosses promised to continue to pay his salary while he studied in the United States on the assumption that he would return to work at the same department.
MIT?
one of his
compadres
said.
Caramba!
That’s the best science the gringos have!