by Marie Arana
The jungle poison seeped through his circle anyway. Pedro Pablo’s wife—my great-grandmother—who had worked tirelessly to help improve the lot of the indígenas in the mountains of Huancavelica, had a heart attack and died. Peru’s newly elected president, Augusto Leguía, a landed capitalist who was a personal friend of my great-grandfather and a defender of Julio César Arana, was wounded in an attempted assassination. He slipped off to London to convalesce.
WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER summoned his son home and quit the governorship of Cusco, he descended from the Inca omphalos in a state of high anxiety, spinning into Lima with a double vertigo: It wasn’t only his name that made him feel like a criminal—he’d been inspired by Julio César. As the rubber baron’s empire had grown, Pedro Pablo had tasted ambition: He’d tried his hand at capitalism, too.
He owned a good stretch of land in the highlands, including a vein of mercury that cut along the cordillera of the Andes. They were rich mines, old mines, with a wretched history he hoped to amend. The largest was the Santa Barbara, an ancient deposit the Spaniards had mined since the late 1500s. Las minas de muerte. The mines of death.
Just as Julio César was consolidating his power, Pedro Pablo published a book called The Mercury Mines of Peru, in which he proposed that the old mines of Santa Barbara—which now lay on his land—be reopened, so that the country would no longer be dependent on foreign imports. It was a proposal for investors, a ticket to the Arana boom, and he was ready to create an empire of his own. His book did not shrink from the truth about the abuses Indian workers had endured in earlier centuries. His own venture, he insisted, would be a model for the enlightened world, a leap into gringo modernity. He posed the program to the president of the country and got no reaction. Then he posed the question to his cousin in Iquitos and got the encouragement he desired.
He had fully expected to enter the mercantile world when his duties in Cusco were over. He had not expected the chaos that ensued: the news about the atrocities; the freeze on all Arana bank assets; the realization that beneath his own ambitions, speeches about progress, and attempts to mimic a gringo efficiency, there lurked a terrible, inescapable truth: The mercury would leave his mines the way rubber had left the jungle, the only way hard labor ever got done in the Americas—as when the Incas enslaved the Chimu, the Spaniards enslaved the cholos, the half-breeds enslaved the negros—on the backs of the darker race.
Pedro Pablo did not need to look far to see that he would never mine Santa Barbara, that he would not match the lucre the northern family had in abundance, that if he could just hold on to his good name, it was all the wealth he would ever want.
His good name. The world was telling him he couldn’t have even that. Imagine a family, the gringos intoned, who put Indians to work without payment, without food, in nakedness; with women stolen, ravished, and murdered; with Indians flogged until their bones are laid bare, left to die with their wounds festering with maggots, their bodies used as food for their dogs. Imagine what lower hell those monsters might dig, unchecked.
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
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MOTHERS
Madres
SO 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.
Abuelito speaks English, as do some of the others, but he rarely appears, and besides, a clear proclamation has been made in the house: The only way she’ll learn Spanish is if she’s made to speak it, by everyone, all day. An exception is made the day the United States claims victory over the Japanese emperor, bringing the war to a close: They congratulate her in her own language. She excuses herself, ducks into the bedroom, sits on the bed, and cries.
VICTORIA IS BORN in Lima’s Clínica Franco. My grandmother had expressed a preference for that hospital, where they allow long visits from the family, as Peruvians are accustomed to having. When Vicki enters this world, she enters it as a princess during the Conquista might have, with family courtiers in an adjoining room.
Abuelita sits by Mother’s bedside, holds her hand, and as the contractions intensify, so do the festivities on the other side of the wall. The birth of an Arana Cisneros is no private affair. More like a family extravaganza. It’s 1945, a decade before women’s suffrage comes to Peru, and the principal duty of a woman is to bear and raise children. The responsibility of her relatives is to see that she gets it done. A child is the finest expression, the ultimate bond of an extended family. To that end, courtships need to be vetted, the union of two families consecrated, and when the fruit of that marriage drops, the family attends as if it’s a party. It’s as simple as that.
These things may make all the sense in the world to a Peruvian mother, but to mine—an Anglo-American of free-spirited pioneer stock—they are more vocabulary she doesn’t have. It doesn’t occur to her that an act she considers private will be a spectacle for people she’s only just met.
From the instant Vicki exits her mother’s womb, she is family property. The Arana Cisneroses break out the champagne. Abuelita longs to hold her, teach my mother all she’s learned about babies in having six of her own. Mother, on the other hand, is nervous: wary as a feline dam. In her mind, this child is not the cumulative handiwork of a complicated Peruvian family. It’s her only blood relative in a bewildering land.
She digs in, marks her turf.
When Papi brings Mother back to my grandparents’ bedroom, the struggle begins in earnest. The Aranas may not realize it. There’s no reason for them to suspect a new calculus at work: They’re in their own country, their own culture, their own home. But there’s an American card in the game now. Mother, too, does not reason through differences. She only knows she wants what her instincts tell her she has every right to
have: both hands on her infant child.
As days wear on, the tug-of-war becomes more evident. In the mornings, my grandmother asks for the child. Mother reluctantly hands her over. By week’s end Abuelita delegates her daughters to carry the babe out to her. Mother’s face twists into a snarl. By month’s end, the household is sending in the squealing ama: La señora de la casa is anxious! She wants the baby right now!
My grandfather’s sister, Tía Carmen, visits. She’s a serious woman who fancies herself a writer but is, in my grandmother’s view, a weird little crone with a meddlesome side.
That gringa is the very picture of sadness, Tía Carmen pipes up. Her little face breaks my heart.
One day, months into the ground battle, when Vicki is already cooing and crawling, Mother decides she’s had enough. The women in the family are playing with the baby in the other room. Their laughter tinkles through corridors, brittle as mockery, skittering under the door like shards. When she hears it, she glowers into a corner where her maidservant huddles. The girl stares back at her, fighting the tears.
Qué pasa, Concepción? my mother asks.
Your eyes, señora. They make me want to cry.
That’s the thing that begins it. Mother bangs out of the room, shuttles down the corridor, hell-bent for the laughter. She swings the door open and stands there, large, in the frame.
Le toca? Feeding time? Abuelita asks her, and the faces all turn up to see. She is a mammary gland, a biological necessity. That is all.
It’s an account she recites over and over, like the bead of a penitent’s rosary, like the point where a frayed string is broken: They have no gauge on her feelings. It’s a family of strangers. Her child is Peruvian. And a gringa in this country always stands at the door.
She is old now. She sits at a wooden table my father has made for her in their sunny kitchen in Maryland, recounting a moment that is more than half a century, half a world away, and yet her voice is shaking with indignation. Her account involves far more than woman and mother-in-law. Whole cultures are in dispute. My gringa mother had assumed that her baby was something between her, her husband, and God. My abuelita had assumed that her grandchild was the first of a new generation, the next row in the family cloth, an offering to the family matriarch. Hers.