by Marie Arana
They say that motherhood everywhere is the same. That mothers give birth and mothers give milk, and up and down the animal kingdom real differences do not exist. I know it isn’t so.
I once met a Mexican woman who returned to Monterrey with her three children after many years as a migrant laborer along the southeastern United States. She had picked apples, strawberries, tomatoes for years alongside her husband, borne him three healthy children, followed him wherever their hands were wanted. That she was a loving mother, loyal wife, was never questioned by anyone. Until one spring day, when she found herself on the steps of a school in Danville, Virginia, listening to some wattled gringo tell her that if she were a better mother she would understand that her fourteen-year-old boy shouldn’t be so worried about the family coffers. He shouldn’t be working the orchards after school, helping her harvest peaches, minding his baby sister. He should be on the soccer field, playing with boys his age. It was the American way, he said, and her boy was an American boy. Lady, you must raise these children up. Make them walk. Be somebody. The mother looked down and saw her son slumped on the school lawn, cradling his sister between his knees, tears sliding down his cheeks. He was a good boy, an honor to his mother, and the man was misunderstanding everything, twisting her motives and her family traditions into something they were not. She was not taking advantage of her son, exploiting him to pick a few more peaches, enslaving him to another child; she was teaching him a responsibility to something greater than himself. The next year, she and the children stayed in Mexico. Her husband hit the migrant road alone.
I tell this as if I agree with that mother. The truth is: I do not know. The principal may have been right. The Mexican woman may have been right. As I sit in my mother’s kitchen in Maryland listening to her angry recollections of my grandmother, I do not know what to think about the two of them. I’m on my mother’s side one minute. I’m on my abuelita’s side the next. I am an ark of confusion.
In the Lima house, my mother issues a letter of grievances. She sits down with her worn dictionary and composes—in ridiculous Spanish—a declaration of her rights. If I say something to you, she writes to her mother-in-law, I’m doing the best I can. I say it as an American. Don’t take my words at face value. They may not say what I mean. Allow me to make mistakes.
As for the baby, she is Jorge’s and mine. I want her with me at all times. Not just for feedings. I am not a cow.
I had always sensed the antagonism between my mother and my grandmother. I knew there were variances in the ways they lived, things they believed. But only in later accounts—told by both of them—did I understand the gulf of their divide. My grandmother was wary of my mother’s independence, of her unwillingness to have her life pried into, of the utter rigidity in her upper lip. My mother was caught off guard by the family, surprised to find it commandeered by a matriarch, taken aback by her rein on so many lives. Abuelita drew her clan with a magical charisma, funneling their energy toward her, deep into the sanctum of that hearth. Not out, not away, not in the typical vector of a Yank.
Mother’s list of grievances is received like a low-grade detonation. Abuelita shows it to others, then folds it into a drawer. She has tried to make the gringa feel welcome: She has given up her bedroom, moved her estimable husband into a side room, given the woman advice on her disastrous ways: For God’s sake, hijita, I don’t care what you did during the war in Boston. You can’t slather your calves with makeup and go out bare-legged in Peru. People will assume you’re something you’re not.
She has, above all, tried to initiate her into the art of motherhood. She has given the gringa everything and has had it flung back in a coolly penned note.
The letter begins a standoff Peruvians call pleito: that inching toward fury, that lingering grudge to the grave. There’s no word for it in English. It’s more than a simple resentment, less than an all-out war. It’s coal fire beneath a prairie, hell under the vista. You come, you go, you chat in the sala—the exterior looks perfectly normal—but a fire is reaming your gut.
Mother asks that dinners be sent to her room, sends kind regards through her maid. Abuelita sews dresses for Vicki, sets them out for everyone to see. But unless etiquette demands it, the two do not talk at all. They bristle, walk wide arcs around each other, scowl from behind beatific smiles.
I can’t play this charade much longer, says my mother to my father one night. I can’t fake it like she can.
It’s late July. They’ve been there for almost a year.
My mother doesn’t fake anything, my father responds. She’s an honorable woman.
A cable tightens. She’s expressed pique. So has he. There are more words along these lines. Her anger escalates. So does his. She is barefoot, in nightclothes, in no condition to leave their room, but she snatches Vicki and heads for the door. Where on earth do you think you’re going? he says, the first time he’s ever used that tone with her.
Out, she says. The hell out. Parrying with a new tone of her own.
Out. The direction she knows best. As in out for all those other Americans like her, who reach thresholds, vault fences, hurl themselves out, out, out, in a centripetal rush away.
She bolts down the stairs with the baby (thwap, thwap, thwap) on pink feet, and my father follows. Past his parents’ door, past the eyes of his mother’s ancestors peering from canvases, trammeled to walls. She opens the front door and hesitates in the frame; the baby looks back at him, rubs her eyes under a curl of golden hair. He rushes up, spins his wife around by her shoulders, and slaps her across the face.
When she tells me this part, she says, He spun me around by the shoulders. When he tells it to me later, the story acquires a detail—the smack on the head. He is full of old anger about it. Not against her, not even against himself, but against the wavering in the bridgework, the tic in the colonnades. I doddle my head at the both of them. I know what you mean, I say.
He manages to get her back up to their room again. He makes her some promises, vows the situation will change. The next day he secures an invitation from prim Tía Carmen. I can see what you’re going through, Jorge, she tells him. Look, I spend so much time on my hacienda. Why don’t you move into my Lima house?
Mother goes about my grandparents’ rooms quietly, retrieving her things: a toy here, a teacup there. Abuelita is heard intoning from another room, La gente tiene boca para hablar! Mouths are for speaking! But neither says a word.
The next night, my father inaugurates a protest all his own: He staggers in well after midnight. High as a spire.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN my mother and my grandmother—I know it now after all these years—was not one between woman and woman. It was the difference between an Anglo’s daughter and the mother of a Latin male. It was a difference between men and men.
The mother of a Latin male is the mother of a Latin male no matter what her class or education. The Mexican migrant worker was not about to surrender her boy to some clutch of strangers from whom he would learn alien notions of bonding and independence. No. A Latin macho must be gradually nurtured, sedulously cultivated, carefully groomed. It doesn’t fall to the father or some other hombre to shape him, as it does in Danville, Virginia, where, in all likelihood, that well-meaning gringo principal is still shooing boys onto a playing field to learn a thing or two from a man. In the mundo Latino, the task falls to the mother.
Latin man. Latin lover. The Anglo world doesn’t have a clue. Ask a North American to imagine the Latin lover, and she will conjure a priapic lothario, an inexhaustible inamorato with the brain of a bullock. She will imagine—because this is the northern equivalent—a man nudged to those arduous heights by other men like him, a kind of clubby, winking acceptance of goatishness passed down from grandfather to father to son.
Ask any Latin woman who has walked down an avenida in Buenos Aires or a dusty barriada on the outskirts of Caracas, and she will tell you a Latin man doesn’t need a gaggle of like-minded males around to make a piropo to a woma
n. A construction worker on the streets of Lima will follow her for blocks, sing in her ear, tell her how her face is breaking his heart. He doesn’t sit by the side of the road, whistle from a distance, make catcalls in a chorus.
In its proper Latin context, a Latin woman does not begrudge a man his street flirtations. They are inevitable, harmless, easily ignored—in ways, reassuring. Love, seduction, amor proprio: these things are taught to men by women in Latin America. It is the mothers who do the teaching. And, in the tutelage, a fabric is maintained.
The myth of the Latin man is all about lovemaking. About libido. In truth, there are subtler motivations at work. Latin men worship women. They are trained to. Mothers admit sons to secrets, pamper them, teach them to cherish babies, prize beauty, pray to the madonna, wear perfume. A love of the feminine is a mother’s legacy to her son. Boys learn to use it. Fathers understand its importance. A Latino is admired for revering his mother. He is sent from mother to wife, strutting, preening, adored. He is allowed vanities few men on this earth enjoy. But a bargain is struck in the process: A man is bound fast by women, tied back to family, held tight by obligation. It is the core of the Latin soul.
So it was in my family. Men were coddled, their petty narcissisms encouraged. My grandmother had learned it from her mother, had taught it to her daughters, and had expected an orderly transition of it through the ranks. In this, her husband had been an unexpected quotient: a Latin man who, for some unknown reason, had had the starch bled out of him, who no longer pranced and preened as custom required. My grandmother may have understood him; she may have learned to tolerate him. But there was no way she could have predicted him. His own father had been the very model of a Latin male.
After the death of his wife, my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana lived in the Hotel Bolívar and took his meals at the exclusive Club Nacional for eighteen years, from retirement until his own death in 1926. Even after the shock of the Casa Arana disclosures, he was still a peacock of a man, regal in his London finery, stiff shirts buttressing his airs. He was high-handed, haughty, skilled in the art of oratory, a master at stonewalling inquiries. But in old age, he made it a point to pay attention to his descendants. He began visiting his son’s house, throwing my grandfather’s household into a nervous bustle, making my grandmother quake. When he arrived on the first of these visits, he brought an ancient crystal goblet laced with silver filigree and asked my grandmother to serve him a refresco in it. Every Sunday thereafter, at eleven in the morning, the senator would appear, staying only long enough to consume one beer from his glass and confer with his son about the state of the republic, the follies of the president, and the future of his mercury mines, the Santa Barbara deposits in the highlands of Huancavelica.
One day, he arrived before the appointed hour, and my abuelita found herself waving him in early, taking his hat and cane. Her babies were mewling in the next room and her hair was in disarray. My grandfather pulled on his waistcoat, secured his spats, smoothed his mustache, and rushed out to meet his father. Abuelita went off to fetch the señor his beer, unwilling to entrust the precious chalice to less-cautious hands. But she was harried that day, made nervous by her father-in-law’s hyperpunctuality and the fuss in the other room. She opened the doors of the aparador and reached up for the glass. It wobbled back from her fingers, skipped off the edge of the shelf, and crashed to the floor, scattering into a hundred bits of twisted silver. When the woman realized that she had destroyed the old man’s goblet, she wept and shook but pulled herself together, brought out an ordinary flagon, and poured her father-in-law a beer. She carried it out on a silver tray.
Ah, the guest said, lifting it to his lips. Gracias. He made no further remark. He continued his pontifications to his son, and she sighed and excused herself to see about the children. When he finished the last of his cerveza, he set down the provisional glass, rose, wished them farewell, and left. But because his chalice had been shattered, his Sunday covenant broke, too. He never came back again.
No one was much surprised.
There were other men as fearsome as Pedro Pablo Arana in the family, but if we knew about them they were on my grandmother’s side, in the Cisneros line. Whereas Arana seemed to have materialized from nowhere, with no forebears, no ancients, the female side—the Cisneros tree—flourished like an overgrown banyan, its roots deep into medieval Spain.
The male ancestor I found most captivating was Joaquín Rubín de Celis de la Lastra, my abuelita’s great-grandfather, who had fought for the Spanish crown at the decisive Battle of Ayacucho, the bloody struggle that won Peru’s independence on December 9, 1824. A yellowed cameo still sits on my grandparents’ mantelpiece, and in it, the tiny countenance of that birdlike warrior. His daughter’s face stares from the opposite wall, smiling wanly as she draws a diaphanous shawl over one shoulder. She and her father had never met in real life, and that fact fills the room with ineffable sadness. Rubín de Celis had been the first Spanish general to charge against the rebel forces at Ayacucho, and the first among generals to fall. When he’d mounted his steed to ride into that bloody struggle, his wife had been pregnant with the dark-haired beauty on the wall.
That daughter was Trinidad Rubin de Celis. She married a Cisneros. Her son Manuel Cisneros—the high treasurer of the province of La Libertad—married one, too. That is to say, a cousin married a cousin. Abuelita was their child.
Not all Cisneros women were defined by the males of the family. One bright Cisneros spinster with a mind of her own fell in love with a Spanish priest, Padre Benjamín. He was seen coming and going from her house in Huánuco. Before long, the spinster’s house rang with the cries of baby boys, and they all had the open, intelligent forehead of her robed visitor. They were given her name, but everyone knew they were sons of the padre. The fact was whispered in salons and bruited about on the street. All the same, the priest went on with his mission and the babies continued to thrive. Eventually, the wide-browed youngsters produced the brilliant, silver-tongued Cisneroses of Peru: the poet Antonio, the orator Manuel. The gossip began to seem vapid, ridiculous, beside the point. So what if the priest had turned out to have a little macho blood in his veins? There were mortal appetites few of Eve’s children could control. Genius was the thing. Could a union that forged it be wrong? These Cisneros men were extraordinary, superior, far better than the rest of the clan. So the rumors about them became irksome, easily quashed.
There was more than one way to be a Latin male.
HOW COULD MY mother know, when she pledged her love to my father on the Fenway, that she would be dropped into the heart of a familia where what was wanted of her was not her American stock in trade—independence—but a clear understanding of three things: the primacy of a Peruvian family, a young wife’s role in it, and the dominion of the Latin male?
Confused, angry, friendless, as soon as she heard about Tía Carmen’s offer, she could hardly wait to leave my grandparents’ house. When Mother, Papi, and Vicki finally moved into Carmen’s spacious house on Avenida Mariátegui on the other side of Lima, they had all the comforts of an established home. There was Mother’s maid, Concepción, a sweet-natured mountain girl, to assist with the concerns of an active baby; the furniture inherited from my haughty great-grandfather; the appurtenances of a good city life.
Independence remained my mother’s forte. She took Italian lessons, studied Russian, memorized poetry, read philosophy with the fervor of a hermit sage. She had not brought her violin with her to Peru. In some strange unwillingness to transport all of herself to her husband’s country, she had left behind the one thing she had always professed to love most: her music.
When Tía Carmen would return to Lima from the estate she had inherited from Pedro Pablo Arana in Huancavelica, the rest of the family came to visit. This would happen in the afternoons, while Papi was still at work. During these visits, my mother retired to a back room and listened to her husband’s family through the walls. Two years went by like this, and Abuelita and
Mother did not speak, the pleito was so thick between them.
Papi saw his parents, caroused with friends into morning, did as he pleased in the city of his birth, and the seeds of a compromise were sown. Mother retained her distance, wandered Lima on her own terms, learned its language and customs, and sealed a bond with her firstborn that has fastened them to this day.
Old Tía Carmen came and went less and less often. She stayed up in the hills, on the hacienda where her mother had hidden away. Eventually, she married an ill-tempered fortune hunter with expensive tastes and a greedy heart. With his fangs deep into her inheritance, he was drawing out all the rest of her: health, strength, the vitality of her remaining days.
Mother and Papi continued to live in Tía Carmen’s languid corner of Lima, where the streets were lined with shade trees, bougainvillea spilled from rooftops, and fog smelled of jasmine. There was a grocer nearby, and a coffee shop. Mornings brought a procession of vendors: the knife grinder with his high, sad whistle, the bread man with gold-rimmed teeth, the fruit ladies with their brightly striped skirts and braids. In the afternoons, a russet-faced girl hawked tamales. There was a sleepy aspect to this life. One might have assumed there was peace of a kind.
But the truth was a different story. Just as the world slid into its version of a pleito and the Cold War bit in, Mother began greeting the mornings with panic. She was pregnant again. She had never been one to look back, but she was thirty-four, about to be a mother for the second time, and her independence had turned into bewilderment. She felt forsaken, alone. At twenty-nine, Papi had left the bridge-building position at the Department of Public Works. He was working three jobs to meet the high cost of living: as rookie engineer for the American company of W. R. Grace, as greenhorn professor at the Colegio de Ingenieros, and as an instructor at the Academy of Police. He had no time to dote on her.