American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [10]
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