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He lowered his eyes, clutched the sides of his chair, and, with great effort, drew himself to his feet. He turned and shuffled away.

“Pero, hijito!” Abuelita said, in her jolly tone, although the party had grown stone-cold sober. “You come all the way down here and then you say something in English—something none of us understands—and now you’re going back up again? Stay, Victor! Have a little glass of sherry. Have some cake!”

He raised one hand and fluttered it, keeping his eyes on his shoes.

“Despise him?” my mother said in the car on the way home. “Despise him? How could I possibly despise him? How could anyone on this earth think your father despicable?”

“He’s an old man,” said my father. “Who knows what’s on his mind.”

I asked what despicable meant, but I needn’t have. I soon met the word again, in a context that made its meaning abundantly clear.

I was in the house of Albertito Giesecke. I had developed a crush on the boy, had wangled my way into playing chess in his house one winter afternoon, when his mother invited me to tea. The Giesecke name was fairly well known in Lima for Albertito’s grandfather. More than twenty years before, he had flown over Machu Picchu to confirm Hiram Bingham’s “discovery” of that mystical mountain city.

Albertito’s father seemed Peruvian in every respect to me, although I’d been told that the flying grandfather was an American and that he was famous for brave expeditions. Albertito’s father had gone to Papi’s preparatory school, Villa Maria. They had been friends. He indicated where I should sit at the table and then peered at me while he smoothed a napkin over his tie.

“So,” he said, “you’re Jorge’s daughter?”

“Sí, señor,” I responded, and sank my teeth into an alfajor, savoring its sweet caramel center.

“Claro, pues, you look like an Arana,” he said.

He studied me as his wife asked me about the Roosevelt School, as she chattered on about the garúa, about how it was impossible to breathe when fog locked in over the city. I thought perhaps he was admiring my good manners. I had had excellent lessons from Abuelita on how a lady should conduct herself at table, even if I didn’t employ that training all the time. I was being a perfect little señorita.

Finally, Señor Giesecke wiped his thin lips on his napkin, leaned across the table toward me, and spoke in a clipped English. “You know, I’ve always wondered whether your father was related to the cauchero.”

“The cauchero?” I said. “Oh, you mean the Arana who lived in the jungle? The rich one with all the rubber? People are always asking me that. My aunts and uncles say no.”

He laughed merrily and took a long, noisy slurp from his cup. “Of course they would say no,” he said then, clacking the cup back in the saucer. “I would say no myself, even if it were one hundred percent true. He was a nasty man, Julio César Arana. A monster. Uy-uy-uy! Pedro, José, y Santa María! He was totally despicable.”

THAT SAME WINTER, I began ballet classes. Mother had noticed my tendency to exaggeration—“It’s the soul of an artistic temperament!” she assured my father—and responded accordingly by enrolling me in the British Academy of Dance. As far as she was concerned, there would be no skimping on any form of education. It was a mansion with high ceilings on Calle Esquilache in San Isidro. There, I took to ballet as if I’d been born to dance, stretching out at the barre, growing thin as a whippet, gliding in mirrors, pausing in doorways like a haughty diva with a neck as long as a swan’s. This was a new kind of power, a fine ammunition.

My teacher was a diminutive Englishwoman. On the first day, she waddled into class like an undernourished duck, toes pointing at opposite walls. But once music rippled up and slid into her limbs, she became agile as a nymph: smooth-browed, tulle-winged, all of her grammar in her bones. I ached to be like her, worked hard to imitate the sinews of her tiny body.

I returned from class one day filled with important