American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [133]
What is it about a bridge that draws me? Perhaps it is the way it arches up, launches out, leaps for new ground. Perhaps it is the way even the most modest—an Andean bridge woven from osier, a slim ladder of slats—can swing out over an abyss, defy nature’s will to divide. Even a vine—thrown from one cliff to another—is a miracle. It connects points that might never have touched. Perhaps it is simply that a bridge depends on two sides to support it, that it is a promise, a commitment to two.
I love to walk a bridge and feel that split second when I am neither here nor there, when I am between going and coming, when I am God’s being in transit, suspended between ground and ground. You could say it’s because I’m an engineer’s daughter and curious about solid structures. I’ve always been fascinated by the fit of a joint, the balance in trestles, the strength of a plinth. Or you could say it’s because I’m a musician’s daughter, who knows something about the architecture of instruments. I’ve pulled string over a bridge on a violin, stretched it tight, anticipated sound.
It could be, perhaps, because I am neither engineer nor musician. Because I’m neither gringa nor Latina. Because I’m not any one thing. The reality is I am a mongrel. I live on bridges; I’ve earned my place on them, stand comfortably when I’m on one, content with betwixt and between.
I’ve spent a lifetime contemplating my mother and father, studying their differences. I count both their cultures as my own. But I’m happy to be who I am, strung between identities, shuttling from one to another, switching from brain to brain. I am the product of people who launched from one land to another, who slipped into other skins, lived by other rules—yet never put their cultures behind them.
What they did put behind them were pasts. My father was running from history. He didn’t know its particulars but had lived with its consequences. The Aranas had become good at avoidance, deft with excuses, masters of contortion. We couldn’t see—didn’t try to find out—what was at the bottom of my grandfather’s strangeness: We wove veils of subterfuge, refused to see things as they were. With time, we looked upon my abuelito with a certain petulance. Had we admitted the truth about our connection to Julio César, we might have turned petulances against him instead.
Who knows? Perhaps even if we’d acknowledged our connection to the Casa Arana, we still would have displaced the blame. We might have pointed fingers at the gringos: They’d been the ones starved for rubber, their roads gaping in anticipation, their factories ready to whirl. As the indios in Cartavio would say, the pishtacos were loose in the rain forest: the machine ghosts were hungry, and the grease of dark people was required.
As it turned out, it didn’t much matter where the dark people were. After the English crushed Julio César, they transplanted Peru’s rubber trees to Malaya, thereby plunging the curse into the far side of the planet, and the afflicted welcomed the disease. The Malayans bore the hardships of their rubber trade valiantly. The British pocketed the cash.
As fate had it, I, too, was transplanted to Malaya. I was twenty-three at the time: the docile bride of an American banker. I hit ground in Kuala Lumpur as unsuspectingly as a pilfered little sprout of Para fine hard. By then, Malaya had become Malaysia, and the country was no longer British. The rubber industry had gone not only from Peru to Malaysia, but from trees to chemical vats, and the old curing posts had turned into tourist stops.
I moved with my first husband into a house above the jungle, to a place that stood on a hill. It was a colonial stucco structure with frangipani nodding by the balcony, monkeys screeching and coupling on the blacktop, papayas dangling in the heat. A Malay woman drove me up the driveway and deposited me at the door. “This was the home of an English rubber baron,” she said. “A powerful tycoon. He built it high, so that he could look out at the jungle canopy.” I went up to the porch and looked out over