American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [134]
Signs are everywhere, Antonio used to tell me. Marisi, you must learn to look.
The connections have not always been easy to follow. But they are there when I look for them. They are there.
The lie that we were not related to the jungle Aranas took its toll slowly, but it ate souls one by one. My grandfather became a hermit. My grandmother had to be satisfied to look at the world through her children, clacking through their lives in high heels and perfume. Her social nature curbed, she moved through Lima crimped as a widow, then died in her chair, her feet too disfigured to walk. My father could never understand why his father stayed upstairs day after day, hid himself in his study, shirked a man’s responsibilities, failed his wife. Little wonder that Papi catapulted himself to a new life. Little wonder that he needed a little alcohol to fuel himself into it. Little wonder there was a bit of jetsam along the way.
The history from which my mother was escaping was different—writ not over a century, but in a handful of years—very hasty, very gringo. In one night, her life exploded. She left her parents’ house on a lark with her big sister and awoke the next morning as the sixteen-year-old wife of a brute. She was trapped, abused, then decided to quit that marriage altogether. When she found love with a Canadian, it was snatched away soon—in a faraway place, in another country’s war. All she could do was box the pain, bury it into some deep corner of consciousness. She got on a train looking to put the past behind her. When she got off, she met the man to put her in another part of the world.
Papi extracted himself from the Arana welter. He returned to Peru regularly and looked after his parents. But he did it from afar, removed from the charade of denial. When his father died during one of his visits, he couldn’t bring himself to sit wake with the body; he couldn’t bear to mount the staircase to say farewell.
My mother reinvented herself completely. I never saw the Clapps after that one spring in Wyoming. Much, much later, I learned that Nub, my chaw-lovin’ cousin, had put a bullet through his brain. I met two of twelve other American cousins when they were already grandparents; I tracked them down in order to write this book. I never saw my mother’s sisters again, never even met two of them. Of my parents, my mother remains the exotic creature, the far more mysterious one. I often marvel that these two are still together, still drawn by each other’s attractions, still shuttling between the United States and Peru.
If two opposing energy bubbles meet, Antonio used to say, there is a natural conflict. If they lock, they rise to a higher plane. Call it enlightenment. Call it love. Call it the start of a twice-blessed soul.
I often think how fortunate I’ve been: Here I am, after all, the product of a chance meeting, in chance circumstances. Then I remind myself how little chance had to do with it. I was meant to go between the apus and Elk Mountain, meant to sit on a crate with Antonio, meant to play conquistadors with Georgie, meant to watch sunsets with Grandpa Doc, meant to weave dreams about my mother, meant to plumb the Arana past.
Sometimes when I sit alone on my porch in the springtime, when light enters my garden at a certain angle, I think I see the black and yellow heliconia butterflies that used to skim the floripondio bushes of my childhood. I see Amazon hummingbirds darting in and out of my buddleia. I see flocks of lime-green parakeets swoop down East Capitol Street, then bank swiftly, up and away. I see Antonio shaking a dirty finger at me.
Qué te dice, Marisi? he is asking me. What does this book tell you about the connections, the historias,