American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [22]
In the camps, on airless, mosquito-clouded afternoons when work was finished and foremen were feeling good, the rum would come out, then the Winchesters and the Mannlichers, and target shooting would begin. This, just for fun: Send an Indian running to the river, riddle him with bullets before he gets there. High points if you kill him. Higher still if he never gets wet. Stand a woman out in the clearing with her baby; make her hold out the child while you aim for the round little bull’s-eye of cranium. Brag about it, take a swig, stagger around cackling, until you pull the trigger, explode the skull, splatter the trees with brain.
The first worldwide report on what was really going on in the Casa Arana was issued by a London magazine called Truth. The headline read: THE DEVIL’S PARADISE—A BRITISH-OWNED CONGO. The reference was to the genocide twenty years before in the Congo, where ten million Africans had been slaughtered under the watch of the Belgian King Leopold. In the text, Walt Hardenburg was quoted: “Now that the civilized world is aware of what occurs in the vast and tragic forest of the Putumayo, I feel that I have done my duty before God.” The article in Truth was followed by a lightning streak of revelations across world newspapers from Europe to the Americas, North and South.
It was in this very year, 1907, that Pedro Pablo Arana, my great-grandfather, was made governor of Cusco. He had campaigned fervently for a civilian government, certain that the country had invested its army with too much power. He despised the tin-pot tyrannies that self-satisfied generals were prone to, and he believed they were likely as not corrupt. He had fought militarists on horseback, been elected senator many times over, had run for the vice presidency of the land on the basis of those convictions. The civilian president, Manuel Pardo—the very same man who, ironically, was approving shipments of Mannlichers for Julio César—wanted to reward my great-grandfather for his contributions to the cause of the civilistas and so made him the prefect of Cusco. Just as my sixty-year-old great-grandfather was setting his inkpot on his desk in the Cusco prefecture, just as he was ready to reap the rewards of an illustrious political career, a New York Times piece about the Arana atrocities was printed, and British pulpits began to resound with his name. When his twenty-five-year-old son unfurled a newspaper in a faculty room in Maine one morning and read about the Mark of Arana, a chill must have mounted his spine.
I imagine my great-grandfather, Pedro Pablo, reeling, stunned, back and forth from Lima to Cusco to his estate in Huancavelica, trying to get a grip on his life. He had been a patriot, a warrior, a hero, a public servant, no more than a cousin to the rubber baron; he had not been prepared for the blot on his family name. He had not anticipated the jungle splatter. Not on his perfect shirts, shiny spats, satin sashes. Not this. His son was writing him desperately from America: Why don’t you answer my letters? Querido Papa, what is going on? Where is the money? Finally, Pedro Pablo sent his son a telegram. Come home, it said. On the next ship. Money is gone.
Pedro Pablo began trying to salvage what good name he had. He cut off all contact with his extended family in Iquitos. He stepped down from the Cusco governorship and retreated to Huancavelica. He refused to take questions about the “Devil of the Putumayo.” When asked, he responded simply: I have no siblings or ancestors. Not one.
“Judge me as you see me,” he’d say from that moment forward, “not as you see others who bear my name,” and all attempts to learn of parents, siblings, or a larger family would be stopped at the first question. But to divorce himself from his clan made him an aberration—a spontaneous generation in a society that nurtured family histories as if they were precious instruments, radar nimble, eggshell fragile, unfailing in their power to triangulate