American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [24]
A Peruvian judge took offense and barked back in a Lima newspaper: Quite funny, don’t you think, he wrote, that England, a country whose debt to history is the massive eradication of red-skinned people; a country that has commandeered plots, assassinations, rapes and assaults on Ireland for centuries and has released convicts and predators of the lowest level to mete out horrors in colonial Australia; a country that has dealt inhumanely with Jamaicans and Boers, conducted abominable witch-hunts in New England, and erected abominable camps in America; England, a country that today is forcing the venom of opium on Chinese people; that has obtained that substance with much violence and murder; that is perpetrating these very acts, this very hour, against the Hindus—I repeat, is it not funny that such a nation should elect itself an arbiter? That it should pretend to judge the work and destiny of a people who may be naive, but have high ideals of justice, who have never hidden behind hypocrisy and false Puritanism?
But it was like shouting into a wind; the campaign was too loud, too broad now.
My great-grandfather could not answer for the whole of Iberia, the whole of Spain, the whole of Peru, the whole of Latin America. He could, however, answer as Pedro Pablo Arana: He was not one of the evil ones. It was a lie that would define us into the fourth generation. We are not those people.
HOW COULD SOMEONE feel so tainted by a cousin a cordillera and a river away? The gringa in me asks that in disbelief and wonder. Why did my great-grandfather feel such shame? When the scandal erupted and Julio César’s empire was exposed, Pedro Pablo left his governorship and called his son back from his northern idylls. Whatever money he had, and he had had plenty—enough to keep a mansion in Cusco, a hacienda in Huancavelica, a fine residence in Lima, enough to maintain my abuelito like a prince in America—his money was gone.
When Víctor Manuel Arana, twenty-five years old, hurried back from Maine, he set up an engineering atelier in Lima with the hopes of using his yanqui expertise, but he was on his own. There were no family coffers to help him get established. Worse yet, there were few customers at his door. Time did eventually bring one interested party: Rosa Cisneros y Cisneros, my abuelita—a mere thirteen and oblivious to the intricacies of the Putumayo scandals. As years passed, she became fascinated by the startled-looking young man with the dapper American clothes who came and went from the offices across Quemado Street. When my grandfather noticed the bright-eyed, bird-faced girl peering out her window, he returned the curiosity. Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, he approached her father, introduced himself, and was met with the question: Was he one of those Aranas? No, certainly not! Following Pedro Pablo’s directive, Abuelito pushed his relations away with such force that one day it propelled him in the opposite direction—out of society, out of career, up to a second-floor limbo.
I don’t have to look far to see how that force has had its effects on me. I am forged by family denials, fed by that long vine of history—a vine I’d one day be warned to examine. My great-grandfather was so ashamed to be an Arana that he disowned the entire extended family—a grave act for a Latin. My abuelito was so mortified by his father’s shame that he drove himself into the rafters. My father, knowing none of this, was so bewildered by his father’s quirkiness and his mother’s long-suffering acceptance of it that he reached for another life altogether. As for me: I ended up so divided between the two sides of my hybrid family that I boomeranged with a burning curiosity. The dominos clacked around—effects spilling from one generation to another—until they clacked round in a circle. Until I found Julio César. Until the last