American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [25]
DENIALS ISSUED FROM all quarters, not just from my family. Everyone rushed to wash their hands of any responsibility. The British and American investors in Julio César’s company claimed they had nothing to do with the slavery, the importation of Barbadian overlords, the killing, the maiming, the scars.
Julio César, in turn, claimed that the blood of thirty thousand rain-forest Indians was certainly not on him. The horrors, if any, had been played out far from his desk. How could he be blamed for the excesses of deputies who worked far below him? He hadn’t killed anybody. If he was responsible for anything, it was that he had brought Peru rubber glories, that he was defending the country’s frontiers.
The denials worked to a degree. The case against Julio César Arana fizzled. A decade after the scandals broke in the gringo world, the jungle state of Loreto elected him senator and sent him to Lima to work to keep control of the Putumayo. My great-grandfather Pedro Pablo by then was mired in poor health. He had had to suffer the indignity of having his assets frozen. He had had to work hard to deny a business association. He had had to hear the news that Julio César was not only surviving the arsenals of a mean gringo justice, the man was advancing to the Peruvian senate, where Pedro Pablo himself proudly served. It was more than my great-grandfather could bear: He crashed down the family gate, lopped the tree off at the trunk, and insisted he had no relatives at all.
Pedro Pablo’s enormous effort to rid himself of the stain eventually did him in. He died in the care of my abuelita, the vibrant young woman who had bought the lie willingly, who had forfeited all social ambition, who would live out her days with his brilliant and brooding son. For a while, Pedro Pablo’s efforts succeeded. It seemed he had washed Julio César right out of the picture. The cauchero was not part of our lives. But he couldn’t erase history.
History eventually pulled Julio César Arana under, as one might expect the freight of thirty thousand dead souls would do. He left the senate, watched Peru lose control of the Putumayo to the Colombian army, and spent the last twenty years of his life in a wretched tenement in Lima’s Magdalena district, staring at walls, listening to the angry sea. His body grew emaciated, wraithlike, but God did not reach down to claim it. Over the years, it withered to a wisp.
Julio César died in 1953, neglected and destitute, never imagining that his son would make a quick bid for power a scant decade later. In 1960, Iquitos, that jungle capital with an itch for perversity, made Luis Arana its mayor. At some point during his tenure, a rumor started that the Mark of Arana had come back to claim even him: He was suspected of filching funds from the city coffers. One quiet morning in his gilded office, the mayor took a gun from his desk, lifted it to his temple, and blew out his brains.
4
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MOTHERS
Madres
SO THAT IS the burden of history that weighs upon the Aranas in the first half of the century. It is the burden that weighs on them still when, on August 6, 1945, just as Hiroshima disappears beneath a swiftly banking cloud, Jorge and Marie Arana land in the port of Callao. Mother is telling me the story of her arrival now, and I can see her old eyes grow deep green at the thought of that morning.
The two of them are standing on the deck of a homebound Argentine freighter, looking out at the swirling crowd. Mother’s belly is large with my older sister, Vicki, her face chalked with anxiety. She holds on to my father as she searches the landing, scanning brown faces for features like his. There! yells Papi, but when she wheels around to see, she cannot tell what he’s pointing at. A throng of strangers surges forward, waving arms at the floating steel.
The Aranas are there: Abuelito in his hat and cane, Abuelita in her waisted silk, all five of my father’s siblings trussed up in their teatime best. When the young couple descends the gangplank, Abuelita steps forward to reach for the