American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [30]
So it was in my family. Men were coddled, their petty narcissisms encouraged. My grandmother had learned it from her mother, had taught it to her daughters, and had expected an orderly transition of it through the ranks. In this, her husband had been an unexpected quotient: a Latin man who, for some unknown reason, had had the starch bled out of him, who no longer pranced and preened as custom required. My grandmother may have understood him; she may have learned to tolerate him. But there was no way she could have predicted him. His own father had been the very model of a Latin male.
After the death of his wife, my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana lived in the Hotel Bolívar and took his meals at the exclusive Club Nacional for eighteen years, from retirement until his own death in 1926. Even after the shock of the Casa Arana disclosures, he was still a peacock of a man, regal in his London finery, stiff shirts buttressing his airs. He was high-handed, haughty, skilled in the art of oratory, a master at stonewalling inquiries. But in old age, he made it a point to pay attention to his descendants. He began visiting his son’s house, throwing my grandfather’s household into a nervous bustle, making my grandmother quake. When he arrived on the first of these visits, he brought an ancient crystal goblet laced with silver filigree and asked my grandmother to serve him a refresco in it. Every Sunday thereafter, at eleven in the morning, the senator would appear, staying only long enough to consume one beer from his glass and confer with his son about the state of the republic, the follies of the president, and the future of his mercury mines, the Santa Barbara deposits in the highlands of Huancavelica.
One day, he arrived before the appointed hour, and my abuelita found herself waving him in early, taking his hat and cane. Her babies were mewling in the next room and her hair was in disarray. My grandfather pulled on his waistcoat, secured his spats, smoothed his mustache, and rushed out to meet his father. Abuelita went off to fetch the señor his beer, unwilling to entrust the precious chalice to less-cautious hands. But she was harried that day, made nervous by her father-in-law’s hyperpunctuality and the fuss in the other room. She opened the doors of the aparador and reached up for the glass. It wobbled back from her fingers, skipped off the edge of the shelf, and crashed to the floor, scattering into a hundred bits of twisted silver. When the woman realized that she had destroyed the old man’s goblet, she wept and shook but pulled herself together, brought out an ordinary flagon, and poured her father-in-law a beer. She carried it out on a silver tray.
Ah, the guest said, lifting it to his lips. Gracias. He made no further remark. He continued his pontifications to his son, and she sighed and excused herself to see about the children. When he finished the last of his cerveza, he set down the provisional glass, rose, wished them farewell, and left. But because his chalice had been shattered, his Sunday covenant broke, too. He never came back again.
No one was much surprised.
There were other men as fearsome as Pedro Pablo Arana in the family, but if we knew about them they were on my grandmother’s side, in the Cisneros line. Whereas Arana seemed to have materialized from nowhere, with no forebears, no ancients, the female side—the Cisneros tree—flourished like an overgrown banyan, its roots deep into medieval Spain.
The male ancestor I found most captivating was Joaquín Rubín de Celis de la Lastra, my