American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [8]
“Over here, let me tell you how I nearly got greased at Midway!” one would shout over a brimming glass of rum at one of my parents’ garden parties. Off they’d go, weaving legends, each one braver than the last.
I liked these solteros. I liked them because they seemed to be at the white-hot core of a kid-hearted craziness that overtook the grown-ups from time to time. I liked them because of their laughter. I liked them for their sweet smell of Cartavio rum. I liked them most of all because, when their long limbs ambled through our gates, the sky would open and my mother’s eyes would dance.
The man sitting with my mother was a soltero. Of that I was sure. Whether or not they’d been talking, I could not tell. I rubbed my eyes and focused closer. My mother had a sweet, peaceful expression on her face. The man looked at her, perfectly calm, and said something I could not hear.
Suddenly, her outstretched hand flew to her forehead, and her long, thick fingers rested there for what seemed a great while, her eyes cast down. Then he stood, bowed awkwardly, and walked away.
It was a fleeting gesture, that manual flutter from chair to brow, but I can see it still, engraved in memory like some irrevocable omen. Up, press. Presto, fermata. A passage that sounds again and again, as if its notes should lead to something else, some other movement. But that something else bows and spins and floats away. Off. Up. Out of sight, never to be explained.
My mother’s hand floated down. She turned her face to the open doors of the bedroom and looked deep into my eyes. A pause, and then a radiant smile. “You slept this time!” she said. Her voice was so full of joy that my heart slipped a bit. There was no cause for joy in my napping. It had been a terrible lapse on my part: I had not awakened George. I had slept through our rendezvous with El Gringo. I had not given the beggar his sacramental scraps of bread. I had not kept the ghouls away. I had not protected my mother from a stone-blind fate.
Her blue eyes were looking at me now with such love, though, I had to grin back. I flung myself off the bed, slipped into George’s old boots, and marched into the afternoon.
I asked about the stranger on the sofa many times in decades to come—even caused a harrowing scene with my questions—but she only shook her head and said she had no recollection of him. “I can’t imagine who you saw there, Mareezie. I just can’t imagine.” Until I thought perhaps the whole thing had been a dream, and the man another ghost in my head.
2
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FATHERS
Padres
TWENTY YEARS BEFORE I leaned out the window and saw my parents laugh their way into the garden, my father’s father, the redoubtable Doctor Ingeniero Víctor Manuel Arana Sobrevilla, stopped coming down the stairs. He and his wife, Rosa Cisneros y Cisneros de Arana, and four of their six children lived five hundred miles away from our Cartavio hacienda in an old colonial house on Calle San Martín in Miraflores, a sleepy district on Lima’s outer lip, where the city trailed out to the sea. Their home was dark and knit with steep, narrow staircases that led where we children were afraid to go. In room after room of musty armoires and heirlooms, life hung like a relic, like a bat in an airless cave.
No one acknowledged that there was something deeply wrong in this. That a brilliant man, highly educated, traveler of the world, would progressively trim back his life until he no longer stepped foot outside his house, until he was a specter up the stair.
My father cared for his father, did not dare to wonder at the strangeness that had driven him up into a little room, far from kin. He was attentive to his mother, quick to assure her that her pantry would not run dry and humiliation would not drag them under. In the ‘30s, at the height of the global Depression, when it was clear that somebody had to be sent out to work, my father, the eldest of the six children, was the first to volunteer. For years, my grandfather stayed on the second floor, venturing down only for a special lunch, a family tea.