American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [9]
She was a black-haired diva, a bantam hen on four-inch heels, clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage. Abuelita was a Cisneros y Cisneros, a New World aristocrat with an Old World pedigree: five centuries of paper, through the viceroyals to Spain. She was as warm and funny as my grandfather was cut and dried. As much a lover of parties as he was a captive of books. As charged with high voltage as the miles of wire he had sketched out for the electrification of Lima. Insofar as anyone knew, she loved her husband, respected and admired him, deferred to his authority. But when it became clear that her husband had gone into retreat, it was as if part of her had been pulled away with him. That traction was never evident in the adoration she showed him, or in the humor she displayed to the world at large, but it was deeply engraved in her face, where everything—lips, eyes, nose—had begun a relentless plunge south.
Abuelito was the essence of compunction. He was consumed by the idea of honor, pricked by some unnamed remorse. A former professor at Lima’s College of Engineers, he was cautious with family, aloof to associates, Olympian with students, and hyperborean with the rest of the world. But for all the importance he was accorded in his household, it was almost as if he wasn’t there. If he was not standing at the top of the stairs in his three-piece suit, cravat, and cane, looking down on our upturned faces, he was alone and forgotten in his study—poring over one of the arcane science columns he wrote for El Comercio, formally attired in a vest, tie, and smoking jacket, which no one outside his family would see.
He was a small man and moved in small ways. He carried his head as if it were a fragile vessel, nestling it between his shoulders, turning it cautiously. He had lost much of his hair, most of which was confined now to a tuft of white mustache beneath a long, straight nose. When he peered over the banister, his eyebrows pulled into a high interrogative as if he were scanning the surface of a pond, on the lookout for danger. If he decided to descend to tea, he would then shuffle down, lost in thought, carrying a pad and pencil, scribbling words and formulas no one could fathom. He was at work on something, we were told; we were not to disturb him.
At table, he would lean over his food and eat slowly, his eyes seldom leaving the limits of the porcelain below. While my grandmother took the host’s place at the head, where she would hold forth brightly about the news of the day, my grandfather sat to one side—a sullen island of solitude—and dispatched whatever she placed before him. No one addressed him directly, although from time to time Abuelita would demand it—“Tell your papa now about that party you went to last night,” she would say to one of my aunts, or to us, “Tell your abuelo that amusing anecdote about” such and such—at which point his eyes would flicker and look around the table, momentarily stunned, before they dulled with whatever was being told him and he sank into reverie again.
He had been handsome once, as was clearly evident in the portrait that hung in the sala. It showed a dashing young man, smartly dressed in high starch and a neatly pinned tie. His hair was shiny black and copious, parted in the center to reveal a broad, intelligent forehead. His eyes were deep and vibrant; his chin smooth and strong; his enigmatic smile shaded by an elegant mustache, turned up and twisted on either side.
I would stare long and hard at that portrait and wonder at the disparity between the man it depicted and the man I knew—or didn’t know. For me, my grandfather was defined by neverness. I never saw him drink. I never saw him smoke. I never heard him raise his voice. I hardly heard his voice at all. The rest of his household—a fizzy menagerie of irrepressible females and hyperkinetic