by Marie Arana
So have they been for well over half a century of marriage, for day after day of their turbulent fusion. Long after Abuelita’s plea in the coffee shop, my parents have chased each other from America to America, pursuing their love along the corridors of time: As Grandpa Doc flew into the blue after Grandma Lo. As pairs of eagles wheeled through the sky to remind me of them. As the dust of my abuelitos moved through God’s mill. As Antonio spawned future generations in the cane fields of Cartavio. As Juan Díaz disappeared into the hills of Pachamama. As Vicki became a professor of literature and big sister to thousands. As George became a psychiatrist, mender of broken minds. As I sprang capriciously from ballet to opera to books. The two halves of my parents stayed together.
That is the wonder of this tale.
EPILOGUE
VENICE MAY HAVE its Bridge of Sighs, but there is another one in Lima—Puente de los Suspiros—and every time I return to Peru, I find myself drawn to it, as if it holds some secret, some deeper meaning about life and love. It is not the imposing suspension bridge my father so admires: the kind of steel colossus that makes him slam on the brakes, pull the car over, get out and stare. Nothing like the Verrazano, Golden Gate, or Chesapeake Bay. And certainly nothing like that intricately wrought, melancholy structure that juts between palace and dungeon over the northeastern waters of Italy. This is a modest trestle, spanning a dry little gorge in the historic district of Barranco. Cut from wood a hundred years or so ago, it is short and square and simple. It was not built to inspire voyagers to nobler ground or brave new worlds. It is where the lovers go.
What is it about a bridge that draws me? Perhaps it is the way it arches up, launches out, leaps for new ground. Perhaps it is the way even the most modest—an Andean bridge woven from osier, a slim ladder of slats—can swing out over an abyss, defy nature’s will to divide. Even a vine—thrown from one cliff to another—is a miracle. It connects points that might never have touched. Perhaps it is simply that a bridge depends on two sides to support it, that it is a promise, a commitment to two.
I love to walk a bridge and feel that split second when I am neither here nor there, when I am between going and coming, when I am God’s being in transit, suspended between ground and ground. You could say it’s because I’m an engineer’s daughter and curious about solid structures. I’ve always been fascinated by the fit of a joint, the balance in trestles, the strength of a plinth. Or you could say it’s because I’m a musician’s daughter, who knows something about the architecture of instruments. I’ve pulled string over a bridge on a violin, stretched it tight, anticipated sound.
It could be, perhaps, because I am neither engineer nor musician. Because I’m neither gringa nor Latina. Because I’m not any one thing. The reality is I am a mongrel. I live on bridges; I’ve earned my place on them, stand comfortably when I’m on one, content with betwixt and between.
I’ve spent a lifetime contemplating my mother and father, studying their differences. I count both their cultures as my own. But I’m happy to be who I am, strung between identities, shuttling from one to another, switching from brain to brain. I am the product of people who launched from one land to another, who slipped into other skins, lived by other rules—yet never put their cultures behind them.
What they did put behind them were pasts. My father was running from history. He didn’t know its particulars but had lived with its consequences. The Aranas had become good at avoidance, deft with excuses, masters of contortion. We couldn’t see—didn’t try to find out—what was at the bottom of my grandfather’s strangeness: We wove veils of subterfuge, refused to see things as they were. With time, we looked upon my abuelito with a certain petulance. Had we admitted the truth about our connection to Julio César, we might have turned petulances against him instead.
Who knows? Perhaps even if we’d acknowledged our connection to the Casa Arana, we still would have displaced the blame. We might have pointed fingers at the gringos: They’d been the ones starved for rubber, their roads gaping in anticipation, their factories ready to whirl. As the indios in Cartavio would say, the pishtacos were loose in the rain forest: the machine ghosts were hungry, and the grease of dark people was required.
As it turned out, it didn’t much matter where the dark people were. After the English crushed Julio César, they transplanted Peru’s rubber trees to Malaya, thereby plunging the curse into the far side of the planet, and the afflicted welcomed the disease. The Malayans bore the hardships of their rubber trade valiantly. The British pocketed the cash.
As fate had it, I, too, was transplanted to Malaya. I was twenty-three at the time: the docile bride of an American banker. I hit ground in Kuala Lumpur as unsuspectingly as a pilfered little sprout of Para fine hard. By then, Malaya had become Malaysia, and the country was no longer British. The rubber industry had gone not only from Peru to Malaysia, but from trees to chemical vats, and the old curing posts had turned into tourist stops.
I moved with my first husband into a house above the jungle, to a place that stood on a hill. It was a colonial stucco structure with frangipani nodding by the balcony, monkeys screeching and coupling on the blacktop, papayas dangling in the heat. A Malay woman drove me up the driveway and deposited me at the door. “This was the home of an English rubber baron,” she said. “A powerful tycoon. He built it high, so that he could look out at the jungle canopy.” I went up to the porch and looked out over a magnificent sea of trees. I smiled at their greenness. I breathed in their air. I brought a child into the world to look at them with me—a little gringa with her grandmother’s hair of gold. I didn’t know we were staring at trees from Julio César Arana’s hellhole. I didn’t know the apus had meant me to study the foliage. I had forgotten about the bruja and the vine.
Signs are everywhere, Antonio used to tell me. Marisi, you must learn to look.
The connections have not always been easy to follow. But they are there when I look for them. They are there.
The lie that we were not related to the jungle Aranas took its toll slowly, but it ate souls one by one. My grandfather became a hermit. My grandmother had to be satisfied to look at the world through her children, clacking through their lives in high heels and perfume. Her social nature curbed, she moved through Lima crimped as a widow, then died in her chair, her feet too disfigured to walk. My father could never understand why his father stayed upstairs day after day, hid himself in his study, shirked a man’s responsibilities, failed his wife. Little wonder that Papi catapulted himself to a new life. Little wonder that he needed a little alcohol to fuel himself into it. Little wonder there was a bit of jetsam along the way.
The history from which my mother was escaping was different—writ not over a century, but in a handful of years—very hasty, very gringo. In one night, her life exploded. She left her parents’ house on a lark with her big sister and awoke the next morning as the sixteen-year-old wife of a brute. She was trapped, abused, then decided to quit that marriage altogether. When she found love with a Canadian, it was snatched away soon—in a faraway place, in another country’s war. All she could do was box the pain, bury it into some deep corner of consciousness. She got on a train looking to put the past behind her. When she got off, she met the man to put her in another part of the world.
Papi extracted himself from the Arana welter. He returned to Peru regularly and looked after his parents. But he did it from afar, removed from the charade of denial. When his father died during one of his visits, he couldn’t bring himself to sit wake with the body; he couldn’t bear to mount the staircase to say farewell.
My mother reinvented herself completely. I never saw the Clapps after that one spring in Wyoming. Much, much later, I learned that Nub, my chaw-lovin’ cousin, had put a bullet through his brain. I met two of twelve other American cousins when they were already grandparents; I tracked them down in order to write this book. I never saw my mother’s sisters again, never even met two of them. Of my parents, my mother remains the exotic creature, the far
more mysterious one. I often marvel that these two are still together, still drawn by each other’s attractions, still shuttling between the United States and Peru.
If two opposing energy bubbles meet, Antonio used to say, there is a natural conflict. If they lock, they rise to a higher plane. Call it enlightenment. Call it love. Call it the start of a twice-blessed soul.
I often think how fortunate I’ve been: Here I am, after all, the product of a chance meeting, in chance circumstances. Then I remind myself how little chance had to do with it. I was meant to go between the apus and Elk Mountain, meant to sit on a crate with Antonio, meant to play conquistadors with Georgie, meant to watch sunsets with Grandpa Doc, meant to weave dreams about my mother, meant to plumb the Arana past.
Sometimes when I sit alone on my porch in the springtime, when light enters my garden at a certain angle, I think I see the black and yellow heliconia butterflies that used to skim the floripondio bushes of my childhood. I see Amazon hummingbirds darting in and out of my buddleia. I see flocks of lime-green parakeets swoop down East Capitol Street, then bank swiftly, up and away. I see Antonio shaking a dirty finger at me.
Qué te dice, Marisi? he is asking me. What does this book tell you about the connections, the historias, the love that resulted in you? But as soon as I imagine him asking, he’s gone.
Come on, little fool, I say to myself as I sit in my wicker rocker—think. There is a man who is all science, from a culture that points him in. There is a woman who is all music, from a culture that drives her out. There’s a jungle, a war, a marriage passing through time. And then … there is me. Is that it, Antonio? Am I the point of this historia? The pivot, the midway crossing?
I, a Latina, who—to this day—burns incense, prays on her knees to the Virgin, feels auras, listens for spirits of the dead.
I, an Anglo, who snaps her out of it, snuffs candles, faces reality, sweeps ash into the ash can, works at a newspaper every day.
I, a north–south collision, a New World fusion. An American chica. A bridge.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK IS the product of a communal memory. I have been fortunate to have had the participation of many family members who helped me recall scenes and exchanges from my early life. None should be blamed for inaccuracies, for if there are errors on these pages, they are entirely mine. Nevertheless, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my relatives for their willingness to revisit the past with me—even the difficult parts—and add texture and color to my memories. They are: Jorge Arana Cisneros, Marie Clapp Arana, Rosa Victoria (Vicki) Arana, George Winston Arana, Maria Isabel (Chaba) Arana Cisneros, Eloísa Arana Cisneros, Víctor Arana Cisneros, Robert Hugh (Huey) Loseman, Erma Jean Grise, and Joyce Loseman-Wheeler.
An author who is steered toward truth is fortunate, and I was indeed fortunate to be steered there by historians Roger Rumrill Garcia of Lima, Umberto Morey of Iquitos, and Juan M. Cravero Tirado, former senator from Ayacucho, all of whom assisted me in reconstructing the connection between my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana and the cauchero Julio César Arana.
Leonard Downie, Robert Kaiser, and Nina King granted me time away from my job at The Washington Post to write. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University gave me a month’s fellowship, an office next to the Stanford Library, and then left me alone to think.
When I pecked out five vaguely worded pages of a proposal and faxed them with humble apologies to Amanda Urban, it was she who convinced me that I might have a book there. I thank Binky not only for the many years of friendship she has given me, but for her laser-true antennae, rock-hard faith, and great good humor. She is the engine that made this possible.
I’ve been in the book business for a long time, first on the publishing side and now in the reviewer’s corner, but I have never encountered anyone like Susan Kamil. For all those skeptics who say good editors exited this world with Maxwell Perkins, I would ask them to consider mine: the hardest nose, biggest heart, keenest mind in the industry. Susan saw the forest for the trees as I struggled to distinguish what was and was not important about endless recollections. She drew me a road map, then nudged me along. I couldn’t have done it without her.
I owe considerable gratitude, too, to my daughter, Hilary (Lalo) Walsh, who read the first draft and gave me the benefit of her nimble brain and wicked wit. Thanks to my son, the inimitable Adam Williamson Ward, who has always been generous, not only with his love, but with his computer skills. Thanks also to my children’s father, Wendell (Nick) B. Ward, Jr., for support and encouragement.
There are others who helped me: Mary Hadar, by telling me I was as much a writer as an editor. Kathy Lord, whose careful line-editing is rare and much to be valued. Jamie Alcabes, who corrected numerous typographical errors in the original. Jane and John Amos, who offered a quiet house in West Virginia when there was rewriting to do. Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, and my colleagues at Book World, who give me continuing support.
But all said and done, this book simply would not be if it weren’t for my husband, Jonathan Yardley. He told me I had a story to tell in the first place, offered kind words as I completed each chapter, and then read every version, with patience and gallantry and love. He is as deeply etched into my life and work as the memories on these pages. I owe him more than I can possibly say.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARIE ARANA is the editor of The Washington Post’s Book World. She has served on the boards of directors of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Book Critics Circle. Formerly a book editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and vice president at Simon & Schuster, she joined The Washington Post in 1992. Apart from her editorial work, she has also done feature writing for The Post. She lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., with her son, Adam Ward, and her husband, Jonathan Yardley.
AMERICAN CHICA
A Dial Press Trade Paperback
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Dial Press hardcover edition / 2001
Delta Trade Paperback edition / June 2002
Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / July 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
To protect their privacy, some individuals have been given pseudonyms. They are: Juan Díaz, Pepe Canales, Tommy Pineda, Ralph and Carmen Cunningham, Kelly O’Neill, Lucilla, Erika, and Minna.
Copyright © 2001 by Marie Arana
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address:
The Dial Press, New York, New York.
The Dial Press and Dial Press Trade Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-047529
eISBN: 978-0-307-76459-1
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