American Chica (44 page)

The evidence appeared—as I have since learned important things do—in a small way. My father came home that fall, lavishing us with gifts, beaming on our accomplishments, registering our adolescent habits with alarm. His first week home was the easiest. The bills all got paid. Mother arranged for a vacation from the dress shop, and the two of them took to the kitchen to turn out
criollo
feasts. By the second week, she was back at work, and he was angry that his wife was waiting on other women in such a common establishment. The indignity of it. The insult. No woman in his family had ever had to do that. Never mind that she liked having her own money, that she was savoring the freedoms it gave her. He was plunking the Johnnie Walker on the table, cursing America’s crudeness, prowling the house like a jaguar in a cage. By the second month, they were bickering about new bills, about Peruvian versus American
mores, about how each of them misused the other language’s preterite past. By the third month, Papi’s bags were packed. Before winter was hard upon us, a bitter wind would blow him out the door again.

He’d be back. The cycle was nothing new. It had happened the year Castro took Cuba. It had happened the spring a spy plane was shot down over Russia. It had happened the autumn of the first Catholic President. It had happened the summer East Germany built a wall. It had happened just after we watched our chief executive’s head explode into the streets of Dallas.

But the evidence, as I say, was in the details. I was looking for love with a grandmother’s charge on my shoulders, and it was finally in still, small voices that I found it. I heard it in the mornings when he came home, in the everyday pitter-patter on the other side of my wall. At dawn, when my parents were alone in their room, when the world had not encroached with its borders and geographies and biases and resentments, they would talk for hours. It was a light chatter, filled with dreams and amusements and a mutual concern about us. Mother would tell of her life, Papi would tell about his, and each would listen to the other, with little exclamations of delight. There was nothing earthshaking about this. They were stark polarities, my parents: irrepressibly different, adamantly themselves, but ardently, irrefutably in love. Abuelita had not been right about them. She hadn’t had any experience by which to judge their hard-won union. I didn’t have to tell them they should live together. They were who they were—nonconformists, independent. Doing fine with a hemisphere in between.

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.

E
PILOGUE

V
ENICE 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.