American Chica (7 page)

It is this bridge—steeped in yesterday, wrapped in guilt, shut in stone—that brings to mind my father’s deep history. Like Mother, he had been molded by the past, but his was a past he had not made and was unaware of, a legacy inherited before he’d seen the light of day. It was the Mark of Arana: as real as a shriveled leg, a maimed hand, a welt from shoulder to shoulder. It had reverberated from jungle to mountain, from one side of the Aranas to another. It had spun into every branch of the family, stung his grandfather, stifled his mother, chased his father up the stair. Nobody spoke of it, no one acknowledged it, nor did anyone really care to track the circuitry, but for Aranas the past had been toxic, and shame spilled through generations like sap through a vine.

All my life, strangers had asked me about the rubber baron Julio César Arana, and I’d always given the rote response: no relation, no connection, not me. So a shadowy figure had been responsible for a human hecatomb in the jungle? Well, that story had played out at the turn of another century, at the hearth of another family; it had little relevance to me. But Julio César crept into my life anyway.

In the summer of 1996, I was granted a fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where I intended to study the problem of Peruvian women and poverty. I had decided to focus on the doughty survivalism that persisted at the hardscrabble edges of Lima. I had returned to Peru with my father for the express purpose of combing Lima’s slums for a newspaper story I might produce during that fellowship. I took my notebooks, a camera bag, and headed for the dunes that embrace the city. I sat in mud huts with mothers who were determined to put the
terror of the
Sendero Luminoso
(Shining Path) guerrillas behind them, listened to men who had seen their babies dismembered, talked to children with stony eyes.

One day, I asked my father to go to the
barriadas
with me. We rode through the shantytowns in my rented car, coiling down the dusty roads to the house of a crippled priest whose legs had been whacked by terrorists’ machetes. Papi was seventy-eight years old and had never seen a
barriada
in his life. He rode in the backseat wordlessly, gazing out the windows, staring at the filth. When I took him home to his sisters, he was sick for a week. I wrote about poor indigenous Peruvians for my newspaper. In the luxury of a Stanford office, I got the job done. But even after I’d put all my notebooks away and sent the piece off to the editors, Peru’s sorrows sat on my desk like a stone.

It was then that I decided to throw open a window on my own past, delve into Arana history. I thought it would be a pleasant enough recreation for a sabbatical: sorting through Stanford’s rich Latin-American collection, finding out who my forebears were. Each morning I’d descend to the library stacks, pull out every book that mentioned Arana, and cart it dutifully to my quiet little office overlooking a picturesque square. What I knew about the Aranas until that point was only what I’d been able to glean from my immediate family.

I knew that my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana, who had graduated from Peru’s finest schools and gone on to a distinguished career as governor, senator, and revolutionary hero, was mysterious and given to secrets about his family ties. He was a proud man with a Napoleonic temper, impatient with curiosities like mine. But his arrogance had nothing to do with lineage, as so much of arrogance can. He did not talk about relatives.

I also knew that when my grandfather—my abuelito—was six, Pedro Pablo had sent him to a boarding school in Lima, then gone off to pursue his political career. Abuelito’s mother, Doña
Eloísa Sobrevilla Diaz, was a dreamy woman who despised the pretense of city life. She preferred to spend her days with her daughter, Carmen, in the hills of her estate in Huancavelica, where she became obsessed with the plight of the
indígenos,
remote from her husband and son. By the time Pedro Pablo Arana was made governor of Cusco—Qosqo, navel of the world—his son was so entrenched in the hermetic world of Catholic schools, from Lima to the University of Notre Dame, that he had little contact with other Aranas. His mother’s family, the Sobrevillas, lived part of the year in Lima and looked in on the boy—but his father’s family was a null.

I found mention of my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana in the first book I looked at—a Latin-American encyclopedia.
Peruvian hero,
it said,
led the last known populist uprising against the military in 1895.
Pedro Pablo had been secretary of war in a revolution against the military machine of General Andres Caceres, president of Peru. “The rule of law over the rule of force!” was his battle cry, and he led three hundred rebels on horseback—springing unexpected from the cordillera—in the 1895 insurrection at Huancayo. But the card catalogs led me to far more mentions of another Arana, Julio César Arana—row upon row of references with provocative rubrics attached to them:
atrocities, London investors, trials, dungeons, human-rights organizations, Mark of Arana.
And so, although I’d never gone looking for Julio César, his ghost beckoned me to the task. I decided to learn why his name never failed to raise eyebrows. Why, every time I asked my family to tell me about Julio César Arana, the answer had been unequivocal: “Oh, there are so many Aranas, Marisi. He has nothing to do with you.”

The facts, as I came upon them in that Stanford library, were as follows: Julio César had been born in 1864 in Rioja, a town in northern Peru, on the cusp of the cordillera and the Amazon jungle. The year he was born, my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo
Arana was a university student, graduate of a prestigious Lima school, bound for a career in law. In 1882, as my great-grandfather made senatorial declamations from podiums in the southern highlands of Huancavelica, eighteen-year-old Julio César decided to try his hand at fortune in Yurimaguas, a musty little jungle outpost on the Huallaga River. He began forays into the rain forest, searching for
cauchos,
rubber trees. Rubber was on the verge of a boom—black gold,
oro negro,
they called it—and the Amazon was thick with it.

As some accounts have it, Julio César was the son of a jipijapa-hatmaker and spent a barefoot childhood hawking hats from the back of a mule. The real history is far more complicated. His father did own a straw-hat business in Rioja, but the Aranas were a network of pioneers, capitalists, and politicians. Our part of the clan had originated in the historic city of Cajamarca, where Pizarro and the Incas first came face to face. One Arana remained in Cajamarca and started a business in precious metals. Another—Julio César’s father—settled in Rioja and made his fortune in the Panama-hat boom. A third—Benito Arana—went to Loreto, to try his hand in politics. A fourth—Gregorio Arana, my ancestor—went south to the highlands of Ayacucho and Huancavelica, to the silver and mercury mines.

By the time Julio César was three, an Arana was already cutting a path through the jungle for him. Benito Arana, governor of Loreto, Peru’s Amazon state, opened the way for rubber fortunes by navigating the Ucayali, the Pachitea, and the Palcazu. The governor was not thinking of rubber only. He was on a mission to dispel the notion that the Amazon was unsafe for commercial development. He decided to make a show of that point by going downriver himself.

There was good reason entrepreneurs were wary of the jungle. Two young sailors by the names of Tavara and West had been lost in the land of Cashibo cannibals, and Benito Arana decided
to find out exactly what had happened to them. In the company of a journalist, Governor Arana made his way to the heart of Cashibo territory. He strode into the camp, searched out the largest hut, and called for the fearsome chief, Yanacuna, to come out and say what had become of the boys. Yanacuna’s wife ran out of the hut in a fury, accusing Benito Arana of invading sacred territory. Two intruders
had
come into Yanacuna’s village, she cried to him.
Dos hombres de hierro!
Iron Men, toting their iron torches. They had cooked up quite nicely, in thirteen clay pots, over thirteen fires. The chief’s wife flung down two jawbones—two sets of teeth—at Governor Arana’s feet.
There are your “boys,”
she snarled.
Take a look. The same could happen to you.

When Benito Arana returned to Iquitos, it was as Moses descending from Mount Sinai with commandments: The rain-forest Indians were beasts, not people. They were less than simian, incapable of real, human feeling. Henceforward they would be dealt with as animals. And with that, a road was paved; two decades later, my ancestor Julio César would travel it.

He was a charismatic man, Julio César: a ringleader, a schemer. He was straight-backed, with powerful shoulders, a high, arrogant forehead, and a weakness for elegant clothes. By eighteen, he’d decided to make a career in rubber. He married Eleonora Zumaeta, a small-town aristocrat, and with her brother established an enterprise called J. C. Arana Brothers, Inc. By twenty, he’d recruited an army of foremen. By twenty-five, he was buying up land from Colombian adventurers, putting rain-forest Indians to work—forcibly—by the thousands, running a business from Iquitos to Manaus, two medullas of rubber that would drive the automobile into the industrial age. By the turn of the century, Julio César had finagled enough leases and staked enough claims to master the rubber-rich Putumayo, a lush stretch of jungle between two tributaries that echoed his name: the Igaraparaná and the Caraparaná.

Precious rubber, white latex,
caucho:
The Amazon was pulsing with it, and nowhere in that jungle was it more copious than the Putumayo, the ungovernable border where Colombia faces Peru—the very point at which the cocaine plant now flourishes. The finest rubber—Para fine hard—was to be found in twelve thousand acres of land no flag had laid formal claim to: the territory between Peru and Colombia that Julio César Arana had established as his. His armies of slaves hacked their way into the green, sending caracaras and marmosets screeching back in retreat. The
cauchos
—“trees that weep white tears,” as the Omagua call them—were slashed, drained, their desiccated trunks left to creak in the wind.

The entire Putumayo was under the rule of this one man: The “Casa Arana” had a monopoly on Para rubber, and treasure hunters from as far away as Pakistan and Australia streamed to Peru to work for its founder. Julio César had put Iquitos—a jungle outpost that was unreachable by land—on the map of the civilized world. He had made it one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. He had six hundred gunmen scouring the jungle for slaves.
Hombres de hierro,
the rain-forest Indians called them: Iron Men, for the dread guns they toted. They would sweep into the villages, make bloated promises, lead able-bodied natives away. Julio César had forty-five centers of operation at strategic points along the border with Colombia, an area that was too feral for either country to defend. By the turn of the century, he had the Peruvian military helping him hold on to it.
I have six hundred men armed with Winchesters,
he cabled the president.
Essential you send me a supply of Mannlichers.

By 1902, when Abuelito, my grandfather, was twenty years old and moving the tassel from one side of his graduation cap to the other at the University of Notre Dame, Julio César had thousands of rain-forest Indians making him rich. They were the Huitoto, the Bora, the Andoke, the Ocaina: from fierce headhunters
to doe-eyed forest folk. They would rise at dawn under the vigilance of overseers, head for the trees in the gray light of morning when the latex flows freely, score V channels in the bark, and let the white milk well into little tin bowls. Each tree could yield a hundred pounds of rubber before it shriveled into a husk. When a stand of
caucho
dribbled all day, a rain-forest Indian might gather enough to roll a cable the size of a human leg.

Julio César’s henchmen recruited
flagelados,
scourged ones, fugitives from the great dust bowl of Ceará. Hundreds of thousands were making an exodus from the wasteland of Brazil’s northeast. The streets of Iquitos and Manaus were full of them—gaunt, toothless desperados, willing to board ships for the promise of work and food. By the time Arana got them to Iquitos, they were in debt to him for passage, for food, for buckets, for bullets, for Winchesters. It didn’t take much to get them to drive slaves.

By 1903, when my great-grandfather was governor of Cusco, campaigning for the vice presidency, dreaming of a fine, democratic republic, Julio César had become one of the wealthiest men in the hemisphere, and his domain—twenty-five million acres of it—stretched from Peru to Colombia. Two years later, he incorporated his business in New York and London, under the name of the Peruvian Amazon Company. He hired a British board of directors, put the company on the London exchange, and began making the gringos rich.

In the space of a decade, the Casa Arana had become a towering enterprise. Julio César and his brothers ran it from his palace, a sprawl of red and white magnificence overlooking the Amazon, not far from the point where the river splits. He called his boulevard Calle Arana and lined it with royal palms. From his raised balconies, he could survey his dominion. From his oleander gardens, he could stride out to a triumphant balustrade that
abutted the gray-green water and watch his barges approach. Out in the jungle were the armies of four hundred, the overlords, the guards, the weighers, the tappers. Out they would go, on trails they could run blindfolded, knowing instinctively which trees would bleed. Once the bundles were brought into the camps, the workers would weigh them, cure them to a smoky charcoal, then ship them downriver on flotillas of armed barges.

Some overlords decided to breed their own workers, in shacks where slave girls were kept for that purpose, six hundred women at a time. The Huitoto children born in those camps were taught to kiss the overlords’ hands, worship them as deities. By the time they were seven, the natural Huitoto gentleness was bred out of them: They were an army of diminutive
guerrilleros,
wielding rifles, shooting trespassers, trained to kill.