American Chica by Marie Arana Read Free Book Online Page A

It is where the tourists go. I’ve lined up behind the Piazza di San Marco to see its stone thrust from one side of the canal to the other. It is a covered span, ornate, with two small, grated windows that look out over the water, and it joins the Doges’ Palace to a dungeon on the other side. They say condemned Venetians were made to walk that chute from judgmentto execution. As they crossed and peered through the grating, they would look out beyond the canal, the lagoon, and sigh for their lives, sigh for their sins, sigh at the beauty of that one last view.
    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 theterror 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