American Chica by Marie Arana Read Free Book Online Page B

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, DoñaEloísa 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 PabloArana 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