American Chica Read online

  Praise for

  AMERICAN

  CHICA

  Two Worlds, One Childhood

  “One of the many reasons the reader can’t put this memoir down is the author’s impressive command of her craft … [displays] virtuosity in the storyteller’s traditional gifts: spareness, clarity and a passion for allegory.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Full of larger-than-life characters and stranger-than-fiction situations … delightful.”

  —The Washington Post

  “An unusual mix of tone and voice—close and distant, ironic and passionate, deeply spiritual and downright funny … seems right out of Joseph Conrad.”

  —The Philadephia Inquirer

  “An engrossing plot, insightful cultural reflections, and well-crafted prose … [Arana] shares the tale of her own family with wisdom and compassion.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “This memoir is worth reading because it transcends self-interest and reveals the world beyond the writer. Its tone is sophisticated and amusing as it captures the nuances of relationships in two clashing cultures.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Marie Arana blends a journalist’s dedication to research with a style that sings with humor.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  (starred review)

  “Reads like a novel … tells a fantastical, spellbinding tale.”

  —The Atlantic Monthly

  “[A] delightful book … in the passionate telling, in the clever remarks, in the elegant style. American Chica is a fascinating blend of … memoir and meditation.”

  —International Herald Tribune

  “Within this winning portrait of a bicultural childhood are a host of notable characters…. A rich and compelling personal narrative.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Arana is like [a] bridge. She is North. She is South…. She is both worlds. She is neither. And for all the … dichotomy, her life is richer than most.”

  —The Advocate

  (Baton Rouge)

  Table Of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 - Ghosts: Pishtacos

  Chapter 2 - Fathers: Padres

  Chapter 3 - Ancestors: Antepasados

  Chapter 4 - Mothers: Madres

  Chapter 5 - Gods and Shamans: Dioses y Brujas

  Chapter 6 - Politics: La Politica

  Chapter 7 - Earth: Pachamama

  Chapter 8 - Sky: El Mundo Arriba

  Chapter 9 - Power: La Conquista

  Chapter 10 - Independence: Sueños Norteños

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To my parents,

  Jorge Arana Cisneros

  and Marie Elverine Clapp,

  who taught me that there are

  two sides to my America,

  and two Americas in this world.

  I am, seeing, hearing,

  with half my soul at sea and half my soul on land,

  and with these two halves of soul I see the world.

  Estoy, mirando, oyendo,

  con la mitad del alma en el mar y la mitad del alma en la tierra,

  y con las dos mitades del alma miro el mundo.

  (Pablo Neruda)

  PROLOGUE

  THERE IS LAUGHTER. There is the sharp report of a slamming door and the staccato of high heels crossing the ceramic tiles of the atrium garden. There is the reveille shout to the servants’ quarters, the slap of sandals making their way to the animal pens, the skrawk of chickens as they are pulled from their cages, one by one, into the ink of night. It is three o’clock, before the light of day.

  I rub the sleep from my eyes, swing my legs over the side of my bed until my toes touch the llama rug, and then sniff the air of a morning (like all my mornings) redolent of ripe bananas, raw sugar, rum—and the sharp, ferric odor of freshly drawn blood.

  I cross the room, hoist myself onto the window ledge, pull back the heavy wrought iron, and lean out into the dark. The second-floor vantage offers me a rich display of the courtyard below. My mother is floating into view, her green dress billowing like a gossamer wing; her long, gold hair throwing light like a tungsten filament; her all-American, Hollywood face alive with expectation. At her side is my Peruvian father—black-haired, handsome, smiling and shouting Spanish over his shoulder, waving a bottle in his fist as if he were a carnival barker on opening day. His friends spill in behind them. Through the kitchen window I see the cook, yawning and plucking feathers from a chicken, letting the blood ooze from its neck into the frying pan for an early-morning sangrecita. I do not read omens in that. I do not yet know about signs.

  My parents are young. It is their moment. Every marriage has one. When love seems infinite, the road feels free, and nights trip festively into day.

  I was only four, but life had already had upheavals. The year I came into the world, five major earthquakes shook Peru. By the time I stood at that window, I’d lived through eighteen. I cannot recollect any one of them. Off in a geologist’s lab, a needle was dancing, wild, registering one disaster after another.

  Three days before I dangled my head into that courtyard, a quake ripped through the Peruvian seaboard, registering almost eight points on the Richter scale. It started shortly after five in the afternoon. The men were at work, the women in kitchens, their children at play. Where was I? The entire population of our hacienda must have heard the rumble beneath, felt the waggle in the stomach, seen concrete slabs wrench loose and skitter across ground. Across, then up, in fragments—belching gray dust. Walls usually rip before a mind can factor it, roofs fall, babies hurl through air.

  I know it happened only because the World Data Center for Seismology tells me so. Earthquake, December 12, 1953, South America: Latitude 4°, Longitude 80°. Magnitude, 7.8. Displacements: thousands. Deaths: severe.

  Shaky days. Yet all I can recall of them is a predawn tableau, my mother and father bursting into our garden with joy.

  As I grew older and learned to register the ground beneath my feet, I saw that my parents’ marriage was shot through with fissures. Something like earthquakes would come—geologic upheavals, when the foundations that underlay their union would rattle with dislocation and longing—but now, just now, in the eighth year of marriage, with three children upstairs and my father’s engineering career in ascendance—in that quick freeze frame before dawn—the gulf between them did not matter much. They were full. They were one. And I, hovering above their world, was seamless and faultless and whole.

  A South American man, a North American woman—hoping against hope, throwing a frail span over the divide, trying to bolt beams into sand. There was one large lesson they had yet to learn as they strode into the garden with friends, hungry for rum and fried blood: There is a fundamental rift between North and South America, a flaw so deep it is tectonic. The plates don’t fit. The earth is loose. A fault runs through. Earthquakes happen. Walls are likely to fall.

  As I looked down at their fleeting radiance, I had no idea I would spend the rest of my life puzzling over them: They were so different from each other, so obverse in every way. I did not know that however resolutely they built their bridge, I would only wander its middle, never quite reaching either side. These were things I was slow to understand.

  I see such childhood moments in sharp relief now. The past comes slamming up like rock through earth, brought there by sights and sounds, sheer happenstance. Aftershocks, they are. One shivered through not long ago, on a winter afternoon as I lazed in the company of a friend.

  She was a rain-forest woman. She’d never seen cleared land until the year before I knew her, whe
n she stepped from the jungle onto a patch of dirt where a helicopter sat waiting to lift her out. She had never seen a road, a roof, a wheel, a knife. She was an Amazon nomad, a Yanomama, one of “the fierce people.” Spikes pierced her face. She was not used to possessions. There had been little reason to carry things—a string of beads, a sharpened rock, at most. No need for clothes. No need for walls to house them. Bed was a hammock of vines. But there came a day when an anthropologist from Philadelphia pushed through the undergrowth to tell her he had come to study her language and ways. Before her sixteenth birthday, he had made her his wife, given her three children, taken her out in that helicopter, back to his New Jersey home.

  One January afternoon, as I sat with her on the floor of their Hackensack living room, watching an endless succession of her husband’s research videos, my eyes happened to fall on their five-year-old daughter. The child was not looking at the screen. She had seen that particular film countless times: In it, a distinctly wobbly Yanomama headman puts a thick bamboo to his nose and gestures for someone to blow a little bomb of ayahuasca—a powerful hallucinogen—up the reed into his brain. The girl was not looking at that. She glanced from her mother, stretched out on the mauve wall-to-wall carpet, to her father in the other room. Back and forth she looked, then back again. The mother was fingering the spike holes in her face, staring raptly at the image of her headman in the electric box. The father was perched over a dining room table strewn with paper, scratching his professorial beard, scribbling into a book.

  I suppose I could have thought of a million things at the sight of that girl, twisting about in her lime-green T-shirt, swiveling a pretty head from left to right. But what struck me was the look in her eyes. How anxious she seemed. How delicate a bridge she was between the northern man and southern woman.

  What I thought of was me.

  1

  —

  GHOSTS

  Pishtacos

  THE CORRIDORS OF my skull are haunted. I carry the smell of sugar there. The odors of a factory—wet cane, dripping iron, molasses pits—are up behind my forehead, deep inside my throat. I’m reminded of those scents when children offer me candy from a damp palm, when the man I love sighs with wine upon his tongue, when I inhale the heartbreaking sweetness of rotting fruit and human waste that rises from garbage dwellers’ camps along the road to Lima.

  I am always surprised to learn that people do not live with memories of fragrance as I do. The smell of sugar is so strong in my head. That they could have spent the first years of their lives in places like Pittsburgh or Hong Kong and not gone for the rest of their days with the stench of a steel furnace or the aromas of fungus and salt shrimp tucked into some netherfold of cortex—how is that possible?

  I had a friend once, from Bombay, who told how baffling it was to travel this world smelling turmeric, coriander, and cardamom in the most improbable corners of Nantucket or Palo Alto, only to find that they were Lorelei of the olfactory, whiffs of his imagination, sirens of his mother’s curry, wafting in like she-cats, flicking seductive tails.

  He chased after those smells, cooking up curries in rented houses in New Jersey, in tidy chalets in Switzerland, in motel rooms along the Shenandoah, mixing pastes from powders out of bottles with Scottish surnames, searing ghees in Sara Lee aluminum, washing out lunch boxes in Maryland rest stops, trying to bring it back. Bring it back. Up into the sinus, trailing down the throat. He was never quite able to recapture that childhood blend: mashed on stone, dried in a Mahabharatan sun, stuffed into earthenware, sold in an old man’s shop, carried home in string-tied packages, measured onto his mother’s mortar, locked into the chambers of his heart.

  So it has been with me and sugar. I look back and see piles of it, glittering crystals of it—burned, powdered, superfine. I smell sugar everywhere. On whispers, in books, in the loam of a garden. In every cranny of life. And always—always—it is my father’s sugar I am longing for: raw, rough, Cartavio brown.

  Cartavio was the name of our hacienda: a company town as single of purpose as Akron or Erie or Turin or anyplace where pistons and steel drive residents’ lives. It was the mid 1950s, boom days for sugar in Peru, and the American industrial giant W. R. Grace was making the most of it in this remote coastal hamlet, five hundred miles north of Lima. Cartavio was surrounded by fields of sugarcane, fringed by a raging Pacific, and life in it was an eerie mirror of Peru’s conquistador past. On one side of the hacienda were the cinnamon-skinned indigenous in a warren of cinder block. On the other, in houses whose size and loveliness depended on the rank of their inhabitants, lived Peruvians of Spanish ancestry, Europeans, North Americans, the elite. There was a church on the square, a mansion for the manager, a Swiss-style guest house, a country club, and a clinic. But in the middle, with smokestacks thrusting so high there could be no doubt as to why the unlikely multitude was there: my father’s factories.

  Cartavio was nestled in the heart of the nation, just under the left breast of the female torso that Peru’s landmass defines. But it was, in many ways, a foreign place, a twentieth-century invention, a colony of the world. Its driving force was industry, and the people who had gathered there were, one way or another, single-minded industrialists. The Americans had come with dollars; the Limeños with political power; the villagers with hands. Although their objectives were shared—a humming production of sugar and paper—Cartavio citizens lived in uncertain harmony. The laborers were willing to surrender themselves to the practicalities of an iron city by day, but under their own roofs by night they returned to ancient superstitions. The Lima engineers were willing to obey the gringo directives, but they suspected they knew a great deal more about those factories than any mahogany-desk boss in New York. The Americans soon learned that if the indigenous believed in ghosts and the criollo overlords resented gringo power, then Grace’s fortunes turned on such chimera as phantoms and pride. They understood the social dynamic, used it, and with old-fashioned American pragmatism, made it work for them.

  I knew, with a certainty I could feel in my bones, that I was deeply Peruvian. That I was rooted to the Andean dust. That I believed in ghosts. That they lived in the trees, in my hair, under the aparador, lurking behind the silver, slipping in and out of the whites of my ancestors’ portraits’ eyes. I also knew that, for all his nods and smiles at the gringos, my father believed in ghosts, too. How could he not? He faced them every day.

  To the hacienda of Cartavio, Papi was Doctor Ingeniero, the young Peruvian engineer in charge of the people and the maintenance of this whirring, spewing, U.S.-owned mill town. He was a sunny man with an open face. Although his hands were small, they were clever. Although he was not tall, his shoulders filled a room. There were photographs my mother would point to when she wanted us to know she thought him handsome, but they were of a man I didn’t recognize—gaunt and angular, black wavy hair, eyes as wide as a calf’s, mouth in a curl. The Papi I knew was barrel-chested, full-lipped. His hair had receded to a V. His cheeks were cherubic and round. His eyes bulged. In the subequatorial heat, he wore his shirt out, and it flapped in the breeze, revealing skin that was brown, smooth, and hairless. He was not fat but taut as a sausage—bien papeado, as Peruvians like to say. Potato-tight. When he laughed, he made no sound. He would lean forward as if something had leapt on his back and held him in an irresistible tickle. His eyes would squint, the tip of his tongue would push out, and his shoulders would bounce vigorously. He’d laugh long and hard like that—silent, save for the hiss that issued from between his teeth—until he was short of breath, red-faced, and weeping. When he wasn’t laughing, he was barking orders. When he wasn’t doing that, his mouth was ringing a cigarette, sucking hard, his eyelids fluttering in thought.

  Papi would not so much walk as strut. Not so much drink as guzzle. Not so much chat with a woman as flirt, wink, and ogle. He was clearly not the slender, soulful man in Mother’s photographs. Not anymore. From the moment he registered on my brain, he was straining buttons, bien papeado—threat
ening to burst.

  He was a machine virtuoso, improvising ways to go from desert to sugar, from burned plants to Herculean rolls of paper. He could take a field of sugarcane into his steel colossus, shove it through squealing threshers, wet it down with processed sea-water, suck it dry of crystals, and feed it onto the rollers to emerge warm and dry from the other end as flying sheets of paper. He could take a faulty German turbine whose only hope for survival was a spare part eight thousand miles away in Stuttgart and, with a knickknack here, a length of wire there, make it hum again. He could pacify the gringos when they came from New York, matching them eye for eye on the intricacies of macromechanics or spherical trigonometry or particle physics. He inspired fervent loyalty from his laborers, striding through his iron city in an impeccably white suit, teaching them the way to an industrial future. The American way.

  Every morning he would head for the belching beast long before the whistle sounded. In late afternoons, he returned to survey his pretty wife over lunch and take a brief siesta in his chair. But there seemed to be no end to his work. Even as he walked back through the gate for a late lunch or dinner and the servants fluttered into the kitchen to announce the señor was home, he was on call. Ready to pull away.

  That he had to work with ghosts was a fact of life and everybody knew it. A worker’s hand might be drawn into the iron jaws of the trapiche as it gathered cane into its mandibles and pulled the mass into its threshers. A finger, a foot, a dog, a whole man might be lost to that ravenous maw as it creaked and shook and thrashed and sifted everything down to liquid sugar and a fine bagasse.

  Los pishtacos, the workers would say to one another whenever such tragedies occurred. Pishtacos, their wives and mothers would whisper the next day as they combed the market or polished the silver services on the richly carved aparadores of the engineers. Ghosts. Machine ghosts. Pishtacos norteamericanos. And as anyone who knew Peruvian historias understood: They needed the fat of indios to grease their machines.