American Chica Read online

  She was a black-haired diva, a bantam hen on four-inch heels, clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage. Abuelita was a Cisneros y Cisneros, a New World aristocrat with an Old World pedigree: five centuries of paper, through the viceroyals to Spain. She was as warm and funny as my grandfather was cut and dried. As much a lover of parties as he was a captive of books. As charged with high voltage as the miles of wire he had sketched out for the electrification of Lima. Insofar as anyone knew, she loved her husband, respected and admired him, deferred to his authority. But when it became clear that her husband had gone into retreat, it was as if part of her had been pulled away with him. That traction was never evident in the adoration she showed him, or in the humor she displayed to the world at large, but it was deeply engraved in her face, where everything—lips, eyes, nose—had begun a relentless plunge south.

  Abuelito was the essence of compunction. He was consumed by the idea of honor, pricked by some unnamed remorse. A former professor at Lima’s College of Engineers, he was cautious with family, aloof to associates, Olympian with students, and hyperborean with the rest of the world. But for all the importance he was accorded in his household, it was almost as if he wasn’t there. If he was not standing at the top of the stairs in his three-piece suit, cravat, and cane, looking down on our upturned faces, he was alone and forgotten in his study—poring over one of the arcane science columns he wrote for El Comercio, formally attired in a vest, tie, and smoking jacket, which no one outside his family would see.

  He was a small man and moved in small ways. He carried his head as if it were a fragile vessel, nestling it between his shoulders, turning it cautiously. He had lost much of his hair, most of which was confined now to a tuft of white mustache beneath a long, straight nose. When he peered over the banister, his eyebrows pulled into a high interrogative as if he were scanning the surface of a pond, on the lookout for danger. If he decided to descend to tea, he would then shuffle down, lost in thought, carrying a pad and pencil, scribbling words and formulas no one could fathom. He was at work on something, we were told; we were not to disturb him.

  At table, he would lean over his food and eat slowly, his eyes seldom leaving the limits of the porcelain below. While my grandmother took the host’s place at the head, where she would hold forth brightly about the news of the day, my grandfather sat to one side—a sullen island of solitude—and dispatched whatever she placed before him. No one addressed him directly, although from time to time Abuelita would demand it—“Tell your papa now about that party you went to last night,” she would say to one of my aunts, or to us, “Tell your abuelo that amusing anecdote about” such and such—at which point his eyes would flicker and look around the table, momentarily stunned, before they dulled with whatever was being told him and he sank into reverie again.

  He had been handsome once, as was clearly evident in the portrait that hung in the sala. It showed a dashing young man, smartly dressed in high starch and a neatly pinned tie. His hair was shiny black and copious, parted in the center to reveal a broad, intelligent forehead. His eyes were deep and vibrant; his chin smooth and strong; his enigmatic smile shaded by an elegant mustache, turned up and twisted on either side.

  I would stare long and hard at that portrait and wonder at the disparity between the man it depicted and the man I knew—or didn’t know. For me, my grandfather was defined by neverness. I never saw him drink. I never saw him smoke. I never heard him raise his voice. I hardly heard his voice at all. The rest of his household—a fizzy menagerie of irrepressible females and hyperkinetic young men—tiptoed about, hissing and shushing and pulling the draperies down, so that the señor could think.

  He had started out to be a force in the country: an engineer with a will to drive Peru out of Third World poverty and into the modern age. He was the son of a prominent politician, educated abroad—as many in the upper class were—at the University of Notre Dame. But somewhere along the way, his star began to dim. He withdrew from his work. Few knew why, and among those who did, no one wanted to say. Come the ‘30s and a worldwide Depression, he stepped into his study, switched on the lights, and sat there for forty years.

  At first, in the years between 1910 and 1920, he had established a consultancy, tried putting his erudition to work. He had rubbed elbows at the exclusive Club Nacional, was called on for major electrification projects. But just as a sixth child was added to his table, his career rumbled to a halt. He had no stomach for politics, no patience for hypocrites. He stopped looking for work, began having disagreements with clients, resentments against cohorts, a general falling-out. There was one further thing about him, infinitely more crippling: an extravagant sense of pride. His children were well aware of his pridefulness, but they learned never to question it. My grandfather’s demeanor was lordly: He walked with his chin in the air. But it was a backward trajectory, a voyage inward, a solemn recessional, as if something had cankered his heart.

  For nine years he was a professor in the Colegio de Ingenieros, but he was a hard grader, insular, difficult. He had no taste for the intrigues of academia, was doggedly loyal to the world he knew, not least his own college education in the United States. When one of his intellectual adversaries, Doctor Laroza, an equally dignified man who had studied in Paris, was made head of the Colegio, my grandfather wrote his employers a brief letter announcing his resignation. It was untenable, he said simply, to imagine that he could work under someone with whom he seldom agreed and who had trained—of all places—in France. Although my grandfather could hardly expect to support six children without a salary, his wife never questioned his withdrawal. The children were told not to bring it up. Abuelito rose every morning, dressed, retired to his study, descended for one meal, spoke little, and wrote for the rest of his life. He produced scientific treatises; trenchant articles; one book about the future of Peru, a copy of which sits in the United States Library of Congress; a valuable, unpublished thesaurus—all without ever leaving that room, tucked away at the top of the stairs.

  As a result, my father, by the time he was fifteen, understood that responsibility for the family had fallen to him. He was an excellent student, ranked first in every school he attended, but when his schoolday was over, his workday would begin. He hopped the Lima tram to the Negri foundry, where he took attendance, paid the laborers, drew designs. He helped make the streetlamps that line the Plaza de San Martin. When Jorge Arana graduated from university in 1940 at age twenty-two, with a full scholarship and honors, he’d been the family wage earner for seven years.

  MY FATHER’S FIRST job pointed him toward the Amazon jungle, the vast expanse of rain forest that lay north of the Andean cordillera. He was hired by Peru’s Department of Public Works as a bridge engineer—a good calling for a twenty-two-year-old. There was a bridge going up on the new road from Lima to Pucallpa, but its cables had snapped and the frames collapsed into the Previsto River. His job had been to recover the twisted beams, straighten them out, continue the foray into the jungle that the Spaniards had begun five centuries before.

  He was living in his father’s house, shuttling to the north and back, helping support his five siblings, keeping company with a woman who was too often found in bolero bars, too easy to bed, too many shades darker than his own skin, when a chance came to change his course. Doctor Laroza, the director of the Colegio de Ingenieros, Abuelito’s former rival, offered him a scholarship to the graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, all expenses paid by the U.S. Department of State. The war in Europe was devouring gringos; American schools had been drained of young men. Peru had declared itself against the Axis, and it seemed the U.S. government was grateful for that. The country and the university were offering one place to a Peruvian engineer. Em Ay Tee? my father said to Laroza—MIT? Never heard of it.

  A year passed. The war in the Pacific intensified, changing the very face of America. The heavy deployment of young Americans had not only depleted the gringo schools,
it was shrinking the gringo workforce. Whatever jobs women were unable to fill were now being offered to foreigners. Peru itself was little fazed by the war, except for Japanese Peruvians, who were rounded up and shipped off to internment camps in the United States—among them a family named Fujimori, whose ranks forty years later would produce a president of Peru.

  In Lima, my father continued to come and go from the Peruvian interior, paying visits to his coffee-colored lover, appalling the family. Abuelita expressed disapproval. La mujer no es gente decente! She’s not the right kind!

  Here is the point, I often thought as a child, when the gears might never have shifted, that I might never have existed, that my father might have taken another path. But four little cogs changed everything: The first was my grandmother’s censure of his woman. The second, the growing ennui of her charms. The third, a renewed offer of the scholarship. The fourth, a conversation at the Department of Public Works: His bosses promised to continue to pay his salary while he studied in the United States on the assumption that he would return to work at the same department. MIT? one of his compadres said. Caramba! That’s the best science the gringos have!

  MY FATHER LOVES to tell the story of coming to America and will tell it to anyone who will hear it, in an urgent present tense. He narrates it now so that I can write this book. It begins this way: In early June of 1943, just as General Patton is planning his leap from the African shore, Jorge Arana flies to Panama City. But he finds himself wandering that capital, wondering whether he’ll ever get out. The planes are full. Panama is crawling with soldiers, and all flights to and from the isthmus are preempted for military use.

  He spends days looking over the airstrip, lining up, waiting for announcements, loosening his collar against the furnace of the sun. At dusk, he is told to pray for luck, come back on the following day. Nights are tolerable, in town with other Latinos, young men lured north by the promise of bigger careers. They go down to the sailor dives, perch on stools, sway to mambos, eye women over tankards of rum.

  Seven days pass and civilian travel remains paralyzed. The dollars he’s hoarded thin to a precious few. MIT has sent only what is necessary to get him to Boston, and each day in that way station is a drain on his future.

  One morning, as he sits in the roiling airport—a suitcase at his side and his parents’ photographs in his pocket—an airport official emerges to bark at the crowd. The day’s plane to Miami is light, he says. We’re one hundred ten pounds short of mail. Anybody weigh fifty kilos or less?

  My father steps forward: a stringy man, a tight bundle of energy. They can see that he isn’t much heavier than a sack of mail. They weigh him, rush him through the gates, strap him in. He comes to America as a letter might: with no more than a destination and a sliver of hope. There, beside the green of young soldiers and the dust of old burlap, he feels his fortunes rise.

  The Miami he flies into is jittery, quick with street life and cash. War is everywhere evident—in the uniforms, the mongering slogans on walls. He stays for two nights, dodges his way through the mayhem, tries to get on a train. There are other Hispanics headed for universities. Much of South America has taken the side of the northern colossus; foreigners are being welcomed in. It’s a liaison of convenience, between a country at war and educated young Latino men. They’re coming just long enough to learn what they can from the gringos, woo a blonde, man the machines awhile.

  At the end of June, he steps off a train into a gray, late night in Boston. He walks through the concrete city to a building he’s been assured will be home. A chain of head-scratching cicerones point the way. The dormitory looks stony, imposing. A uniformed man sits inside. Yes, sir? the sailor says, snapping up brisk under a pale crew cut.

  Good evening, says my father, pronouncing the English words slowly, nodding politely. He rifles through his pockets and draws out the letter that has led him there. The military man scans it quickly, shakes his head.

  This was an MIT building last week. Not tonight, he says, thrusting the paper back into my father’s hand. It’s the headquarters for a V-12 navy training program now. There’ll be a full crew by morning.

  My father’s face darkens, the sailor’s softens. Here, let me look at that again, the gringo says, and reads the worn document a second time. When he looks up, the eyes have a different intelligence. Well, I don’t see why you can’t stay here one night.

  With that simple sentence, Jorge Arana takes a liking to America. Its food is bland. Its women rattle on incomprehensibly. Its afternoons rumble with thunder, torrents gushing from the sky. Its streets are all car horn and elbow. But there’s a wartime goodwill in the air: a winking camaraderie, a link with the hemisphere at large.

  Within a few days, my father is registered in MIT’s graduate division, paying two dollars a day for a rented room and two meals, struggling to decipher Boston’s expletives, sitting in a classroom with no idea what the professor has said. He has studied English for years in Lima, but he finds himself unable to produce it, helpless before the machine-gun fire of American slang.

  Jack Coombs, the man in whose apartment he lives, is a working-class Irishman with a colorful vocabulary and a powerful thirst for ale. Coombs is short, square; so is his “missus.” Together, they’re a monument to chance. The Coombses are gambling aficionados, their conversation focuses on horses and hazards, jockeys and odds. My father sits at their table with a dictionary at his side, puzzling over the lexicon, marveling at the luck of his draw.

  What’s it like down where you come from, Horrr-hey? Coombs shouts between slurps of beer. Y’all wear feathers and stomp around barefoot?

  We wear shoes, Mr. Coombs. Nice leather ones. We’ve been ordering them from Paris since the sixteenth century, before your people ever set foot in this country, he bandies back. But only after he’s roared merrily and looked up the words in his book.

  Graduate school is hard, and his English isn’t good enough. His professors are direct: If he doesn’t get a perfect score on his engineering project, he won’t be granted a degree. The project is to be an invention, something no one on the faculty has seen before. Within the first weeks, he decides the form it will take. He’ll build an instrument that will gauge the load on a bridge. Not burdens on spans as they’re being erected; there are plenty of those contraptions around. No, his tool will test a suspension bridge that has gone up before anyone has had an opportunity to test it—a cable deemed unsteady, a structure everyone figures will fall.

  More than five decades later, I ask him about it. He is over eighty now, paunched and grizzled and gray, nearly blind in one eye, but I recognize an intensity, the deliberateness he must have had as a young man. He takes out a pencil, sketches it for me: a bridge cable and a delicate instrument that squats on it. The next time I visit, he has constructed a model. Here it is, he says, setting the device before me. There is a metal cable between two pulleys, weighted with burdens on either side. A triangular pincer presses down from above, displaces the cable in increments, mathematically measures the load. The model is made—as everything he now makes is—out of something altogether practical: a wooden fruit crate, neatly painted, smoothly sanded, clearly labeled with equations. He explains it meticulously. My eighty-six-year-old mother leans forward, engrossed in its fragile balance. She’s platinum-haired, lovely. She’s holding a tangerine.

  THE FIRST TIME I SEE HER, he tells me, is through the frame of a window. He is inside a dormitory, she is walking along the Fenway, a gaggle of women around. He registers her as a color in a rainbow, one swift stripe on a variegated field. She is stately in her fern-green suit, hair smoothed into a golden roll, a brown feather quivering somewhere above. Her companions are fresh-faced girls. She is a decade older, seasoned, a different flux in the well of her eyes.

  He sees her often after that. Every day into winter. He is in a houseful of Latinos now, three stories of them, in a building rented out by the Boston Conservatory of Music. In the spirit of wartime frugality, the musicians
are sharing a basement dining room with the MIT men.

  She comes up the stairs of 24 Fenway with her violin wedged under one arm, shakes the snow from her fur coat, steps into a roomful of dark-eyed lotharios, darts past to a table in the back. She marks the din and the laughter but is removed, disconnected somehow.

  She’s unmarried, he can see that from the unadorned finger; she’s sleeker, more studied than the rest. She has the preened, perfumed air of a woman who has been in the world for a while.

  At first he sees she’s well-courted, walking briskly from the conservatory with a series of suitors. He notices only in passing. There are more-pressing concerns on his side of the window. Science has swept romance from his prospects, into a far corner of life. Others like him are washing dishes, waiting tables, taking odd jobs, earning money for a weekend jink. He spends his days in a library, in a laboratory, between a dictionary and a stack of books. Some Saturdays he puts on fiestas, mixing punch in a bathtub, ordering up rhumbas and mambos, navigating the dancers with his drink in the air. The Latins at MIT are known for their parties, for scoring champagne, for serving it up in shoes. Mostly, however, he sees the world from a third-floor window, decoding gibberish he’s copied from a blackboard, digging his shoulder into a wall. Everyone knows how America rids itself of Latino students who do not make the grade: They ship them to Ellis Island or, worse, to holding camps, before deportation home.

  Between sirens and blackouts and rations of horse meat, there’s a night of conga and rum. Come here, he beckons, when to his surprise she appears at the doorway. Let me teach you. He puts one hand on her waist, draws her in. She’s warm with a strange phosphorescence, with a glow on the nape of her neck. She tilts her head to one side and laughs back at him, and then there’s a point when the air is still.