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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articles; one book about the future of Peru, a copy of which sits in the United States Library of Congress; a valuable, unpublished thesaurus—all without ever leaving that room, tucked away at the top of the stairs.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 fullscholarship 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 andshipped 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