A Peruvian Oasis : A writer neither here nor there : GRINGA LATINA: A Woman of Two Worlds, <i> By Gabriella de Ferrari (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 176 pp.)</i>

Mule driver, you gradually vanish with your red poncho, enjoying the Peruvian folk song of your coca leaves. And I, from a hammock, from a century of irresolution, brood over your horizon. . . .

--From “The Mule Drivers,” Cesar Vallejo (Translated by Robert Bly)

For those who travel across cultures and countries, it is perhaps true that some enormous exertion or incredible luck is required to jump the boundaries of class. While Americans, with our egalitarian expectations and classifications unfortunately based on race, may find this concept difficult, it is a defining factor that often colors relationships across the world. In Latin America, stratification based on class and money goes hand-in-hand with race--indigenous and African races being at the bottom end of the social food chain and those of European origin at the top. To be white, to be blond, to be fair of features in Latin America has long been an entree into a privileged world.

Gabriella De Ferrari is a magazine writer and has written the novel “A Cloud on Sand.” She describes herself as a gringa Latina--ironically considered gringa for her Euro features in her country of origin, Peru, and yet Latina in our country, so-called, of gringos. Born in Peru into a family of Italian immigrants, De Ferrari af fords a glimpse into a world of bourgeois privilege in the provincial setting of the southern town of Tacna. While distant from the capital Lima--home of the rich oligarcas --De Ferrari’s father, an immigrant to Peru in 1917, obviously forged with sharp business acumen a prosperous life for himself and his family. De Ferrari’s glimpse is largely a tribute to her parents, in particular her mother, and a nostalgic evocation of a more innocent, insular and provincial Peru of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Set on an oasis in the Atacama Desert near the Chilean border and some 30 miles from the Pacific--the Altiplano looming great to the east and Lake Titicaca to the north--Tacna of De Ferrari’s childhood is a dry sleepy town of cobblestones and palm trees, adobe houses with patios and gardens flowering against dusty shades of brown. Typical of Latin American towns, Tacna is graced with a central plaza complete with unfinished cathedral, dry fountain, movie house, white marble statue of Christopher Columbus and a cast of town characters--the spinster with a sad unspeakable past, the French widow who never leaves her house, the English pilot, his mistress and his aircraft, the homosexual and his lover found murdered, Indians maids with magic herbs, frustrated wives, petty bureaucrats and all their gossip. In this context, the De Ferrari household, with its rose and vegetable gardens, ample kitchen and indigenous servants, is remembered as a reflection of the taste and traditions of both an Italian and Peruvian heritage--an orchestration of loving elegance conducted largely by De Ferrari’s mother.

For the dreaming young woman fascinated by images of American life in the ‘50s--baby-blue convertibles, modern kitchens, banana splits and jazz, culled from women’s magazines, National Geographic and the Voice of America--this home in Peru is an oasis. For the author whose privilege will allow her to travel to Lima, to Italy, to study in London and finally in the U.S. at St. Louis University and Harvard, and to marry into a Boston family with a Harvard tradition, this home is a temporary oasis as it is also the rose garden through which Peru is seen--Indians, cholos, faceless terrorists and Communists, Incan and Spanish history, political bureaucracy, drug trafficking, poverty, pre-Columbian artifacts, and contrasts in landscape from the Andes to the Amazon to desert sands stretching along the Pacific.

It is not that this Peru is ignored nor necessarily filtered from the author’s vision; it is that this messy, corrupt, economically unstable Third World country with its Nisei autocrat as president and his estranged and publicly defiant wife, its brewing war with Ecuador on the northern border, its Sendero Luminoso and imprisoned mastermind Abimael Guzman, its Moche treasure plundered, coca traffic and murder, is somehow the sad thing that happened to Peru while De Ferrari set her sights on America. Now in America, the author dreams of Peru. That De Ferrari is a woman of two worlds has perhaps less to do with race and culture, as the title “Gringa Latina” suggests, than a change in address.

In one episode, De Ferrari recounts her secret childhood infatuation for a boy of modest means and a cholo, meaning that he is of “mixed blood.” When she is discovered, her mother banishes the help and leaves her alone in the kitchen with a dead hen, feathers and all, saying, “If you are so much in love with Manuel, I think you should learn how women of his class live. Please pluck the hen, clean it, and cut it.” Years later, De Ferrari meets Manuel working at the post office, and comments. “As he sold me some stamps, it was hard for me to conceive that he had been the subject of my adoration. He had lost all his bravado, his habanera hid a large belly, and two gold teeth had replaced the gold medal.” And what indeed did Manuel see?

In recent years, Latina writers, among them Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, Gioconda Belli, Sandra Benitez, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Laura Esquivel, Mary Helen Ponce and Helena Viramontes, have lent their excellent voices to the rich landscape of human history from as far as Chile to Central America, Mexico and the American Southwest. American culture, as always hankering to be entertained by and to simultaneously absorb the other, may discover that this literature in fact covers vast and varied lands, complex histories, psychological textures, politics, economies and an infinite array of cultural mixes, and even, in this case, the gringa Latina.