Perl is part of the "C family" - i.e. a language syntactically inspired by C (like Java, Javascript, etc), so if learning C some things will be familiar - insignificant whitespace; many of the operators; some functions (printf, sprintf, etc); braces as block delimiters; semicolons as statement separators; etc.

Some things in C are quite painful though; memory management is done manually - you often need to deallocate the memory used by variables when you've finished using them - it lacks an automatic garbage collector. And personally I've never been especially happy with the lack of a native string data type (strings are just arrays of characters).

But C/C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world - perhaps the most widely used. So it will stand you in good stead that way.

Another direction to consider is something like Ada - a high level, object-oriented language which can compile down to machine code. (Ada has been on my "to learn" list for some time, but recent events have pushed Scala up the list.)