A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (45 page)

Those were feverish days, with endless rushing about and exciting talks, with Javier, with Guillermo, and with my cousin Nancy, whom I also turned into an accomplice, asking her to help me find a little furnished room or a boardinghouse. When I told her the news, Cousin Nancy opened her eyes as wide as saucers and began stammering something or other, but I put my hand over her mouth and told her that she had to get to work immediately so the plan wouldn’t fall through, and she, who was very fond of me, immediately went about looking for a place for us to live. Efficiently: in two or three days’ time she announced to me that a lady, a co-worker of hers in a social aid program, had a townhouse divided up into tiny little apartments, near the Diagonal, and that one of them would be empty at the end of the month. It cost six hundred soles, slightly more than the pay I received for my work at Porras Barrenechea’s. Now all I had to worry about was how we were going to have enough money to eat!

Javier, Julia, and I left for Chincha in a jitney one Saturday morning. Guillermo had been waiting for us there since the night before. I had taken all my savings out of the bank and Javier had lent me his, which together ought to be enough for the twenty-four hours that we figured the adventure would last. It was our plan to go directly to the mayor’s office, spend the night in Chincha, at the Hotel Sudamericano, near the main square, and go back to Lima the next day. A friend from San Marcos, named Carcelén, had been entrusted with the task of calling Uncle Lucho that Saturday afternoon, with the simple message: “Mario and Julia have gotten married.”

In Chincha, Guillermo told us that there was an unforeseen complication: the mayor had a lunch on his schedule, and since he had promised to marry us himself, we would have to wait for a few hours. But we were to go to the lunch as his guests. We went. The little restaurant looked out over the tall palm trees of Chincha’s sunny main square. There were some ten or twelve people there, all men, who must have been drinking beer for quite a while already, since they were tipsy and some of them downright plastered, including the likable young mayor, who began by proposing a toast to the couple about to be wed and very shortly thereafter began to flirt with Julia. I was furious and ready to butt him with my head, but practical reasons held me back.

When the accursed lunch was over, and Javier and Guillermo and I were able to carry the mayor, dead drunk, to his office, another complication arose. The registrar, or representative mayor, who had been preparing the marriage certificates, said that if I couldn’t present a notarized permit from my parents authorizing the wedding, he couldn’t perform the ceremony, since I was a minor. We begged and threatened him, but he wouldn’t give in, as meanwhile the mayor, in a semicomatose state, followed our argument with glassy eyes, burping and completely out of it. Finally, the registrar advised us to go to Tambo de Mora. There wouldn’t be any problem there. Such things could be done in a little town, but not in Chincha, the capital of the province.

We then began a pilgrimage from one town in the province to another, in search of an understanding mayor, which lasted all that afternoon, that night, and almost all of the following day. I remember it as something phantasmagoric and filled with anxiety: the ancient taxi that was taking us along dusty roads, full of potholes and stones, amid cotton fields and vineyards and stock farms, the sudden glimpses of the sea and the succession of squalid offices of mayors who inevitably slammed the door in our faces when they discovered how old I was. Of all the mayors or representative mayors of those hamlets, I remember the one in Tambo de Mora, a huge barefoot, potbellied black who burst out laughing fit to kill and exclaimed: “In other words you’re kidnapping the girl!” But when he took a look at my birth certificate, he scratched his head: “No way!”

We went back to Chincha as it was getting dark, discouraged and worn out, but determined to go on with the search the next morning. That night Julia and I made love for the first time. It was a cramped little room, with a monastic-style window that caught the light from the roof and pink walls on which pornographic and religious images had been pasted up. All night long the shouting and singing of drunks reached our ears from the bar of the hotel or from some neighborhood tavern. But we paid no attention to them, happy as we were, making love to each other and vowing that even though all the mayors of the world refused to marry us, nothing could separate us now. When we finally fell asleep, full daylight was entering the room and morning sounds could be heard.

Javier came to wake us up around noon. Since very early that morning, he and Guillermo had gone on, in the rattletrap taxi, with their exploration of neighboring towns, without much success. But finally Javier found the solution in the course of a conversation with the mayor of Grocio Prado, who told him he didn’t see any problem about marrying us if, on my birth certificate, we revised the date of the year in which I was born by changing 1936 to 1934. The two years’ difference would make me legally of age. We looked closely at the certificate and it was easy: right there and then we added to the 6 the little mark that turned it into a 4. We then went immediately to Grocio Prado, by way of a trail buried in dust. The city hall was closed and we had to wait a while.

To pass the time, we visited the house of the person who had made the town famous and had turned it into a pilgrimage center: the Blessed Melchorita. She had died a few years before, in the same whitewashed hut with walls of wild reeds and mud in which she had always lived, caring for the poor, mortifying herself, and praying. She was reputed to have wrought miraculous cures, made prophecies, and in her saintly ecstasies communicated in foreign languages with the dead. Around a photograph of her, showing her face of a mestiza, framed by the hood of a crudely woven ankle-length habit, were dozens of little lighted candles and women praying. The town was a tiny one, on sandy ground, with a large stretch of open countryside that served both as a main square and as a soccer field, surrounded by farms and growing crops.

The mayor finally arrived, in the middle of the afternoon. The formalities were exceedingly, dishearteningly slow. When everything appeared to be ready, the mayor said that a witness was needed, since Javier, a minor, wouldn’t do. We went out onto the street to talk the first passerby into being the witness. A farmer from thereabouts, he agreed but, after mulling it over, said that he couldn’t be a witness to a marriage ceremony in which there was not one measly drop of alcohol so as to drink to the happiness of the bride and groom. So he left and after a few endless minutes came back again with his wedding present: a couple of bottles of Chincha wine. We drank a toast or two with him, after the mayor had reminded us of our rights and duties as man and wife.

We returned to Chincha as night was already falling, and Javier left at once for Lima, with the mission of seeking out Uncle Lucho, so as to reassure him. Julia and I spent the night at the Hotel Sudamericano. Before going to bed, we ate something in the little bar of the hotel and were overcome by a fit of laughter on discovering that we were talking in very low voices, like conspirators.

The next morning, the hotel desk clerk woke me up to announce that there was a phone call for me from Lima. It was Javier, in a panic. On the return trip, the minibus he was in had gone off the road so as to prevent a collision. His conversation with Uncle Lucho had been a good one, “under the circumstances.” But he had had the scare of his life shortly thereafter, when my father suddenly turned up at his boardinghouse and shoved a revolver into his chest, demanding that he reveal my whereabouts. “He’s turned into a madman,” Javier said to me.

We got out of bed and went to the main square of Chincha, to take the minibus to Lima. We spent the two hours of the trip hand in hand, looking into each other’s eyes, scared to death and happy. We went directly to Uncle Lucho’s on Armendáriz. He received us at the top of the staircase. He kissed Julia and said to her, pointing to the bedroom: “Go confront your sister.” He was sad, but he didn’t upbraid me or tell me that I had done something quite insane. He made me promise him that I wouldn’t give up going to the university, that I would finish my courses. I swore I would, and also that my marrying Julia wouldn’t keep me from becoming a writer.

As we were talking together, I could hear Julia and Aunt Olga in the distance, behind the locked bedroom door, and it seemed to me that Olga had raised her voice and was crying.

I went from there to the apartment on the Calle Porta. My grandparents and Auntie Mamaé were a model of discretion. But the confrontation with my mother, who was there, was dramatic, with tears and outcries on her part. She said I’d ruined my life and didn’t believe me when I swore to her that I’d be an attorney and even a diplomat (her great ambition for me). Finally, calming down a little, she told me that my father was beside himself and that I should keep out of his way, since he was capable of killing me. He was carrying his famous revolver in his pocket.

I bathed and dressed as hurriedly as I could to go see Javier, and just as I was leaving the house a summons came for me from the police. My father had had me summoned to police headquarters in Miraflores to declare there whether it was true that I had gotten married, and where and with whom. The policeman in civvies who questioned me made me spell out my answers as he typed them out, with two fingers, on a clattering old hulk of a machine. I told him that, as a matter of fact, I had married Doña Julia Urquidi Illanes, but that I wasn’t going to declare in what mayor’s office because I was afraid my father would try to annul the marriage and I didn’t want to make the task any easier for him. “What he’s going to do is denounce her as a corrupter of minors,” the policeman warned me amiably. “He told me so when he swore out this complaint.”

I left police headquarters in search of Javier and we went to consult an attorney from Piura who was a friend of his. He was very obliging, and didn’t even charge me for the consultation. He told us that altering my birth certificate did not annul the marriage in and of itself, but that it might be a reason to declare it annulled if there was a court trial. If not, in two years, the marriage was automatically “legal.” But my father could formally accuse Julia of corrupting minors, although, in view of my age, nineteen, in all likelihood no judge would take the accusation seriously.

Those were days of yearning bordering on the absurd. I continued to sleep at my grandparents’ and Julia at Aunt Olga’s, and I saw my brand-new wife only for a few hours at a time, when I went to visit her, as before the wedding. Aunt Olga treated me with her usual affection, but one night her face was grim. Through my mother, my father had sent me threatening messages: Julia was to leave the country or be prepared to suffer the consequences.

On the second or third day, I received a letter from him. It was ferocious, the ravings of a madman. He set a date just a few days away for Julia to leave the country on her own initiative. He had spoken with one of the ministers in Odría’s government, who was a friend of his, and the friend had assured him that, if she didn’t leave
motu proprio
, he would have her expelled as an undesirable. As it went on, the letter became more and more exasperating. He ended up by telling me, amid obscenities, that if I didn’t obey him, he would kill me as if I were a rabid dog. After his signature, as a postscript, he added that I could go to the police to ask for help, but that that would not keep him from pumping five shots into me. And he signed his name a second time as proof of his determination.

I talked over with Julia what we should do. I had plans impossible to carry out, such as leaving the country (using what for a passport? using what for money?) or going to some province too far away for my father’s long arm to reach (living on what? with what sort of job?). Finally, she was the one who proposed the most practical solution. She would leave and go to stay with her parents in Chile. Once my father had calmed down, she would come back. Meanwhile, I could arrange to secure other sources of income and find a boardinghouse or an apartment. Uncle Lucho argued in favor of this strategy. It was the only sensible one, in view of the circumstances. Filled with rage, with sorrow, with a feeling of powerlessness, after a fit of tears I had to resign myself to Julia’s leaving.

In order to pay for her ticket to Antofagasta I sold almost all my clothes and took out a loan, at the pawnshop run by the Municipality of Lima, with my typewriter, my watch, and everything I owned that could be pawned as collateral. On the eve of her departure, feeling sorry for us, Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho discreetly withdrew after dinner, and I was able to be alone with my wife. We made love and wept together and promised to write each other every day. We didn’t sleep all night long. At dawn, Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho and I went with her to the Limatambo airport to see her off. It was one of those typical winter mornings in Lima, with the invisible mist making everything damp and that fog that turns the façades of the houses, the trees, and the silhouettes of people into ghostly apparitions. My heart raged with fury, and I could hardly hold back my tears as, from the terrace, I saw Julia going off toward the gangplank of the plane taking her to Chile. When would I see her again?

Beginning that very day, I entered a period of frantic activity to secure work that would allow me to be independent. I had the research for Porras Barrenechea and the small assignments on the side with
Turismo
. Thanks to Lucho Loayza—who, on learning the story of my incredible marriage, made an unpleasant remark on how superior those silent and unreal English marriages were to Latin ones, so disorderly and earthy—I got an assignment to write a weekly column in the Sunday supplement of
El Comercio
, the editor-in-chief of whose literary section was Abelardo Oquendo. An intimate of Loayza’s, Abelardo was to be a close friend of mine too from then on. Abelardo had me write up weekly interviews I had with Peruvian writers, with magnificent sketches by Alejandro Romualdo to illustrate them, for which I was paid some thousand soles a month. And Luis Jaime Cisneros immediately got me another job: writing the volume on Civic Education in a series of textbooks that the Catholic University was preparing for its applicants for admission. Despite my not being a student at Católica, Luis Jaime arranged matters so as to persuade the rector of the university to entrust the writing of that book to me (the first work of mine ever published, although it has never appeared in my bibliography).