A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (46 page)

Porras Barrenechea for his part immediately secured for me a couple of jobs that were easy and decently paid. My interview with him was rather surprising. I began explaining to him why I had not showed up for two or three days, when he interrupted me: “I know all about it. Your father came to see me.” He paused and elegantly skirted this pitfall: “He was very nervous. A quick-tempered man, isn’t that so?” I tried to imagine what the interview would have been like. “I calmed him down with an argument that may have impressed him,” Porras added, with that wicked gleam in his eyes that suddenly appeared when he made sly remarks. “After all, getting married is an act of manhood, Señor Vargas. An affirmation of virility. It’s not all that terrible, then. It would have been much worse if his boy had turned out to be a homosexual or a drug addict, isn’t that true?” He assured me that, on leaving the Calle Colina, my father appeared to have calmed down.

“You did the right thing by not coming to tell what you were planning to do,” Porras said to me. “Because I would have tried to knock a nonsensical idea like that out of your head. But now that it’s a fait accompli, we’ll have to find you more decent sources of income.”

He promptly did so, with the same generosity with which he poured forth his wisdom for his students. The first job was as a library assistant at the Club Nacional, the institution that symbolized the aristocracy and the oligarchy of Peru. The president of the club, a hunter of wild beasts and a collector of gold art objects, Miguel Mujica Gallo, had placed Porras on its directorate as head librarian, and my job consisted of spending a couple of hours every morning in the beautiful rooms of the library, with pieces of English furniture and coffered mahogany ceilings, cataloguing the new acquisitions. But since the library bought few books, I was able to devote those hours to reading, studying, or working on my articles. The fact is that between 1955 and 1958 I read a great deal in those few short hours in the morning, in the elegant solitude of the Club Nacional. The club’s library was a fairly good one—or rather, it had been, since the time came when its budget gave out—and it had a splendid collection of erotic books and magazines, a good part of which I read or at least leafed through. I remember above all the volumes of the series
Les Maîtres de l’amour
, edited by Apollinaire and often with a foreword by him, thanks to which I became acquainted with Sade, Aretino, Andrea de Nerciat, John Cleland, and, among many others, the picturesque and monothematic Restif de la Bretonne, a freakish writer who laboriously reconstructed the world of his time, in his novels and in his autobiography, from the point of view of his fetishistic obsession for the feminine foot. Those readings were very important, and for a fair time I believed that eroticism was a synonym of rebellion and of freedom in the social and artistic realm, and a marvelous source of creativity. That is what it seems to have been, at least in the eighteenth century, in the works and the attitudes of the
libertins
(a word which, as Roger Vailland liked to recall, does not mean “pleasure-loving,” but “a man who defies God”).

But it did not take me long—that is to say, only a few years—to realize that, with modern permissiveness, in the open industrial society of our day, eroticism changed sign and content, and became a commercial, manufactured product, as conformist and conventional as it could possibly be, and almost always of a dreadful artistic indigence. The discovery of erotic literature of high quality, which I made unexpectedly on the shelves of the Club Nacional, has had an influence on my work and left its deposit on what I have written. Moreover, the prolix and prolific Restif de la Bretonne helped me to understand an essential characteristic of fiction: that it serves the novelist to re-create the world in his image and likeness, to subtly rearrange it in accordance with his most secret appetites.

The other job that Porras Barrenechea secured for me was a gloomy one: cataloguing the graves of the oldest sections of the colonial cemetery of Lima, the Presbítero Maestro, whose registers had been lost. (The running of the cemetery was the responsibility of the Public Welfare Office of Lima, at that time a private institution, of which Porras was a member of the board of directors.) The advantage of this job was that I could do it very early in the morning or late in the afternoon, on work days or on holidays, and for as many hours or minutes as I liked. The head administrator of the cemetery paid me by the number of dead I catalogued. I managed to make some five hundred soles a month from this minor job. Javier sometimes accompanied me on my scouting trips through the cemetery, with my notebook, my pencils, my ladder, my spatula (to remove the crust of dirt that covered some of the tombstones), and my flashlight in case we were still there after dark. As I counted my dead and totted up the hours I’d worked, the head administrator, a tubby, likable, talkative man, told me anecdotes about the first sessions of each presidential session of Congress, which he had never failed to attend, from the days when he’d been just a youngster.

Before only a couple of days had gone by, I had taken on six jobs (a year and a half later, there would be seven of them, when I began working for Radio Panamericana), multiplying my pay by five. With the three thousand or three thousand five hundred soles a month they brought in, it was now possible for Julia and me to survive, if we found some inexpensive place to live. Luckily, the little apartment that had been promised to Nancy was now empty. I went to see it, was delighted by it, took it, and Esperanza La Rosa, the landlady, waited a week until, with my first pay from the new jobs, I was able to put down the deposit and the first month’s rent. It was in an ocher-colored townhouse, divided up into individual dwellings so tiny that they seemed like doll houses, at the end of the Calle Porta, where the street grew narrower and narrower and finally dwindled to nothing at the foot of a wall that in those days separated it from the Diagonal. Our apartment consisted of two bedrooms and a little kitchen and a bathroom, both of these so tiny that only one person at a time could fit into them and then only by sucking in his or her belly. But despite its diminutive dimensions and its spartan furnishings, there was something utterly charming about it, with its cheerful curtains and the little patio with old furniture and pots of geraniums that each of the apartments looked out upon. Nancy helped me clean the place and decorate it to receive the bride.

After her departure, Julia and I wrote to each other every day and I can still see Granny Carmen handing me the letters with a wicked smile and a joke: “Now who can this little letter be from, who can it be from? Who can be writing so many letters to my little grandson?” Four or five weeks after Julia’s departure for Chile, when I had already secured all those jobs, I phoned my father and asked him for an appointment. I hadn’t seen him since before the wedding, nor had I answered his homicidal letter.

I became very nervous that morning on my way to his office. I was determined, for the first time in my life, to tell him that he could fire his damned revolver once and for all, but, now that I was able to support her, I wasn’t going to go on living apart from my wife. Nonetheless, deep down, I was afraid, once the moment was at hand, that I would again lose my courage and again feel paralyzed in the face of his wrath.

But I found him oddly serene and rational as we spoke together. And because of certain things he said and others he forbore to mention, I have always suspected that that conversation with Dr. Porras—to which neither he nor I made the slightest allusion—had had its effect and helped him to resign himself in the end to a marriage planned without his consent. Very pale, he listened to me without a word as I told him of the jobs I had gotten and what I was going to earn from all of them, then assured him that it would be enough to support myself. And how, moreover, despite those various jobs, some of which I could do at home at night, I could attend classes and take the exams at the university. Finally, swallowing hard, I told him that Julia was married to me and that we couldn’t go on living with her alone, there in Chile, and me here in Lima.

He didn’t voice the slightest reproach. Instead, he spoke to me as though he were a lawyer, using certain legal technicalities on which he had collected detailed information. He had a copy of my declaration to the police, which he showed me, marked in red pencil. I gave myself away by admitting that I had gotten married when I was only nineteen. That was enough to start legal proceedings to annul the marriage. But he wasn’t going to try to do that. Because, even though I had made a stupid mistake, getting married, after all, was a manly thing to do, a virile act.

Then, making a visible effort to employ a conciliatory tone of voice that I didn’t remember his ever having used with me before, he immediately began to advise me not to abandon my studies, not to ruin my career, on account of this marriage. He was sure that I could go a long way, as long as I didn’t do any more crazy things. If he had always acted harshly toward me, it had been for my own good, to straighten out what, through a misguided affection, the Llosas had twisted. But contrary to what I had thought, he loved me, because I was his son, and how could a father help loving his son?

To my surprise, he opened his arms for me to embrace him. I did so, without kissing him, disconcerted by the denouement of the interview, and thanking him for his words, in a way that might strike him as the least hypocritical one possible.

(That interview, sometime in the latter part of August 1955, marked my definitive emancipation from my father. Although his shadow will doubtless accompany me to my grave, and although at times, even today, all at once the memory of some scene, of some image, of the years when he had complete authority over me gives me a sudden hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, after that meeting we never had another fight. Not directly, that is to say. In all truth, we saw very little of each other. And, in the years when the two of us were still in Peru—until 1958, when I left for Europe and he went with my mother to Los Angeles—or on the rare occasions later when we both happened to be in Lima, or when I went to visit the two of them in the United States, he often made gestures and said things and took steps aimed at lessening the distance between us and erasing the bad memories, so that we could have that close and affectionate relationship that we never had. But I, my father’s son after all, never knew how to answer these overtures on his part, and even though I always tried to be polite to him, I never showed him more affection than I felt—that is to say, none whatsoever. The terrible rancor, my burning hatred of him in my childhood, gradually disappeared in the course of those years, above all as I discovered little by little how hard it had been for him during his first days in the United States, where he and my mother held down jobs as factory workers—my mother, for thirteen years, was a weaver in a textile mill, and he was employed in a shoe factory—and then working as doorkeepers and caretakers in a synagogue in Los Angeles. Naturally, even in the worst periods of that difficult adaptation to his new country, his pride did not allow my father to ask me for help or permit my mother to do so, except to buy her plane tickets to Peru, where they spent their vacations—and I believe that it was only in the last days of his life that he accepted help from my brother Ernesto, who provided him with an apartment to live in, in Pasadena.

(When we saw each other—every two, sometimes every three years, always for just a few short days—our relationship was polite but frigid. To him it was always something incomprehensible that I should have become known thanks to my books, that my name and sometimes my photograph should appear in
Time
or in the
Los Angeles Times
; this pleased him, no doubt, but also disconcerted and puzzled him and so we never spoke about my novels, until our last quarrel, the one that put us completely out of touch with each other until his death, in January 1979.

(It was a quarrel we had without seeing each other and without exchanging a single word, when we were thousands of kilometers apart, about
La tía Julia y el escribidor
[
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
], a novel in which there are autobiographical episodes in which the father of the narrator is shown acting in much the way mine did when I married Julia. Months after the book came out I was surprised to receive a curious letter from him—I was living in Cambridge, England—in which he thanked me for acknowledging in that novel that he had been severe with me but that when all was said and done he had acted as he did for my own good “since he had always loved me.” I didn’t answer his letter. Sometime later, during one of the phone calls that I made to my mother in Los Angeles, she surprised me by saying that my father wanted to talk to me about
La tía Julia y el escribidor
. Foreseeing some sort of ukase, I said goodbye to her and hung up before he could get to the phone. Some days later, I received another card from him, a violent one this time, accusing me of being resentful and of slandering him in a book, without giving him a chance to defend himself, reproaching me for not being a believer and prophesying divine punishment for me. He warned me that he would circulate this letter among my acquaintances. And as a matter of fact, in the months and years that followed, I found out that he had sent dozens and perhaps hundreds of copies of it to relatives, friends, and acquaintances of mine in Peru.

(I never saw him alive again. In January of 1979 he came from Los Angeles with my mother, to spend a few weeks’ summer vacation in Lima. One afternoon, my cousin Giannina—Uncle Pedro’s daughter—phoned me to announce that my father, who had been having lunch at their house, had fallen unconscious. We called an ambulance and I took him to the Clínica Americana, where he was found to be dead on arrival. The only people who came to the wake in the funeral chapel that night to bid him a last farewell were the surviving aunts and uncles and many nieces and nephews of that Llosa family that he had so detested. In the last years of his life, he had finally made his peace with them, visiting them and accepting their invitations in the brief trips he made to Peru from time to time.)