A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (7 page)

The Lima-San Miguel streetcar went along the Avenida Salaverry, in front of the little house in La Magdalena where we came to live in those final days of 1946 or early 1947. The house still exists, faded and shabby, and even now, when I pass that way, I feel sharp pangs of anxiety. The year and a little more that I lived in it was the most agonizing one in my life. It was a two-story house. Downstairs there was a little living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and across a little patio, the maid’s room. And upstairs, the bathroom and my bedroom and my parents’, separated from mine by a short staircase landing.

From the moment we arrived, I felt excluded from the relationship between my mama and my papa, a man who, as the days went by, seemed to keep his distance from me. It infuriated me that they shut themselves up in their bedroom during the day, and on one pretext or another I kept going to knock on the door, until my father upbraided me, warning me not to do it again. His cold way of speaking and the steely look in his eyes is what I remember best of those first days in Lima, a city I detested from the very first moment. I was lonely, I missed my grandparents, Auntie Mamaé, Uncle Lucho, my friends from Piura. And I was bored, shut up in the house, not knowing what to do to occupy myself. Shortly after we arrived, my father and mother enrolled me in the sixth grade of the La Salle primary school, but classes didn’t begin until April and it was only January. Was I going to spend the summer shut up inside the house, seeing the clanging San Miguel streetcar go by every so often?

Around the corner, in a little house identical to ours, Uncle César lived with Aunt Orieli and their sons Eduardo, Pepe, and Jorge. The first two were a little older than I was and Jorge was my age. My uncle and aunt were affectionate toward me and did their best to make me feel a part of the family, taking me one night to a Chinese restaurant on the Calle Capón—the first time I’d ever tasted Chino-Peruvian food—and my cousins took me with them to soccer games. I remember very vividly the visit to the old stadium on the Calle José Díaz, sitting in the cheap seats, watching the classic Alianza Lima-Universitario de Deportes match. Eduardo and Jorge were fans of the Alianza and Pepe of the U, and like him, I too became a rooter for this top-notch team, and soon I had, in my room, photographs of its star players: the spectacular goalie Garagate, the guard and captain Da Silva, the blond Toto Terry, “the Arrow,” and above all the very famous Lolo Fernández, the great center forward, the gentleman of the field and a scorer. My cousins had a
barrio
, a gang of friends from the neighborhood with whom they got together in front of their house to talk and kick a soccer ball around and make shots at the goal, and they would call to me to come play with them. But I never managed to belong to their
barrio
, in part because, unlike my cousins, who could go outside on the street anytime and have their friends over to their house, this was forbidden me. And partly because, although Uncle César and Aunt Orieli, as well as Eduardo, Pepe, and Jorge, always made gestures to me to come closer, I kept my distance. Because they were the family of that man who was my father, not
my
family.

After we’d been in La Magdalena for only a short while, I burst out crying one night at dinnertime. When my father asked what was the matter, I told him I missed my grandparents and that I wanted to go back to Piura. That was the first time he had a fight with me, without hitting me, but raising his voice in a way that scared me, and looking at me with a fixed stare that from that night on I learned to associate with his fits of rage. Up until then I had been jealous of him, because he had stolen my mama from me, but from that day on I began to be afraid of him. He sent me up to bed and a little while later, having already climbed into bed, I heard him reproaching my mother for having brought me up as a flighty little boy, and making extremely cruel remarks about the Llosa family.

From then on, every time we were alone, I began to torment my mother for having brought me to live with him, and demand that we escape together to Piura. She tried to calm me down, told me to be patient, to do my best to win my papa’s affection, for he found me hostile and resented this. I shouted back at her that that man didn’t matter to me, that I didn’t love him and never would, because the people I loved were my aunts and uncles and my grandfather and grandmother. Those scenes exasperated her and made her cry.

Across from our house, on the Avenida Salaverry, there was a bookstore in a garage. It sold books and magazines for children and I spent every bit of my pocket money buying
Penecas, Billikens
, and an
El Gráfico
, an Argentine sports magazine with nice illustrations in color along with whatever books I could, by Salgari, Karl May, and above all Jules Verne; Verne’s
Michael Strogoff, or The Courier of the Czar
and
Around the World in Eighty Days
had set me to dreaming of exotic countries and lives that were out of the ordinary. I never had enough pocket money to buy everything I wanted to, and the bookstore owner, a little man with a beard and all bent over, sometimes lent me a magazine or a book of adventures, on condition that I bring it back all in one piece within twenty-four hours. In those first long and gloomy months in Lima, in 1947, reading was my escape from that loneliness I suddenly found myself lost in, after having lived surrounded by relatives and friends, accustomed to their pleasing me in every possible way and looking on my bad behavior as if it were a joke. In those months I grew used to fantasizing and to dreaming, to seeking in my imagination, which those magazines and little storybooks aroused, an alternative life to the one I had, imprisoned and solitary. If I already had had the seeds of a storyteller within me, they began to take firm root in this stage, and if I didn’t have them, they must have been planted then and there and begun to send out their first shoots.

Worse than not ever going out and spending hours on end in my room was a new sensation, an experience that during those months took possession of me and from then on was my companion: fear. Fear that that man would come home from the office with that paleness, those dark circles under his eyes, and that little swollen vein in his forehead that foretold a storm brewing, and would start insulting my mama, making her account to him for all the things she’d done in the last ten years, asking her what lewd behavior she’d gone in for while he was separated from her, and cursing out all the Llosas, one by one, grandparents, aunts and uncles, all of whom he shat on—yes, shat on—even though they were relatives of that poor weakling who was the president of the Republic, on whom, naturally, he shat as well. I felt panicked. My legs trembled. I wanted to shrink to nothing, to disappear. And when, overexcited by his own fit of rage, he sometimes flung himself at my mother to hit her, I wanted to die for real, because even dying seemed preferable to the fear I felt.

He gave me a beating too, every so often. The first time was on a Sunday, as Mass let out at the parish church in La Magdalena. For some reason I was being punished and was not to leave the house, but I had supposed that the punishment did not include missing Mass, and with my mama’s permission, I went to church. As I came out, amid the crowd of people, I saw the blue Ford, at the foot of the steps. And I saw him, standing motionless in the street, waiting for me. By the look on his face, I knew what was going to happen. Or perhaps I didn’t, for it was toward the very beginning and I still didn’t know him. I may have imagined that, as my uncles had sometimes done when they couldn’t stand my misbehavior any longer, he would cuff me on the head or pull my ears and five minutes later the whole thing would be forgotten. Without a word, he gave me such a hard slap on the face that it threw me to the ground; he hit me again and then pushed me into the car, where he began to say those terrible dirty words that made me suffer as much as his blows. And, once we got back home, as he forced me to beg his pardon, he went on beating me, as he warned me that he was going to straighten me out, to make a little man of me, because he wouldn’t allow his son to be the sissy the Llosas had raised.

Then, along with the terror, he made me feel hatred. The word is cruel and it seemed so to me too, at that time, and all of a sudden, at night, when, huddled in my bed, hearing him shout at my mother and insult her, I wanted all the misfortunes in the world to happen to him—for Uncle Juan, Uncle Lucho, Uncle Pedro, and Uncle Jorge to ambush him and give him a thrashing someday, for instance. I was overcome with fear, because hating one’s own father was surely a mortal sin, for which God would punish me. At La Salle, there was confession every morning and I frequently made confession; my conscience was always sullied by that fault, hating my father and wanting him to die so that my mama and I could again have the life we’d had before. I approached the confessional with my face burning with shame for having to repeat the same sin every time.

Neither in Bolivia nor in Piura had I been very pious, one of those sanctimonious little prigs that abounded among my schoolmates at La Salle and at the Salesian Brothers’ school, but in this first period in Lima I came close to being one, even though for bad reasons, since that was a discreet way of resisting my papa. He made fun of the religious hypocrites that the Llosas were, of that pantywaist habit they had inculcated in me of crossing myself when I passed in front of a church and of that custom of Catholics to kneel before those men in skirts: priests. He said that in order for him to be on good terms with God he didn’t need intermediaries, and needed even less lazy, parasitical ones in women’s skirts. But even though he ragged us a lot about how devout my mama and I were, he didn’t forbid us to go to Mass, perhaps because he suspected that, even though she obeyed his every order and prohibition, she would not have respected that one: her faith in God and in the Catholic Church was stronger than the passion she felt for him. Although who knows? My mother’s love for my father, as masochistic and tortured as it always seemed to me, had that excessive and transgressive nature of great love-passions that do not hesitate to defy heaven and even pay the price of going to hell in order to prevail. At any event, he allowed us to go to Mass and sometimes—I suppose it was because of his inordinate jealousy—he went with us himself. He remained standing throughout the entire Mass, without crossing himself or kneeling during the consecration. I, on the other hand, did so, and prayed with fervor, joining my hands and half-closing my eyes. And I took communion as often as I could. These demonstrations were a way of opposing his authority and, perhaps, of annoying him.

But it was also a matter of something more indirect and barely conscious, because the fear that I had of him was too great for me to risk deliberately provoking those storming rages that turned into the nightmare of my childhood. My manifestations of rebellion, if they can be called that, were remote and cowardly; they were contrived in my imagination, safe from his gaze, when, in my bed, in the dark, I invented evil deeds against him, or acted them out with attitudes and gestures imperceptible to anyone but myself. For example, not kissing him ever again after the afternoon I first met him, in the Hotel de Turistas in Piura. In the little house in La Magdalena, I kissed my mama and merely said good night to him and ran upstairs to bed, frightened of my daring in the beginning, afraid he’d call me back, rivet his motionless gaze on me and with his knife-sharp voice ask me why I hadn’t kissed him as well. But he didn’t, doubtless because the block was as filled with stubborn pride as the chip that had come off it.

We lived in constant tension. I had the presentiment that something dreadful was about to happen at any moment, a terrible catastrophe, that in one of his fits of rage he was going to kill my mama or me or both of us. It was the most abnormal house in the world. There was never a single visitor, we never ever went out to visit anybody. We didn’t even go to Uncle César and Aunt Orieli’s, because my father abhorred social life. When we were alone and I began to throw it up to my mama that the reason she had become reconciled with him was so that we’d die of fear, she tried to persuade me that my papa wasn’t so bad. He had his virtues. He never drank a drop of alcohol, he didn’t smoke, he never went out on the town, he was so polite and such a hard worker. Weren’t those great virtues? I told her that it would have been better if he got dead drunk, if he liked to live it up, because that way he’d be a more normal man, and she and I could go out together and I could have friends and invite them to my house and go to play at theirs.

After a few months in La Magdalena, the relationship with my cousins Eduardo, Pepe, and Jorge came to an abrupt end, after a family quarrel that was to keep my papa and his brother César apart for many years. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that Uncle César came to the house with his three sons and invited me to go see a soccer match. My papa wasn’t home, and having learned to be prudent, I told my uncle that I didn’t dare go without having first asked my father for his permission. But Uncle César said he’d explain about the match later. When we got back, after dark, my father was waiting for us in the street outside Uncle César’s front door. And Aunt Orieli was at the window, with an alarmed expression, as if to warn us of something. I still remember the terrible set-to, the way my father screamed at poor Uncle César, who drew back in bewilderment, trying to explain, and my own terror, as my father kicked me all the way home.

When he beat me, I went off the deep end, and terror many times made me humble myself before him and beg his pardon with my hands joined. But that didn’t calm him down. And he went on hitting me, screaming and threatening to put me in the army as a private as soon as I was old enough to be a recruit, so that I’d be set on the right path. When the whole scene was over and done with, and he could lock me in my room, it was not the blows, but rage and disgust with myself for having been so afraid of him and having humbled myself before him in that way, that made me spend a sleepless night, weeping in silence.