A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (9 page)

During the time he kept me confined at the gringa’s (as my mother and I called her), my papa had turned up without warning at my Uncle Juan’s. He didn’t come in. He told the maid that he wanted to talk with my uncle and that he would wait for him in the car. My father had not been on speaking terms with anybody in the family ever since that long-ago day when he abandoned my mother at the Arequipa airport, at the end of 1935. Uncle Juan told me some time later about their meeting, straight out of a movie. My father was sitting at the wheel of the blue Ford waiting for him and when Uncle Juan got in, he warned him: “I’m armed and ready for anything.” So as not to leave any doubt in my uncle’s mind, he showed him the revolver he was carrying in his pocket. He said that if the Llosas, taking advantage of their relationship with the president, tried to send me abroad, he would take reprisals against the family. Then he railed against the upbringing they had given me, spoiling me and drumming it into my head that I should hate him and fostering in me fancy-pants ideas like saying that when I was grown up I’d be a bullfighter and a poet; his name was at stake and he wouldn’t have a son who was a pansy. Following this semi-hysterical peroration, in which Uncle Juan couldn’t get so much as a word in edgewise, he noted that as long as the Llosas refused to give him any guarantees that my mother wouldn’t go off abroad with me, the family wouldn’t see my face again. And he drove off.

That revolver he showed Uncle Juan was an emblematic object of my childhood and adolescence, the symbol of the relationship I had with my father as long as I lived with him. I heard him shoot it, one night, in the little house in La Perla, but I don’t know if I ever managed to see the revolver with my own eyes. It is quite true that I saw it constantly, in my nightmares and in my moments of terror, and every time I heard my father shout and threaten my mama, it seemed to me that, in all truth, what he said he was going to do, he really and truly would do: take out that revolver, shoot five times, and kill her and then me.

These abortive escapes nonetheless eventuated in my having a counterweight to the life I led on the Avenida Salaverry, and, later, in La Perla: being able to spend the weekends in Miraflores, with my aunts and uncles. This came about after one of the times we ran away; in the course of the reconciliation, my mother managed to get my papa to allow me, when Saturday classes were over, to go directly from La Salle to Aunt Lala and Uncle Juan’s. I went back home on Mondays, after the morning classes. That day and a half a week, in Miraflores, far from his prying eyes, living the normal life of other youngsters my age, became the most important thing in my life, the objective fondly imagined all week long, and that Saturday afternoon and Sunday in Miraflores an experience that filled me with courage and happy images, enabling me to resist the horrendous five remaining days.

I couldn’t go to Miraflores every weekend, only when I got the grades E (excellent) or O (highest in class) on my report card. If my grades were D (unsatisfactory) or M (bad), I had to go back home to spend the weekend shut up inside. And then there were, besides, the punishments that I received for some other reason, and which, once my father discovered that what I hoped for most in the world was to spend those weekends a long way away from him, consisted of: “This week you’re not going to Miraflores.” For the most part, though, the years 1948 and 1949 and the summer of 1950 were divided up for me like this: Mondays to Fridays in La Magdalena or in La Perla, then Saturdays and Sundays in the Diego Ferré
barrio
of Miraflores.

A
barrio
was a parallel family, a group of youngsters of the same age with whom one talked of sports or played soccer
—fútbol—
or a version of it on a smaller scale
—fulbito
. With whom one went swimming at the pool and bodysurfing at the beaches of Miraflores—the Club Regatas or La Herradura—and took walks around the park after eleven o’clock Mass, went to the matinee at the Leuro or Ricardo Palma movie theater, and finally went for a stroll through the Salazar gardens. And with whom, as one grew older, one learned to smoke, dance, and make girls fall in love—the ones who, little by little, got permission from their families to come stand in the doorways of the houses to talk to the boys and organize, on Saturday nights, parties in which, dancing a bolero—preferably “Me gustas,” by Leo Marino—the boys fell for the girls and announced to them that they were
templados
(in love). The girls would say, “I’m going to think it over,” or “All right,” or “I don’t want to have a boyfriend yet because my mama won’t let me.” If the answer was “All right,” one now had a girlfriend. One could dance cheek to cheek with her at parties, go to the Sunday matinee together, and kiss each other in the dark. And also, walk hand in hand after having an ice cream at the Crem Rica on the Avenida Larco, and ask her to go with you to see the sun set on the ocean from the Salazar gardens while you made a wish. Aunt Lala and Uncle Juan lived in a little white two-story house, in the heart of one of the most famous districts in Miraflores, and Nancy and Gladys belonged to the youngest generation of the
barrio
, which also had its old-timers, who were fifteen, eighteen, or twenty years old, and thanks to my cousins I joined it. I owe all my good memories between the ages of eleven and fourteen to my
barrio
. It was called the Happy Barrio at one time, but it changed its name when the newspapers began to call the Jirón Huatica de La Victoria (the street where the prostitutes were) by that name, and it became the Diego Ferré or the Colón
barrio
, because our main hangout was at the intersection of those two streets.

Gladys and I had our birthdays on the same day, and Aunt Lala and Uncle Juan gave a party with boys and girls of the
barrio
on March 28, 1948. I remember my surprise when I came in and saw that there were couples dancing and that my two cousins also knew how to dance. And that the birthday party was being held not to play games but to put records on, to hear music, and to serve as a “mixer” for the boys and girls. All my aunts and uncles were there and they introduced me to some youngsters with whom I would be great friends later on—Tico, Coco, Luchín, Mario, Luquen, Víctor, Emilio, el Chino—and they even made me ask Teresita to dance. I was dying of embarrassment and felt like a robot, not knowing what to do with my hands and feet. But afterward I danced with my cousins and other girls and from that day on I began to dream romantic dreams of being in love with Teresita. She was my first sweetheart. Inge was the second, and Helena the third. I made a very formal declaration of love to the three of them. We boys rehearsed the declaration beforehand, among ourselves, and each of them suggested words or gestures so that all would not be lost when one fell for a girl. Some of them preferred to declare their love at the movies, taking advantage of the darkness at the matinee and making the declaration coincide with some romantic moment of the film, which they presumed had a contagious effect. I tried that method, once, with Maritza, a very pretty girl with dark black hair and very pale skin, and the result was farcical. Because when, after hesitating for a long time, I dared to murmur in her ear the time-hallowed words—“I like you a whole lot; I’m in love with you. Would you be my girl?”—she turned to look at me, weeping like a Mary Magdalene. Totally absorbed in the film, she had barely heard me and asked: “What’s that? What did you say?” Incapable of taking up again where I had left off, all I managed to do was to stammer what a sad movie it was, wasn’t it?

But I made my declarations to Tere, Inge, and Helena in an orthodox way, dancing a bolero at a Saturday night party, and I wrote love poems to all three of them that I never showed them. I dreamed about them all week, counting how many days were left before I saw them again and praying that there would be a party that Saturday so that I might dance cheek to cheek with my sweetheart. At the Sunday matinee I grabbed their hand in the dark, but didn’t dare kiss them. I only kissed them when we played spin the bottle, or forfeits, when my friends from the
barrio
, who knew that we were sweethearts, sent us away as a punishment if we lost at the game, to give each other three, four, and even ten kisses. But they were kisses on the cheek and that, according to Luchín, the one who wanted to be considered a grownup, didn’t count, because a kiss on the cheek wasn’t a smacker. Smackers were given on the mouth. But at that time couples from Miraflores twelve or thirteen years old were still more or less innocent little archangels and not many of them dared give each other real smackers. I, naturally, didn’t dare. I fell in love the way calves fall in love with the moon—a pretty expression that we used to use to define boys who were enamored of a girl—but I was abnormally timid with the girls from Miraflores.

Spending the weekend in Miraflores was an adventure in freedom, the possibility of a thousand entertaining and exciting things. To go to the Club Terrazas to play
fulbito
or have a swim in the pool, from which great swimmers had come. Among all sports—I liked all of them—the one I was best at was swimming. I came to master the crawl quite well and one of my frustrations was not having been able to train in the academy directed by Walter Ledgard, the Sorcerer, as did some Miraflores boys my age who later became international champions, Ismael Merino or Rabbit Villarán for instance. I was never a very good soccer player, but my enthusiasm compensated for my lack of skill and one of the happiest days of my life was the Sunday when Toto Terry, a star from our
barrio
, took me to the National Stadium and had me play with the youngsters of the Universitario de Deportes against those of the Deportivo Municipal. Wasn’t going out onto that enormous field, wearing the uniform of the top team, the best thing that could happen to anyone in the world? And didn’t the fact that Toto Terry, the blond “Arrow” of the U, was from our
barrio
prove that ours was the best one in Miraflores? That was demonstrated in a series of “Olympic Games” we organized on several consecutive weekends, in which we competed with the
barrio
of the Calle San Martín in cycling, field and track,
fulbito
, and swimming races.

Carnival was the best time in the year. We went out during the day to squirt water on people, and in the afternoons, disguised as pirates, to the masked balls. There were three children’s balls that weren’t to be missed: the one at the park in Barranco, the one at the Club Terrazas, and the one at the Lawn Tennis Club. We brought paper streamers and squirt guns full of ether, and the group from the
barrio
, all dressed in identical costumes, was a large, joyful one. For one of those carnivals Dámaso Pérez Prado came with his orchestra. The mambo, recently invented in the Caribbean, was all the rage in Lima too, and contestants had even been invited to a national mambo championship in the Plaza de Acho, but the archbishop, Monsignor Guevara, forbade it, threatening to excommunicate the participants. The arrival of Pérez Prado filled the Córpac airport, and there too I was with my friends, running behind the convertible with the top down that was taking the composer of “El ruletero” and of “Mambo número cinco,” greeting people right and left, to the Hotel Bolívar. Aunt Lala and Uncle Juan laughed as they watched me, almost the minute I reached the house on Diego Ferré, on Saturdays at noon, begin practicing mambo steps, all by myself, on the stairs and through the rooms, in preparation for that night’s party.

Teresita and Inge were transitory sweethearts, for just a few weeks, something halfway between a children’s game and puppy love, what Gide calls the harmless caracoles of love. But Helena was a serious and steady long-time sweetheart, an expression that meant a relationship of several months or perhaps even a year. She was a close friend of Nancy’s, and her classmate at the Colegio La Reparación. She lived in one of a group of little ocher-colored townhouses with a common entrance, in Grimaldo del Solar, a place some distance away from Diego Ferré, in which there was also a
barrio
. If a stranger came to make the girls of one’s own neighborhood fall in love with him it was not looked upon with favor; it constituted a violation of one’s territory. But I was very much in love with Helena, and as soon as I reached Miraflores, I ran to the townhouse in Grimaldo del Solar to see her, if only from afar, in the window of her house. I went with Luchín and my namesake Mario, who had received declarations of love from Ilse and Lucy, neighbors of Helena’s. If luck was with us, we could talk with them for a moment in the doorway of their houses. But the kids in that neighborhood moved closer to hurl insults or throw stones at us, and on one of those afternoons we were obliged to come to blows with them, because they tried to kick us out of their turf.

Helena was blond, with bright blue eyes, very pretty teeth, and a very joyful laugh. I missed her a lot in the desolation and loneliness of La Perla, in that isolated little house in the middle of a vast stretch of open countryside to which we moved in 1948. My father, besides working for the International News Service, bought lots, built houses, and then sold them; for several years that was an important source of income for him. I say this with some hesitation because his economic situation, like a fair part of his life, was a mystery to me. Did he earn good money? Did he save much of it? He lived an extremely abstemious life. He never went out to a restaurant, much less, needless to say, to those cabarets—the Cabaña, the Embassy, or the Bolívar Grill—to which my aunt and uncle sometimes went to dance on Saturday nights. In all likelihood he and my mama went to the movies once in a while, but I do not recall their ever doing that either, or perhaps they did so on the weekends that I spent in Miraflores. From Monday to Friday he came home from the office between seven and eight, and after dinner he sat down to listen to the radio, for an hour or two, before going to bed. I think that the programs of Teresita Arce’s comic series, “La Chola Purificación Chauca,” on Radio Central, ones he always laughed at, were the only diversion in that house. And my mama and I laughed too, in unison with our lord and master. He himself had built the little house in La Perla, with the help of a construction foreman.