Juan Peineta walked out of the Hotel Mogollón, on the third block of Huallaga Concourse, followed by Serafín. It was still early and the center of Lima was half deserted. He saw street sweepers, emollient peddlers—“relics of a past time,” he imagined—night owls after a long night, and the usual beggars and vagrants dozing at the corners and in doorways. Some early-rising turkey buzzards picked at the garbage scattered on the street, cawing. He tried one more time to remember what his name had been when he was very young, before he began to use the artist’s surname that everyone knew him by (well, back when he was known): Was it Roberto Arévalo? No, nothing like that. He still had some papers in the pile of documents that he kept in a cardboard box in his small room at the Mogollón, his birth certificate, for example, with his old name, but he didn’t want to read it, he wanted to remember it. He had been struggling against this forgetfulness. His memory failed so often that he dedicated a good part of his time to what he was doing now: trying to fish, in the confused mess his head had turned into, for some lost word, some indistinct faces, names, anecdotes. The only thing he never forgot was the name Felipe Pinglo, the immortal bard, one of his idols since he was a boy, and the name Rolando Garro, the man who had ruined his life; for that reason, two or three times a week, he wrote notes attacking him to the papers, radio stations, and magazines, which rarely published them. But he had made himself known through those persistent notes, and in the world of show business, everyone laughed at him.
They had reached the corner of Emancipación, and Serafín, as he always did at streets and avenues with heavy traffic, stopped and waited for Juan to pick him up. Juan did, carried him across the avenue, and deposited him on the ground on the other side. His relations with Serafín were some three years old. “The years of my decline,” he thought. No, his real decline—changing his job, betraying his vocation—came from further back, ten years at least, perhaps more. One day he went into his room in the Hotel Mogollón—well, calling it a room was a great exaggeration, it was a hole, really, a den—and he saw a cat lying on his bed. The one small window in the room was open. That’s how the cat got in. “Out, out!” He shooed him away with his hands, and the cat, frightened, jumped to the floor; then Juan noticed that the animal could barely walk; he dragged his hind legs as if they were lifeless. And half stretched out on the floor, he had begun to cry the way cats cry, with long, low meows. He felt sorry for the animal, picked it up, put it on the bed, and even shared the little bottle of milk he drank at night before going to sleep. The next day he took him to the Municipal Veterinary Clinic, which was free. The veterinarian who examined the animal said that the kitten’s legs weren’t broken, only bruised by a blow he had received, perhaps from those street urchins who amused themselves using their slingshots to stone stray animals in Lima; he’d be better soon, with no need for remedies or splints. That was when, after naming him Serafín—for Serafín Álvarez Quintero, a poet who was one of his specialties when he was a professional reciter of poetry—he adopted him. The little cat became his companion and friend. A very special companion, of course, a libertine; at times he would disappear for several days and then return suddenly as if nothing had happened. Juan Peineta would always leave the small window in his dismal little room open so that the cat could come and go as he wished.
A strange little animal, Serafín. Juan Peineta had never been able to tell whether the cat loved him or was indifferent to him. Perhaps he loved him the way cats love, that is, without the slightest sign of sentiment. At times he would curl up in his arms, but it wasn’t a demonstration of affection; the fact was he was enjoying his greatest pleasure: having Juan scratch his neck and belly. Sometimes he would recite what remained in his memory of the old poems from his repertoire: José Santos Chocano, Amado Nervo, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Juan de Dios Peza, Juana de Ibarbourou, Gabriela Mistral—remnants of poems that hadn’t wandered away from his mind—and usually Serafín would listen with an attention that moved him, “an attention equivalent to applause,” he told himself.But at other times, with an indifference that resembled scorn, Serafín would turn away and leave him reciting to ghosts while the cat applied himself to smoothing his whiskers and falling asleep. “He’s an egoist and ungrateful,” Juan Peineta thought. Yes, no doubt about it, but he’d become fond of him. In fact, he was the only living creature for whom he felt affection—that is, except for Willy the Ruletero and fat Crecilda, another victim of the slanderous Rolando Garro—because all the others had been dying and leaving him more alone with each passing day. “That’s what you are, Juan Peineta,” he repeated to himself for the hundredth time: “an orphan.”
What he did remember very clearly was his old love for the genius of Peruvian song, Felipe Pinglo, and his own age: seventy-nine. There he was, resisting the avalanche of time. Unfortunate, perhaps, but healthy, his only ailments those inherent to his age—some deafness; poor vision; dead sex; a slow, uncertain step; a cold or flu in the winter—nothing to worry about from the physical point of view, though mentally his memory was worse each day, and it wasn’t impossible that he would end up transformed into a phantom of himself, not knowing who he was, or what his name was, or where he was. He laughed when he was alone: “What a sad ending for the famous Juan Peineta!”
Had he been famous? In a certain sense he had, especially during the time when he recited in coliseums, between performances of folkloric dances and singers. The applause was enormous after they heard Bécquer’s “The Dark Swallows Will Return,” Chocano’s “He was a sad Inca with a dreaming brow, / ever sleeping eyes, and a smile of bitter gall,” Neruda’s “Tonight I can write the saddest verses,” or “I like it when you’re silent because it’s as if you were absent,” or the lyrics to the waltzes of Felipe Pinglo, his specialty. They would ask for his autograph. “Señor Poet,” they called him, but he corrected them right away with the modesty that always characterized him: “Not a poet, señora, just a reciter.” He also recited on the radio, though never on television, the mortal enemy of poetry. At times he had recited in private homes, at parties or receptions—first communions, weddings, birthdays, funerals—occasions when they tended to pay him very well. But Juan had never cared too much about earning money; what he liked was reciting, transmitting the words of poets, those sensitive geniuses, such beautiful sentiments accompanied by the lilting music of good poetry. He recalled that at times he recited with so much emotion that his eyes would fill with tears.
He had inherited his love and unbounded admiration for Felipe Pinglo from his father, who knew Pinglo and even was his companion at musical gatherings and songfests of the bard, who in his brief life—born in 1899, he died at the age of thirty-seven—had elevated Peruvian music with his compositions to heights not attained by the waltz, the polka, or the marinera or tondero folk dances either before or after his prolific existence. Juan had known him only through the stories and anecdotes of his father, who, in spite of not being a singer or playing any instrument, had been part of the bohemian life and Peruvian songfests in Barrios Altos. There, in that neighborhood, Felipe Pinglo had thought up a good number of the compositions that would make him famous. Juan’s father told him that he had been in the Alfonso XIII Theater in Callao in 1930 when the singer Alcides Carreño gave the first performance of Pinglo’s most famous waltz, “El Plebeyo.” When Juan Peineta and Atanasia were married, they went to lay the bride’s bouquet of gardenias at the foot of the statue that immortalized the Peruvian bard in front of the little house where he had been born, on the fourteenth block of Junín Alleyway, a few steps from Five Corners, the navel of Barrios Altos. When he died, Felipe Pinglo had left some three hundred waltzes and polkas. Juan Peineta knew a good number of them by heart, and he had copied many others into a thick student notebook. A source of artistic pride had been including in his reciter’s repertoire some texts of the waltzes of Felipe Pinglo, who, in his opinion—he always said this to the audience before reciting—was as great a poet as he was a musician and composer. The truth is that Juan had a good deal of success reciting, as if they were poems without music, the lyrics of “Hermelinda,” “El plebeyo,” “La oración del labriego,” “Rosa Luz,” “De vuelta al barrio,” and “Amelia,” Pinglo’s first well-known song, composed when he was still a boy. Before reciting their lyrics, he would entertain the audience by recounting anecdotes (both true and invented) about the immortal bard: his sad, sickly life, his poverty, the modesty of his daily existence, the way he introduced cadences from the North American fox-trot and the one-step, which were very popular at the time, into Peruvian music and, above all, that the first musical instrument he played was the harmonica and how, because he was left-handed, he had to play the guitar backward, which, he said, had allowed him to discover new tonalities and accents for his compositions.
Juan Peineta had met Atanasia while he was reciting. He didn’t like to think about Atanasia, because he lost control of his feelings, became sad and depressed, and none of that was good for his health. But now it was difficult to remove Atanasia from his memory: there she was, in the first row at the Club Apurímac de Lima, in her little gray skirt, her green blouse, her white shoes, listening to him with fervor and applauding madly. She had eyes that gave off sparks; when she laughed, she had dimples in her cheeks and you could see her small, even teeth. After his number he had introduced himself to her, and she said she was a telephone operator at the Central Post Office in Lima, single, and not seeing anyone. The party at the Apurímac went on for a while, they drank, danced to waltzes, boleros, a few huaynitos, and this was the beginning of the relationship that would end in their engagement and a marriage that had lasted for many years. Juan Peineta felt that fat tears had begun to run down the wrinkles in his face. This usually happened when Atanasia, taking advantage of some carelessness on his part, suddenly got into his head.
He reached the Church of the Nazarenes, and Serafín, who knew that cats were not allowed in the church—the pious old women there had made his life very difficult—immediately climbed the little tree at the entrance to wait for him. Mass hadn’t begun and Juan sat in the first row—there weren’t very many people yet—and, saddened by the memory of Atanasia, dozed off. A little bell awakened him. They were reading the gospel of the day, and he wondered whether being tardy to the service would be acceptable in the eyes of God, or have no effect at all on the balance sheet of good and bad deeds that would decide his future in the next life. He had been very Catholic ever since he was a boy, but his religiosity had increased substantially with old age and forgetfulness. He had always gone to Mass on Sundays; now he also went to processions, rosaries, rogations, and the holy sermons on Friday in the parish church of the Good Death.
When he left the church, Serafín appeared, wrapping himself around his feet. During his return to the Hotel Mogollón—some three-quarters of an hour at his prudent, very slow pace—he thought about the episode of The Three Jokers, a key moment in his artistic career. Like everyone else in Lima, he knew the program. Atanasia and he would watch it on Saturday nights in the small house in Mendocita where they had lived since their marriage. With what he earned through his recitals and her salary as a telephone operator, they had been able to rent this house, which Atanasia arranged and furnished with her invariable good taste. Things were going pretty well for Juan as far as contracts were concerned; he always had performances at clubs in the district, at a few Peruvian-music clubs, and sometimes even in a nightclub. Moreover, he kept his little weekly program, The Poetry Hour, on Radio Libertad. He liked his work, and since his marriage to Atanasia, he had been happy. At night, when he prayed, he thanked God for being so generous to him.
It was a great surprise when the manager of Radio Libertad told him that América Television had called, asking for him. And had left an urgent message for him to call the producer, no less a personage than Don Celonio Ferrero, the magician and master of the small screen, who invited him to take some refreshment with him in a cafeteria near the television station. Señor Celonio Ferrero was tall and well dressed, wearing a waistcoat, tie, and rings; his nails were buffed, his watch gleamed with diamond chips, and he was so sure of himself that Juan Peineta felt constrained and dwarfed next to that demigod.
“I don’t have much time, Juan Peineta, my friend, so I’ll get right to the point,” he said as soon as they sat down and had ordered two coffees. “Tiburcio, one of the Three Jokers, is dying. Cancer of the liver. Bad luck, poor man. Or maybe too much alcohol. So young. He’ll be able to work only until the end of the month. A problem, because he’s left me with an opening in the most popular program on Peruvian television. Do you want to replace him?”
Surprise made Juan Peineta’s jaw drop. Was he suggesting that he, an artist of poetry, replace a vulgar and utterly tasteless clown?
“Close your mouth before a fly goes in,” Señor Celonio Ferrero said with a laugh, giving him a little pat. “Yes, I know, my offer is like winning the lottery. But I’ve got it in my head that you are the ideal person to replace that mestizo Tiburcio. These intuitions of mine are never wrong. I heard you recite not too long ago at the Club Arequipa, and I laughed out loud. That’s when I told myself: ‘This guy could be one of my Three Jokers.’”
Juan Peineta was so offended, he felt like standing and telling this arrogant man that he was an artist and his proposal had wounded his professional honor, and end the conversation then and there. But Don Celonio Ferrero beat him to it:
“I’m sorry, my friend, but I don’t have much time,” he repeated, consulting his aerodynamic watch. “I’m offering ten thousand soles a month to start. If you work out, we can talk about a raise, if you don’t work out, our agreement ends after the fourth week. I’ll give you a couple of days to think it over. It’s been a pleasure to meet you and shake your hand, Señor Juan Peineta.”
He paid the bill, and Juan watched him walk away with long strides toward the television station. Ten thousand a month? Had he heard correctly? Yes, that’s what he had said. Juan had never seen so much money. Ten thousand a month? He went back home, his head in a whirl, knowing deep down that it would be impossible not to accept a job that would pay him a fortune like that.
“That was when you ruined your career as an artist,” he thought once again, as he had been doing for many years. “You sold yourself out of greed, you renounced poetry for playing the clown, you stabbed art out of sheer avarice. That’s when your decline began.”
They had reached the Hotel Mogollón in time to sit down in the small lounge at the entrance, next to Sóceles, the hotel guard, to listen to Radio Popular and the nastiness and venom of Rolando Garro on his program Red Hot: Truth and Lies About Show Business.
Before he went to sleep, Juan Peineta wrote a letter in his tremulous, tortuous hand to Radio Popular, protesting in his own name and in the name of many listeners the “pestilential vulgarity that the man named Rolando Garro vomits in his program; he should more appropriately be called the Slanderous Gossipmonger. How shameless, what a discredit to the station!” He signed his name and placed the letter in an envelope. He’d mail it tomorrow.