In my memories, the tree is always different. Sometimes it’s a bushy rubber tree, attached to the car roof like a Christmas tree in a film; other times, it’s a scrawny trunk with yellowy leaves that slips down the windscreen. What never changes is the car: a grey Nissan three-door which my father always said had been imported especially from Japan. The expression on my mother’s face as she watches him get out of the car with his shirt half-buttoned, bulging eyes and dirty trousers doesn’t change either. I remember her checking the roof and the bumper and kicking the passenger door while my father stumbled towards the house. I see myself following them, dressed in my Caspar the Friendly Ghost pyjamas, which had lost their shape from the top being pulled down so often.
‘Did you buy any rockets?’ asked Sergio, coming down the stairs.
My father didn’t answer. He switched on the radio and turned up the volume. Mama went over to him asking for explanations; she was frowning and holding up the car keys with a small twig between her fingers. He didn’t even look at her. He started singing the Camilo Sesto song that was emanating from the stereo. My mother threw the keys at his stomach and turned away. Then Sergio went over to my father and tugged on his shirt. He asked him again whether he had bought any rockets. Papa stared at him and took him by the arm.
‘What more do you want from me? I have nothing left!’ he shouted.
Sergio tried to wriggle free, but my father was holding his wrist as though he were applying a tourniquet. My brother’s eyes filled with tears.
‘I have nothing left!’ my father shouted again.
My mother went over and bent his fingers back until he let go of my brother.
Sergio ran towards the stairs without looking at me. Papa shrugged his shoulders, changed the song on the radio and slumped into a chair. My mother took me by the hand and we went up to my bedroom. She closed the door, opened my clothes drawers, rummaged frantically. ‘Put this on,’ she said, handing me a purple matching outfit. Then she left my room. I put the clothes on over my pyjamas and waited motionless on the edge of my bed.
We went back downstairs, trying not to make a sound, sure that my father would say something if he saw us, but what we found was only the shell of him. He was like a model of himself with half-closed eyes and a crooked smile, swaying in time to Nino Bravo. ‘You always ruin everything!’ shouted Sergio, and he ran towards the garage. My father tried to get up, leaning on the back of his chair, but the wood creaked and it collapsed immediately. We left the house as his body hit the floor.
It was easy to recognize the hotel. Soap operas would often use its facade as a prop to show that Lima was gradually becoming more modern. They were brief aerial shots, focusing on the flow of traffic on Paseo de la República. When we reached the lobby, Mama asked for a room away from the celebrations. The lady at the desk gave us one on the tenth floor and handed Mama a key and a little bag that contained streamers and a wreath. In my memories of that night I stay silent. Sergio takes a leaflet from the desk. ‘They have a swimming pool,’ he says, his eyes wide. He immediately lost interest in any fireworks my father might set off. In the hallway we came across a woman wearing a mask and a yellow hat who was vomiting onto the marble floor. My mother hurried towards the lift. ‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ she murmured. In that moment I thought of my father. Whenever we were faced with a lift, he would go up the stairs with me. By day he was an athletic man who could climb up seven flights with no sign of fatigue. But by night he became somebody else, a slumped body, held up by the banister rail, counting each step until he reached the bedroom, where he would collapse onto the bed and become a doll that snored automatically. I closed my eyes as soon as we entered the lift, concentrating on the bell which chimed each time the doors opened. ‘We’re here,’ my mother said when we arrived. My brother was the first to leave the lift. I had never stayed in a hotel like this. The carpeted corridors overlooked the ground-floor lobby. Sergio stood on tiptoe and leaned against the waist-high concrete wall that prevented him from falling to his death. My mother tugged him away brusquely and made him walk on the other side of the corridor. We didn’t speak until we stopped in front of door number 1001. The room was large. It had a king-sized bed and cable TV, which my brother turned on immediately. It also had a large desk with a telephone directory and a pad of headed notepaper on it. Mama went over to the window and opened the curtains. Our room looked over the swimming pool which, from this high up, was a perfect rectangle, dark and unchanging. From time to time the sky was illuminated by the rockets that were going off in the city centre. They were lengthy explosions, twinkles that lit up the sky for several seconds. My father would let off set-piece fireworks that he bought from the street vendors on Avenida Aviación. He would explain the route of the fuse. He said that there had to be harmony, that it was a case of using the gunpowder to make the light dance. My brother and I would watch him from the covered patio that overlooked the garden. Papa would light the firework, mop his sweaty brow and wait near the flame until the last light died away. I picked up the blank notepaper and began to draw on it while Sergio flicked through the cable channels.
‘Don’t leave the room,’ my mother warned us. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’
‘I bet you Uncle Mario’s at our house,’ Sergio said to me in a low voice.
I ignored his words and closed my eyes. Uncle Mario used to turn up at every family celebration, even though he was only a friend of my father’s. He combed his hair forward to hide his baldness. Whenever there was a get-together he was always the last to go home, in spite of Mama’s hints. The only time I saw my father cry was with Uncle Mario. I had gone down to the kitchen for a glass of water and I ended up watching them from the bottom of the stairs. My father’s eyes were puffy and there were splashes of alcohol on his shirt. ‘We’re screwed, mate. What are we going to do?’ he said, rubbing his temples. He looked up in my direction and then turned back to the ashtray in front of him without speaking. He lost control of the tears he had been holding back. Perhaps my presence had been a trigger. Perhaps he remembered the four of us together on a happy day and each of us became one of the component sobs of his crying. I ran up to my room and hid under the sheets until my tears became an inevitable extension of his.
Mama came back to the room with two bags hanging from her arm. One contained polo shirts she had bought in the hotel shop. I took off my jumper and the ghost made his appearance. Even so, my mother insisted that I use the printed T-shirt that she laid out on the bed as a nightie. I refused point-blank, wrapping my arms around myself and the ghost, with his open mouth and big eyes, depicted on my chest. Sergio put on a polo shirt that came down to his knees. I lay back next to him while my mother took snacks and fizzy drinks out of the other bag. After giving us the food, she picked up the telephone and moved as far away as she could, pulling the wire of the receiver taut. I could tell she was calling home from the way she was clenching her teeth and touching her nose. She dialled several times. She gave up after the fifth attempt and went over to the window.
‘Sergio, Macarena, come here. It’s five minutes to midnight.’
I leaned my forehead against the glass until my reflection disappeared and concentrated my gaze on the silent and fleeting world outside the room. I pretended that my father was among that pack of tiny cars that sped along the avenue. I imagined him asking for his family when he arrived in the lobby, running up the stairs to the tenth floor, turning the handle of the room seconds before twelve o’clock. I imagined his apologies and my mother’s shouting before returning home in that state of contradictory peace that follows once the tears stop. But we saw in midnight watching the show put on by the families on the other side of the glass. We hugged one another as if it were a duty. Sergio crashed out between the sheets in a matter of seconds. I made myself comfortable in the middle of the bed while Mama turned off the lights. When she lay down next to me, I started to play with her black hair. That ritual was our lullaby. I would wind my fingers into her hair and twist it into spirals that would gradually hypnotize me. ‘I’ll be back in a moment, sweetheart,’ she whispered, getting up from the mattress. She looked in her handbag and took out a packet of Winstons which she hid immediately in her trouser pocket. She went into the bathroom, shuffling her feet. When she came back I was still awake. My mother lay down on the bed carefully. I snuggled into her body, put my arm around her waist and inhaled that mixture of tobacco and perfume that had become her personal fragrance. Then she was the one who began to play with my hair. I could feel her caresses become more irregular and her fingers gradually slipping out of my hair. Mama fell asleep first. I followed her, closing my eyes, losing myself in her deep breathing, while every so often a light from outside would flash briefly off our window.
We left the hotel in the morning, when there were still some drunk people stumbling along the pavements and a certain smell of gunpowder still hung in the air. Mama chose a route at random. She set off along Jirón Lampa and we made our way into the centre of Lima until we arrived at the Plaza de Armas. Sergio pointed out the remains of big ratablanca bangers and other smaller ones under blackened benches in the middle of the square.
‘Before we go home … is there anywhere you want to stop off?’ Mama asked in the rear-view mirror.
I shook my head. Sergio asked to go to our grandparents’ house, so we made for their neighbourhood in Miraflores. When we reached their apartment building my mother was the only one who got out of the car. She went to the intercom and came back in a matter of minutes. I never asked her if she rang the bell. It was probably an act so Sergio wouldn’t go on about it. My grandmother didn’t know how to lie. She had hidden my parents’ wedding photo behind a vase so she didn’t have to look at it. Perhaps she felt complicit in the failed plan our family had become. After all, she was also one of the people smiling in the photo, a witness who failed to spot the warning signs. Mama started the car and turned on a news station. It was the best way to keep us quiet, although her own attention was elsewhere.
In my memories, I always find my father in a different place. Sometimes I tell myself that we found him stretched out on the sofa in the living room. Other times, sitting on the rug next to the remains of the broken chair. What is always the same is his face, his mouth open and his eyes completely shut. The untouched set-piece beside the Christmas tree. My brother says we’ll set it off the following night. I try to imagine it: a single firework set-piece lighting up the entire street.