Fifteen
Aunt Julia
At the end of May 1955, Julia, a younger sister of Aunt Olga’s, arrived in Lima to spend a few weeks’ vacation. She had been divorced not long before from her Bolivian husband, with whom she had lived for several years on a hacienda in the Altiplano; since their separation, she had been living in La Paz, with a woman friend from Santa Cruz.
I had known Julia in my childhood in Cochabamba. She was a friend of my mother’s and often came to the house on Ladislao Cabrera; once, she lent me a romantic novel in two volumes—E. M. Hull’s The Sheik and Son of the Sheik—which delighted me. I remember the tall and graceful figure of that friend whom my mother and my aunts and uncles called “the little Chilean” (because, although she lived in Bolivia, she had been born in Chile, as had Aunt Olga) dancing very vivaciously at Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby’s wedding celebration, a dance that my cousins Nancy and Gladys and I spied on from a stairway until the wee hours of the night.
Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga lived in an apartment on the Avenida Armendáriz, in Miraflores, very near Quebrada, and from the windows of the living room on the second floor you could catch a glimpse of the Jesuit seminary. I used to go to their house to have lunch or dinner very often, and I remember having happened to come by one noon, on leaving the university, just after Julia had arrived and was still unpacking. I recognized her hoarse voice and her hearty laugh, her slender, long-legged silhouette. She made a few joking remarks as she greeted me—“What! You’re Dorita’s little boy, that crybaby from Cochabamba?” She asked me what I was doing these days and was surprised when Uncle Lucho told her that besides being a student working toward a degree in Letters and Law, I wrote for newspapers and magazines and had even won a literary prize. “So how old are you now?” “Nineteen.” She was thirty-two, but didn’t show her age because she looked young and pretty. When we said goodbye to each other, she said to me that if my pololas—my sweethearts—would let me, I should go to the movies with her some night. And that, of course, she’d be the one who paid for the tickets.
The truth was that I hadn’t had a sweetheart for quite some time. Except for my platonic attachment to Lea, in recent years my life had been devoted to writing, reading, studying, and being active in politics. And my relationship with women had been friendly or as a fellow militant, not sentimental. I hadn’t set foot in a brothel again since Piura, or had even one love affair. And I don’t think that that austerity had weighed too heavily on me.
I am positive, though, that on this first meeting, I didn’t fall in love with Julia, nor did I think very much about her after we said goodbye to each other, nor, probably, after the two or three times that I saw her next, always at Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s house. I’m sure of it because of something that happened a short while later. One night, after several hours at one of those conspiratorial meetings that we frequently held at Luis Jaime Cisneros’s, on coming back to the townhouse on the Calle Porta I found a note from my grandfather on my bed: “Your Uncle Lucho says you’re a cad, who agreed to go to the movies with Julita and never showed up.” And as a matter of fact, I had completely forgotten about it.
The next day I raced to a florist’s shop on the Avenida Larco and sent Julia a bunch of red roses with a card that said: “Humble apologies.” When I went to apologize in person that afternoon, after working at Dr. Porras’s, Julia did not hold my having forgotten against me and teased me a lot about the red roses.
That same day, or very soon afterward, we began going to the movies together, to the evening performance. We almost always went on foot, often to the Barranco, crossing the Quebrada de Armendáriz and walking through the little zoo that existed in those days around the lagoon. Or to the Leuro, in Benavides, and sometimes even as far as the Colina, which meant nearly an hour’s walk. We always got into an argument because I wouldn’t let her pay for the tickets. We saw Mexican melodramas, American comedies, Westerns, and gangster movies. We talked about lots of things and I began to tell her how I wanted to be a writer and how, as soon as I could, I was going off to live in Paris. She no longer treated me like a little kid, but it doubtless never entered her head that I might someday become something more than the one who took her to the movies on nights when she was free.
Because, shortly after she arrived, pesky suitors started buzzing around Julia. Among them, Uncle Jorge. He had separated from Aunt Gaby, who went off to Bolivia with their two children. The divorce, which made me very sad, was the culmination of a period of dissipation and scandalous skirt-chasing on the part of the youngest of my uncles. He had become very well off after his return to Peru, when he had begun as a low-level employee with the Wiese organization. One day, after having been promoted to the position of manager of a construction company, he disappeared. And the next morning, on the society page of El Comercio, his name turned up among the first-class passengers on the Reina del Mar, which was sailing for Europe. Coupled with his name was that of a Spanish lady with whom he had been having a not at all secret love affair.
It was a great scandal in the family and gave Granny Carmen many a crying spell. Aunt Gaby left for Bolivia and Uncle Jorge stayed for several months in Europe, living like a king and squandering money he didn’t have. Finally, he was left high and dry, in Madrid, unable to pay for his return passage. Uncle Lucho had to perform miracles to get him back to Peru. He returned with no job, no money, and no family, but still possessed of his drive and his skill, which, along with his likable nature, permitted him to get on his feet again. That was the point at which Julia arrived in Lima. He was one of the beaux who invited her out. But Aunt Olga, who was inflexible when it came to matters of manners and morals, forbade Uncle Jorge to date her sister Julia, because he was a scatterbrain and a carouser, and she subjected her sister to such close watch that it made Julia almost die laughing. “I’ve gone back to the days of having a chaperone and having to ask permission to go out,” she told me. And she also told me that Aunt Olga breathed freely when, instead of accepting invitations from her pesky suitors, she went to the movies with Marito.
Since I was already in the habit of dropping by their house all the time, and Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga often were going out somewhere, they used to take me with them and circumstances turned me into Julita’s partner. Uncle Lucho was a devotee of horse racing and sometimes we went to the racetrack, and the four of us celebrated Aunt Olga’s birthday, on June 16, at the Bolívar grill, where one could dine and dance. During one of the pieces that we were dancing to, I kissed Julia on the cheek, and when she drew her face back to look at me, I kissed her again, on the lips this time. She didn’t say anything to me but a look of stupefaction crossed her face, as though she’d seen a ghost. Later, as we were going back to Miraflores in Uncle Lucho’s car, I held her hand in the dark and she didn’t draw it away.
I went to see her the next day—we had agreed to go to the movies—and as chance would have it, nobody else was in the house. She received me, intrigued and at the same time tempted to laugh, looking at me as though it weren’t me and I couldn’t possibly have kissed her. In the living room, she said to me jokingly: “I don’t dare offer you a Coca-Cola. Would you like a whisky?”
I told her that I was in love with her and would let her do anything she pleased, except to treat me ever again like a little kid. She told me that she’d done many mad things in her life, but that this was one she wasn’t going to do. Fall in love with Lucho’s nephew—with Dorita’s son, no less! She wasn’t a woman who seduced minors, after all. Then we kissed each other and went to the evening showing at the Cine Barranco, sitting in the last row of the orchestra, where we went on kissing each other from the beginning of the movie to the end.
An exciting period of secret rendezvous began, at different hours of the day, in little coffeehouses downtown or at neighborhood movie theaters, where we talked in whispers or remained silent for long intervals, holding hands and constantly worrying that a member of the family might suddenly turn up. The secrecy and having to dissemble in front of Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga or the other relatives seasoned our love with a piquant pinch of risk and adventure that to an incorrigible sentimentalist like me made it all the more intense.
The first person to whom I revealed, in confidence, what was happening was the inseparable Javier Silva, my friend since we were young boys. He had always been my confidant in affairs of the heart and I his. He was permanently enamored of my cousin Nancy, whom he showered with invitations and presents, and she, as beautiful as she was flirtatious, played with him like a cat with a mouse. My friend till death, Javier racked his brain to make my amorous interludes with Julia easier to arrange, organizing evenings at the movies and the theater, occasions on which, moreover, Nancy always accompanied us. On one such evening we went to the Teatro Segura, to see Molière’s L’Avare, put on by Lucho Córdoba, and Javier, who could never get the better of his ostentatiousness, paid for a box, so that nobody who was in the theater could fail to see us.
Did the family suspect anything? Not yet. Their suspicions were aroused during a weekend outing at the end of June, at the Paramonga sugar plantation, where we went to visit Uncle Pedro. There was a party there, for some reason or other, and we all went out together in a motorcade: Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, Uncle Jorge, perhaps Uncle Juan and Aunt Laura too, though I’m not certain, and Julia and I. Uncle Pedro and Aunt Rosi put us up as best they could, in their house and in the guest house at the hacienda, and we spent several very enjoyable days, with walks through the cane fields, having a look at the sugar mills and refining equipment, and on Saturday night at the party, which lasted till breakfast time. While at the hacienda, Julia and I cast prudence to the winds and exchanged glances and whispers or danced in a way that aroused suspicion. I remember Uncle Jorge suddenly bursting into a little reception room where Julia and I had sat down to talk together, and on seeing us there, he raised his glass and cried: “Long live the fiancés!” The three of us laughed, but an electric current passed through the room. I felt uncomfortable and it seemed to me that Uncle Jorge had also become very uncomfortable. From that moment on I was certain that something was going to happen.
In Lima, we went on seeing each other in secret during the day, in coffeehouses downtown where we always felt on edge, and going to the movies at night. But Julia suspected that her sister and her brother-in-law smelled a rat, from the way they looked at her, especially when I came to get her to go to the movies. Or was all of that paranoia on our part, the result of our uneasy consciences?
No, it wasn’t. I discovered that by chance one night when on the spur of the moment I decided to drop in at Uncle Juan and Aunt Lala’s on Diego Ferré. From the street I saw the living room lights all on, and through the curtains, the whole family gathered together. All the aunts and uncles, but not my mother. I immediately presumed that Julia and I were the reason for this secret meeting. I went into the house, and when I appeared in the living room, they hurriedly dropped whatever subject it was that they had been talking about. Later on, my cousin Nancy, very frightened, confirmed that her parents had devoured her with questions so as to get her to tell them whether “Marito and Julita were in love.” It alarmed them that “the beanpole” could be having a love affair with a divorcée, a woman thirteen years older than he was, and they had summoned the tribe together to see what ought to be done.
I immediately foresaw what would happen. Aunt Olga would send her sister back to Bolivia and tell my parents, so that they would remind me that I was still legally a minor. (In those days one reached one’s majority at the age of twenty-one.) That same night I went to get Julia, on the pretext that we were going to the movies, and asked her to marry me.
We had been walking along the sea walls of Miraflores, between the Quebrada de Armendáriz and the Salazar gardens, which were always deserted at that hour. At the bottom of the cliff, the sea roared, and we walked along very slowly, in the damp darkness, hand in hand, stopping with every step to kiss each other. Julia started by telling me just what I expected she would: that this was madness, that I was still just a brat and she a grownup woman, that I hadn’t yet finished my studies at the university or begun to live, that I didn’t even have a real full-time job or a cent to my name and that, under those circumstances, marrying me was a crazy idea that no woman who had an ounce of sense would go along with. But that she loved me and that if I were that mad, she was too. And that we should get married right away so they wouldn’t separate us.
We agreed to see each other as little as possible, as meanwhile I made arrangements for our elopement. I set to work the next morning, without hesitating for a moment as to what I was about to do, and without stopping to think about what we’d do once we had the marriage certificate in hand. I went to wake up Javier, who was now living just a few blocks from my house, in a boardinghouse on the corner of Porta and 28 de Julio. I told him the news and after the de rigueur question—wasn’t this an utterly insane thing to do?—he asked me how he could help me. We had to get hold of a mayor, in a town not very far from Lima, who would agree to marry us despite my not being of age yet. Where? Who? I then remembered my university buddy and fellow Christian Democrat militant Guillermo Carrillo Marchand. He was from Chincha and spent every weekend there, with his family. I went to talk to him and he assured me that there would be no problems, since the mayor of Chincha was a friend of his; but he preferred to make inquiries first, so we’d know for certain before going there. A few days later he went to Chincha and came back very optimistic. The marriage ceremony would be performed by the mayor himself, who was delighted by the idea of the elopement. Guillermo brought me the list of papers that were required: certificates, photographs, requests on officially stamped paper. Since it was my mother who kept my birth certificate for me and it wasn’t prudent to ask her for it, I asked my friend Rosita Corpancho, the secretary of the Faculty at San Marcos, to help me out, and she let me remove the pertinent part of my university record so as to have it photocopied and notarized. Julia had her papers with her in her handbag.
Those were feverish days, with endless rushing about and exciting talks, with Javier, with Guillermo, and with my cousin Nancy, whom I also turned into an accomplice, asking her to help me find a little furnished room or a boardinghouse. When I told her the news, Cousin Nancy opened her eyes as wide as saucers and began stammering something or other, but I put my hand over her mouth and told her that she had to get to work immediately so the plan wouldn’t fall through, and she, who was very fond of me, immediately went about looking for a place for us to live. Efficiently: in two or three days’ time she announced to me that a lady, a co-worker of hers in a social aid program, had a townhouse divided up into tiny little apartments, near the Diagonal, and that one of them would be empty at the end of the month. It cost six hundred soles, slightly more than the pay I received for my work at Porras Barrenechea’s. Now all I had to worry about was how we were going to have enough money to eat!
Javier, Julia, and I left for Chincha in a jitney one Saturday morning. Guillermo had been waiting for us there since the night before. I had taken all my savings out of the bank and Javier had lent me his, which together ought to be enough for the twenty-four hours that we figured the adventure would last. It was our plan to go directly to the mayor’s office, spend the night in Chincha, at the Hotel Sudamericano, near the main square, and go back to Lima the next day. A friend from San Marcos, named Carcelén, had been entrusted with the task of calling Uncle Lucho that Saturday afternoon, with the simple message: “Mario and Julia have gotten married.”
In Chincha, Guillermo told us that there was an unforeseen complication: the mayor had a lunch on his schedule, and since he had promised to marry us himself, we would have to wait for a few hours. But we were to go to the lunch as his guests. We went. The little restaurant looked out over the tall palm trees of Chincha’s sunny main square. There were some ten or twelve people there, all men, who must have been drinking beer for quite a while already, since they were tipsy and some of them downright plastered, including the likable young mayor, who began by proposing a toast to the couple about to be wed and very shortly thereafter began to flirt with Julia. I was furious and ready to butt him with my head, but practical reasons held me back.
When the accursed lunch was over, and Javier and Guillermo and I were able to carry the mayor, dead drunk, to his office, another complication arose. The registrar, or representative mayor, who had been preparing the marriage certificates, said that if I couldn’t present a notarized permit from my parents authorizing the wedding, he couldn’t perform the ceremony, since I was a minor. We begged and threatened him, but he wouldn’t give in, as meanwhile the mayor, in a semicomatose state, followed our argument with glassy eyes, burping and completely out of it. Finally, the registrar advised us to go to Tambo de Mora. There wouldn’t be any problem there. Such things could be done in a little town, but not in Chincha, the capital of the province.
We then began a pilgrimage from one town in the province to another, in search of an understanding mayor, which lasted all that afternoon, that night, and almost all of the following day. I remember it as something phantasmagoric and filled with anxiety: the ancient taxi that was taking us along dusty roads, full of potholes and stones, amid cotton fields and vineyards and stock farms, the sudden glimpses of the sea and the succession of squalid offices of mayors who inevitably slammed the door in our faces when they discovered how old I was. Of all the mayors or representative mayors of those hamlets, I remember the one in Tambo de Mora, a huge barefoot, potbellied black who burst out laughing fit to kill and exclaimed: “In other words you’re kidnapping the girl!” But when he took a look at my birth certificate, he scratched his head: “No way!”
We went back to Chincha as it was getting dark, discouraged and worn out, but determined to go on with the search the next morning. That night Julia and I made love for the first time. It was a cramped little room, with a monastic-style window that caught the light from the roof and pink walls on which pornographic and religious images had been pasted up. All night long the shouting and singing of drunks reached our ears from the bar of the hotel or from some neighborhood tavern. But we paid no attention to them, happy as we were, making love to each other and vowing that even though all the mayors of the world refused to marry us, nothing could separate us now. When we finally fell asleep, full daylight was entering the room and morning sounds could be heard.
Javier came to wake us up around noon. Since very early that morning, he and Guillermo had gone on, in the rattletrap taxi, with their exploration of neighboring towns, without much success. But finally Javier found the solution in the course of a conversation with the mayor of Grocio Prado, who told him he didn’t see any problem about marrying us if, on my birth certificate, we revised the date of the year in which I was born by changing 1936 to 1934. The two years’ difference would make me legally of age. We looked closely at the certificate and it was easy: right there and then we added to the 6 the little mark that turned it into a 4. We then went immediately to Grocio Prado, by way of a trail buried in dust. The city hall was closed and we had to wait a while.
To pass the time, we visited the house of the person who had made the town famous and had turned it into a pilgrimage center: the Blessed Melchorita. She had died a few years before, in the same whitewashed hut with walls of wild reeds and mud in which she had always lived, caring for the poor, mortifying herself, and praying. She was reputed to have wrought miraculous cures, made prophecies, and in her saintly ecstasies communicated in foreign languages with the dead. Around a photograph of her, showing her face of a mestiza, framed by the hood of a crudely woven ankle-length habit, were dozens of little lighted candles and women praying. The town was a tiny one, on sandy ground, with a large stretch of open countryside that served both as a main square and as a soccer field, surrounded by farms and growing crops.
The mayor finally arrived, in the middle of the afternoon. The formalities were exceedingly, dishearteningly slow. When everything appeared to be ready, the mayor said that a witness was needed, since Javier, a minor, wouldn’t do. We went out onto the street to talk the first passerby into being the witness. A farmer from thereabouts, he agreed but, after mulling it over, said that he couldn’t be a witness to a marriage ceremony in which there was not one measly drop of alcohol so as to drink to the happiness of the bride and groom. So he left and after a few endless minutes came back again with his wedding present: a couple of bottles of Chincha wine. We drank a toast or two with him, after the mayor had reminded us of our rights and duties as man and wife.
We returned to Chincha as night was already falling, and Javier left at once for Lima, with the mission of seeking out Uncle Lucho, so as to reassure him. Julia and I spent the night at the Hotel Sudamericano. Before going to bed, we ate something in the little bar of the hotel and were overcome by a fit of laughter on discovering that we were talking in very low voices, like conspirators.
The next morning, the hotel desk clerk woke me up to announce that there was a phone call for me from Lima. It was Javier, in a panic. On the return trip, the minibus he was in had gone off the road so as to prevent a collision. His conversation with Uncle Lucho had been a good one, “under the circumstances.” But he had had the scare of his life shortly thereafter, when my father suddenly turned up at his boardinghouse and shoved a revolver into his chest, demanding that he reveal my whereabouts. “He’s turned into a madman,” Javier said to me.
We got out of bed and went to the main square of Chincha, to take the minibus to Lima. We spent the two hours of the trip hand in hand, looking into each other’s eyes, scared to death and happy. We went directly to Uncle Lucho’s on Armendáriz. He received us at the top of the staircase. He kissed Julia and said to her, pointing to the bedroom: “Go confront your sister.” He was sad, but he didn’t upbraid me or tell me that I had done something quite insane. He made me promise him that I wouldn’t give up going to the university, that I would finish my courses. I swore I would, and also that my marrying Julia wouldn’t keep me from becoming a writer.
As we were talking together, I could hear Julia and Aunt Olga in the distance, behind the locked bedroom door, and it seemed to me that Olga had raised her voice and was crying.
I went from there to the apartment on the Calle Porta. My grandparents and Auntie Mamaé were a model of discretion. But the confrontation with my mother, who was there, was dramatic, with tears and outcries on her part. She said I’d ruined my life and didn’t believe me when I swore to her that I’d be an attorney and even a diplomat (her great ambition for me). Finally, calming down a little, she told me that my father was beside himself and that I should keep out of his way, since he was capable of killing me. He was carrying his famous revolver in his pocket.
I bathed and dressed as hurriedly as I could to go see Javier, and just as I was leaving the house a summons came for me from the police. My father had had me summoned to police headquarters in Miraflores to declare there whether it was true that I had gotten married, and where and with whom. The policeman in civvies who questioned me made me spell out my answers as he typed them out, with two fingers, on a clattering old hulk of a machine. I told him that, as a matter of fact, I had married Doña Julia Urquidi Illanes, but that I wasn’t going to declare in what mayor’s office because I was afraid my father would try to annul the marriage and I didn’t want to make the task any easier for him. “What he’s going to do is denounce her as a corrupter of minors,” the policeman warned me amiably. “He told me so when he swore out this complaint.”
I left police headquarters in search of Javier and we went to consult an attorney from Piura who was a friend of his. He was very obliging, and didn’t even charge me for the consultation. He told us that altering my birth certificate did not annul the marriage in and of itself, but that it might be a reason to declare it annulled if there was a court trial. If not, in two years, the marriage was automatically “legal.” But my father could formally accuse Julia of corrupting minors, although, in view of my age, nineteen, in all likelihood no judge would take the accusation seriously.
Those were days of yearning bordering on the absurd. I continued to sleep at my grandparents’ and Julia at Aunt Olga’s, and I saw my brand-new wife only for a few hours at a time, when I went to visit her, as before the wedding. Aunt Olga treated me with her usual affection, but one night her face was grim. Through my mother, my father had sent me threatening messages: Julia was to leave the country or be prepared to suffer the consequences.
On the second or third day, I received a letter from him. It was ferocious, the ravings of a madman. He set a date just a few days away for Julia to leave the country on her own initiative. He had spoken with one of the ministers in Odría’s government, who was a friend of his, and the friend had assured him that, if she didn’t leave motu proprio, he would have her expelled as an undesirable. As it went on, the letter became more and more exasperating. He ended up by telling me, amid obscenities, that if I didn’t obey him, he would kill me as if I were a rabid dog. After his signature, as a postscript, he added that I could go to the police to ask for help, but that that would not keep him from pumping five shots into me. And he signed his name a second time as proof of his determination.
I talked over with Julia what we should do. I had plans impossible to carry out, such as leaving the country (using what for a passport? using what for money?) or going to some province too far away for my father’s long arm to reach (living on what? with what sort of job?). Finally, she was the one who proposed the most practical solution. She would leave and go to stay with her parents in Chile. Once my father had calmed down, she would come back. Meanwhile, I could arrange to secure other sources of income and find a boardinghouse or an apartment. Uncle Lucho argued in favor of this strategy. It was the only sensible one, in view of the circumstances. Filled with rage, with sorrow, with a feeling of powerlessness, after a fit of tears I had to resign myself to Julia’s leaving.
In order to pay for her ticket to Antofagasta I sold almost all my clothes and took out a loan, at the pawnshop run by the Municipality of Lima, with my typewriter, my watch, and everything I owned that could be pawned as collateral. On the eve of her departure, feeling sorry for us, Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho discreetly withdrew after dinner, and I was able to be alone with my wife. We made love and wept together and promised to write each other every day. We didn’t sleep all night long. At dawn, Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho and I went with her to the Limatambo airport to see her off. It was one of those typical winter mornings in Lima, with the invisible mist making everything damp and that fog that turns the façades of the houses, the trees, and the silhouettes of people into ghostly apparitions. My heart raged with fury, and I could hardly hold back my tears as, from the terrace, I saw Julia going off toward the gangplank of the plane taking her to Chile. When would I see her again?
Beginning that very day, I entered a period of frantic activity to secure work that would allow me to be independent. I had the research for Porras Barrenechea and the small assignments on the side with Turismo. Thanks to Lucho Loayza—who, on learning the story of my incredible marriage, made an unpleasant remark on how superior those silent and unreal English marriages were to Latin ones, so disorderly and earthy—I got an assignment to write a weekly column in the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, the editor-in-chief of whose literary section was Abelardo Oquendo. An intimate of Loayza’s, Abelardo was to be a close friend of mine too from then on. Abelardo had me write up weekly interviews I had with Peruvian writers, with magnificent sketches by Alejandro Romualdo to illustrate them, for which I was paid some thousand soles a month. And Luis Jaime Cisneros immediately got me another job: writing the volume on Civic Education in a series of textbooks that the Catholic University was preparing for its applicants for admission. Despite my not being a student at Católica, Luis Jaime arranged matters so as to persuade the rector of the university to entrust the writing of that book to me (the first work of mine ever published, although it has never appeared in my bibliography).
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.)
I left my father’s office in great excitement to send Julia a telegram telling her that her exile was over and that I’d be sending her money for her plane ticket back to Peru very soon. Then I rushed over to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s to pass on the good news to them. Although I was very busy now, what with all the jobs I’d taken on, every time I had a free moment I would hurry over to their house on the Avenida Armendáriz to have lunch or dinner, because with them I could talk about my exiled wife, the only subject that interested me. Aunt Olga too had finally become accustomed to the idea that her sister’s marriage was irreversible, and she was happy that my father had agreed to Julia’s return.
I immediately began to think up ways I could buy her plane ticket. Even though I was earning more money now, renting the apartment and redeeming my typewriter and my watch, indispensable for fulfilling all my work assignments, had left me without a cent. I was looking into how I could buy the plane ticket in installments or get a loan from the bank, when a telegram from Julia arrived for me, announcing her arrival on the following day. She had stolen a march on me by selling her jewelry.
I went to the airport to meet her, along with Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, and when Aunt Olga spied her among the passengers on the plane from Santiago, she made a remark that delighted me, because it showed that the family situation was back to normal: “Look how pretty your wife has made herself for the reunion.”
That was a very happy day, to be sure, for Julia and me. The little apartment in the townhouse on the Calle Porta was as tidy as could be and in it were fragrant flowers to welcome the bride. I had brought all my books and clothes there the evening before, with great expectations, moreover, at the prospect of finally beginning to live an independent life, in a house of my own (in a manner of speaking).
I had planned to finish my college courses and then my studies in the two Faculties—Letters and Law—that came after that, and not only because I had promised my family that I would, but also because I was certain that only those degrees would allow me to have the minimum financial security needed to devote myself to writing, and because I thought that without them I’d never get to Europe, to France, something that continued to be the main goal of my life. I was more determined than ever to try to be a writer and was convinced that I would never manage to be one if I didn’t leave Peru, if I didn’t live in Paris. I talked this over a thousand times with Julia and she, who was adventurous and fond of new things, egged me on: yes, yes, I should finish my studies and apply for the scholarship that the Banco Popular and San Marcos were awarding for postgraduate studies in Spain. Then we would go to Paris, where I would write all the novels I had in my head. She would help me.
She helped me a great deal, from the very first day. Without her aid, I would not have been able to hold down my seven jobs, to find the time to attend classes at San Marcos, to compose the essays the professors assigned and, as if all that weren’t enough, to write a fair number of short stories.
When, today, I try to reconstruct my schedule during those three years—1955 to 1958—I’m amazed: how was I able to do so many things and, on top of everything else, read piles of books, and cultivate the friendship of several wonderful friends such as Lucho and Abelardo, and also go to the movies every so often and eat and sleep? On paper, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all that. But I found room to fit it all in, and despite the hectic rushing around and the need to stretch every penny, they were exciting years of hopes renewed and enhanced, years in which, to be sure, I did not regret my sudden marriage.
I believe Julia didn’t either. We loved each other, enjoyed each other’s company, and although we had the inevitable fights that married life brings with it, during those three years in Lima, before the trip to Europe, our relationship was productive and mutually stimulating. One source of our quarrels was my fits of retrospective jealousy, the absurd, anguished fury I felt when I discovered that Julia had had a love life, and most important of all, following her divorce and up until the eve of her coming to Lima, she had had an impassioned love affair with an Argentine singer, who came to La Paz and caused havoc among the women in the city. For some mysterious reason—the subject makes me laugh today, but at the time it made me suffer a great deal and I made Julia suffer too on account of it—my wife’s affair with the Argentine singer, which she naïvely mentioned in passing shortly after we were married, kept me awake nights and made me feel that, even though it was over and done with, it represented a threat, a danger to our marriage, for it stole a part of Julia’s life from me, a part that would always be out of my reach, and that therefore we would never be able to be completely happy. I demanded that she recount to me a plethora of details about this adventure, and for that reason we sometimes had violent arguments, which would end in tender reconciliations.
But we also had fine times together. When one almost never has time, or money, for diversions, these, however rare and modest they may be, take on a wondrous quality, produce a pleasure unknown to those who can enjoy them when and as they please. I remember the childlike excitement it caused us, at the end of the month sometimes, to go out to lunch in a German restaurant on the Calle La Esperanza, the Gambrinus, where they served a delicious Wiener schnitzel, for which we joyfully prepared ourselves, looking forward to it for days. Or on certain nights, going to eat a pizza with a little pitcher of wine at La Pizzería, which a nice Swiss couple had just opened up on the Diagonal, and which, from the modest garage where it first set up in business, would become over the years one of the best-known restaurants in Miraflores.
Where we went at least once a week was to the movies. They delighted both of us. Unlike what happens to me with books, which, when they’re bad, not only bore me but irritate me as well, since they make me feel that I’m wasting my time, I can put up with bad films very easily, and as long as they aren’t pretentious, they amuse me. So we used to go see whatever was playing, and above all Mexican melodramas, full of moaning and groaning, with María Félix, Arturo de Córdoba, Agustín Lara, Emilio Tuero, Mirta Aguirre, and all the others, for which Julia and I had a perverse predilection.
Julia was a very good typist, so that I could give her the list of dead in the Presbítero Maestro scribbled in my notebooks and she would turn them into luminously clear index cards. She also typed my feature stories and articles for El Comercio, Turismo, and the magazine Cultura Peruana, for which I began to write, soon after, a monthly column devoted to the most important Peruvian political thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the title of “Hombres, libros y ideas” (“Men, Books and Ideas”). Preparing that column, for a little over two years, was very enjoyable, since, thanks to Porras Barrenechea’s library and the one at the Club Nacional, I could read almost all of them, from Sánchez Carrión y Vigil to José Carlos Mariátegui and Riva Agüero, passing by way of González Prada, whose virulent anarchical diatribes against institutions and political leaders of all stripes, in an exquisitely sculptured prose with the bright polish of the Parnassian poets, naturally made a tremendous impression on me.
The weekly interviews that Abelardo assigned me for El Comercio were very instructive with regard to the situation of Peruvian literature, although frequently they were disappointing. The first writer I interviewed was José María Arguedas. He had not yet published Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers), but the author of Yawar Fiesta and Diamantes y pedernales (Diamonds and Flints), published not long before by Mejía Baca, was already surrounded by a certain cult that thought highly of him as a delicately lyrical narrator possessed of intimate knowledge of the world of the Indian. I was surprised by how timid and modest he was, how little he knew about modern literature, and his fears and hesitations. He made me show him the interview once I had written it up, corrected a number of things, and then sent a letter to Abelardo, requesting that it not be published, since he didn’t want anyone’s feelings to be hurt by it (because in it he had mentioned the stepbrother who had tormented him in his childhood). The letter arrived after the interview had already been printed. Arguedas was not disturbed by this and immediately sent me an affectionate little note, thanking me for how well I had dealt with him and his work.
I think that for that column I interviewed every living Peruvian who had ever published a novel in Peru: from the very elderly Enrique López Albújar, a living relic, who, in his little house in San Miguel, mixed up names, dates, and titles and spoke of men now seventy years old as “boys,” to the brand-new arrival on the literary scene, Vargas Vicuña, who was in the habit of interrupting his public readings by letting out a shout that was his motto (“Long live life, goddamn it!”) and who, after the beautiful prose passages of Nahuín, mysteriously vanished, at least from the world of literature. And passing, of course, by way of the likable Piuran Vegas Seminario, or Arturo Hernández, the author of Sangama, and dozens of writers, both men and women, on any number of subjects, the authors of novels about Creoles, about aborigines, about mestizos, about local customs, about blacks, which always fell from my hands and seemed very old (not ancient, just very old) because of the way in which they were written and, above all, structured as narratives.
At that time, largely because of my bedazzlement by Faulkner’s works, I was continually fascinated by novelistic technique, and all the novels that came my way I read with a clinical eye, observing the way in which point of view was handled, how the chronology was organized, whether the function of the narrator was consistent or whether the inconsistencies and technical infelicities—the use of adjectives, for example—destroyed (got in the way of) the work’s verisimilitude. I questioned all the novelists and short story writers whom I interviewed about narrative form, about their technical preoccupations, and their answers, disdainful of such “formalisms,” always dismayed me. Some of them added “formalisms borrowed from abroad, imitations of European trends,” and others went so far as to use the loaded word “telluric”: “To me, the important thing is not form, but life itself,” “My literature receives its sustenance from Peruvian essences.”
Ever since those days I have abhorred the word “telluric,” flaunted by many writers and critics of the time as the greatest literary virtue and the obligatory theme of every Peruvian writer. To be telluric meant to write a literature with roots in the bowels of the earth, in local landscape and local customs, preferably Andean ones, and to denounce the bossism and feudalism of the highlands, the jungle, or the coast, with cruel episodes involving mistis (whites in positions of power) who raped peasant girls, drunken authorities who stole, and fanatical, corrupt priests who preached resignation to the Indians. Those who wrote and promoted telluric literature failed to realize that, despite their intentions, it was the most conformist and conventional literature in the world, the repetition of a series of clichés, put together mechanically, in which a folkloristic language, affected and caricatural, and the carelessness with which the narratives were constructed completely corrupted the historico-critical testimony meant to justify them. Unreadable as literature, they were also false social documents, in truth a picturesque, banal, and complaisant adulteration of a complex reality.
For me, the word telluric came to stand for provincialism and underdevelopment in the field of literature, the elementary and superficial version of the writer’s vocation held by the ingenuous pen pusher who believes that good novels can be written by inventing good “subjects” and has yet to learn that a successful novel is a valiant intellectual effort, a struggle with language and the invention of a narrative order, of an organization of time, of movements, of an imparting of information alternating with silences on which it depends entirely whether a piece of fiction is true or false, moving or ridiculous, serious or stupid. I didn’t know whether I would manage to become a writer someday, but I did know after those years that I would never be a telluric writer.
To be sure, not all the Peruvian writers whom I interviewed had that folkloristic scorn for form nor did they shield their laziness behind an adjective. One of the exceptions was Sebastián Salazar Bondy. He had not written novels, but he had written short stories—in addition to essays, works for the theater, and poetry—and thus had a place in the series. That was the first time I conversed at length with him. I sought him out in his little office at the daily La Prensa, and we went downstairs to have coffee together, at the Crem Rica on the Jirón de la Unión. He was tall and slender and sharp as a knife, tremendously likable and intelligent and, unlike the others, well acquainted with modern literature, about which he spoke with an assurance and a keenness of judgment that filled me with respect. Like every young person who aspired to be a writer, I was a parricide, and Salazar Bondy, because of how active and many-sided he was—he seemed at times to represent the entire cultural life of Peru—turned out to be the “father” whom my generation had to bury in order to take on a personality of our own, and it was very “in” to attack him. I had done so too, severely criticizing, in Turismo, his play No hay isla feliz (There Is No Happy Island), which I didn’t like. Although we came to be intimate friends only much later, I keep remembering that interview, because of the good impression it made on me. Talking with him was a healthy contrast to other authors whom I had interviewed: he was living proof that a Peruvian writer didn’t have to be telluric, that one could have a firm footing in Peruvian life and at the same time a mind open to the good literature of the whole world.
But of all my interviewees, the most picturesque and original one was, by far, Enrique Congrains Martin, who at the time was at the height of his popularity. He was a few years older than I was, blond and fond of sports, but very serious, to the point, I believe, of being impermeable to humor. He had a somewhat disconcerting fixed stare and his whole person exuded energy and action. He had come to literature for purely practical reasons, although that seemed scarcely believable. From an early age he had been a salesman of various products, and rumor had it that he was also the inventor of a special soap to wash saucepans, and that one of the fantastic projects he’d thought up had been to organize a union of domestic cooks who worked in Lima, so as to require, through this entity (he would be pulling the strings), all the housewives of the city to have their kitchenware scrubbed with the soap that he’d invented. Everyone thinks up mad undertakings; Enrique Congrains Martin had the ability—unheard of in Peru—to invariably put into practice the crazy projects that he came up with. From being a soap salesman he went on to be a book salesman, and so one day he decided to write and publish the books he sold himself, convinced that no one would resist this argument: “Buy this book, of which I am the author, from me. Have a good time reading it and help the cause of Peruvian literature.”
That was how he had come to write the collection of short stories Lima, hora cero (Lima, Zero Hour), Kikuyo, and most recently the novel No una, sino muchas muertes (Not One, but Many Dead), with which he brought his career as a writer to an end. He published his books and sold them from office to office, from house to house. And nobody could say no to him, because to anyone who told him he didn’t have any money, his reply would be that payment could be made in weekly installments of a few centavos. When I interviewed him, Enrique had dazzled all the Peruvian intellectuals who couldn’t see how he could be, at one and the same time, all the things he was.
And this was only the beginning. As soon as he got to literature he left it behind and went on to become a designer and salesman of peculiar pieces of furniture with three legs, a grower and seller of miniature Japanese trees, and, finally, a clandestine Trotskyite and a conspirator, and therefore thrown in prison. He got out and fathered twins. One day he disappeared and I had no news of him for a long time. Years later I discovered that he was living in Venezuela, where he was the prosperous owner of a speed-reading school, where a method was used that he himself, naturally, had invented.
A couple of months after her return from Chile, Julia became pregnant. The news came as an indescribable shock to me, because I was convinced at the time (was this too an obvious proof of Sartre’s influence on me?) that my vocation might possibly be compatible with marriage, but that it would irremediably founder if children who had to be fed, dressed, and educated entered the picture. Goodbye dreams of going off to France! Goodbye plans to write extra-long novels! How to devote oneself to an activity that didn’t put food on the table and work at things that brought in money to support a family? But Julia was looking forward to having a baby with such high hopes that I was obliged to hide my deep distress, and even to simulate an enthusiasm I didn’t feel at all at the prospect of being a father.
Julia hadn’t had any children during her previous marriage and the doctors had told her that she couldn’t have any, which was a great frustration in her life. This pregnancy was a surprise that overjoyed her. The German woman doctor who saw her gave her a very strict regimen to follow in the first months of her pregnancy, in which she was to move about as little as possible. She obeyed the doctor’s orders with great self-discipline, but after several warning signs, she lost the baby. It was very soon after the beginning of her pregnancy and it did not take long for her to recover from her disappointment.
I believe it was around that time that someone gave us a puppy. He was a lovable mutt, although a bit neurotic, and we named him Batuque—Rumpus. Little and wiggly, he would leap all about to welcome me home and used to jump up onto my lap as I read. But at times he would suddenly be overcome by unexpected fits of bad temper and make a lunge at one of our neighbors in the townhouse on the Calle Porta, the poet and writer María Teresa Llona, who lived by herself, and whose calves, for some reason, attracted and infuriated Batuque. She put up with it graciously, but we often found ourselves very embarrassed.
One day, when I came home at noon, I found Julia bathed in tears. The dogcatchers had taken Batuque to the pound. The men in the van had practically grabbed him out of her arms.
I rushed off to get him at the pound, which was near the Puente del Ejército. I managed to get there in time and rescue poor Batuque, who, the minute they took him out of the cage and I picked him up, pissed and shat all over me and lay trembling in my arms. The spectacle at the pound left me as terrified as he was: two zambos (men half Indian and half black) who worked there were beating to death, right in plain sight of the dogs in cages, the animals who had not been reclaimed by their owners after several days had gone by. Driven half out of my mind by what I had seen, I went off with Batuque and sat down in the first cheap little coffeehouse I came across. It was called La Catedral. And it was there that the idea crossed my mind to begin with a scene like that the novel that I would write someday, inspired by Esparza Zañartu and Odría’s dictatorship, which, then in 1956, was gasping its last.