The Cubs and Other Stories Read online

  To the memory

  of Sebastián Salazar Bondy

  Contents

  Translators’ Note

  Author’s Preface

  The Cubs

  The Leaders

  The Grandfather

  A Visitor

  On Sunday

  The Challenge

  The Younger Brother

  Translators’ Note

  Begun as long ago as 1968, this translation would never have achieved even its present state without the continuing advice of many readers. To be sure, none of them is responsible for any errors or infelicities that may be found here; on the other hand, the translators recognize that much of whatever may be good in our work is owing to these readers, among whom we are pleased, and most grateful, to acknowledge Gene Bell-Villada, Luis Harss, José Miguel Oviedo, Colonel Fred Woerner and, of course, Mario Vargas Llosa himself.

  GREGORY KOLOVAKOS

  RONALD CHRIST

  Author’s Preface

  The six short stories from The Leaders are a handful of survivors out of the many I wrote and tore up between 1953 and 1957, while I was still a student in Lima. I have a certain fondness for them, because they remind me of those difficult years when, even though literature mattered more to me than anything else in the world, it never entered my mind that one day I would be a writer—in the real sense of that word. I had married early and my life was smothered by jobs to earn a living as well as by classes at the university. But more than the stories I wrote on the run, what I remember from those years are the authors I discovered, the beloved books I read with the voracity that characterizes one’s addiction to literature at the age of eighteen. How did I manage to read them with all the work I had? By doing only half of it or doing it very poorly. I read on buses and in classrooms, in offices and on the street, in the midst of noise and people, standing still or walking, just so long as there was a little light. My ability to concentrate was such that nothing or no one could distract me from a book. (I’ve lost that ability.) I remember some feats: The Brothers Karamazov read in one Sunday; that white night with the French version of Henry Miller’s Tropics, which a friend had lent me for a few hours; my astonishment at the first novels by Faulkner that fell into my hands: The Wild Palms, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, which I read and reread with paper and pencil as if they were textbooks.

  Those readings saturate my first book. It’s easy for me to recognize them in it now, but that wasn’t the case when I wrote the stories. The earliest of them, “The Leaders,” ostensibly re-creates a strike that we, the graduating students at the San Miguel Academy in Piura, attempted and deservedly failed at. But it’s an out-of-tune echo of Malraux’s novel Man’s Hope, which I was reading while I wrote the story.

  “The Challenge” is a memorable story, but for reasons the reader cannot share. A Parisian art and travel magazine—La Revue Française—was devoting an issue to the land of the Incas and consequently organized a contest for Peruvian stories offering a first prize of nothing less than a two-week trip to Paris with reservations at the Napoleon Hotel, from whose windows the Arch of Triumph could be seen. Naturally, there was an epidemic of literary vocation throughout Peru and hundreds of stories were entered in the competition. My heart beats fast all over again when I recall my best friend entering the booth where I was writing news for a radio broadcast to tell me that “The Challenge” had won the prize and that Paris was waiting for me with a welcoming band of musicians. The trip was literally unforgettable and full of livelier episodes than the story offered me. I wasn’t able to see my idol of the moment—Sartre—but I did meet Camus, whom I approached with as much audacity as impertinence at the exit of the theater where a revival of Les justes was being staged; and I inflicted on him a little eight-page magazine that three of us were bringing out in Lima. (His good Spanish surprised me.) At the Napoleon I discovered that my neighbor across the hall was another laureate who was enjoying two free weeks at the hotel—Miss France of 1957—and I was terribly embarrassed at Chez Pescadou (the hotel restaurant, which I entered on tiptoe for fear of wrinkling the carpet) when they handed me a net and indicated that I should fish in the dining room tank for the trout I had chosen from the menu in complete ignorance.

  I liked Faulkner but I imitated Hemingway. These stories owe a great deal to that legendary figure, who came to Peru just at that time to fish for dolphin and hunt whales. His stay left us with a shower of adventure stories, spare dialogues, clinical descriptions and bits of information withheld from the reader. Hemingway was good reading for a Peruvian who started writing a quarter of a century ago: a lesson in stylistic abstinence and objectivity. Although it had gone out of style elsewhere, we were still practicing a literature about country girls raped by despicable landowners, a literature written in purple prose that the critics used to call “telluric.” I hated it for being a cheat, since its authors seemed to believe that denouncing injustice excused them from all artistic and even grammatical concerns; nevertheless, I admit that my distrust did not prevent me from lighting a candle at that altar, because “The Younger Brother” lapses into indigenist themes, flavored, perhaps, with motives originating in another of my passions of that period: Hollywood westerns.

  “The Grandfather” is out of key in this suite of adolescent and machista stories. It, too, is a leftover from my reading—two beautiful, perverse books by Paul Bowles, A Delicate Prey and The Sheltering Sky—and of a summer in Lima filled with decadent actions: we used to go to the Surca cemetery at midnight, we worshipped Poe and, hoping to achieve satanism someday, we consoled ourselves with spiritism. The spirits dictated all their messages to the medium, a relative of mine, with identical mistakes in spelling. Those were intense and sleepless nights, because while the séances left us skeptical about the beyond, they put our nerves on edge. Judging by “The Grandfather,” I was wise not to persist in the genre of diabolism.

  “On Sunday” is the story in this collection whose life I would spare. The institution of the barrio—a fellowship of girls and boys with their own territory, a magical space for the human game described by Huizinga—is now obsolete in Miraflores. The reason is simple: nowadays, as soon as they stop crawling, the young people of Lima have their own bicycles, motorcycles or cars that carry them great distances and bring them back to their homes. In this way, each one of them establishes a geography of friends whose routes spread across the city. But thirty years ago we had only roller skates, which hardly let us go around the block, and even those who did go by bicycle didn’t get much farther since their parents forbade it. (And in those days, parents were obeyed.) So we boys and girls were condemned to our barrio, an extension of the home, a kingdom of friendship. Nor should barrio be confused with “gang” as it is known in the United States—masculine, bullyish, gangsterish. The barrio in Miraflores was innocent: a parallel family, a mixed tribe where you learned to smoke, dance, play sports and open your heart to girls. The concerns were not very elevated: they came down to enjoying yourself to the hilt every holiday and every summer. The great pleasures were surfing and playing soccer, dancing the mambo gracefully and switching couples after a while. I grant that we were rather silly, more uncultured than our older brothers and sisters—which is already saying a lot—and blind to what was going on in the immense country of hungry people that was ours. Later on we would discover all that, as well as what good fortune had been ours in having lived in Miraflores and having had a barrio! And retroactively, at a given moment, we came to feel ashamed. That was silly too: one doesn’t choose one’s childhood. As for me, my warmest memories are all linked to those barrio rites out of which—nostalgia blended in—I wrote “On Sunday.”

  The barrio is also t
he theme of “The Cubs.” Yet this story is no youthful transgression but something I wrote as an adult in Paris in 1965. I say “wrote” and I should say “rewrote,” because I made at least a dozen versions of the story, which never worked out. It had been going through my mind ever since I had read in a newspaper about a dog’s emasculating a newborn child in the Andes. From then on I dreamed of a story about this strange wound that, in contrast to others, time would open rather than close. Simultaneously, I was turning over in my mind the idea for a short novel about a barrio: its character, its myths, its liturgy. When I decided to merge the two projects, the problems started. Who was going to narrate the story of the mutilated boy? The barrio. How to ensure that the collective narrator didn’t drown out the various voices speaking for themselves? Bit by bit, filling up my wastebasket with torn sheets of paper, that choral voice gradually took shape, dissolving into individual voices and coming together again in one that gives expression to the entire group. I wanted “The Cubs” to be a story more sung than told and, therefore, each syllable was chosen as much for musical as for narrative reasons. I don’t know why, but I felt in this case that the verisimilitude depended on the reader’s having the impression of listening, not reading, that the story should get to him through his ears. These, shall we say, technical problems were what absorbed me. Imagine my surprise, then, at the variety of interpretations that P.P. Cuéllar’s misadventures deserved: the parable of an impotent social class, castration of the artist in the underdeveloped world, a paraphrase of the aphasia among young people brought on by comic strip culture, a metaphor of my own ineptitude as a narrator. Why not? Any one of these may be correct. One thing I have learned from writing is that in this craft nothing is ever entirely clear: truth is a lie and the lie truth, and no one knows for whom it works. What’s certain is that literature does not solve problems—instead, it creates them—and rather than happy, it makes people more apt to be unhappy. That’s how it is and it’s all part of my way of living and I wouldn’t change it for any other.

  Lima

  February 1979

  The Cubs

  1.

  They were still wearing short pants that year, we weren’t smoking yet, they preferred soccer to all the other sports and we were learning to surf, to dive from the high board at the Terraces Club, and they were devilish, smooth-cheeked, curious, very agile, voracious. That year, when Cuéllar enrolled in the Champagnat Academy.

  Brother Leoncio, is it true a new boy’s coming? into 3A, Brother? Yes, with his fist Brother Leoncio pushed back the forelock hanging in his face, now let’s have some quiet.

  He appeared one morning at inspection time, holding his father’s hand, and Brother Leoncio put him at the head of the line because he was even shorter than Rojas, and in class Brother Leoncio sat him in the back with us, at that vacant desk, young man. What’s your name? Cuéllar, and yours? Choto, and yours? Chingolo, and yours? Manny, and yours? Lalo. From Miraflores? Yes, since last month, before that I was living on San Antonio and now on Mariscal Castilla, near the Colina movie theater.

  He was a grade grubber (but no apple polisher): the first week he came out fifth and afterwards always first until the accident, then he started goofing off and getting bad grades. The fourteen Incas, Cuéllar, Brother Leoncio would say, and he would recite them without taking a breath, the Ten Commandments, the three stanzas of the Marist Hymn, the poem “My Flag” by López Albujar—without taking a breath. What a whiz kid, Cuéllar, Lalo said to him and Brother a very good memory, young man, and to us, follow his example, you rascals. He would polish his nails on the lapel of his jacket and look at the whole class over his shoulder, showing off (well, not really, at heart he wasn’t a show-off, just a little goofy and lots of fun. And, besides, a good pal. He’d whisper answers to us during tests and during recess he’d offer us lollipops, money bags, taffy, lucky stiff, Choto would say to him, they give you a bigger allowance than all four of us get, and he ’cause he pulled good grades and us it’s not so bad ’cause you’re an okay guy, you little grade grubber, that saved him).

  Classes for the lower grades let out at four, at four-ten Brother Luke had them break ranks and at a quarter after four they were on the soccer field. They would throw their books on the grass, their jackets, their ties, hurry up Chingolo, hurry up, get to the goal before the others grab it, and in his cage Judas went crazy, gr-r-r, his tail stood straight up, gr-r-r gr-r-r, he bared his fangs, gr-r-r gr-r-r gr-r-r, he jumped in somersaults, gr-r-r gr-r-r gr-r-r gr-r-r, he shook the wire fence. Jeez, if he escapes one day, Chingolo said, and Manny if he escapes you gotta stay quiet, Great Danes only bit when they smelled that you’re scared of them, who told you? my old man, and Choto I’d climb on top of the goal, he couldn’t reach up there and Cuéllar took out his penknife and swish swish he was dreaming it, he was slicing away and burrrrryiiiin, looking up at the sky, iiiiiinnnnggg, his two hands over his mouth, ahahahhh: you like how I imitated Tarzan’s yell? They only played until five o’clock, well at that hour the upper classes let out and the big guys ran us off the field like it or lump it. Tongues hanging out, brushing ourselves off and sweating they picked up their books, jackets and ties and we went out onto the street. They went down the crosstown avenue shooting baskets with their book bags, get this one, baby, we crossed the park up near Delicacies, I got it, did ya see, babe, and in the D’Onofrio candy shop on the corner we bought ice cream cones, vanilla? combo? pile on a little more, man, no gypping, a little lemon, stingy, a little extra strawberry. And then they continued along the crosstown avenue, the Gypsy’s Guitar, not talking, Porta Street, absorbed in their ice cream, a traffic light, shhlp sucking shhlp and crossing over to the St. Nicholas Building and there Cuéllar said good-bye, man, don’t go yet, let’s go to Terraces they’d ask Chino for his ball, don’t you want to try out for the class team? man, you’d have to train a little for that, c’mon, let’s go, let’s get a move on, just till six a quick game of soccer at Terraces, Cuéllar. He couldn’t, his father wouldn’t let him, he had to do his homework. They walked him home, how was he going to make the class team if he didn’t practice? and we finally ended up going to Terraces alone. Nice guy but a real bookworm, Choto said, he neglects sports for his studies, and Lalo it wasn’t his fault, his old man must be a ball breaker, and Chingolo sure, he was dying to come with them and Manny it was going to be real hard for him to make the team, he doesn’t have the build, no kick, no stamina, he poops out right there, no nothing. Still, he butts well, Choto said, and besides he was our buddy, he had to get on somehow Lalo was saying, and Chingolo so he’s with us and Manny, yeah, we’d get him on, but it was going to be tough work!

  But Cuéllar, who was stubborn and dying to play on the team, practiced so much in the winter that the following year he was picked for the left inside forward position on the class team: mens sana in corpore sano, Brother Augustine said, now did we see? you can be a good athlete and zealous in your studies, that we should follow his example. How’d you do it? Lalo asked him, where’d you get that control, those passes, that grip on the ball, those angle shots. And he: his cousin Sparky had trained him, and his father took him to the stadium every Sunday and there, watching the pros, he learned their tricks, did we catch on? He had spent the three months without going to the movies or the beach, just watching and playing soccer morning and afternoon, feel these calves, hadn’t they firmed up? Yes, he’s gotten a lot better, Choto was saying to Brother Luke, the coach, really, and Lalo he’s a fast, hardworking forward, and Chingolo he sure organized that offense swell and, especially, he never lost his morale, and Manny did you see how he comes right down to the goal to get the ball when the opposition’s got it, Brother Luke? we have to put him on the team. Cuéllar laughed happily, blew on his fingernails and polished them on his 4A jersey, white sleeves and blue chest: you’re already on, we told him, we already got you on but don’t let it go to your head.

  In July, for the intramural championship, Brother Augustine authorized t
he 4A team to practice two times a week, Mondays and Fridays at the hour for drawing and music. After the second recess, when the courtyard was left empty, dampened by the drizzle, polished like a brand-new boot, the chosen eleven went down to the field, we changed uniforms and, with soccer shoes and black warm-up suits, they came out of the changing room Indian file, jogging, led by Lalo, the captain. At every schoolroom window appeared envious faces to catch a glimpse of them running laps, there was a cold breeze wrinkling the water of the swimming pool (would you go swimming? after the match, not now, brrr it’s cold), of their goal kicks, and stirring the crowns of the eucalyptus and fig trees in the park peeping over the academy’s yellow wall, of their penalty kicks, and the morning flew by: great practice, said Cuéllar, terrific, we’ll win. An hour later Brother Luke blew his whistle and, while the classrooms were emptying out and the grades were lining up in the courtyard, we team members got dressed to go home for lunch. But Cuéllar lagged behind because (you copy all the pro shots, said Chingolo, who’d ya think ya are? Toto Terry?) he always jumped into the shower after practice. Sometimes they all showered, gr-r-r, but that day, gr-r-r gr-r-r, when Judas appeared in the doorway to the locker room, gr-r-r gr-r-r gr-r-r, only Lalo and Cuéllar were washing up: gr-r-r gr-r-r gr-r-r gr-r-r. Choto, Chingolo and Manny jumped out the windows, Lalo screamed he escaped look man and he managed to shut the shower door right on the Great Dane’s snout. There, shrunk back, white tiles and trickles of water, trembling, he heard Judas’s barking, Cuéllar’s sobbing and only barking and a lot later, I swear to you (but how much later, asked Chingolo, two minutes? longer man, and Choto five? longer much longer), Brother Luke’s booming voice, Brother Leoncio’s curses (in Spanish, Lalo? yeah, and in French too, did you understand him? no, but you could tell they were curses, stupid, from the anger in his voice), the shits, the my Gods, the get outs, the scrams, the get losts, the get goings, the brothers’ desperation, their terrible fright. He opened the door and already they were carrying him out, wrapped up, you could hardly see him between the black robes, passed out? yeah, naked, Lalo? yeah, and bleeding, man, I swear, it was horrible: the whole shower was pure blood. What else, what happened afterwards while I was getting dressed, Lalo asked, and Chingolo Brother Augustine and Brother Luke put Cuéllar in the school station wagon, we saw them from the stairway and Choto and Manny they tore off at high speed, honking and honking the horn like firemen, like an ambulance. Meanwhile, Brother Leoncio was chasing Judas who was racing back and forth in the yard, taking leaps and tumbles, he grabbed him and pushed him into his cage and between the wires (he wanted to kill him, Choto said, you should have seen him, it was scary) he whipped him savagely, beet red, his forelock bobbing in his face.