A Fish in the Water Read online

  A year after I was born, my grandfather signed a ten-year contract with the Said family to go off to cultivate landed properties—the Saipina hacienda—that they had just acquired in Bolivia, near Santa Cruz, where the Saids wanted to introduce cotton growing, a crop that my grandfather had successfully cultivated in Camaná. Although I was never told as much, I could never rid myself of the idea that that unfortunate story of their elder daughter, and the enormous trouble caused them by my mother’s abandonment and divorce, had driven my grandfather to accept a job that got the family out of Arequipa, never to return. “It was a great relief to me to go to another country, to another city, where people would leave me in peace,” my mother says in reference to that move.

  The Llosa family moved to Cochabamba, at that time a more livable city than the tiny, isolated little town of Santa Cruz, and settled in an enormous house on the Calle Ladislao Cabrera, in which my entire early childhood was spent. I remember it as a paradise. It had an entry hall with a tall curved roof that sent back the echo of people’s voices, and a patio with trees where, with my cousins Nancy and Gladys and my school chums from La Salle, we reenacted the Tarzan films and the serials we saw on Sundays, after the Mass held at school, and at the matinees at the Cine Rex. Around the front patio was a pillared terrace with sun awnings and rocking chairs where Grandpa Pedro, when he was not out at the hacienda, used to take his afternoon nap, swaying back and forth, with snores that used to make me and my two cousins almost die laughing. There were two other patios, one paved with tiles and the other with beaten earth, where the laundry and the servants’ quarters were located, along with pens in which there were always hens and, at one time, a baby goat brought from Saipina which my grandmother finally adopted. One of the first terrors of my childhood was that kid, which when it worked itself loose from its tether used to attack everything that got in its way, causing a great hubbub in the house. At another period I also had a chatterbox of a parrot that imitated the loud fits of stamping my feet that frequently came over me and screeched, in exactly the same way as I did: “Graaanny! Graaanny!”

  The house was huge, but we all had our own places in it, with our own rooms: my grandma and grandpa, Mamaé, my mama and I, my Aunt Laura and my Uncle Juan and their daughters Nancy and Gladys, Uncle Lucho and Uncle George, and Uncle Pedro, who was studying medicine in Chile but who came to spend his vacations with us. Besides all of them, there were the cook and the servants, who never numbered less than three.

  In that house I was pampered and spoiled to extremes that made a little monster out of me. The pampering was thanks to the fact that I was the grandparents’ first grandchild and the aunts’ and uncles’ first grandnephew, and also because I was the son of poor Dorita, a fatherless little boy. Not having a papa, or rather, having a papa who was in heaven, wasn’t anything that tormented me; on the contrary, it conferred on me a privileged status, and the lack of a real father had been compensated by any number of surrogates: my grandpa and my uncles Juan, Lucho, Jorge, and Pedro.

  My wild pranks made my mama enroll me at La Salle when I was five, a year before the one recommended by the order’s brothers. I learned to read shortly thereafter, in Brother Justiniano’s class, and this—the most important thing that happened to me before that afternoon on the Eguiguren embankment—calmed down my tempestuous behavior, for the reading of books for children—Billikens, Penecas—and all sorts of little stories and tales of adventure became an exhilarating pastime that kept me quiet for hours and hours. But reading did not keep me from playing games, and I was capable more than once of inviting my whole class to have tea at my house, excesses that Granny Carmen and Mamaé, whom I hope, if God and heaven exist, have been adequately rewarded, would tolerate without a word of protest, carefully preparing slices of buttered bread, cold drinks, and coffee with milk for this swarm of children.

  The entire year was one big party. It included outings to Cala-Cala, going to the main square to eat Salta-style meat pies on the days when there were open-air military band concerts, going to the movies, and playing at friends’ houses—but there were two holidays that stood out, for the excitement and the happiness they brought me: Carnival and Christmas. For Carnival, we filled balloons with water beforehand—it was the custom—and when the day arrived, my cousins Nancy and Gladys and I bombarded the people passing by on the street and stole peeks, bedazzled, at our uncles and aunts as they dressed in fantastic costumes to go to masked balls. The preparations for Christmas were meticulous. Granny and Mama sowed wheat seeds in special containers for the Nativity scene, a laborious structure brought to life with little plaster figures of shepherds and animals that the family had brought from Arequipa (or that had perhaps been brought from Tacna by Granny). Decorating the tree was a fantastic ceremony. But nothing was as exciting as writing to the Baby Jesus—who had not yet been replaced by Santa Claus—little letters about the presents that I wanted him to bring on the twenty-fourth of December. And getting into bed that night, trembling with eagerness, with my eyes half-closed, wanting and at the same time not wanting to see the Baby Jesus steal into my room with the presents—books, many books—that he would leave at the foot of the bed and that I would discover the next day, my chest bursting with excitement.

  While I was in Bolivia, up until the end of 1945, I believed that the Baby Jesus brought toys, and that storks brought babies from heaven, and not one of what my confessors called bad thoughts ever crossed my mind; they made their appearance later, when I was living in Lima. I was a mischievous child and a crybaby, but as innocent as a lily. And devoutly religious. I remember the occasion of my first communion as a great event: the preparatory classes given us every afternoon beforehand by Brother Agustín, the principal of La Salle, in the chapel of the school, and the moving ceremony—with me dressed in white for the occasion and the entire family present—in which I received the host from the hands of the bishop of Cochabamba, an imposing figure enveloped in royal purple vestments whose hand I hastened to kiss when I met him on the street or when he appeared at the house on Ladislao Cabrera (which was the Peruvian consulate as well, a post my grandfather had assumed ad honorem). And I remember as well the breakfast with hot chocolate and sweets made of almonds and candied fruit which they gave to those of us who had celebrated our first communion, and our families, in the patio of the school.

  From Cochabamba I remember the Salta-style meat pies and the Sunday lunches, with the whole family present—Uncle Lucho was already married to Aunt Olga, no doubt, and Uncle Jorge to Aunt Gaby—and the enormous family dining table, where everyone always reminisced about Peru, or perhaps I should say about Arequipa, and where we all hoped that when it came time for dessert there would appear the sopaipillas, delicious fritters dipped in honey, and the guargüeros, pineapple and coconut sweets, desserts typical of Tacna and Moquegua, that Granny and Mamaé made with magic hands. I remember the Urioste and Beverley swimming pools to which Uncle Lucho took me, in which I learned to swim, the sport I liked best as a youngster and the only one in which I managed to acquire a certain skill. And I also remember, with the greatest affection, the little stories and the books that I read with mystical concentration and absorption, totally immersed in their world of illusion—the stories of Genevieve of Brabant and William Tell, of King Arthur and Cagliostro, of Robin Hood and the hunchback Lagardère, of Sandokán and Captain Nemo, and, above all, the series about Guillermo, a mischievous little boy my age, about whom each book in the series recounted an adventure which I tried to repeat afterward in the garden of the house. And I remember my first scribblings as a storyteller, which were usually in the form of little verses, or prolongations and amended versions of the stories I read, for which the family praised me. Grandfather was fond of poetry—my great-grandfather Belisario had been a poet and had had a novel published—and he taught me to memorize verses by Campoamor or Rubén Darío, and both he and my mother (who kept on her night table a copy of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción des
esperada, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which she forbade me to read) congratulated me on those preliterate ventures as charming signs of my poetic gifts.

  Despite her being so young, my mother did not have—nor did she want—suitors. Shortly after arriving in Cochabamba she began to work as an assistant accountant in the branch office of the Grace Line and her work and her son occupied her entire life. The explanation was that she couldn’t even think of marrying again since she was already married in God’s eyes, the only kind of marriage that counted, something she doubtless believed wholeheartedly, since she is the most Catholic of Catholics in that firmly Catholic family that the Llosas were—and still are, I believe. But, even more deep-seated than the religious reason for her remaining indifferent to those suitors who flocked about her after her divorce, was the fact that, despite what had happened, she was still in love with my father, with a total and unyielding passion, which she hid from all those around her, until, when the family went back to Peru, the Ernesto J. Vargas who had disappeared appeared again, to enter her life and mine once more, like a whirlwind.

  “My papa is here in Piura?”

  It was like one of those storybook fantasies, so captivating and exciting that they seemed true, but only as long as the time it took to read them. Was this one too going to vanish all of a sudden, like the ones in books the minute I closed them?

  “Yes, in the Hotel de Turistas.”

  “And when am I going to see him?”

  “Right now. But don’t tell Grandpa and Grandma. They don’t know he’s here.”

  From a distance, even the bad memories of Cochabamba seem like good ones. There were two bad ones: my tonsillectomy and the Great Dane in the garage of a German, Señor Beckmann, located across the street from our house on Ladislao Cabrera. They tricked me into going to Dr. Sáenz Peña’s office, telling me that it was just another visit like the other ones I made for my frequent fevers and sore throats, and once we got there they sat me down in the lap of a male nurse who imprisoned me in his arms, as Dr. Sáenz Peña opened my mouth and sprayed a little ether in it, with a squirt gun that looked like the one that my uncles took with them to festivities in the streets at Carnival time. Afterward, as I was convalescing under the pampering care of Granny Carmen and Auntie Mamaé, I was allowed to eat lots of ice cream. (Apparently, during that operation under local anesthesia, I screamed and wriggled about, interfering with the removal of my tonsils by the surgeon, who botched the operation and failed to remove bits of them. They grew larger and larger and today they are again the same size as they were then.)

  Señor Beckmann’s Great Dane fascinated and terrified me. He kept it tied up and its barking deafened me in my nightmares. At one time Jorge, the youngest of my uncles, kept his car in that garage and I would go there with him, secretly relishing the idea of what might happen if Señor Beckmann’s Great Dane got loose. One night it flung itself on us. We took off at a run. The animal chased us, caught up with us as we reached the street, and tore the seat of my trousers. The bite it gave me was superficial, but the excitement and the dramatic versions of it that I gave my schoolmates lasted for weeks.

  And one day it happened that “Uncle José Luis,” the Peruvian ambassador to La Paz and a relative of my grandfather Pedro’s, was elected president of the Republic, in far-off Peru. The news electrified the whole family, in which Uncle José Luis was looked upon as a revered celebrity. He had come to Cochabamba and been at our house a number of times, and I shared the family’s admiration for this important relative who was so well-spoken, wore a bow tie, a hat with a ribbon-bound brim, and walked with his short legs spread wide apart, just like Charlie Chaplin—because on each of those visits to Cochabamba he had left a bit of spending money in my pocket when he said goodbye to me.

  Once he had entered office, Uncle José Luis offered to appoint my grandfather to the post either of Peruvian consul in Arica or of prefect of Piura. My grandpa, whose ten-year contract with the Saids had just ended, chose Piura. He departed almost immediately, leaving the rest of the family with the task of clearing out our things from the house. We stayed there until almost the end of 1945, so that my cousins Nancy and Gladys and I could take our year-end exams. I have a vague idea of those last months in Bolivia, of the interminable succession of visitors who came to say goodbye to the Llosas, who in many ways were now a Cochabamba family: Uncle Lucho had married Aunt Olga, who, although Chilean by birth, was Bolivian by family background and heartfelt loyalties, and Uncle Jorge was married to Aunt Gaby, who was Bolivian on both sides of her family. Moreover, our family had grown in Cochabamba. Family legend has it that I tried to see the arrival in this world of the first daughter, Wanda, born to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, by spying on her birth from one of the tall trees in the front patio, from which Uncle Lucho hauled me down by one of my ears. But that must not be true, since I don’t remember it, or if it’s true, I didn’t manage to find out very much, because, as I’ve already said, I left Bolivia convinced that children are ordered from heaven and brought into the world by storks. In any event, I was not able to spy on the appearance on this earth of the second daughter born to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, my cousin Patricia, for she was born in the hospital—the family was resigning itself to modern ways—barely forty days before the return of the tribe to Peru.

  I have a very vivid impression of the Cochabamba railway station, the morning we took the train. There were many people who had come to say goodbye to us and some of them were weeping. But I wasn’t, nor were my friends from La Salle who had come to give me one last farewell hug: Romero, Ballivián, Artero, Gumucio, and my closest friend of all, the son of the town photographer, Mario Zapata. We were grownups—nine or ten years old—and grownup men don’t cry. But Señora Carlota and other ladies, and the cook and the housemaids, were crying, and, holding fast to Granny Carmen, the gardener, Saturnino, an old Indian, wearing sandals and a cap with earflaps, was weeping too. I can still see him running alongside the train window and waving goodbye as the train pulled out of the station.

  The whole family went back to Peru, but Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby, and Uncle Juan and Aunt Laura, went to live in Lima, which was a great disappointment to me, since it meant being separated from Nancy and Gladys, the cousins I had grown up with. They had been like two sisters to me and their absence was hard to bear during the first months in Piura.

  The only ones who made that journey from Cochabamba to Piura—a long, unforgettable one in many stages, by train, boat, car, and plane—were my grandmother, Auntie Mamaé, myself, and two members added to the family through the kindness of Granny Carmen: Joaquín and Orlando. Joaquín was a youngster only a little older than I was, whom Grandfather Pedro had met on the Saipina hacienda, with no parents, relatives, or identity papers. Feeling sorry for him, he took him to Cochabamba, where he had shared the life of the house servants. He grew up with us, and my grandmother couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him behind, so he came to form part of the family entourage. Orlando, a boy a little younger, was the son of a cook from Santa Cruz named Clemencia, whom I remember as being tall and good-looking, and with hair she always wore loose. One day she got pregnant and the family was unable to find out who the father was. After giving birth, she disappeared, abandoning the newborn baby boy at our house. Attempts to discover her whereabouts came to nothing. Granny Carmen, who had grown fond of the child, brought him with her to Peru.

  Throughout that entire journey, crossing the Altiplano by train, or Lake Titicaca on a little steamer that plied between Huaqui and Puno, my one thought was: “I’m going to see Peru, I’m going to get to know Peru.” In Arequipa—where I had been once before, with my mother and my grandmother, for the Eucharistic Congress of 1940—we again stayed at Uncle Eduardo’s, and his cook Inocencia again made me those reddish, very hot, highly spiced fresh shrimp stews that I dearly loved. But the highlight of the trip was the discovery of the sea, on reaching the top of “Skull Hill” and catching sight of the beaches of Ca
maná. I was so excited that the driver of the car that was taking us to Lima stopped so that I could dive into the Pacific. (The experience was a disaster because a crab pinched my foot.)

  That was my first contact with the landscape of the Peruvian coast, with its endless empty expanses, tinged gray, blue, or red depending on the position of the sun, and its solitary beaches, with the ocher and gray spurs of the cordillera appearing and disappearing amid the sand dunes. A landscape that would always remain with me as my most persistent image of Peru when I went abroad.

  We stayed a week or two in Lima, where Uncle Alejandro and Aunt Jesús put us up, and the only thing I remember about that stay is the little tree-lined streets of Miraflores, where they lived, and the roaring ocean waves at La Herradura, where Uncle Pepe and Uncle Hernán took me.

  We went by plane north to Talara, for it was summer and my grandfather, thanks to his post as prefect of the departamento, had a little house there, made available to him during the vacation season by the International Petroleum Company. Grandfather met us at the airport of Talara and handed me a postcard showing the façade of the Salesian elementary school in Piura, where they had already registered me for the fifth grade. Of those vacations in Talara I remember friendly Juan Taboada, the chief steward of the club owned by International Petroleum, a head of a labor union and a leader of the APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana: American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) party. He also worked in the vacation house and took a liking to me; he took me to see soccer matches and, when they showed films for underaged children, to performances at an open-air movie theater whose screen was the white wall of the parish church. I spent the entire summer immersed in the International Petroleum swimming pool, reading little stories, climbing the cliffs close by and spying in fascination on the mysterious goings and comings of the crabs on the beach. But, to tell the truth, feeling lonely and sad, far from my cousins Nancy and Gladys and my Cochabamba friends, whom I began to miss a great deal. In Talara, on March 28, 1946, I turned ten.