Conversation in the Cathedral Read online

  “Now we do have to go, Amalia.” Santiago stood up, left the bottle on the table. “Thanks for inviting us in.”

  “Thank you, child,” Amalia said. “For having come and for what you brought me.”

  “Come by the house and see us,” Santiago said.

  “Of course, child,” Amalia said. “And give my best to little Teté.”

  “Get out of here, get up, what are you waiting for,” Santiago said. “And you, fix your shirt and comb your hair a little, you fool.”

  He had just lighted the lamp, he was smoothing his hair, Popeye tucked his shirt in his pants and looked at him, terrified: beat it, get out of the room. But Amalia kept sitting on the bed and they had to lift up her dead weight, she stumbled with an idiotic expression, supported herself on the night table. Quick, quick, Santiago smoothed the bed cover and Popeye ran to turn off the phonograph, get out of the room, you fool. She was unable to move, she was listening to them with eyes full of surprise and she slipped out of their hands and at that moment the door opened and they let go of her: hi, mama. Popeye saw Señora Zoila and tried to smile, in slacks and wearing a garnet turban, good evening, ma’am, and the lady’s eyes smiled and looked at Santiago, at Amalia, and her smile diminished and died: hi, papa. Behind Señora Zoila he saw the full face, the gray mustache and sideburns, Don Fermín’s laughing eyes, hello, Skinny, your mother decided not to, hello, Popeye, I didn’t know you were here. Don Fermín entered the room, collarless shirt, summer jacket, loafers, and he shook hands with Popeye, how are you, sir.

  “You, why aren’t you in bed?” Señora Zoila asked. “It’s already after twelve.”

  “We were famished and I woke her up to make us some sandwiches,” Santiago said. “Weren’t you going to sleep over in Ancón?”

  “Your mother had forgotten that she’d invited people to lunch tomorrow,” Don Fermín said. “Your mother’s outbursts, otherwise …”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Popeye saw Amalia go out with the tray in her hands, she was looking at the floor and walking straight, they were in luck.

  “Your sister stayed at the Vallarinos’,” Don Fermín said. “All in all, my plans for a rest this weekend didn’t work out.”

  “Is it twelve o’clock already, ma’am?” Popeye asked. “I’ve got to run. We didn’t pay any attention to the time, I thought it must have been ten.”

  “How are things with the senator?” Don Fermín asked. “We haven’t seen him at the club in ages.”

  She went to the street with them and there Santiago patted her on the shoulder and Popeye said good-bye: ciao, Amalia. They went off in the direction of the streetcar line. They went into El Triunfo to buy some cigarettes; it was already boiling over with drinkers and pool players.

  “A hundred soles for nothing, a wild bit of showing off,” Popeye said. “It turned out that we did the girl a favor, now your old man has got her a better job.”

  “Even so, we got her in a jam,” Santiago said. “I’m not sorry about those hundred soles.”

  “I don’t want to keep harping on it, but you’re broke,” Popeye said. “What did we do to her? Now that you’ve given her five pounds, forget about your remorse.”

  Following the streetcar line, they went down to Ricardo Palma and they walked along smoking under the trees on the boulevard between rows of cars.

  “Didn’t it make you laugh when she talked about Coca-Cola that way?” Popeye laughed. “Do you think she’s that dumb or was she putting on? I don’t know how I held back, I was pissing inside wanting to laugh.”

  “I’m going to ask you something,” Santiago says. “Do I have the face of a son of a bitch?”

  “And I’m going to tell you something,” Popeye said. “Don’t you think her going out to buy the Coca-Cola for us was strictly hypocritical? As if she was letting herself go to see if we’d repeat what happened the other night.”

  “You’ve got a rotten mind, Freckle Face,” Santiago said.

  “What a question,” Ambrosio says. “Of course not, boy.”

  “O.K., so the breed girl is a saint and I’ve got a rotten mind,” Popeye said. “Let’s go to your house and listen to records, then.”

  “You did it for me?” Don Fermín asked. “For me, you poor black crazy son of a bitch?”

  “I swear you don’t, son.” Ambrosio laughs. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Teté isn’t home,” Santiago said. “She went to an early show with some girl friends.”

  “Listen, don’t be a son of a bitch, Skinny,” Popeye said. “You’re lying, aren’t you? You promised, Skinny.”

  “You mean that sons of bitches don’t have the faces of sons of bitches, Ambrosio,” Santiago says.

  3

  THE LIEUTENANT DIDN’T YAWN once during the trip; he was talking about the revolution the whole time, explaining to the sergeant driving the jeep how now that Odría had taken power the Apristas would toe the mark, and smoking cigarettes that smelled like guano. They had left Lima at dawn and had only stopped once, in Surco, to show their pass to a patrol that was manning a roadblock on the highway. They entered Chincha at seven in the morning. There were no signs of the revolution there: the streets were alive with schoolchildren, there wasn’t a soldier to be seen on the corners. The Lieutenant leaped to the sidewalk, went into the café-restaurant called Mi Patria, heard on the radio the same communiqué with a military march in the background that he had been hearing for two days. Leaning on the counter, he asked for coffee and milk and a cream cheese sandwich. He asked the man who waited on him, wearing an undershirt and with a sour face, if he knew Cayo Bermúdez, a businessman in town. Was he going, the man rolled his eyes, to arrest him? Was that Bermúdez an Aprista? How could he be, he wasn’t involved in politics. That’s good, politics was for bums, not hardworking people, the Lieutenant was looking for him on a personal matter. He wouldn’t find him here, he never came here. He lived in a little yellow house behind the church. It was the only one that color, the other ones around were white or gray and there was also a brown one. The Lieutenant knocked on the door and waited and heard footsteps and a voice who is it.

  “Is Mr. Bermúdez in?” the Lieutenant asked.

  The door opened with a creak and a woman came forward: a fat Indian woman with a blackish face that was full of moles, yessir. The people in Chincha said if you could only see her now. Because she wasn’t bad-looking as a girl. Night and day, I tell you, what a change, yessir. Her hair was all messy, the woolen shawl that covered her shoulders looked like a burlap bag.

  “He’s not home.” She looked sideways with suspicious greedy little eyes. “What’s it about? I’m his wife.”

  “Will he be back soon?” The Lieutenant examined the woman with surprise, mistrust. “Can I wait for him?”

  She drew away from the door. Inside, the Lieutenant felt nauseous in the midst of the heavy furniture, the pots without flowers, the sewing machine and the walls with constellations of shadows or holes or flies. The woman opened a window, a tongue of sun came in. Everything was worn, there were too many things in the room. Boxes stacked up in the corners, piles of newspapers. The woman murmured an excuse and vanished into the dark mouth of a hallway. The Lieutenant heard a canary trilling somewhere. Was she really his wife? Yessir, his wife before God, of course she was, a story that shook up Chincha. How did it begin? A whole string of years ago, when the Bermúdez family left the De la Flor ranch. The family, that is the Vulture, Doña Catalina the church biddy, and the son, Don Cayo, who was probably still crawling in those days. The Vulture had been foreman on the ranch and when he came to Chincha people said that the De la Flors had fired him for stealing. In Chincha he became a loan shark. Anybody needed money, he went to the Vulture, I need so much, what’ll you give me for security, this ring, this watch, and if you didn’t pay he kept the item and the Vulture’s interest was so high that people owed him so much they might as well have been dead. That’s why they called him the Vulture, yessir: he lived off corps
es. He was loaded with money in a few years and he put the gold clasp around it when the government of General Benavides began to put Apristas in jail and deport them; Subprefect Núñez gave the orders, Captain Rascachucha put the Apristas in the lockup and chased their families away, the Vulture auctioned off their belongings, and they split the pie among the three of them. And with money the Vulture became important, yessir, he was even mayor of Chincha and you’d see him wearing a derby on the Plaza de Armas during parades on national holidays. And he got all puffed up. He saw to it that his son always wore shoes and didn’t mix with black people. When they were kids they played soccer, stole fruit in the orchards, Ambrosio visited his house and the Vulture didn’t care. When they got money-rich, on the other hand, they kicked him out and they scolded Don Cayo if they caught him with him. His servant? Oh, no sir, his friend, but only when he was this size. The black woman had her stand on the corner where Don Cayo lived then and he and Ambrosio gave her a hard time. Then they were split up by the Vulture, yessir, that’s life. Don Cayo was put into the José Pardo School and the black woman, ashamed because of Trifulcio, took Ambrosio and Perpetuo to Mala, and when they came back to Chincha, Don Cayo was always with someone from José Pardo, the Uplander. Ambrosio would meet him on the street and he didn’t use the intimate form anymore, only the formal. In the activities at José Pardo Don Cayo recited, read his little speeches, carried the school flag in parades. The child prodigy of Chincha, they said, a future brain, and the Vulture drooled when he talked about his son and said he’d go a long way, they said. And he really did, yessir, right?

  “Do you think he’ll be very long?” The Lieutenant crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Do you know where he is?”

  “And I got married too,” Santiago says. “Didn’t you get married?”

  “Sometimes he comes home very late for lunch,” the woman muttered. “Would you like to leave a message?”

  “You too, son, and so young?” Ambrosio says.

  “I’ll wait for him,” the Lieutenant said. “I hope he doesn’t take too long.”

  He was already in his last year at school, the Vulture was going to send him to Lima to study to be a shyster and Don Cayo was made to order for that, they said. Ambrosio was living in the group of shacks that used to be outside Chincha then, yessir, on the road to what was Grocio Prado later on. And he’d run into him there once, and right away caught on that he was playing hooky and right away wondered who the female was. Mounting her? No sir, looking at her with the eyes of a lunatic. He was pretending not to notice, somebody watching hogs, somebody waiting. He’d left his books on the ground, he was kneeling, his eyes were turned toward the huts and Ambrosio said which one is it, I wonder which one it is. It was Rosa, yessir, the daughter of Túmula the milk woman. A skinny girl with nothing particular about her, at that time she looked more like a little white girl than an Indian. There are some kids who are born ugly and get better later on, Rosa started off passable and ended up a dog. Passable, not good, not bad, one of those that a white man does a favor for once and if I saw you I’ve forgotten. Her little teats half formed, a young body and nothing else, but so dirty she couldn’t even be fixed up to go to mass. She used to be seen in Chincha driving the donkey with the jugs, yessir, selling it by the gourd from house to house. Túmula’s daughter, the Vulture’s son, you can imagine the scandal, yessir. The Vulture already had a hardware store and a warehouse and they say he said that when the boy comes back from Lima with his law degree he’ll make a pile of money. Doña Catalina spent all her time in church, a close friend of the priest, raffles for the poor, Catholic Action. And the son prowling around the milk woman’s daughter, who would have thought it. But that’s the way it was, yessir. He was attracted by the way she walked or something, some people would rather have a mongrel than a thoroughbred, they say. He must have been thinking, I’ll work her over, wet her and leave her, and she realized that the white boy was drooling over her and must have thought I’ll let him work me over, wet me and I’ll grab him. The fact is that Don Cayo went ki-yi, yessir: what can I do for you? The Lieutenant opened his eyes, leaped to his feet.

  “I’m sorry, I fell asleep.” He ran his hand over his face, coughed. “Mr. Bermúdez?”

  Next to the horrible woman was a man with a dry and acidy face, in his forties, in shirtsleeves, a briefcase under his arm. The wide cuffs of his pants covered his shoes. Sailor pants, the Lieutenant managed to think, a clown’s pants.

  “At your service,” the man said, as if bored or displeased. “Have you been waiting for me long?”

  “Please pack your bags,” the Lieutenant said jovially. “I’m taking you to Lima.”

  But the man didn’t change his expression. His face didn’t smile, his eyes weren’t surprised or alarmed or happy. They watched him with the same indifferent monotony as before.

  “To Lima?” he asked slowly, his eyes dull. “Who wants to see me in Lima?”

  “Colonel Espina, no less,” the Lieutenant said with a triumphal little voice. “The Minister of Public Order, no less.”

  The woman opened her mouth, Bermúdez didn’t blink. He remained expressionless, then the hint of a smile altered the dreamy annoyance of his face, a second later his eyes became uninterested and bored again. His liver’s kicking up, the Lieutenant thought, bitter over life, with the wife he’s saddled with it’s easy to understand. Bermúdez tossed the briefcase onto the sofa.

  “Yes, indeed. Yesterday I heard that Espina was one of the ministers of the Junta.” He took out a pack of Incas, offered an unappetizing cigarette to the Lieutenant. “Didn’t the Uplander tell you why he wanted to see me?”

  “Only that he needs you urgently.” The Uplander, the Lieutenant thought. “And for me to bring you back to Lima even if I have to stick a pistol in your chest.”

  Bermúdez dropped into an easy chair, crossed his legs, blew out a mouthful of smoke that clouded his face and when the smoke disappeared, the Lieutenant saw that he was smiling at him as if he was doing me a favor, he thought, as if he was making fun of me.

  “It’s hard for me to leave Chincha today,” he said with a growing laxness. “There’s a business deal I have to close on a ranch near here.”

  “If a person is summoned by the Minister of Public Order, he has no recourse but to go,” the Lieutenant said. “Please be reasonable, Mr. Bermúdez.”

  “Two new tractors, a good commission,” Bermúdez explained to the flies or holes or shadows. “This is no time for outings to Lima.”

  “Tractors?” The Lieutenant put on an irritated face. “Use your head a little, please, and let’s not waste any more time.”

  Bermúdez took a puff, half closing his cold little eyes, and he exhaled the smoke unhurriedly.

  “When you’re up to here with bills, you have to think about tractors,” he said, as if he couldn’t hear or see him. “Tell the Uplander I’ll come by in a few days.”

  The Lieutenant looked at him with consternation, amused, confused: if things were that way he would have to draw his pistol and stick it in his chest, Mr. Bermúdez, if things were that way they were going to laugh at him. But Don Cayo as if nothing happened, yessir, played hooky and went into the settlement and the women pointed at him, Rosa, they whispered to each other and laughed at him, Rosita, look who’s coming. Túmula’s daughter was very bold, yessir. Just imagine, the Vulture’s son had come there to see her, who’d have thought it. She didn’t come out to talk to him, she curled up, she ran to where her girl friends were, all laughs, all flirty. It didn’t matter to him that the girl gave him the cold shoulder, that seemed to get him all the hotter. She knew how to put on, Túmula’s daughter did, yessir, and no need to talk about her mother, anyone would have realized it, but not him. He took it all, he waited, he went back to the settlement, the little half-breed would fall someday, black boy, he was the one that fell, yessir. Can’t you see that she gets stuck-up instead of thanking you, Don Cayo? Tell her to go to hell, Don Cayo. But he as if
he’d been given a love potion, chasing right after her, and people were beginning to gossip. They’re talking all over the place, Don Cayo. And he what the fuck, he did what his belly told him and his belly told him to get the girl, naturally. Fine, who was going to call him down, any white boy can get sweet with a little half-breed, do this little thing, and who cares, yessir, right? But Don Cayo chased after her as if the thing was serious, wasn’t that crazy? And crazier still was the fact that Rosa gave herself the luxury of treating him like dirt. She seemed to be giving herself the luxury, yessir.