Conversation in the Cathedral Read online

  “You’ve been looking at me as if I were some kind of ogre,” Aída said.

  “What a thing to think, I respect all ideas, and besides, you can believe it or not, I’ve got …” Santiago fell silent, searched for words, stammered, “advanced ideas too.”

  “Well, I’m happy for you,” Aída said. “Are we going to have the orals today? With so much waiting I’m terribly confused, I can’t remember anything I’ve studied.”

  “We can review a little, if you want,” Santiago said. “What are you most scared of?”

  “World history,” Aída said. “Yes, let’s ask each other questions. But while we’re walking. I can study better that way than sitting down, what about you?”

  They went through the entranceway with wine-colored floor tiles and classrooms along the sides, where did she live? he wondered, there was a small courtyard with fewer people in back. He closed his eyes, he could see the narrow little house, clean, with austere furniture, and he could see the streets around it, and the faces—strong, dignified, serious, sober?—of the men who came along the sidewalks in overalls and gray jackets, and he could hear their conversations—all for one and one for all, spare, clandestine?—and he thought workers, and he thought Communists and he decided I’m not a Bustamantist, I’m not an Aprista, I’m a Communist. But what was the difference? He couldn’t ask her, she’ll think I’m an idiot, he’d have to worm it out of her. She must have spent the whole summer like that, her fierce little eyes fastened on the questions, pacing back and forth in a tiny little room. There probably wasn’t much light, in order to take notes she probably sat at a little table lighted by a lamp with no shade or by candles, she probably moved her lips slowly, closing her eyes, she would get up and, as she walked, repeat names, dates, nocturnal and dedicated, was her father a worker, her mother a maid? He thinks: poor Zavalita. They walked very slowly, the dynasties of the pharaohs, asking each other questions in a low voice, Babylonia and Nineveh, could she have heard Communism talked about in her home? the causes of World War I, what would she think when she found out that his old man was an Odríist? the Battle of the Marne, she probably wouldn’t want to meet you anymore, Zavalita: I hate you, papa. We asked each other questions but we didn’t ask each other anything, he thinks. He thinks: we were getting to be friends. Could she have studied at a national high school? Yes, in a central school, what about him? at Santa María, ah, a school for rich boys. There were all kinds, it was an awful school, it wasn’t his fault if his folks had sent him there, he’d rather have gone to Guadalupe and Aída began to laugh: don’t blush, she wasn’t prejudiced, what happened at Verdun. He thinks: we expected great things at the university. They were in the Party, they went to the press together, they hid in a union hall together, they put them in jail together and they exiled them together: it was a battle, not a treaty, silly boy, and he of course, how foolish, and now she who was Cromwell. We expected great things of ourselves he thinks.

  “When you got into San Marcos and they shaved your head, Missy Teté and young Sparky hollered pumpkin head at you,” Ambrosio says. “Your papa was so happy that you’d passed the exams, son.”

  She talked about books and she wore skirts, she knew about politics and she wasn’t a man, the Mascot, the Chick, the Squirrel all faded away, Zavalita, the pretty little idiots from Miraflores melted away, disappeared. Discovering that one of them at least was good for something else, he thinks. Not just to be climbed on top of, not just to make him masturbate thinking about them, not just to fall in love with. He thinks: for something else. She was going into Law and Education too, you were going into Law and Letters.

  “Are you supposed to be a vamp, a clown, or what?” Santiago asked. “Where are you going all prettied up and with all that makeup on?”

  “What’s your major in Letters going to be?” Aída asked. “Philosophy?”

  “Wherever I feel like and what business is it of yours?” Teté asked. “Who said anything to you and what right have you got to talk to me?”

  “Literature, I think,” Santiago said. “But I’m still not sure.”

  “Everybody who goes into Literature wants to be a poet,” Aída said. “You too?”

  “Stop your fighting,” Señora Zoila said. “You’re like a cat and a dog, that’s enough.”

  “I had a notebook of poems hidden away,” Santiago says. “No one was to see it, no one was to know about it. You see? I was a pure boy.”

  “Don’t blush because I asked you if you wanted to be a poet.” Aída laughed. “Don’t be so bourgeois.”

  “They drove you crazy too by calling you Superbrain,” Ambrosio says. “All the fights you people had, child.”

  “You can go change that dress and wash your face,” Santiago said. “You’re not going out, Teté.”

  “And what’s wrong with Teté’s going to the movies?” Señora Zoila asked. “Since when have you been so strict with your sister here, you, the liberal, the priest-eater?”

  “She’s not going to the movies, she’s going dancing at the Sunset with that damned Pepe Yáñez,” Santiago said. “I caught her making her plans by phone this morning.”

  “To the Sunset with Pepe Yáñez?” Sparky asked. “With that half-breed?”

  “It’s not that I want to be a poet, just that I like literature,” Santiago said.

  “Are you out of your mind, Teté?” Don Fermín asked. “Is all this true, Teté?”

  “All lies, lies.” Teté trembled and singed Santiago with her eyes. “Damn you, you imbecile, I hate you, go drop dead.”

  “So do I,” Aída said. “In Education I’m going to take Literature and Spanish.”

  “Do you think you can fool your parents like that, you little devil?” Señora Zoila said. “And what do you mean by telling your brother to drop dead? Have you gone crazy?”

  “You’re not old enough for nightclubs, child,” Don Fermín said. “You won’t be going out tonight, tomorrow, or Sunday.”

  “I’m going to take Pepe Yáñez apart,” Sparky said. “I’ll kill him, papa.”

  Teté was shouting and weeping now, she’d spilled her cup of tea, why don’t you drop dead, and Señora Zoila you’re acting crazy, crazy, such a great big man and such a great big coward, and Señora Zoila you’re staining the tablecloth, instead of gossiping like a woman go write your fairy poetry. She got up from the table and left the dining room still shouting your fairy gossip poetry and go drop dead, damn you. They heard her go up the stairs, slam her door. Santiago stirred the spoon in the empty cup as if he had just put some sugar in it.

  “Is it true what Teté says?” Don Fermín smiled. “Do you write poetry, Skinny?”

  “He keeps it hidden in a little notebook behind the encyclopedia, Teté and I have read it all,” Sparky said. “Love poetry, and about the Incas too. Don’t be ashamed, Superbrain. Look at his expression, papa.”

  “You’re barely literate, so it must have been hard for you to have read anything,” Santiago said.

  “You’re not the only person in the world who knows how to read,” Señora Zoila said. “Don’t be so stuck-up.”

  “Go write your fairy poetry, Superbrain,” Sparky said.

  “What have the pair of you learned, why did we send you to the best school in Lima?” Señora Zoila sighed. “You insult each other like truck-drivers right in front of us.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were writing poetry?” Don Fermín asked. “You have to show me some, Skinny.”

  “Sparky and Teté’s lies,” Santiago babbled. “Don’t pay any attention to them, papa.”

  There was the examining board, there were three of them, a fearful silence had come over the place. Boys and girls watched the three men cross through the entranceway led by a beadle, watched them disappear into a classroom. Let me get in, let her get in. The buzzing started up again, thicker and louder than before. Aída and Santiago went back to the rear courtyard.

  “You’re going to pass with high marks,” Santiago said
. “You know all the answers right down to the last comma.”

  “Don’t you believe it, there’s a lot I just barely know,” Aída said. “You’re the one who’s going to get in.”

  “I spent all summer cramming,” Santiago said. “If they flunk me, I’ll blow my brains out.”

  “And I’m against suicide,” Aída said. “Killing yourself is a sign of cowardice.”

  “Priests’ tales,” Santiago said. “It takes a lot of courage to kill yourself.”

  “I don’t care about priests,” Aída said, and her little eyes think: come on, come on, I dare you. “I don’t believe in God, I’m an atheist.”

  “I’m an atheist too,” Santiago said immediately. “Naturally.”

  They started walking again, the questions, sometimes they became distracted, they forgot about the questions and they began to chat, to argue: they agreed, disagreed, joked, time was flying and suddenly Zavala, Santiago! Hurry up, Aída smiled at him, and hoped he got an easy question. He passed between two rows of candidates, went into the examination room, and you can’t remember anything else, Zavalita, what question you got or the examiners’ faces or what you answered: just that you were happy when you came out.

  “You remember the girl you liked and the rest is all erased,” Ambrosio says. “That’s natural, son.”

  You liked everything about the day, he thinks. The place that was falling apart from old age, the shoe-polish, earthen, or malarial faces of the candidates, the atmosphere that bubbled with apprehension, the things that Aída was saying. How did you feel, Zavalita? He thinks: like on the day I had my first communion.

  “You came because it was Santiago making it,” Teté pouted. “You didn’t come to mine, I don’t love you anymore.”

  “Come here, give me a kiss,” Don Fermín said. “I came because Skinny took first place, if you’d have gotten good marks I would have come to your first communion too. I love all three of you the same.”

  “You say that, but it’s not true,” Sparky complained. “You didn’t come to my first communion either.”

  “With all this jealousy, Skinny’s day will be ruined, stop the nonsense,” Don Fermín said. “Come on, get in the car.”

  “To Herradura beach to have milk shakes and hot dogs, papa,” Santiago said.

  “To the Ferris wheel they’ve set up in the Campo de Marte, papa,” Sparky said.

  “We’re going to Herradura,” Don Fermín said. “Skinny’s the one who made his first communion, we have to give him what he wants.”

  He ran out of the classroom, but before he got to Aída, did you get your grade right there, were the questions long or short? he had to hold off the candidates’ attack, and Aída received him with a smile: from his face you could see he’d passed, wonderful, now he wouldn’t have to blow his brains out.

  “Before I picked the ball with the question, I thought, I’ll sell my soul for an easy one,” Santiago said. “So if the devil does exist, I’m going to go to hell. But the end justifies the means.”

  “Neither the soul nor the devil exists”—I challenge you, I dare you. “And if you think that the end justifies the means, then you’re a Nazi.”

  “She had a negative answer for everything, she had an opinion about everything, she argued as if she wanted to start a fight,” Santiago says.

  “A pushy girl, the ones you say white to and they say black, black and they say white,” Ambrosio says. “Tricks to get a man all heated up, but which have their effect.”

  “Of course I’ll wait for you,” Santiago said. “Do you want me to go over some questions with you for a little while?”

  Persian history, Charlemagne, the Aztecs, Charlotte Corday, the external factors of the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the birth and death of Danton: hoping she would have an easy question, hoping she would pass. They went back to the first courtyard, sat down on a bench. A newsboy came in hawking the evening papers, the boy who was next to them bought El Comercio and a moment later said bastards, that was too much. They turned to look at him and he showed them a headline and the picture of a man with a mustache. Had they put him in jail, exiled him, or killed him, and who was the man? There was Jacobo, Zavalita: blond, thin, his blue eyes furious, his finger pointing to the picture in the newspaper, his drawling voice protesting, Peru was going from bad to worse, a strange Andean trace in that milky face, where you stuck your finger, pus came out, as González Prada had said, seen on occasion and from a distance on the streets of Miraflores.

  “Another one of those?” Ambrosio asks. “Lord, San Marcos was a nest of subversives, boy.”

  Another exact model of one of those, he thinks, in revolt against his skin, against his class, against himself, against Peru. He thinks: is he still pure, is he happy?

  “There weren’t so many, Ambrosio. It was only by chance that the three of us came together that first day.”

  “You never brought those friends from San Marcos home,” Ambrosio says. “On the other hand, young Popeye and his schoolmates were always having tea at your place.”

  Were you ashamed, Zavalita? he thinks: that Jacobo, Héctor, Solórzano didn’t visit your home and the people you lived with, didn’t meet your old lady and listen to your old man, that Aída didn’t hear Teté’s delightful idiocies? He thinks: or that your old man and old lady shouldn’t know who you hung around with, that Sparky and Teté shouldn’t see Martínez’ toothless half-breed face? That first day you began to kill off the old folks, Popeye, Miraflores, he thinks. You were breaking away, Zavalita, entering another world: was it then, was it then that you shut it off? He thinks: breaking with what, entering what world?

  “They heard me talking about Odría and they left.” Jacobo pointed to a group of candidates going off and he looked at them with a curiosity that had no irony. “Are you people afraid too?”

  “Afraid?” Aída straightened up immediately on the bench. “I say that Odría is a dictator and a murderer and I’ll say it here, in the street, anywhere.”

  Pure, like the girls in Quo Vadis, he thinks, impatient to go down into the catacombs and come out into the arena and throw herself into the lions’ claws and fangs. Jacobo was listening to her disconcertedly, she’d forgotten about the exam, a dictator who’d risen to power at bayonet point, she was raising her voice and waving her arms and Jacobo was nodding and looking at her sympathetically and he’d suppressed parties and the freedom of the press and now all worked up and had ordered the army to massacre the people of Arequipa and now bewitched and had jailed, deported and tortured so many people that no one even knew how many, and Santiago was looking at Aída and Jacobo and suddenly, he thinks, you felt tortured, exiled, betrayed, Zavalita, and he interrupted her: Odría was the worst tyrant in the history of Peru.

  “Well, I don’t know if he’s the worst or not,” Aída said, pausing for breath. “But he’s one of the worst, that’s for sure.”

  “Give him time and you’ll see,” Santiago insisted, with drive. “He’ll be the worst.”

  “Except for that of the proletariat, all dictatorships are the same,” Jacobo said. “Historically.”

  “Do you know the difference between Aprismo and Communism?” Santiago asks.

  “We can’t give him time to become the worst,” Aída said. “We have to overthrow him before that.”

  “Well, there are a lot of Apristas and only a few Communists,” Ambrosio says. “What other difference is there?”

  “I don’t think those people there went off because you were going after Odría, but because they’re studying,” Santiago said. “Everybody has to be a radical at San Marcos.”

  He looked at you as if he’d spotted a small pair of wings on your back, he thinks, San Marcos wasn’t what it used to be anymore, like a good but backward child, Zavalita. You didn’t know, you didn’t even understand the vocabulary, you had to learn what Aprismo, what Fascism, what Communism were, and why San Marcos wasn’t what it used to be: because since Odría’s coup the studen
t leaders had been persecuted and the federated centers disbanded and because the classes were full of informers enrolled as students and Santiago frivolously interrupted him: did Jacobo live in Miraflores? He seemed to have seen him around there at some time, and Jacobo blushed and unwillingly said yes and Aída started to laugh: so the two of them were from Miraflores, so the two of them were nice little boys. But Jacobo, he thinks, didn’t like kidding. His blue eyes pedagogically fastened on her, his voice patient, Andean, smooth, he explained that it didn’t matter where one lived, but what one thought and did, Aída that was right, but she hadn’t been serious, she was joking about that nice boys business, and Santiago would read, study, learn Marxism the way he had: oh, Zavalita. The beadle shouted a last name and Jacobo stood up: they were calling him. He went slowly toward the classroom, as confident and calm as he had spoken, intelligent, right? and Santiago looked at Aída, very intelligent, and besides, he knew so much about politics and Santiago decided I’m going to know even more.

  “Can it be true that there are plainclothesmen among the students?” Aída asked.

  “If we find one in our class we’ll beat him up,” Santiago said.

  “You’re already talking like a student, what chance have you got?” Aída said. “Let’s review some more.”

  But they’d barely started the questions and their circular walk again when Jacobo came out of the classroom, slow and thin in his frayed blue suit, and he came over to them, smiling and disappointed, the exams were a farce, Aída had nothing to worry about, the chairman of the board, a chemist, knew less about letters than you or I. You had to answer with assurance, he only flunked those who seemed unsure. He’d made a bad impression on me, he thinks, but when they called Aída and they went with her to the classroom and returned to the bench and talked alone, you liked him, Zavalita. You lost your jealousy, he thinks, I began to admire him. He’d finished high school two years ago, he didn’t enter San Marcos the year before because of an attack of typhoid, he gave opinions like a person chopping with an ax. You felt dizzy, imperialism, idealism, like a cannibal seeing skycrapers, materialism, social consciousness, confused, immoral. When he got better he used to come in the afternoon to walk around the Faculty of Letters, he went to read at the National Library, and he knew everything and had answers for everything and talked about everything, he thinks, except about himself. What school had he gone to, was his family Jewish, did he have any brothers and sisters, what street did he live on? He didn’t grow impatient with the questions, he was abundant and impersonal with his explanations, Aprismo meant reform and Communism revolution. Did he ever come to esteem you and hate you, he thinks, to envy you the way you did him? He was going to study Law and History and you listened to him dazzled, Zavalita: you studied together, went to the underground press together, you conspired, worked, prepared the revolution together. What did he think of you, he thinks, what could he be thinking of you now? Aída came back to the bench with her eyes sparkling: an A, she was tired of talking to them. They congratulated her, smoked, went out onto the street. The cars were passing along Padre Jerónimo with their headlights on, and a glorious breeze cooled their faces as they went along Azángaro, talkative, excited, toward the Parque Universitario. Aída was thirsty, Jacobo hungry, why didn’t they stop and have something? Santiago proposed, they good idea, he it was on him and Aída agh what a bourgeois. We didn’t go to that dive on Colmena to have pork rind and biscuits but to tell each other about our plans, he thinks, to become friends arguing until our voices gave out. Never again such exaltation, such generosity. He thinks: such friendship.