The Neighborhood

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Agustín drove very steadily, and now Quique was nervous, looking all around, afraid something would happen to him, thinking that in fact, why not, they could kidnap him just as they did Cachito. His kidnapping had frightened all of Lima society. Could it be true they were asking for a six-million-dollar ransom? Apparently the insurance man who came from New York to negotiate with the kidnappers was very tough and would not give in to their demands. The result might be that Cachito would end up a corpse. It could have happened to any businessman, himself included. Ever since the terrorism had begun, this was an idea that from time to time would get into his head, much more so since Garro’s visit with those photographs.

  Luciano was waiting for him, and in his office were two cups of recently poured coffee.

  “Take it easy, Quique,” said his friend. “You look awful. The worst thing is to let yourself be defeated like this before you’ve even begun the battle.”

  “My nerves are shattered, Luciano,” he agreed, dropping into an armchair. “Not on my account, or Marisa’s, or because of what this could cost me. But if those photos are published, it would kill my mother. You know how conservative, how Catholic she is. I swear to you that if she saw them, she’d have a heart attack or lose her mind, I don’t know which. Well, let’s get down to business. What do your two criminal lawyers have to say?”

  “First of all, take it easy, Quique. We’ll do everything possible and impossible to prevent their publication,” the attorney said encouragingly. “They both agree that it’s better to wait for them to make the first move. What do they want? How much do they want? In the final analysis, we’ll have to negotiate. The most important things are the guarantees for recovering the negatives. And in the meantime, of course, denying categorically that you’re the man in the photographs.”

  “Do they know this Garro? What do they know about him?”

  “They know him very well,” Luciano agreed. “A yellow journalist specializing in show business. A toady, apparently, of little importance at the outset, who has made a career of blackmailing or offering publicity to actors, scriptwriters, announcers, program presenters. He lives on scandals. He’s been sued several times for libel and slander, but the association of journalists protects him, and in the name of freedom of the press the judges almost always file away the lawsuits or acquit him. There are lots of stories about him, including one that says he could be one of the Doctor’s undercover reporters hired to throw dirt at critics of the government, destroying their reputations, inventing scandals about them. The two criminal lawyers in the firm don’t believe Garro is the head of this operation. He’s just a minor player, a messenger, a tool of the real bosses. They’re surprised he went in person to blackmail an entrepreneur as well known as you. We’ve requested an appointment with the Doctor. We’ll go with the presidents of the Confederation of Entrepreneurs and the Mining Society to impress him. So he’ll know that not only you but the entire business sector feels threatened by this blackmail. Do you agree, Quique?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “I hate the idea of so many people knowing about this, but it’s true, it’s better to go right to the top. The Doctor can stop it by frightening Garro and obliging him to inform on his accomplices.”

  “According to the criminal lawyers, this is a high-flying operation. Perhaps an international mafia.”

  He smiled at him affectionately, but Enrique didn’t return the smile. This stupid comment was all that these criminal specialists could tell him? He’d known that someone was behind Garro from the very beginning.

  “What’s the worst that could happen to me, Luciano?”

  Luciano became very serious before answering.

  “The worst, my friend, would be if the person behind this operation is the one you’ve already imagined.”

  “I haven’t imagined anyone, Luciano. Please, speak more clearly.”

  “None other than the sinister Doctor,” said Luciano, lowering his voice. “He’s very capable of plotting something as dark as this. Especially if he thinks there’s a lot of money involved.”

  “Fujimori’s own adviser?” Quique was surprised.

  “The strongman in this government, the one who makes and unmakes careers, the real boss of Peru,” Luciano reminded him. “Lawyers are absolutely certain that the man does things like this. He’s greedy, with an excessive thirst for money. There are indications that many small businessmen have been blackmailed, and it seems to come from him. They’d be surprised at his setting up something like this against a person as important as you. That’s why it’s a good idea that when we go to see him, the directors of the Confederation of Entrepreneurs and the Mining Society accompany us. Their presence may frighten him a little, if in fact he’s involved. On the other hand, I’ve already told you there are rumors that one of the gossip columnists the Doctor uses to ruin the reputations of his political enemies is this Garro. You know he finances a good number of those obscene sheets full of filthy words and naked pictures that bathe critics of the government in shit. Are you listening to me, Quique?”

  Enrique had begun to think that if Dr. Montesinos, the head of the regime’s Intelligence Service, was behind those photos, there was no way out. He was lost. How could he confront so powerful a man, the Machiavellian adviser to the president? He recalled the only time he had seen him, at a dinner for entrepreneurs, when the famous Doctor had suddenly appeared without being invited. Very pleasant, somewhat unctuous and servile with all of them, in a tight blue suit, and with a potbelly that struggled to be noticed, he told them that private enterprise would be secure in the country as long as Engineer Fujimori remained in the government. And that the regime needed at least twenty years to complete the program of reforms that was taking Peru out of underdevelopment and raising her to first-world-nation status. Regarding terrorism, he talked at some length, justifying his “hard-fisted” policy with an example that made the hair of some of those present stand on end: “It doesn’t matter if twenty thousand die, including fifteen thousand innocents, if we kill five thousand terrorists.” When he left, the entrepreneurs had joked about the presumption of this character, a fawning, ostentatious braggart who wore yellow shoes with a blue suit.

  “If he’s behind this, Luciano, I’m fucked, plain and simple,” he murmured.

  “Nobody’s saying it’s him, take it easy,” his friend reassured him. “It’s just one conjecture among many. Don’t be frightened ahead of time. And don’t think the Doctor has as much power as he believes he has.”

  “What should I do, then?”

  “The fact that they’ve waited two years since they took those pictures means something,” said Luciano. “Try to remember every possible detail of your relationship with the Yugoslav who organized the thing in Chosica. Look for every letter and message from him still in your files. One way or another, this individual is at the root of it all. Do this for the time being, and we’ll wait. The criminal lawyers advise not taking any action until they show themselves. And above all, not going to the police. Let’s see what comes of our negotiation with the Doctor. And please, try not to look so nervous. Garro brought you the photographs to frighten you, to soften you up. The hare will jump very soon. When he does, and we know what kind of blackmail is involved, we’ll know what to do. Then we’ll decide on a plan of action.”

  They talked for another moment and Luciano suggested that he get away with Marisa for a few days. Quique rejected that idea out of hand. He had a thousand matters pending, an unusual amount of work because of the country’s difficult situation. Leaving Lima, rather than calming him, would make him even more upset than he was already. They agreed that, in any event, this week the two couples would have lunch together—Sunday, for example, at La Granja Azul—and Luciano walked with him to the door.

  When Quique reached his office, the head of security at the Huancavelica mine, and a pile of messages, letters, and e-mails, were already waiting for him. Señor Urriola—wrinkles like furrows, a big mustache, a
boxer’s hands, and a stereotyped smile that never left his face—did not give him good news. There had been more thefts of explosives in the past month, due to complicity among thieves, clerks, and workers, perhaps with the help of the police guards stationed there. Happily, no shoot-outs or victims. The watchmen, of course, hadn’t noticed anything.

  “I must sound like a broken record,” Señor Urriola said as he ended his report. “But you should have the Guardia Civil withdraw from the mines. I assure you my people would stop these thefts cold. The guards earn miserable salaries, and now terrorism gives them the perfect alibi for stealing from us and blaming the Path and the MRTA.”

  After Urriola, three more people came in, and there was a long phone call from New York. It was difficult for Quique to concentrate, to listen to them or answer them. He could not get out of his head the sinister images that had hounded him since Garro’s visit. He couldn’t even recall that damn party in Chosica with any precision. Had the Yugoslav given him some drug? He remembered how unwell and dizzy he’d felt, his nausea and vomiting. Finally, at about twelve, when the last visitor left, he told his secretary not to forward any more calls, because he had urgent matters to attend to and needed complete privacy.

  In reality he wanted to be alone, to let up for a while on his exhausting efforts to split himself in two, trying to pay attention to office matters when all he could think of was his personal problem. He spent almost an hour seated in one of the easy chairs where he received visitors, staring at but not seeing the vast expanse of Lima at his feet. What could he do? How long would this uncertainty last? At one point he felt drowsiness overcoming him, and though he tried to resist, he fell asleep. “It’s anguish,” he thought as he dropped off. Perhaps it would be good if he did what he had never wanted to do: learn to play golf, the sport of the Japanese and the lazy. Perhaps it would be a good relaxant for his nerves. He woke with a start: at 1:15 he had a lunch appointment at the Club de la Banca. He washed his face, combed his hair, and called his secretary.

  She gave him a long list of messages, which he barely listened to.

  “And that reporter you saw the other day called, too,” she added. “Garro? Yes, Rolando Garro. He was very insistent and said it was urgent. He left me a phone number. What shall I do? Make an appointment or put him off?”

  8

  Shorty

  As soon as she felt that the individual behind her, on the bus from Surquillo to Five Corners, was too close and had bad intentions, Shorty took out the long needle she wore in her belt. She kept it in her hand, waiting for the vehicle to make its next stop, since the wise guy took advantage of the stops to bring his fly close to her buttocks. He did just that, in fact, and then she turned to look at him with her enormous, intense eyes—he was an insignificant little man, along in years, who immediately looked away—and, holding the long needle up to his face, she warned him:

  “The next time you push into me I’ll stick this in that filthy little prick of yours. I swear to you it’s poisoned.”

  Some people in the bus laughed, and the little man was confused; he dissembled and pretended to be surprised:

  “Are you talking to me, señora? What is it?”

  “You’ve been warned, asshole,” she concluded, drily, and turned her back.

  The man absorbed the lesson, and, uncomfortable and shamed by the mocking glances of the passengers, no doubt, got off at the next stop. Shorty recalled that these warnings didn’t always work, in spite of the fact that she, on two occasions, had carried out her threats. The first, on a bus on this same line, right by the Barbones military base; the boy, who was stabbed by the needle in the middle of his fly, had given a shriek that startled all the passengers and made the driver brake suddenly.

  “Now you’ll learn to only rub up against your mother, faggot!” Shorty had shouted, taking advantage of the fact that the bus had stopped to jump down onto the street and start running toward Junín Alleyway.

  The second time she had plunged the needle into the fly of someone rubbing against her was more complicated. He was a hulking mulatto whose entire face was covered with pimples; he shook against her frenetically and would have hurt her if other passengers had not stopped him. But the matter ended at the police station; they let her go only when they discovered that she was carrying a reporter’s identity papers. She knew that in general the police were more afraid of journalists than of outlaws and holdup men.

  As the bus drove toward Five Corners, she returned to what she had been thinking before she became aware of the man pressing into her back: had the emolienteros, the vendors of herbal drinks, disappeared? Whenever she saw someone pushing a cart on the street she approached for a better look. Usually he was selling ice cream or sodas or candy bars. Rarely, very rarely, herbal drinks. They must be dying out, another sign of supposed progress in Lima. Soon there wouldn’t be a single one left, and Limeños of the future wouldn’t even know what an emoliente was.

  Her childhood was inseparable from that traditional Peruvian drink, made with barley, flax seed, boldo leaves, and horsetail; throughout her childhood, she had watched her father prepare it with an assistant, a twisted cripple nicknamed Fish. Back then, the emolienteros were all over the center of the city, especially at the entrances to factories, in the vicinity of the Plaza Dos de Mayo, and along Argentina Avenue. “My best customers are drinkers and laborers,” her father would say. As a little girl and an adolescent, she had gone with him on his rounds thousands of times, pulling the cart with the big pots of emoliente that he and Fish had prepared in the small house where they lived then, in Breña, at the end of Arica Avenue, where the old part of the city ended and the wasteland that stretched all the way to La Perla, Bellavista, and Callao began. Shorty remembered very well that her father’s most faithful customers were, in fact, the night owls who had spent hours drinking in the little bars in the center of the city, and the workers who at dawn entered the factories on Argentina and Colonial Avenues, and in the area of the Ejército Bridge. She would help, serving the small glasses to the customers with a little piece of cut paper to use as a napkin. When her father left her at the little neighborhood school and the life of the city began with the appearance of street sweepers and the traffic police, the emolientero had already been working at least four hours. Hard work; a killing, dangerous job. Her father had been mugged and robbed of all the day’s earnings several times, and, worst of all, he risked so much to earn no more than a pittance. Thinking about it carefully, it wasn’t strange that emolienteros were disappearing from the streets of Lima.

  She’d never asked her father about her mother. Had she left him? Had she died, or was she still alive? He never said a word about her, and Julieta respected his silence, not asking even once about her. He was an introverted man who could go for days without saying a word, but although he was never very effusive with her, she remembered him with affection. He had been good to his only child; at least, he had been concerned about her finishing school so that in the future, he told her, she wouldn’t have the kind of hard life he’d had because he was illiterate. Not knowing how to read or write infuriated him. The happiest day of his life was the afternoon when his only child showed him the journalist’s card that Rolando Garro had obtained for her after hiring her as a reporter on his magazine.

  They were in Five Corners now, and Shorty got off the bus. She walked the seven blocks between the bus stop and her house on Teniente Arancibia Alleyway, passing all the places she knew by heart and responding with movements of her head or her hand to the greetings of people she recognized: the spiritualist from Piura who saw his clients only at night, an auspicious time to converse with souls; the pharmacist who occupied the little house where, they said, Felipe Pinglo, the great composer of waltzes, was born; Heeren Manor, which, apparently, had been a redoubt of the most elegant mansions of Lima during the nineteenth century and was now a collection of ruins fought over by turkey buzzards, bats, drug addicts, and fugitives from justice; the house of Lim
bómana, the abortionist; the Church of Carmen and the small convent of the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. It was still early, but since robberies and muggings had increased a great deal in the neighborhood, the shopkeepers already had their grates up and waited on customers through a slit barely large enough for small packages to pass through. Half-built houses and filthy alleys with a single water tap, vagrants and beggars on the corners that, at night, filled with drug dealers and transient prostitutes, their pimps lurking in the darkness. Her house was at the back of a dilapidated courtyard; its buildings, all one-story, were small and seemed fitted inside one another except for hers, which, because it was the last one, stood somewhat apart from the others. The house had a bedroom, a living-dining room, a small kitchen, and a bathroom; it was furnished with the bare essentials but was filled with piles of newspapers and magazines in every room. Shorty had been collecting them since she was a girl. Beginning in primary school, she had been a compulsive reader of papers and magazines and had begun to keep them long before she knew that one day she would be a reporter and could benefit from the enormous collection. Although in personal matters she wasn’t very orderly, her mountains of newspapers and magazines were rigorously organized. Small pieces of paper, written on in her tiny hand, indicated the most important years and subjects. She devoted her free time to putting them in order, just as other people dedicated their time to sports, chess, knitting, embroidery, or watching television. She had an old, small television set that she turned on—when the electricity hadn’t been cut—only for programs dedicated to gossip and scandals; that is, to topics related to her work.

  She went into her house and in the kitchen prepared a packet of dried soup and reheated a plate of rice and tripe she had left in the oven. She never ate very much, and she didn’t drink or smoke. She was nourished above all by her work, which was also her vocation: finding out other people’s secret shames. Bringing them to light produced both professional and personal satisfaction. It excited her to do it, and she intuited in a somewhat confused way that by doing what she did, she was taking her revenge on a world that had always been so hostile to her and her father. Although she was young, her achievements were already enviable.