A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  After a few months in La Magdalena, the relationship with my cousins Eduardo, Pepe, and Jorge came to an abrupt end, after a family quarrel that was to keep my papa and his brother César apart for many years. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that Uncle César came to the house with his three sons and invited me to go see a soccer match. My papa wasn’t home, and having learned to be prudent, I told my uncle that I didn’t dare go without having first asked my father for his permission. But Uncle César said he’d explain about the match later. When we got back, after dark, my father was waiting for us in the street outside Uncle César’s front door. And Aunt Orieli was at the window, with an alarmed expression, as if to warn us of something. I still remember the terrible set-to, the way my father screamed at poor Uncle César, who drew back in bewilderment, trying to explain, and my own terror, as my father kicked me all the way home.

  When he beat me, I went off the deep end, and terror many times made me humble myself before him and beg his pardon with my hands joined. But that didn’t calm him down. And he went on hitting me, screaming and threatening to put me in the army as a private as soon as I was old enough to be a recruit, so that I’d be set on the right path. When the whole scene was over and done with, and he could lock me in my room, it was not the blows, but rage and disgust with myself for having been so afraid of him and having humbled myself before him in that way, that made me spend a sleepless night, weeping in silence.

  From that day on I was forbidden to go back to my Uncle César and Aunt Orieli’s and to be with my cousins. I was completely alone until the summer of 1947 was over and I’d turned eleven. With the classes at La Salle, things became better. For several hours a day I was outside the house. The blue bus from the school picked me up on the corner, at seven-thirty in the morning, brought me back at noon, picked me up again at one-thirty, and brought me back to La Magdalena at five. The trip along the long Avenida Brasil to Breña, picking up schoolboys and leaving them off, was a liberation from being shut up at home and I was overjoyed. Brother Leoncio, our sixth-grade teacher, a ruddy-faced Frenchman of around sixty, rather bad-tempered, with rumpled white hair, a thick lock of which kept constantly falling over his forehead and which he tossed back with equine movements of his head, made us learn poems by Fray Luis de León by heart. I soon got over the inevitable embarrassment of being a newcomer in a class of boys who had been together for several years now, and I made good friends at La Salle. Some lasted longer than the three years that I was a pupil there, among them José Miguel Oviedo, my desk mate, who later on would be the first literary critic to write a book about me.

  But despite these friends, and a few good teachers as well, my memory of the years at La Salle was clouded by the presence of my father, whose overwhelming shadow grew larger and larger, dogged my footsteps, and appeared to intrude on all my activities and spoil them. Real life at school is one of games and rites; it is not lived during classes but before and after them, in corners where friends get together, in private houses when they seek each other out and meet to plan the matinees or the parties they’ll all go to or the pranks they’ll play; parallel to classes, these make up the profound education of a boy, the enchanting adventure of childhood. I had had that in Bolivia and in Piura and now that I no longer had it, my existence was one of nostalgia for that period, full of envy toward those schoolmates at La Salle—like Perro Martínez, or Perales, or Vieja Zanelli, or Flaco Ramos—who could stay after classes to play soccer on the school field, visit each other’s houses, and go to the serials at the neighborhood movie theaters even though it wasn’t Sunday. I had to go back home once the day’s classes were over and shut myself up in my room to do my homework. And when it occurred to one of the boys at school to invite me to have tea or go to his house on Sunday after Mass, to have lunch and go to the matinee, I had to invent all sorts of excuses, because how was I going to dare to ask my father for permission to do things like that?

  I went back to La Magdalena and pleaded with my mother to give me my dinner early so that I might be in bed before he got home and thereby manage not to see him until the next day. Often, when I was still not finished eating, I would hear the blue Ford braking outside the door, and go scurrying upstairs and dive into bed with all my clothes on, covering even my head with the sheet. I kept hoping that they were eating or listening on Radio Central to Teresita Arce’s program, “La Chola Purificatión Chauca” (“The Mestiza Purification Chauca”), which made him roar with laughter, so that I could get out of bed on tiptoe and put my pajamas on.

  To think that Uncle Juan, Aunt Laura, and my cousins Nancy and Gladys, and my Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby, and Uncle Pedro lived in Lima and that we couldn’t go see them because of my papa’s antipathy for the Llosa family embittered me as much as being subjected to his authority. My mama tried to make me understand, with reasons I didn’t even hear: “He’s the way he is, we have to please him if we want to lead a joyful life in peace and quiet.” Why did he forbid us to see my aunts and uncles, my cousins? When he wasn’t around, when I was alone with my mother, I regained my sense of security and again felt free to engage in the impertinent behavior that, before, my grandparents and Mamaé had indulgently tolerated. My scenes demanding that we run away together to a place where he could never find us must have made her life much more difficult. One day, in desperation, I even went so far as to threaten that, if we didn’t leave, I would tell my papa that in Piura the Spaniard whose name was Azcárate, the one who tried to buy me off by taking me to see a boxing championship bout, had visited her in the prefect’s house. She began to cry and I felt like a miserable wretch.

  Until one day we made our escape. I don’t remember which one of the fights—although using that word to describe those scenes in which he shouted, insulted, and lashed out while my mother wept or listened to him without a word is an exaggeration—made her decide to take the great step. Perhaps it was that episode that lingers in my memory as one of the worst of all. It was at night and we were coming home from somewhere, in the blue Ford. My mama was recounting something and suddenly mentioned a lady from Arequipa named Elsa. “Elsa?” he asked. “Elsa who?” I started to tremble. “Yes, that Elsa,” my mother stammered and tried to change the subject. “The number-one whore in person,” he hissed. He fell silent for some time and suddenly I heard my mother cry out. He had pinched her so hard on the leg that a large purple bruise formed immediately. She showed it to me later, saying that she couldn’t stand any more. “Let’s leave, Mama, let’s leave once and for all, let’s run away.”

  We waited until he’d left for the office, and taking with us only a few things that we could carry by hand, we went by taxi to Miraflores, to the Avenida 28 de Julio, where Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby lived, and also Uncle Pedro, still a bachelor, who was finishing his medical training that year. It was exciting to see my aunts and uncles again and to be in this neighborhood that was so pretty, with tree-lined streets and little houses that had well-cared-for gardens. Above all, it was marvelous to feel that I was with my family once more, far from that man, and to know that I would never again hear him or see him or feel afraid. Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby’s house was small, and they had two children, Silvia and Jorgito, who were still hardly older than toddlers, but we all fit in somehow—I slept in an armchair—and my happiness knew no bounds. What would happen to us now? My mama and my aunt and uncle held long conversations which I was not allowed to participate in. In any event, I didn’t have words enough to thank God, the Virgin, and that Lord of Limpias to whom Granny Carmen was so devoted, for having freed us from that man.

  A few days later, when classes were over, just as I was about to climb into the La Salle school bus that took the pupils to San Isidro and Miraflores, my heart sank: there he was. “Don’t be afraid,” he said to me. “I’m not going to do anything to you. Come with me.” I noticed that he looked very pale and had big dark circles under his eyes, as though he hadn’t had any sleep for days. In the car, talking to me
in a friendly way, he explained that we’d go pick up my clothes and my mama’s and that then he’d take me to Miraflores. I was certain that that affable manner was a hidden trap and that the moment we arrived at the house on the Avenida Salaverry he would beat me. But he didn’t. He had already packed part of our clothes in suitcases and I had to help him put the rest in some sacks and, when those gave out, in a blue blanket, which we tied together by the corners. As we were doing that, I, with my soul hanging by a thread, constantly fearing that at any moment he would regret allowing me to leave, noted, in surprise, that he had removed many of the photos that my mama kept on her night table, thereby eliminating her and me, and that he had stuck pins in others. When we had finally finished packing everything, we brought it all down to the blue Ford and took off. I couldn’t believe that it would be so easy, that he would act in such an understanding way. In Miraflores, in front of Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby’s, he wouldn’t let me call the maid to unload the things. He left them outside, on the tree-lined sidewalk, and the blanket came undone and clothes and various objects spilled out over the lawn. My aunt and uncle remarked afterward that with a spectacle like that, the whole neighborhood had had an eyeful of the family’s dirty linen.

  A few days later, when I came back for lunch, I noticed something strange about the expression on the faces of Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby. What had happened? Where was my mama? They passed the news on to me tactfully, as was their habit, aware that it would be a tremendous disappointment for me. My mama and papa had made up and my mama had gone back to him. And that afternoon, when I got out of school, instead of going to Miraflores, I too was to go to the Avenida Salaverry. My world came tumbling down. How could she do such a thing? Was my mama too betraying me?

  At the time I was unable to understand it, only suffer it, and I emerged from each of these escapes of ours and my parents’ later reconciliations more embittered, feeling that life was full of sudden shocks, without any compensation. Why did my mother make up with him every time, knowing full well that, after having calmed down for a few days or weeks, he would begin his physical violence and his insults once again, on the slightest pretext? She did so because, despite everything, she loved him with that obstinacy that was one of the traits of her character (one that I would inherit from her) and because he was the husband that God had given her—and a woman like her could have only one husband till the end of time, even though he mistreated her and even though she had a vague semi-definite divorce decree—and also because, despite her having worked for Grace Lines in Cochabamba and in Piura, my mother had been brought up to have a husband, to be a housewife, and so she felt incapable of earning a living for herself and for her son with her own earnings alone. She did it because she felt ashamed that she and I were continuing to be supported by my grandparents, who weren’t all that well off—Grandpa had never been able to put money aside with that tribe on his back—or else we would one day come to be supported by my aunt and uncle, who were trying their best to make their way financially in Lima. I know that now, but when I was eleven or twelve years old I didn’t know it, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have understood. The only thing I knew and understood was that, every time my mother and father took up with each other again, I had to go back to being imprisoned, to loneliness and fear, and this was gradually filling my heart with bitterness toward my mother as well, with whom, from that time on, I was never again as close as I had been before I met my father.

  Between 1947 and 1949 we made our escape a number of times, at least half a dozen, always to the house of Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby or to Juan and Laura’s, also in Miraflores, and each time, within a few days, the much-feared reconciliation came about. With the distance of the years, how comical those escapes, hidden refuges, tearful receptions, those makeshift beds set up for us in the living rooms or dining rooms of my aunts and uncles seem. There was always that lugging of suitcases and sacks, the goings and comings, the very embarrassing explanations at La Salle, to the Brothers and to my schoolmates, of why, all of a sudden, I would be taking the Miraflores school bus instead of the La Magdalena one and then, after a while, the La Magdalena bus once more. Had I moved from one house to another again, or hadn’t I? Because nobody moved back and forth from one house to another every so often the way we did.

  One day—it was summer, so it must have been shortly after our arrival in Lima—my papa took me alone with him in the car and we picked up two boys on a street corner. He introduced me to them: “They’re your brothers.” The older one, a year younger than I was, was named Enrique, and the other one, two years younger, Ernesto. The latter had blond hair and such light blue eyes that anybody would have taken him for a little gringo. All three of us were embarrassed and didn’t know what to do. My papa took us to the beach at Agua Dulce, rented an awning, sat down in the shade, and sent us to play in the sand and take a dip in the ocean. Little by little we began to feel closer to each other. They were students at the Colegio San Andrés and spoke English. Wasn’t San Andrés a Protestant school? I didn’t dare ask them. Afterward, when we were alone, my mama told me that, after separating from her, my papa had married a German lady and that Enrique and Ernesto were the sons of that marriage. But that he had separated from his gringa wife some years before, because she too had a testy temperament and couldn’t stand his bad moods. I didn’t see my brothers again for quite some time. Until, during one of those periodic escapes—this time we had taken refuge at Aunt Lala and Uncle Juan’s—my papa came to La Salle for me when school let out. Like the time before, he made me get into the blue Ford. He looked very stern and I was terrified. “The Llosas are plotting to send you abroad,” he said to me. “Taking advantage of their family ties with the president. They’re going to have me to contend with and we’ll see who wins.” Instead of going to La Magdalena, we went to Jesús María, where he stopped in front of a group of little red brick houses, made me get out of the car, knocked, and we went in. There were my brothers. And their mama, a blond lady, who offered me a cup of tea. “You stay here until I arrange matters,” my papa said. And he went away.

  I was there for two days, without going to school, convinced that I would never see my mama again. He had kidnapped me and this would be my house from then on. They had given me one of my brothers’ beds and the two of them shared the other one. At night they heard me crying and got up, turned the light on, and tried to console me. But I went on crying, until the lady of the house also appeared and tried to calm me down. Two days later my papa came to get me. There had been another reconciliation and my mama was waiting for me in the little house in La Magdalena. Then she told me that, in fact, she had thought of asking the president for a job in a Peruvian consulate somewhere abroad, and that my papa had found out. Wasn’t the fact that he had kidnapped me a proof that he loved me? When my mama tried to convince me that he loved me or that I should love him, since, in spite of everything, he was my papa, I felt even more bitter toward her than I did because of their periodic making up with each other.

  I believe I saw my brothers only a couple of times more in that year, and always for only a few hours. The following year, they left with their mother for Los Angeles, where she and Ernesto—who goes by the name of Ernie now, since he’s an American citizen and a prosperous attorney—still live. Enrique began to suffer from leukemia when he was in school and suffered a painful death. He came back to Lima for a few days, shortly before he died. I went to see him and could scarcely recognize, in that fragile little figure racked with disease, the handsome, sporting boy of the photographs that he used to send to Lima and that my papa sometimes showed us.

  During the time he kept me confined at the gringa’s (as my mother and I called her), my papa had turned up without warning at my Uncle Juan’s. He didn’t come in. He told the maid that he wanted to talk with my uncle and that he would wait for him in the car. My father had not been on speaking terms with anybody in the family ever since that long-ago day when he abandoned my mother at the Arequipa
airport, at the end of 1935. Uncle Juan told me some time later about their meeting, straight out of a movie. My father was sitting at the wheel of the blue Ford waiting for him and when Uncle Juan got in, he warned him: “I’m armed and ready for anything.” So as not to leave any doubt in my uncle’s mind, he showed him the revolver he was carrying in his pocket. He said that if the Llosas, taking advantage of their relationship with the president, tried to send me abroad, he would take reprisals against the family. Then he railed against the upbringing they had given me, spoiling me and drumming it into my head that I should hate him and fostering in me fancy-pants ideas like saying that when I was grown up I’d be a bullfighter and a poet; his name was at stake and he wouldn’t have a son who was a pansy. Following this semi-hysterical peroration, in which Uncle Juan couldn’t get so much as a word in edgewise, he noted that as long as the Llosas refused to give him any guarantees that my mother wouldn’t go off abroad with me, the family wouldn’t see my face again. And he drove off.

  That revolver he showed Uncle Juan was an emblematic object of my childhood and adolescence, the symbol of the relationship I had with my father as long as I lived with him. I heard him shoot it, one night, in the little house in La Perla, but I don’t know if I ever managed to see the revolver with my own eyes. It is quite true that I saw it constantly, in my nightmares and in my moments of terror, and every time I heard my father shout and threaten my mama, it seemed to me that, in all truth, what he said he was going to do, he really and truly would do: take out that revolver, shoot five times, and kill her and then me.