A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Grandpa Pedro resigned as prefect of Piura on the same day as the military coup, bundled up his tribe—Grandmother Carmen, Mamaé, Joaquín, and Orlando—and brought them to Lima. Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga stayed in Piura. That post as prefect was the last steady job my grandfather ever had. There would then begin for him, still robust and lucid at the age of seventy-five, a long via crucis, the slow immersion in the mediocrity of routine and poverty that he never grew weary of fighting, seeking work right and left, sometimes securing, temporarily, an audit or a liquidation with which he was entrusted by a bank, or minor matters to take up with administrative agencies, which filled him with hope, got him up out of bed at dawn to get ready in a great hurry and wait impatiently for it to be time to leave for “his job” (although this might well consist merely of standing in line in some ministry to secure the official seal of some bureaucrat). Miserable and mechanical, those little jobs made him feel alive and relieved him of the torture that it was for him to live on the small monthly sums that his children slipped him. Later on—I know that it was as a protest by his body against the tremendous injustice of not finding a job when he was still able to work, of feeling condemned to a useless and parasitic life—when he had his first cerebral hemorrhage and could no longer manage to secure even those temporary assignments, the inactivity little by little drove him mad. He rushed out onto the streets, walking from one place to another, very fast, inventing tasks for himself. And my uncles tried to find some sort of work for him to do, some sort of minor business transaction for him to carry out for them, so he wouldn’t feel like a useless old man.

  Grandfather Pedro wasn’t the sort to take his grandchildren in his arms and devour them with kisses. Children bothered him and, at times, in Bolivia, in Piura, and then later in the little houses in Lima where he lived, when his grandchildren and great-grandchildren made a great racket, he ordered them to cut it out. But he was the kindest and most generous man I have ever known and I often have recourse to the memory of him when I feel overcome with despair for the species and inclined to believe that, all things considered, humanity is nothing but trash. Not even in the very last stage of his life, a penniless old age, did he lose the moral composure that he had always had, and that, through his prolonged existence, led him to respect unfailingly certain values and rules of behavior that stemmed from a religion and principles that in his case were never frivolous or mechanical. They determined all the important acts of his life. If he had not assumed the burden of supporting all those abandoned creatures that my Granny Carmen took in, and adopting them—adopting us, since he was my real father during the first ten years of my life, who reared me and fed me—perhaps he wouldn’t have reached old age pitifully poverty-stricken. But neither would he have reached that point if he had stolen, or coldly calculated his life, if he had been less decent in everything he did. I believe that his great concern in life was to go about things in such a way that Granny Carmen would not learn that what is evil and filthy is also part of existence. He was only partially successful, of course, even though his children helped him in this endeavor, but he managed to spare her many sufferings and bring her considerable relief from others that he was unable to prevent. He devoted his life to this goal and Granny Carmen knew it, and therefore in their marriage they were the happiest that a couple can be in this life, where so often the word happiness seems obscene.

  They nicknamed my grandfather “Gringo” when he was young, apparently because he had blond hair. I, for my part, as far back as I can remember, see him with sparse white hair, a ruddy face, and that big nose that is a trait shared by the Llosa family, as is walking with our feet splayed apart. He knew many poems by heart, some written by others and some his own, which he taught me to memorize. That I should write verses as a small boy amused him, and that later on articles of mine should appear in the newspapers made him highly enthusiastic, and that I should reach the point of having books of mine published filled him with satisfaction. Although I am certain that it must also have alarmed him, as it did my Granny Carmen, who told me so, that my first novel, La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero), which I sent them from Spain as soon as it came out, was full of dirty words. Because he was always a gentleman and gentlemen never say—much less write—dirty words.

  In 1956, when Manuel Prado won the elections and took office, the brand-new minister of the interior, Jorge Fernández Stoll, summoned my grandfather to his office and asked if he would agree to be the prefect of Arequipa. I never saw my grandfather so happy. He was going to work, to stop depending on his children. He would go back to Arequipa, his beloved homeland. With great care he wrote a speech for the ceremony of taking office and read it to us, in the little dining room of the house on the Calle Porta. We applauded it. He smiled. But the minister didn’t call him back or return his calls, and only much later informed him that the APRA, an ally of Prado’s, had vetoed the appointment because he was related to Bustamante y Rivero. It was a very hard blow, but I never heard him blame it on anyone.

  When he gave up the prefecture of Piura, he and Granny Carmen came to live in an apartment on the Avenida Dos de Mayo, in Miraflores. It was a small place and they were quite uncomfortable there. Shortly thereafter, Auntie Mamaé moved in with us, in La Perla. I don’t know how my father came to agree that someone who was as vital a representative of the family that he detested should become part of his household. Perhaps what decided him was knowing that in this way my mother would have company during the long hours that he spent at the office. Mamaé stayed with us as long as we lived in La Perla.

  Her real name was Elvira, and she was a cousin of Granny Carmen’s. She had been left an orphan as a small child, and in the Tacna of the end of the nineteenth century she had been adopted by my great-grandparents, who brought her up like a sister to their daughter Carmen. When still an adolescent, she was engaged to a Chilean officer. As the wedding day approached—family legend has it that her bridal gown had already been made and the wedding announcements sent out—something happened, she found out about something, and broke the engagement. From that time on, until her death at the age of a hundred and four, she remained a spinster and never again became engaged. She never separated from my granny, whom she followed to Arequipa when the latter married, and then to Bolivia, to Piura, and to Lima. She brought up my mother and all my uncles, who called her Auntie Mamaé. And she also brought up my cousins and me, and even held my children and theirs in her arms. The secret of why she broke off with her fiancé—what dramatic episode made her choose spinsterhood forever after—she and Granny Carmen, the only ones who knew the details, took to their graves with them. Mamaé was always a tutelary shadow in the family, the second mama of everyone, the one who stayed up all night keeping watch over anyone who was ill and acted as babysitter and chaperone, the one who took care of the house when everyone was gone, the one who never protested or complained and the one who loved and pampered all of us. Her diversions were listening to the radio when the others did, rereading the books of her youth as long as her eyes held out, and, of course, praying and arriving punctually for Sunday Mass.

  She was a great deal of company to my mother, there in La Perla, a great happiness to me to have her in the house, and also someone whose presence toned down to some degree my father’s fits of fury. Every once in a while, amid those attacks accompanied by insults and blows, Mamaé would come out, a tiny little thing, dragging her feet, with her hands placed together, to implore him: “Ernesto, I beg you,” “Ernesto, in the name of what you hold most dear,” and he would usually make an effort and calm down.

  At the end of 1948, when we had already taken the final examinations of the first year of secondary school—around the beginning or the middle of December—something happened to me at La Salle that had a delayed but decisive effect on my relations with God. These had been those of a boy who believed and practiced everything that he had been taught insofar as religion was concerned, and for whom the existence of God and the tru
e nature of Catholicism were so evident that not even the shadow of a doubt in this respect had ever entered his head. The fact that my father made fun of the pious believers that my mother and I were only served to confirm that certainty. Wasn’t it only to be expected that someone who seemed to me to be the very embodiment of cruelty, the evildoer personified, should be an unbeliever and an apostate?

  I do not remember that the Brothers at La Salle overwhelmed us with catechism classes and exercises in piety. We had a course in religion—the one given us by Brother Agustín, in the second year of secondary school, was as entertaining as his lessons in universal history, and it impelled me to buy a Bible for myself—together with Sunday Mass and a few retreats during the year, but nothing that resembled those schools that were renowned for the rigor of their religious instruction, such as La Inmaculada or La Recoleta. Every so often the Brothers made us fill out questionnaires to check to see if we had felt the call of God, and I always answered no, that my vocation was to be a sailor. And in all truth, I never experienced, as some of my schoolmates did, religious crises and fears. I remember what a surprise it was, in my barrio, to see one of my friends suddenly burst into tears and sobs one night, and when Luchín and I, who were trying to calm him down, asked him what was the matter, to hear him stammer that he was weeping over how greatly men offended God.

  I couldn’t go get my report card, at the end of that year in 1948, for some reason or other. I went the following day. The school was empty of pupils. They handed me my report card in the principal’s office and I was just leaving when Brother Leoncio, who had been our teacher the year before, appeared, cheerful and smiling. He asked me about my grades and my vacation plans. Despite his reputation as a little old grouch, who used to rap our heads with his knuckles when we behaved badly, we all loved Brother Leoncio for his picturesque appearance, his ruddy face, his unruly forelock, and his Spanish full of Gallicisms. He devoured me with questions, without giving me an opening so as to say goodbye, and all of a sudden he told me that he wanted to show me something and to come with him. He took me to the top floor of the school, where the Brothers had their rooms, a place where we students never went. He opened a door and there was his room: a small one with a bed, a clothes closet, a little worktable, and religious prints and photographs on the walls. I noticed that he was very excited, talking very fast about sin, the devil, or something like that, as he poked around in this clothes closet. I began to feel uncomfortable. Finally he took out a pile of magazines and handed them to me. The first one I opened was called Vea and was full of pictures of naked women. I felt tremendous surprise, mingled with embarrassment. I didn’t dare raise my head, or answer, for still speaking in a rush and tripping over his words, Brother Leoncio had come closer to me, asking me if I was acquainted with those magazines, if my friends and I bought them and leafed through them by ourselves. And, all of a sudden, I felt his hand on my trousers fly. He was trying to open it at the same time as, clumsily, with his hand on top of my trousers, he rubbed my penis. I remember his congested face, his tremulous voice, a thread of saliva dangling from his mouth. I wasn’t afraid of him, as I was of my papa. I began to shout “Let me go! Let me go!” at the top of my lungs and in an instant Brother Leoncio’s face turned from beet-red to deathly pale. He opened the door for me and murmured something like “But why are you afraid?” I ran down to the street.

  Poor Brother Leoncio! How embarrassed he too must have been after that episode. The next year, the last one in which I attended La Salle, when he met me in the patio his eyes avoided mine and his face showed signs of how ashamed he felt.

  From that time on, I gradually stopped being interested in religion and in God. I went on attending Mass, going to confession and taking communion, and even saying prayers at night, but in a more and more mechanical way, not participating in what I was doing, and during the obligatory daily Mass at school, thinking of something else, until one day I realized that my faith was gone. I had turned into an unbeliever. I didn’t dare tell anyone, but when I was by myself, I told myself, without shame or fear. Only in 1950, when I entered the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, did I dare defy the people around me with the curt remark “I’m not a believer; I’m an atheist.”

  That episode with Brother Leoncio, besides making me gradually lose interest in religion, augmented the disgust I’d felt for sex ever since that afternoon down by the Piura River when my friends revealed to me how babies were made and how they came into the world. It was a disgust I hid very well, since both at La Salle and in my barrio talking about fucking was a sign of virility, a way of ceasing to be a child and becoming a man, something I wanted as much as my pals and perhaps even more than they did. But even though I too talked of fucking and boasted of having spied on a girl as she was undressing and having masturbated, things like that repelled me. And when, on occasion, in order not to make myself look bad, I engaged in them—like one afternoon, when I climbed down the cliff with half a dozen boys from the barrio to hold a masturbating contest along the beach at Miraflores, which the astronautical Luquen won—I had a lingering feeling of disgust for days afterward.

  For me, then, falling in love had absolutely nothing to do with sex: what I felt for Helena was a diaphanous, disincarnate, intense, and pure sentiment. It consisted of daydreaming a great deal about her and fantasizing that we had gotten married and were traveling about in gorgeous places, of writing verses to her and imagining impassioned heroic situations, in which I saved her from dangers, rescued her from enemies, wrought vengeance on her attackers. She rewarded me with a kiss. A kiss without tonguing: we had had a discussion on the subject with the boys in the barrio, and I defended the position that one could not kiss one’s sweetheart with a tongue kiss; only girls you might be able to score with, vulgar show-offs, lower-class chicks. Tongue kissing was like pawing, and who outside of the worst of degenerates was going to paw a decent girl?

  But if sex revolted me, I shared, on the other hand, the passion of my friends from the barrio for being well dressed and shod and, if it had been possible, going around in the Ray-Ban sunglasses that made boys irresistible to girls. My papa never bought me clothes, but my uncles gave me the suits that had grown too small for them or were going out of style, and a tailor on the Calle Manco Cápac turned them inside out and altered them to fit me, so that I always went around well dressed. The problem was that, when the tailor turned the suits inside out, it left a visible seam down the right side of the jacket, where the handkerchief pocket had been, and I insisted each time to the tailor that he make an invisible darn to hide any trace of that pocket that might make people suspect that my suit was a hand-me-down turned inside out.

  As for pocket money, Uncle Jorge and Uncle Juan, and sometimes Uncle Pedro—who after graduating had left to work in the North, as a doctor on the San Jacinto hacienda—gave me five, and then ten soles every Sunday, and with that amount I had more than enough for the matinee, the Viceroy cigarettes we bought one at a time, or to have a glass of capitán—a mixture of vermouth and pisco brandy—with the boys in the barrio before the parties on Saturday nights, at which only nonalcoholic refreshments were served. In the beginning, my papa also gave me some pocket money, but ever since I first began to go to Miraflores and receive a bit of money from my uncles, I discreetly refused to accept any from my father, saying goodbye to him very quickly on Saturday morning before he gave it to me: another of my overly subtle ways of opposing him, an idea conceived by my cowardice. He must have understood, because from around that time on, the beginning of 1948, he never gave me another centavo.

  But despite these demonstrations of economic pride, in 1949 I dared—it was the one time I ever did anything like it—to ask him to have my teeth straightened. Because they stuck out, they had bothered me a lot at school, where I was called Rabbit and teased about them. I don’t believe that it had mattered all that much to me before, but once I began to go to parties, to keep company with girls and to have a sweetheart, getting braces t
o straighten my teeth as several of my friends had done became a passionately embraced ambition. And, suddenly, the possibility came within reach. One of my friends in the barrio, Coco, was the son of a dental technician, whose specialty was none other than those braces to line up the upper and lower teeth. I talked to Coco and he to his papa, who arranged for the kindly Dr. Lañas, the dentist he worked for, to give me an appointment at his office on the Jirón de la Unión, in the downtown district of Lima, and examine me. He would fit me with braces without charging me for his work; the only thing I would have to pay for was the material. My pride and my vanity battled it out for many days before I took that great step, which, at heart, I considered to be an abject surrender. But vanity won out—my voice must have trembled—and I ended up asking to be fitted with the braces.

  My father said that was fine with him, that he would talk to Dr. Lañas, and perhaps he did. But before Dr. Lañas began the treatment, something happened, one or another of those domestic tempests or running away again with my mother to my aunt and uncle’s house, and, once the crisis subsided and family unity was restored, my father didn’t say anything more to me about the subject nor did I remind him of it. I was left with my rabbit’s teeth, and the following year, when I entered the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, it no longer mattered to me if I was buck-toothed.

  Four

  The Democratic Front

  After the Meetings for Freedom, in August and September 1987, I left for Europe, on October 2, as I was in the habit of doing every year during this period. But unlike other years, this time I took along, deep within me, despite Patricia’s outbursts and her apocalyptic prophecies, the disease of politics. Before leaving Lima, in a televised program thanking those who had supported me in the mobilizations against nationalization, I said that I was returning “to my study and my books,” but nobody believed me, beginning with my wife. I didn’t believe it either.