A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Uncle Lucho was very fond of reading and as a young man had written poetry. (Later on, at the university, I learned through professors who had been his friends in his youth, in Arequipa—Augusto Tamayo Vargas, Emilio Champion, and Miguel Ángel Ugarte Chamorro, for instance—that in those days all his intimate friends were convinced that his vocation was to be an intellectual.) I still remember some of his verses, in particular a sonnet, in which he compared a lady’s beautiful moral qualities to the beads of a necklace, and in our conversations during that year in Piura, when I spoke to him of my vocation and told him that I wanted to be a writer even if I starved to death, because literature was the best thing there was in the world, he used to recite that sonnet to me, as he encouraged me to follow my literary inclinations without giving a thought to the consequences, because—it is a lesson that I learned and have tried to transmit to my children—the worst misfortune that can befall a man is to spend his life doing things that he doesn’t like to do instead of those that he would have liked to do.

  Uncle Lucho listened to me read aloud to him La huida del inca, and many poems and short stories, offering me certain criticisms at times—exuberance was my major defect—but tactfully, so as not to hurt my feelings as a novice writer.

  Aunt Olga had fixed up a room for me at the back of the little patio of their tiny house on the Calle Tacna, just a little way away from its intersection with the Avenida Sánchez Cerro, opposite the Plaza Merino, where my brand-new school, San Miguel, was located. The house occupied the lower floors of an old building, and consisted of a small living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms, plus the bathrooms and bedrooms for the household help. My arrival wrecked the orderly household, which had grown—besides Wanda and Patricia, nine and seven years old, Lucho had been born and was two years old by then—and the three cousins had to be jammed together in one bedroom so that I could have my own, all to myself. In it, on a couple of shelves, were Uncle Lucho’s books, old volumes published by Espasa-Calpe, editions of classics put out by Ateneo, and, above all, the complete collection of the Biblioteca Contemporánea, published by Losada, some thirty or forty books of novels, essays, poetry, and theater that I am certain I read from beginning to end, in that year of voracious reading. Among Uncle Lucho’s books, I found an autobiography, published by Diana, a Mexico City publishing house, that kept me awake for many nights and gave me a violent political jolt: Out of the Night, by Jan Valtin. Its author had been a German Communist, in the Nazi era, and his autobiography, full of episodes of clandestine militancy, of sacrifices of fates and fortunes to the cause of revolution, and of hideous abuses was, to me, a detonating device, something that for the first time gave me pause and made me think about justice, political action, revolution. Although, at the end of the book, Valtin severely criticized the Communist Party, which sacrificed his wife and dealt with him in the most cynical way, I remember having finished the book feeling great admiration for those lay saints who, despite the risk of being tortured, decapitated, or condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the underground cells of the Nazis, dedicated their lives to fighting for socialism.

  Since the school was just a few meters from the house—all I had to do was cross the Plaza Merino to get to it—I got up out of bed as late as possible, dressed in a mad rush, and raced off when they were already blowing the whistle for the beginning of classes. But Aunt Olga refused to let me skip breakfast and would send the maid to San Miguel with a cup of milk and a slice of buttered bread for me. I don’t know how many times I had to go through the embarrassing experience of seeing the head supervisor, “el Diablo”—“the Devil”—come into the classroom just after the first morning lesson had started, to summon me: “Vargas Llosa, Mario! To the door, to have his breakfast!” After my three months as a night-owl reporter on La Crónica and a steady customer of brothels, I had gone back to being a youngster with a family.

  I didn’t regret it. I felt happy that Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho pampered me, and that at the same time they treated me like a grownup, giving me complete freedom to go out at night, or stay home reading until all hours, something that I often did. For that reason it took a superhuman effort on my part to get up in time for school. Aunt Olga signed blank cards for me, so that I could invent excuses myself for being late. But since I turned them in too often, Wanda and Patricia were given the responsibility for waking me up each morning. Wandita did so gently; her younger sister, Patricia, took advantage of this chance to give free rein to her wicked instincts and had no compunction about throwing a glass of water all over me. She was a little seven-year-old demon hidden behind a cute turned-up nose, flashing eyes, and curly hair. Those glasses of cold water she poured on top of me became a nightmare and I awaited them, still half asleep, with anticipated shivers. Stunned and startled by the sudden dash of cold water, I would throw the pillow at her in fury, but she would answer me with a great burst of laughter too big to have come out of her semi-skeletal little body. Her bad behavior beat all the records of family tradition, including my own. When something wasn’t to her liking, Cousin Patricia was capable of crying and stamping her feet for hours on end, until her tantrums infuriated Uncle Lucho, whom I once observed putting her under the shower fully dressed, to see if that would make her stop screaming. At a certain period when she slept in my room, I took it into my head to write her a poem, and she learned it by heart and used to fill me with embarrassment by reciting it in front of Aunt Olga’s friends, lingering over each word and giving it gelatinous accents so that it would sound even worse:

  Duerme la niña

  The little girl sleeps

  cerquita de mí

  right next to me

  y su manecita

  and her little hand

  blanca y chiquitita

  white and wee

  apoyada tiene

  she keeps folded tightly

  muy junta de sí…

  right next to her…

  At times, I gave her a quick pinch or pulled her ears, whereupon she would kick up a fuss and begin howling as though she were being skinned alive, and in order that Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga wouldn’t believe I’d been mistreating her, I had to placate her by pleading with her or putting on a clown act. She used to exact a price for the deal: “Either you buy me a cup of chocolate or I’ll go on screaming…”

  San Miguel de Piura was opposite the Salesian school, but unlike it, it didn’t have a roomy and comfortable building; it was in an old house made of reeds and clay with a corrugated zinc roof, not at all suited to its needs. But San Miguel, thanks to the efforts of its headmaster—Dr. Marroquín, to whom I gave so many headaches—was a splendid school. In it many youngsters from humble Piura families—from La Mangachería, from La Gallinacera and other districts on the outskirts of the city—attended classes with youngsters from the middle class and even from the top families of Piura, who were enrolled there either because the priests of the Salesian school wouldn’t put up with them any longer or because they were attracted by the good teachers at San Miguel. Dr. Marroquín had managed to persuade distinguished professionals of the city to come to the school to give classes—above all to pupils in my year, the last one before graduation—and thanks to this I had the good luck, for instance, to study political economy with Dr. Guillermo Gulman. It was this course, I believe, and also Uncle Lucho’s advice, that made me make up my mind to study, later on at the university, for degrees in Letters and in Law. But in those classes of Dr. Gulman’s, the law seemed much more profound and important than something that had to do merely with lawsuits: it was an open door to philosophy, to economics, to all the social sciences.

  We also had an excellent history teacher, Néstor Martos, who wrote a daily column in El Tiempo entitled “Voto en Contra” (“A Vote Against”) on local issues. Professor Martos, an impenitent bohemian with a debauched face, who seemed to arrive in class, every so often, directly from some little bar where he had spent the whole night drinking chicha, his hair
uncombed, his chin stubbled, and with a muffler covering half his face—a muffler, in torrid Piura!—was transformed in the classroom into an Apollonian expositor, a painter of frescoes of the pre-Inca and Inca eras of American history. I listened to him spellbound, and my face turned beet-red one morning in that class, in which, without mentioning my name, he devoted himself to enumerating all the reasons why no true Peruvian could be a “Hispanist” or praise Spain (which I had done, that same day, in my column in La Industria, on the occasion of the visit to Piura of the ambassador of that country). One of his arguments was this: In the three hundred years of colonialism, had any ruler ever deigned to visit the American possessions of the Spanish Empire?

  The literature teacher was a little less lofty—we had to memorize the adjectives that described the classics: San Juan de la Cruz, “profound and essential” Góngora, “baroque and classicist” Quevedo, “ornate, festive, and imperishable” Garcilaso, “Italianizing, dead before his time, and a friend of Juan Boscáu’s”—but this blind teacher, José Robles Rázuri, was a very fine person. When he discovered my vocation, he held me in high esteem and used to lend me books—he had put pink paper covers on all of them and a little seal with his name—among which I remember the first two of Azorín’s that I read: Al margen de los clásicos (Marginal Notes to the Classics) and La ruta de Don Quijote (The Path of Don Quixote).

  In the second or third week of classes, in a daring gesture, I told Professor Robles in secret about my little work for the theater. He read it and proposed something to me that gave me heart palpitations. The school habitually put on one of the ceremonies commemorating Piura Week, in July. Why didn’t we suggest to the head of San Miguel that the school put on my La huida del inca this year? Dr. Marroquín gave his approval of the project and, without further ado, I was put in charge of directing it, for its very first performance on July 17, in the Teatro Variedades. You can imagine how excited I was when I ran home to tell the news to Uncle Lucho: We were going to put on La huida del inca! And at the Teatro Variedades, no less!

  If only because it allowed me to see, onstage, living with the fictitious life of the theater, something that I myself had invented, my debt to Piura can never be repaid. But I owe it other things. Good friends, some of whom I still have. Several of my old classmates of the Salesian school, such as Javier Silva and Manolo and Richard Artadi, had gone on to San Miguel, and among my new schoolmates there were others, the Temple twins, the León cousins, the Raygada brothers, who became my soulmates. This fifth year of secondary school turned out to be a pathbreaking one, since for the first time so-called mixed classes were tried out in a state school. In our class there were five girls; they sat in a row by themselves and our relations with them were formal and distant. One of them, Yolanda Vilela, was one of the three “vestals” in La huida del inca, according to the faded program of the performance that I’ve carried in my wallet, as a talisman, ever since.

  Of all that group of friends, my closest pal was Javier Silva. He was already, at sixteen, what he would be later, many times over: fat, gluttonous, intelligent, tireless, unscrupulous, likable, loyal, always ready to embark on any and every adventure, and more generous than anybody else. He says that as long ago as that year I had convinced him that life far from Paris was impossible, that we had to go there as soon as we could, and that I dragged him with me to open a joint savings account, so as to be sure of having the money for the passage. (My memory tells me that that took place later in Lima, when we were university students.) He had a gigantic appetite and on the days when he was given pocket money—he lived around the corner from my house, in the Calle Arequipa—he would come by to invite me to El Reina, a restaurant on the Avenida Sánchez Cerro, where he ordered an appetizer and a beer for us to share. We used to go to the movies—to the Municipal, to the Variedades, or to the Castilla, the open-air movie theater with only one projector, so that at the end of each reel there was an intermission. We would go swimming at the Club Grau, and we would visit the Casa Verde, the Green House, on the road to Catacaos, to which I had to drag him the first time after getting him over the panic fear that his father, a much-loved doctor in Piura, had instilled in him, assuring him that if he went there he’d catch syphilis.

  The Casa Verde was a big cabin, a building a bit more rustic than a house, a much happier and more sociable place than the brothels in Lima, which were usually sordid and frequently the scene of violent brawls. The bordello in Piura had retained the traditional function of a place to meet and hold get-togethers, and was not merely a house of prostitution. Piurans of all social classes went there. I remember being surprised one night to find the prefect, Don Jorge Checa, at one of the tables, moved by the tonderos and the cumananas of a trio from the Mangachería district. They went to listen to music, to eat the regional dishes—young goat, ceviche, or the stew of pork, corn, and bananas called chifles, and cream custards, along with light chicha and thick chicha—or to dance and to talk together, and not just for love-making. The atmosphere was easygoing, informal, cheery, and rarely spoiled by rows. Much later, when I discovered Maupassant, I couldn’t help associating that Casa Verde with his beautifully portrayed Maison Tellier, just as La Mangachería, the joyful, violent, and marginal neighborhood on the outskirts of Piura, was always identified in my memory with the Court of Miracles of Alexandre Dumas’s novels. Ever since I was a small boy, the real-life things and people that have moved me most have been the ones that most closely resembled literature.

  My generation experienced the swan song of the brothel, buried that institution that was gradually to die out as sexual mores became more relaxed, the pill was discovered, the myth of virginity gradually became obsolete, and boys began to make love to their sweethearts. The banalization of sex that resulted is, according to psychologists and sexologists, a very salutary development for society, which, in this way, finds an outlet for its numerous neurotic repressions. Something very positive, doubtless. But it has also signified the trivialization of the sexual act and the disappearance of a privileged source of pleasure for contemporary humans. Stripped of mystery and of centuries-old religious and moral taboos, as well as of the elaborate rituals that surrounded the practice of it, physical love has come to be the most natural thing in the world for the younger generations, a gymnastic exercise, a temporary diversion, something very different from that central mystery of life, of the approach by way of it to the gates of heaven and hell that it still was for my generation. The brothel was the temple of that clandestine religion, where one went to celebrate an exciting and perilous rite, to live, for a few short hours, a life apart. A life founded on terrible social injustices, no doubt—from the next year on, I would be conscious of this and would be very much ashamed of having gone to brothels and having frequented whores like a contemptible bourgeois—but the truth is that it gave many of us a very intense, respectful, and almost mystical relationship to the world and the practices of sex, something inseparable from the intuition of the sacred and of ceremony, of the active unfolding of fantasy, of mystery and shame, of everything that Georges Bataille calls transgression. Perhaps it is a good thing that sex has come to seem something natural to most mortals. To me it never was, nor is it now. Seeing a naked woman in a bed has always been the most disquieting and most disturbing of experiences, something that never would have had for me that transcendental nature, deserving of so much tremulous respect and so much joyous expectation, if sex had not been, in my childhood and adolescence, surrounded by taboos, prohibitions, and prejudices, if in order to make love to a woman there had not been so many obstacles to overcome in those days.

  Going to that house daubed with green paint, on the outskirts of Castilla, along the road to Catacaos, cost me my meager paycheck from La Industria, so I went only a few times a year. But each time I left there with my head full of impassioned images, and I am certain that from that time on I vaguely dreamed of one day making up a story, the scene of which would be that Casa Verde. It is possible f
or memory and nostalgia to embellish something that was wretched and sordid—what can one expect of a little bordello in a tiny city such as Piura?—but as I remember it, the atmosphere of the place was happy and poetic, and those who went there really had a good time, not only the johns but also the gay men who worked as waiters and bouncers, the whores, the musicians who played waltzes, tonderos, mambos, or huarachas, and the cook who prepared the food in sight of everyone, doing dance steps around the stove. There were only a few little rooms with rough beds for couples, so that often it was necessary to go out into the open among the sand dunes all about to make love, amid the mesquite and the goats. The lack of comfort was compensated for by the warm bluish atmosphere of Piuran nights, with the soft light of the moon when it was full and the sensual curves of dunes amid which one caught glimpses, on the other side of the river, of the twinkling lights of the city.

  Just a few days after my arrival in Piura, I presented myself, with my letters of recommendation from Alfonso Delboy and Gastón Aguirre Morales, at the home of the owner of La Industria, Don Miguel F. Cerro Guerrero. He was a spindly little oldster, a little bit of a man with a weather-beaten face, covered with a thousand wrinkles, in which keen, restless eyes betrayed his indomitable energy. He had three daily provincial newspapers—issues of La Industria for Piura, Chiclayo, and Trujillo—which he ran from his little house in Piura with an energetic hand, and a cotton plantation, in the vicinity of Catacaos, which he rode out to on the back of a lazy mule as old as he was, so as to supervise things personally. He rode it matter-of-factly down the middle of the street, heading for the Old Bridge, paying no attention to pedestrians and to cars passing by. He made a stop at the main office of La Industria, in the Calle Lima, into whose patio surrounded by grillwork the mule would burst without warning, badly pitting the tiling with its hoofs, so that Don Miguel could have a look at the material in the editorial room. He was a man who never tired, who worked even when he was asleep, who was nobody’s fool, stern and even hardhearted but possessed of a rectitude that made those of us who worked under him feel secure. Legend had it that one night somebody had asked him, at a dinner accompanied by a great deal to drink, at the Centro Piurano, if he was still able to make love. And that Don Miguel had invited the other guests to accompany him to the Casa Verde, where he had, to all intents and purposes, laid that doubt to rest.