Raul was a charmer. He was always joking and full of laughter; he was both romantic and politically intense, an irresistible combination for my mother, who wrote endless pages about him in her diary. He told her that he had left home at the age of fifteen to work in the mines, had organized workers, had been the messenger boy for Luis de la Puente Uceda (the martyred activist, politician, and guerrilla of the 1960s), and had even fought alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia. He showed her an old tattered book about Che Guevara that had a grainy black-and-white photo of Che sitting around a campfire with an “unidentified Peruvian,” who Raul insisted was him. And she could not believe her good fortune when Raul told her he didn’t smoke or drink, unlike nearly every other Peruvian man.
My mother was enchanted by Raul’s life stories—about his childhood as the oldest of five, learning to survive on the streets of Lima selling food and newspapers and collecting bottles. Raul’s family, like so many others, had migrated to Lima from the highlands. His mother spent three months in jail for spitting in the face of an abusive government official. His drunkard father refused to teach his sons how to drive because he didn’t want them to be able to borrow his old pickup truck, which he used to haul junk for a living. When his mother didn’t make enough money to feed them, Raul said, he pickpocketed tourists and put the money surreptitiously in her purse. If she caught him, he got a whipping.
Raul also told her gruesome details about taking part in a massacre of forty policemen when he was a teenager, and about being the sole survivor of a five-person guerrilla unit that hid in the jungle for six months. These dramatic tales of bravery and danger, which my mother was so eager to believe that she accepted them as entirely truthful (Raul would later confess to her that he made much of it up to impress her), left her feeling both awestruck and humbled. She admitted to Raul that they made her deeply question her preparedness for guerrilla warfare.
My mother was even more captivated by Raul’s poetry and singing. He wrote poems about her every day, long and short, handwritten and typed. He even sang love songs to her while they took long walks together through the streets of Jauja. “Wish I could record all the poems and songs Raul makes up for me,” she wrote. “When we walk together at night he sings and sings and sings, often making up words as he goes along.”
My mother had found her dream man in a small village in the middle of Peru. Raul was everything my father was not: funny, spontaneous, affectionate, romantic, charismatic, passionate, and intoxicatingly political.
Within a week of meeting my mother, Raul told her that he wanted us to come live with him in Huancayo. Giddy with excitement, my mother talked to me incessantly about Raul and his wondrous plans for their life together filled with romance and revolution. She said she could never stomach being with the son of a “bourgeois Peruvian family,” but Raul came from the slums, had fought against oppression and injustice his entire life, and was a proven revolutionary.
“You’re dreaming, Mommy,” I said to her, rolling my eyes and shaking my head. I then added, “You know, Angelica says he’s trouble, that he’s a little crazy.”
As I’d predicted, my mother didn’t want to hear me. All she said was “You should go to sleep now, Peter,” and then tucked me in with a quick kiss on my forehead.
My mother had a look about her that I had never seen before. She had been involved with many men since she’d left my father; some lasted no more than a few days, some a week or two, a few stuck around for several months. I hadn’t met all of them, and others I wouldn’t learn about until reading through her diaries decades later, but this felt different. She seemed reckless, out of control. I worried that all this talk of fighting for the revolution with Raul could lead her into a situation as bad, or worse, than the one we’d just escaped in Chile.
But all my worrying got me no closer to a solution. A week later, in early February, we left Angelica’s family and moved in with Raul in Ocopilla, a poor barrio up a long dirt road on a hill on the outskirts of Huancayo. My mother didn’t discuss it with me ahead of time. She was so elated, so sure of her choices, that she assumed the three of us would be happy together.
I didn’t realize her plan until we arrived at Raul’s place, a tiny square room on the second floor of an old blue-green adobe house occupied by a family of fourteen. Besides the bedroom, Raul had use of the shared bathroom across the hall. He grinned as he opened the door to the bedroom, gesturing grandly as if the space were palatial. “We can all live here together,” he said.
“Maybe we should get a place with two rooms?” my mother ventured. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to fit a second bed.”
“No, no, no, it’ll be fine, you’ll see.” Raul pushed the window open, as if to prove the vastness of the space.
“But maybe Peter should have a separate room?”
“Nonsense,” Raul said, locking his arm around my shoulders. “Peter needs the security of being with us. Isn’t that right, Peter?”
I looked at my mother and opened my mouth.
“Good,” Raul said, smashing me closer to him. “It’s settled. We’ll all be nice and cozy here together.”
We quickly arranged the room in two parts, with a desk and table in between the beds. I took Raul’s old bed, and he and my mother headed to the local market to buy a second twin mattress. They carried it home together over their shoulders and plopped it on the floor.
“Don’t worry, Peter,” my mother said as she slipped into her nightgown that first night at Raul’s, “we’ll only make love when you’re asleep.”
“And we’ll try not to make too much noise,” added Raul, chuckling, as he tossed his clothes to the side. Raul always slept naked, regardless of how hot or cold it was outside.
“Sure,” I said with a sigh.
The next day we returned to the local market for a hot plate, some dishes, and a dustpan. Apparently Raul had never made a meal in the room before; he always ate at the market or grabbed a bite from street vendors or cheap restaurants. Our new hot plate would be on almost all the time—used both to boil water and to heat the room—under the single bare bulb that lit the room. We washed dishes in the shared bathroom across the hall, and washed our clothes and burned our trash in the backyard.
I dutifully did my part to help out, which my mother most appreciated when she was sick. One diary entry from those first months in Ocopilla read:
Raul is off to look for a doctor. I have much confidence in Peter. He is a little man who is very playful and a little mischievous, but always goes and buys our basic necessities. He handles life well and is honest with his feelings—he is sane and alive. He made a big effort to prepare breakfast—boiled eggs with bread and tea, and an orange after. Now I’m going back to sleep.
To wash our bodies, we either took a quick cold bath or committed to the long process of heating up enough water on the hot plate to take a warm but shallow bath. Or, as a special treat, we went downtown and paid for a little plastic tube of shampoo, a fresh towel, and a hot shower at the public baths, which we ended up doing every couple of weeks. To save money we all showered together in one stall. I got used to the ritual and didn’t really mind; I was just happy that the water was hot.
The bathroom belonged to everyone in the house, but being right next to it we had the advantage of proximity. Nobody took responsibility for cleaning it; it was always a stinking, filthy mess, and either the faucet or the toilet usually leaked. Someone from the family downstairs tried to creatively deal with the toilet leak by using dirt from outside to channel it to the drain in the floor, but this only ended up making the bathroom floor muddy and clogged the drain. When someone in the house broke the sink faucet without taking responsibility for it, a huge commotion erupted in the house over who would get a plumber and pay for the fix, which my mother eventually did when she realized that it would otherwise never get taken care of.
Soon after we moved in, Raul drew a picture of my mother and me on the wall, perhaps to try to make us feel more at home
in his cramped room. We appreciated that creative gesture even though Raul wasn’t much of an artist and we only vaguely resembled the drawing. Raul enjoyed drawing on the walls. They were painted light blue, but he drew pictures and made other scribble marks all over them in other colors.
With my mother and Raul in Huancayo, 1974
I hadn’t forgotten Angelica’s warnings and remained suspicious of Raul, but even so, I was warming to him. Unlike some of the other men, he didn’t ignore me. He seemed to think of me as an inseparable part of my mother rather than as an inconvenience or an annoyance. I didn’t know if he actually liked me or simply hoped to impress my mother by his acceptance of me. My mother thought of me as a full part of their relationship: “Peter is very much in the middle,” she wrote in her diary, “a positive force between us.”
Our room also had some uninvited guests. When we discovered a mouse sneaking into the room through a small hole near the floor, Raul drew a house and trees around the hole where the mouse lived, and we put food in front of the hole to make him part of our “family.” Over time, that mouse turned into an ever-growing family of mice that brazenly took over the room every night when we turned out the light. Eventually, my mother got so fed up that she decided to leave the light on, but all that accomplished was that none of us slept. Other houseguests included dozens of flies that clung to the ceiling, mostly without moving, as if drunk or asleep, until one of Raul’s periodic fly-killing rampages. The fly population would immediately start to replenish; there was no screen on the single window in the room that overlooked the dusty street in front of the house.
“Try to treat Raul as your new father,” my mother had said to me the day we moved in with him. “It will be easier for everyone that way, okay?”
I’d nodded. This was yet more evidence of how hard my mother had fallen for Raul; she’d never asked me to think of any of her other boyfriends as my father, so this was a big deal. It felt weird, and made me uncomfortable because it seemed like I was betraying my father, but I would give it a try.
From then on, Raul proudly introduced my mother and me as his wife and son to everyone we met, including the family that lived downstairs. My local ID card included Raul’s last name. That looked all wrong to me when I first saw the ID and read the name. And besides, I didn’t really think of Raul as my father, despite my mother’s and Raul’s hopes, and I missed my real father. I often thought about how completely different he was from Raul; like a rock compared to sand. But I was willing to play along: it was sort of fun pretending to be a family, and I hoped it would help me fit in. I was obviously a gringo boy—despite my tanned skin and brown hair and eyes, there was no chance I could pass as a local—but I figured it couldn’t hurt to claim a Peruvian father. And by now my Spanish was convincing and accentless.
My ID card in Ocopilla, 1974
* * *
The Catholic chapel in Ocopilla was a small adobe structure standing at the top of Cerro de la Libertad, which a few neighbors had built years earlier. Priests and nuns rarely visited it. Someone had given a key to my mother and Raul, and they—while devoutly antireligious—had no qualms about using the chapel for meetings with young people to discuss politics. They often brought me along. The group talked about how to block the logging that a private developer was doing on communal forestland; they complained about the industrial pollution and garbage that was fouling the creek, about the fancy fútbol stadium that was being built nearby with public funds even though many in the community had no electricity or other amenities. They wrote songs about these issues and also sang “The Internationale.” Often, adults came to listen, or kneeled to pray in the pews while we talked politics in the atrium.
My mother and Raul called their new organization Juventud Ocopillana Progresista. We had light blue membership cards printed up for everyone, including me, though these cards never actually served any real purpose other than to make us feel serious and important. My title was “Director de Deportes” (sports director). For months, we all worked on a play to be performed by the community about the heroic struggles against the rich and powerful. When the church authorities learned about this, they took away the key to the chapel and forbade entry to the building. The show went on anyway, outside the chapel, though Raul defiantly broke inside to ring the bell to signal the start of the performance.
* * *
That April, when the semester started, my mother enrolled me in the local elementary school and began to teach courses on dialectical materialism at the university. I have no idea how she managed to get that job, but she had always been good at talking her way into things. To brush up on Marxist theory, she bought all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. On the surface, my mother exuded confidence about her theoretical sophistication in Marxist theory. But in her diaries she confessed her worry that she had never carefully or fully read Capital before and was sort of winging her way through teaching it.
Meanwhile, I was anxious about fitting in when I arrived at school for the first day of classes in my new uniform—dark gray polyester pants, a white collared long-sleeve shirt, and the school’s red, yellow, and white insignia patch protected by a clear plastic case pinned to my gray sweater. Luckily, the rules for footwear didn’t prohibit me from wearing my beat-up boots, which was the only pair of shoes I owned other than sneakers and rubber sandals. In uniform, all the students looked the same, all of us poor, some desperately poor. But despite our outward similarities, I was haunted by differences: my mother and I were poor by choice, out of political principle. Yet even as I secretly longed for the creature comforts I could have had—a car, a TV, hot water, separate bedrooms, a private bathroom, a real kitchen—I thought that being poor helped us look a little less like the gringo outsiders that we were.
I was wrong. On that first day at school, despite the blending-in effect of my uniform, I was clearly marked as an outsider. All the other kids seemed to know one another already, and they pointed and laughed when they saw my hair. They threw rocks, banana peels, and insults at me. I went home that afternoon in tears. “Mommy, you have to cut my hair. Please, all the kids are making fun of me, calling me a girl.”
Silence.
“My teacher even said I have to cut my hair before coming back to class.”
That got her attention. “Well, okay,” my mother said with a sigh. “But just a bit shorter, no crew cut.” She took out her scissors, sat me down on the chair in the middle of the room, and cut my hair. “There, that should do it.”
I rushed to the bathroom to take a look in the cracked mirror above the sink. I looked exactly the same. “Please, Mommy,” I begged her, “just a little bit shorter, please?”
Raul chimed in, “Carola, Peter is a Peruvian now and you should let him look like a Peruvian.”
Finally convinced, my mother took out the scissors again, sat me back down, and snipped away more aggressively. I didn’t care how bad the quality of the haircut was going to be; I just needed my hair to be shorter.
It worked. A few kids still picked on me, but the teachers protected me, yanking them away by their ears if they bullied or poked fun at me too much.
After school, still in my uniform, I’d spend the rest of the afternoon and evening playing soccer with kids from school on the dirt street in front of the house. My mother had bought me a soccer ball made of real leather, right after we moved to Ocopilla. And that was what did the trick: nothing helps make new friends like a shiny new soccer ball.
Passing the Hat
RAUL WAS STRUGGLING in his chemistry classes, often studying late into the night, sitting at the desk between our two beds, lights on and music blaring while my mother and I tried to sleep. Raul liked to pace while reading aloud passages from his textbooks. Before the end of his first year, he’d failed too many of his classes and decided to drop out of the university. I think my mother and I were actually relieved when he flunked; school made him a nervous wreck and nobody was getting any sleep because of it. Raul’s parents in Lima
, however, were upset with him—the first of the family to go on to higher education—for dropping out. They blamed my mother for distracting him with talk about revolution. “Politics is for the rich. Only the rich can afford politics,” his mother, Berta, liked to tell him. Raul’s parents warned him that my mother was a “hippie CIA agent,” though they stopped saying that after the relationship lasted for more than a few months, and they eventually warmed up to her.
Raul himself didn’t seem upset by his failure; it freed up more of his time to do what he loved most: street theater. He was always performing, always looking for an audience, as if the world were one big stage. In Huancayo’s downtown plaza, he entertained crowds for hours with his political comedies. At the end of each act, enough people would drop money into his hat to allow him to scrape by.
At Raul’s insistence, my mother and I went as often as we could to watch his weekend performances. He attracted his biggest crowds on weekends, especially on Sundays, when people had time to stop and watch. Then his audience could swell from a dozen or so people to a hundred or more, especially if the weather was nice. Weekends were also the days when people felt most generous, willing to drop a coin or two, or maybe even a bill, into Raul’s hat when he passed it around.
Raul had an ever-expanding repertoire of skits, some carefully planned out and choreographed, others improvisational. Sometimes he made changes as he went along, including incorporating people from the audience into his acts, which always drew applause. Many of his skits were pantomime, a white painted face his only costume. He sometimes mixed in dialogue and revolutionary political commentary to get his point across. He also read poetry and sold copies of his typed poems. It was fun watching Raul perform in public—he was at his best then, entertaining, confident, charismatic.
Rebel Mother Page 10
