A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  But it did not take me long—that is to say, only a few years—to realize that, with modern permissiveness, in the open industrial society of our day, eroticism changed sign and content, and became a commercial, manufactured product, as conformist and conventional as it could possibly be, and almost always of a dreadful artistic indigence. The discovery of erotic literature of high quality, which I made unexpectedly on the shelves of the Club Nacional, has had an influence on my work and left its deposit on what I have written. Moreover, the prolix and prolific Restif de la Bretonne helped me to understand an essential characteristic of fiction: that it serves the novelist to re-create the world in his image and likeness, to subtly rearrange it in accordance with his most secret appetites.

  The other job that Porras Barrenechea secured for me was a gloomy one: cataloguing the graves of the oldest sections of the colonial cemetery of Lima, the Presbítero Maestro, whose registers had been lost. (The running of the cemetery was the responsibility of the Public Welfare Office of Lima, at that time a private institution, of which Porras was a member of the board of directors.) The advantage of this job was that I could do it very early in the morning or late in the afternoon, on work days or on holidays, and for as many hours or minutes as I liked. The head administrator of the cemetery paid me by the number of dead I catalogued. I managed to make some five hundred soles a month from this minor job. Javier sometimes accompanied me on my scouting trips through the cemetery, with my notebook, my pencils, my ladder, my spatula (to remove the crust of dirt that covered some of the tombstones), and my flashlight in case we were still there after dark. As I counted my dead and totted up the hours I’d worked, the head administrator, a tubby, likable, talkative man, told me anecdotes about the first sessions of each presidential session of Congress, which he had never failed to attend, from the days when he’d been just a youngster.

  Before only a couple of days had gone by, I had taken on six jobs (a year and a half later, there would be seven of them, when I began working for Radio Panamericana), multiplying my pay by five. With the three thousand or three thousand five hundred soles a month they brought in, it was now possible for Julia and me to survive, if we found some inexpensive place to live. Luckily, the little apartment that had been promised to Nancy was now empty. I went to see it, was delighted by it, took it, and Esperanza La Rosa, the landlady, waited a week until, with my first pay from the new jobs, I was able to put down the deposit and the first month’s rent. It was in an ocher-colored townhouse, divided up into individual dwellings so tiny that they seemed like doll houses, at the end of the Calle Porta, where the street grew narrower and narrower and finally dwindled to nothing at the foot of a wall that in those days separated it from the Diagonal. Our apartment consisted of two bedrooms and a little kitchen and a bathroom, both of these so tiny that only one person at a time could fit into them and then only by sucking in his or her belly. But despite its diminutive dimensions and its spartan furnishings, there was something utterly charming about it, with its cheerful curtains and the little patio with old furniture and pots of geraniums that each of the apartments looked out upon. Nancy helped me clean the place and decorate it to receive the bride.

  After her departure, Julia and I wrote to each other every day and I can still see Granny Carmen handing me the letters with a wicked smile and a joke: “Now who can this little letter be from, who can it be from? Who can be writing so many letters to my little grandson?” Four or five weeks after Julia’s departure for Chile, when I had already secured all those jobs, I phoned my father and asked him for an appointment. I hadn’t seen him since before the wedding, nor had I answered his homicidal letter.

  I became very nervous that morning on my way to his office. I was determined, for the first time in my life, to tell him that he could fire his damned revolver once and for all, but, now that I was able to support her, I wasn’t going to go on living apart from my wife. Nonetheless, deep down, I was afraid, once the moment was at hand, that I would again lose my courage and again feel paralyzed in the face of his wrath.

  But I found him oddly serene and rational as we spoke together. And because of certain things he said and others he forbore to mention, I have always suspected that that conversation with Dr. Porras—to which neither he nor I made the slightest allusion—had had its effect and helped him to resign himself in the end to a marriage planned without his consent. Very pale, he listened to me without a word as I told him of the jobs I had gotten and what I was going to earn from all of them, then assured him that it would be enough to support myself. And how, moreover, despite those various jobs, some of which I could do at home at night, I could attend classes and take the exams at the university. Finally, swallowing hard, I told him that Julia was married to me and that we couldn’t go on living with her alone, there in Chile, and me here in Lima.

  He didn’t voice the slightest reproach. Instead, he spoke to me as though he were a lawyer, using certain legal technicalities on which he had collected detailed information. He had a copy of my declaration to the police, which he showed me, marked in red pencil. I gave myself away by admitting that I had gotten married when I was only nineteen. That was enough to start legal proceedings to annul the marriage. But he wasn’t going to try to do that. Because, even though I had made a stupid mistake, getting married, after all, was a manly thing to do, a virile act.

  Then, making a visible effort to employ a conciliatory tone of voice that I didn’t remember his ever having used with me before, he immediately began to advise me not to abandon my studies, not to ruin my career, on account of this marriage. He was sure that I could go a long way, as long as I didn’t do any more crazy things. If he had always acted harshly toward me, it had been for my own good, to straighten out what, through a misguided affection, the Llosas had twisted. But contrary to what I had thought, he loved me, because I was his son, and how could a father help loving his son?

  To my surprise, he opened his arms for me to embrace him. I did so, without kissing him, disconcerted by the denouement of the interview, and thanking him for his words, in a way that might strike him as the least hypocritical one possible.

  (That interview, sometime in the latter part of August 1955, marked my definitive emancipation from my father. Although his shadow will doubtless accompany me to my grave, and although at times, even today, all at once the memory of some scene, of some image, of the years when he had complete authority over me gives me a sudden hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, after that meeting we never had another fight. Not directly, that is to say. In all truth, we saw very little of each other. And, in the years when the two of us were still in Peru—until 1958, when I left for Europe and he went with my mother to Los Angeles—or on the rare occasions later when we both happened to be in Lima, or when I went to visit the two of them in the United States, he often made gestures and said things and took steps aimed at lessening the distance between us and erasing the bad memories, so that we could have that close and affectionate relationship that we never had. But I, my father’s son after all, never knew how to answer these overtures on his part, and even though I always tried to be polite to him, I never showed him more affection than I felt—that is to say, none whatsoever. The terrible rancor, my burning hatred of him in my childhood, gradually disappeared in the course of those years, above all as I discovered little by little how hard it had been for him during his first days in the United States, where he and my mother held down jobs as factory workers—my mother, for thirteen years, was a weaver in a textile mill, and he was employed in a shoe factory—and then working as doorkeepers and caretakers in a synagogue in Los Angeles. Naturally, even in the worst periods of that difficult adaptation to his new country, his pride did not allow my father to ask me for help or permit my mother to do so, except to buy her plane tickets to Peru, where they spent their vacations—and I believe that it was only in the last days of his life that he accepted help from my brother Ernesto, who provided him with an apartment to live in,
in Pasadena.

  (When we saw each other—every two, sometimes every three years, always for just a few short days—our relationship was polite but frigid. To him it was always something incomprehensible that I should have become known thanks to my books, that my name and sometimes my photograph should appear in Time or in the Los Angeles Times; this pleased him, no doubt, but also disconcerted and puzzled him and so we never spoke about my novels, until our last quarrel, the one that put us completely out of touch with each other until his death, in January 1979.

  (It was a quarrel we had without seeing each other and without exchanging a single word, when we were thousands of kilometers apart, about La tía Julia y el escribidor [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter], a novel in which there are autobiographical episodes in which the father of the narrator is shown acting in much the way mine did when I married Julia. Months after the book came out I was surprised to receive a curious letter from him—I was living in Cambridge, England—in which he thanked me for acknowledging in that novel that he had been severe with me but that when all was said and done he had acted as he did for my own good “since he had always loved me.” I didn’t answer his letter. Sometime later, during one of the phone calls that I made to my mother in Los Angeles, she surprised me by saying that my father wanted to talk to me about La tía Julia y el escribidor. Foreseeing some sort of ukase, I said goodbye to her and hung up before he could get to the phone. Some days later, I received another card from him, a violent one this time, accusing me of being resentful and of slandering him in a book, without giving him a chance to defend himself, reproaching me for not being a believer and prophesying divine punishment for me. He warned me that he would circulate this letter among my acquaintances. And as a matter of fact, in the months and years that followed, I found out that he had sent dozens and perhaps hundreds of copies of it to relatives, friends, and acquaintances of mine in Peru.

  (I never saw him alive again. In January of 1979 he came from Los Angeles with my mother, to spend a few weeks’ summer vacation in Lima. One afternoon, my cousin Giannina—Uncle Pedro’s daughter—phoned me to announce that my father, who had been having lunch at their house, had fallen unconscious. We called an ambulance and I took him to the Clínica Americana, where he was found to be dead on arrival. The only people who came to the wake in the funeral chapel that night to bid him a last farewell were the surviving aunts and uncles and many nieces and nephews of that Llosa family that he had so detested. In the last years of his life, he had finally made his peace with them, visiting them and accepting their invitations in the brief trips he made to Peru from time to time.)

  I left my father’s office in great excitement to send Julia a telegram telling her that her exile was over and that I’d be sending her money for her plane ticket back to Peru very soon. Then I rushed over to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s to pass on the good news to them. Although I was very busy now, what with all the jobs I’d taken on, every time I had a free moment I would hurry over to their house on the Avenida Armendáriz to have lunch or dinner, because with them I could talk about my exiled wife, the only subject that interested me. Aunt Olga too had finally become accustomed to the idea that her sister’s marriage was irreversible, and she was happy that my father had agreed to Julia’s return.

  I immediately began to think up ways I could buy her plane ticket. Even though I was earning more money now, renting the apartment and redeeming my typewriter and my watch, indispensable for fulfilling all my work assignments, had left me without a cent. I was looking into how I could buy the plane ticket in installments or get a loan from the bank, when a telegram from Julia arrived for me, announcing her arrival on the following day. She had stolen a march on me by selling her jewelry.

  I went to the airport to meet her, along with Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, and when Aunt Olga spied her among the passengers on the plane from Santiago, she made a remark that delighted me, because it showed that the family situation was back to normal: “Look how pretty your wife has made herself for the reunion.”

  That was a very happy day, to be sure, for Julia and me. The little apartment in the townhouse on the Calle Porta was as tidy as could be and in it were fragrant flowers to welcome the bride. I had brought all my books and clothes there the evening before, with great expectations, moreover, at the prospect of finally beginning to live an independent life, in a house of my own (in a manner of speaking).

  I had planned to finish my college courses and then my studies in the two Faculties—Letters and Law—that came after that, and not only because I had promised my family that I would, but also because I was certain that only those degrees would allow me to have the minimum financial security needed to devote myself to writing, and because I thought that without them I’d never get to Europe, to France, something that continued to be the main goal of my life. I was more determined than ever to try to be a writer and was convinced that I would never manage to be one if I didn’t leave Peru, if I didn’t live in Paris. I talked this over a thousand times with Julia and she, who was adventurous and fond of new things, egged me on: yes, yes, I should finish my studies and apply for the scholarship that the Banco Popular and San Marcos were awarding for postgraduate studies in Spain. Then we would go to Paris, where I would write all the novels I had in my head. She would help me.

  She helped me a great deal, from the very first day. Without her aid, I would not have been able to hold down my seven jobs, to find the time to attend classes at San Marcos, to compose the essays the professors assigned and, as if all that weren’t enough, to write a fair number of short stories.

  When, today, I try to reconstruct my schedule during those three years—1955 to 1958—I’m amazed: how was I able to do so many things and, on top of everything else, read piles of books, and cultivate the friendship of several wonderful friends such as Lucho and Abelardo, and also go to the movies every so often and eat and sleep? On paper, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all that. But I found room to fit it all in, and despite the hectic rushing around and the need to stretch every penny, they were exciting years of hopes renewed and enhanced, years in which, to be sure, I did not regret my sudden marriage.

  I believe Julia didn’t either. We loved each other, enjoyed each other’s company, and although we had the inevitable fights that married life brings with it, during those three years in Lima, before the trip to Europe, our relationship was productive and mutually stimulating. One source of our quarrels was my fits of retrospective jealousy, the absurd, anguished fury I felt when I discovered that Julia had had a love life, and most important of all, following her divorce and up until the eve of her coming to Lima, she had had an impassioned love affair with an Argentine singer, who came to La Paz and caused havoc among the women in the city. For some mysterious reason—the subject makes me laugh today, but at the time it made me suffer a great deal and I made Julia suffer too on account of it—my wife’s affair with the Argentine singer, which she naïvely mentioned in passing shortly after we were married, kept me awake nights and made me feel that, even though it was over and done with, it represented a threat, a danger to our marriage, for it stole a part of Julia’s life from me, a part that would always be out of my reach, and that therefore we would never be able to be completely happy. I demanded that she recount to me a plethora of details about this adventure, and for that reason we sometimes had violent arguments, which would end in tender reconciliations.

  But we also had fine times together. When one almost never has time, or money, for diversions, these, however rare and modest they may be, take on a wondrous quality, produce a pleasure unknown to those who can enjoy them when and as they please. I remember the childlike excitement it caused us, at the end of the month sometimes, to go out to lunch in a German restaurant on the Calle La Esperanza, the Gambrinus, where they served a delicious Wiener schnitzel, for which we joyfully prepared ourselves, looking forward to it for days. Or on certain nights, going to eat a pizza with a little pitcher of wine at La
Pizzería, which a nice Swiss couple had just opened up on the Diagonal, and which, from the modest garage where it first set up in business, would become over the years one of the best-known restaurants in Miraflores.

  Where we went at least once a week was to the movies. They delighted both of us. Unlike what happens to me with books, which, when they’re bad, not only bore me but irritate me as well, since they make me feel that I’m wasting my time, I can put up with bad films very easily, and as long as they aren’t pretentious, they amuse me. So we used to go see whatever was playing, and above all Mexican melodramas, full of moaning and groaning, with María Félix, Arturo de Córdoba, Agustín Lara, Emilio Tuero, Mirta Aguirre, and all the others, for which Julia and I had a perverse predilection.