The Time of the Hero

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “The Metro’s awfully pretty,” she said. “Very elegant.”

  “You haven’t been in here before?”

  “No. I hardly ever go to the downtown theaters. I get out of work late, at six-thirty.”

  “Don’t you like the movies?”

  “Yes, lots! I go every Sunday. But I go to a neighborhood theater near my house.”

  The picture was in color, with a great many dance numbers. The head dancer was also a comedian. He mixed people’s names up, he took pratfalls, he made faces, he rolled his eyes. You can tell he’s a queer from a mile off, Alberto thought. He turned to look at Teresa. She was completely absorbed by what was happening on the screen: her mouth was half open and there was a hungry stare in her eyes. Later, when they were outside, she described the whole movie as if Alberto had not seen any part of it. She chattered about the actresses’ dresses and their jewelry, and when she recalled the comedy episodes her laughter was very bright and innocent.

  “You have a good memory,” he said. “How can you remember all that?”

  “I told you, I’m crazy about the movies. When I’m seeing a good movie I forget everything else. It’s like I’m in another world.”

  “Yes,” Alberto said, “I could tell. You looked as if you were hypnotized.”

  They got on the express and sat down side by side. The San Martín Plaza was full of people who had come out from the first showing of the movies and were walking around under the street lights. There was a tangle of cars on all sides of the square. As they approached the Raimondi stop, Alberto pushed the button.

  “You don’t have to go with me,” she said. “I can get home alone. I’ve already taken up enough of your time.”

  He objected, and insisted on going with her. The street that ran into the middle of Lince was dark. A few couples went by. Others were standing together in the shadows, and stopped murmuring or kissing when someone passed them.

  “You really didn’t have anything to do?” Teresa asked.

  “No, honest.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “But it’s true. Why don’t you believe me?”

  She hesitated. Finally she said, “You haven’t got a girl friend?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  “I know you’re lying. But you must have had lots of them.”

  “Not lots,” Alberto said. “Just a few. And have you had a lot of boy friends?”

  “Me? Not one.”

  Should I ask her to be my girl friend right now? Alberto wondered. “That’s not true,” he said. “You must have had dozens.”

  Arequipa Avenue with its double line of cars was far away now. The street was narrow and the shadows were even deeper. The drops of water that had gathered on the leaves and branches during the afternoon drizzle were gently dripping from the trees onto the sidewalk.

  “Is that because you haven’t wanted to?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why you haven’t had any boy friends.” He paused for a moment. “A pretty girl can have as many as she wants.”

  “Oh,” Teresa said. “But I’m not pretty. Don’t you think I know it?”

  Alberto objected strongly, and said, “You’re one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen.”

  Teresa turned to look at him. “Now you’re making fun of me,” she murmured.

  I’m an imbecile, Alberto thought. He heard Teresa’s little steps beside him, two for each one of his, and he glanced over at her. She had her head bent a little, her arms crossed on her breast, her mouth closed. The blue ribbon looked black, and was lost against her black hair; it stood out when they passed under a street light, then disappeared in the darkness again. They walked to the door of her house without speaking.

  “Thank you,” Teresa said. “Thanks for everything.”

  They shook hands. “See you soon.” Alberto turned away, walked a few feet, and came back.

  “Teresa.”

  She had raised her hand to knock on the door. She looked around, startled.

  “Have you got anything to do tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I’d like to take you to the movies. How about it?”

  “I haven’t got anything to do. Thanks very much.”

  “I’ll come by for you at five,” he said.

  Before she went into the house, Teresa watched Alberto until he vanished from sight.

  When his mother opened the door, Alberto immediately began to make his excuses. Her eyes were filled with reproach and she was sighing loudly. They went in and sat down in the living room. His mother was silent and resentful. Alberto felt infinitely bored.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her once again. “Don’t be cross, mamma. Honest, I did everything I could to get away early, but they wouldn’t let me go. I’m feeling kind of tired. Is it all right if I go to bed now?”

  There was no reply. She was still looking at him accusingly, and he wondered, When will it start? It was not long, for suddenly she put her face in her hands and started weeping quietly. Alberto stroked her hair. She asked him why he made her suffer so. He swore he loved her above everything else in the world. She said he was a hypocrite, just like his father. Between her sobs and her appeals to God she told him how she had bought cakes and cookies at the store around the corner, how she had picked out the very best they had, how their tea had got cold on the table, how her loneliness and her tragic grief had been sent to her by the Lord in Heaven to test her moral fortitude and her spirit of self-sacrifice. Alberto raised her head with both hands and leaned over to kiss her brow. He was thinking: Here’s another week gone by and I still haven’t been to see Golden Toes. Then his mother was calmer, and asked him to try to eat the dinner she herself had prepared for him with her own two hands. Alberto agreed, and while he was eating a bowl of vegetable soup she embraced him and said, “You’re the only hope I’ve got in the whole wide world.” She told him that his father had left the house after about an hour, that he had made all sorts of proposals-a trip somewhere, a pretended reconciliation, a divorce, an amicable separation-and that she had turned down all of them without hesitating an instant.

  Then they went back to the living room and Alberto asked her if he could smoke. She nodded, but when she saw him light his cigarette she burst into tears and began talking about how time flies, how little boys grow up so fast, how life is ephemeral. She reminisced about her childhood, the family trips to Europe, her friends at school, her good looks, her suitors, the many young men she turned down to marry this man whose only purpose now was to destroy her. Then, lowering her voice, and putting on her most tragic expression, she began talking about his father. She repeated again and again, “He wasn’t like this when I met him,” and she described how good he was at sports, all the tennis tournaments he won, his fine manners, their honeymoon in Brazil, the midnight walks they used to take, hand in hand, on the beach at Ipanema. “But he got into bad company,” she said. “Lima’s the most corrupt city in the world. But I’ll save his soul with my prayers.” Alberto listened to her in silence, thinking about Golden Toes, another week without seeing her, and he wondered what the Slave would say when he found out he took Teresa to the movies, and he thought about Pluto and Helena, and the Military Academy, and the neighborhood he had not visited for three years. At last, his mother yawned. He stood up, said good night to her, and went to his room. While he was undressing he noticed an envelope on the stand beside his bed, with his name printed in big letters. He opened it and took out a fifty-sol bill.

  “He left that for you,” his mother said from the doorway. She sighed. “It’s the only thing I accepted from him. My poor little boy, there’s no reason you should have to suffer too!”

  He threw his arms around his mother, lifted her off the floor, and whirled her around, saying, “Just you wait, mamma, it’ll all come out all right, I promise you I’ll do everything you want me to.” She smiled happily and said, “We don’t need anybody else.�
�� In the midst of their patting and hugging, he asked her permission to go out.

  “Just a few minutes,” he said. “I want some fresh air.”

  Her smile died, but she agreed. He put on his tie and jacket again, ran his comb through his hair, and left. His mother called out to him from the front window: “Don’t forget to say your prayers before you go to bed.”

  Vallano was the first one to mention her nickname in the barracks. One Sunday at midnight, when the cadets had taken off their dress uniforms and were smoking the cigarettes they had got past the officer of the guard by hiding them in their caps, Vallano started talking to himself in an undertone about a woman in the fourth block of Huatica Street. His eyes rolled in their sockets like two magnetized steel balls, and he sounded very excited.

  “Shut up, you clown,” the Jaguar said. “Cut it out.”

  But he went on talking while he was making his bunk. Cava, who was already in bed, asked him, “What did you say she’s called?”

  “Golden Toes.”

  “Must be a new one,” Arróspide said. “I know everybody in the fourth block and I don’t remember that name.”

  On the following Sunday, Cava and the Jaguar and Arróspide were also talking about her. They kept nudging each other and laughing. “Didn’t I tell you?” Vallano asked them proudly. “Just follow my advice.” A week later, half of the section knew her and the name of Golden Toes began to ring in Alberto’s ears like a popular song. The vague but suggestive references he heard them make aroused his imagination. In his dreams, her name took on strange, voluptuous, contradictory meanings: the woman was always the same and yet different, a presence that vanished when he was about to touch her or uncover her face, provoking the most extravagant impulses or submerging him in a tenderness so profound that he felt he would die of impatience.

  Alberto talked about Golden Toes as much as anyone else in the section. No one suspected that he knew about Huatica Street and its environs only by hearsay, because he repeated anecdotes he had been told and invented all kinds of lurid stories. But he could not overcome a certain inner discontent. The more he talked about sexual adventures to his friends, who either laughed or shamelessly thrust their hands into their pockets, the more certain he was that he would never go to bed with a woman except in his dreams, and this depressed him so much that he swore he would go to Huatica Street on his very next pass, even if he had to steal twenty soles, even if he got syphilis.

  He got off at the corner of Wilson and the 28th of July. I’m fifteen but I look older, he thought. I haven’t got any reason to be nervous. He lit a cigarette, then threw it away after only two puffs. As he went down the 28th of July, the avenue grew more and more crowded, and after he crossed the tracks of the Lima-Chorrillos streetcar he found himself in the midst of a swarm of workers, housemaids, mestizos with lank hair, mixed Chinese who walked as if they were dancing, copper-colored Indians, smiling half-breeds. He could tell he was in the Victoria district by the smell of native food and drink that filled the air, an almost visible smell of fried porkskin and pisco, of ham rolls and sweat, of beer and dirty feet.

  As he crossed the Victoria Plaza, which was huge and crowded, the stone Inca that loomed against the sky reminded him of the hero’s statue at the Academy, and also of what Vallano said once: “Manco Cápac is a pimp, he’s pointing the way to Huatica Street.” The crowd forced him to walk slowly, and he almost suffocated. The lights on the avenue seemed deliberately weak and far apart, thus accentuating the profiles of the men who walked by looking in the windows of the identical little houses lined up along the sidewalks. At the corner of Huatica and the 28th of July, Alberto heard a chorus of abuse from inside a restaurant run by a Japanese dwarf. He saw a group of men and women arguing viciously around a bottle-covered table. He lingered a few moments on the corner. He had his hands in his pockets and he stole glances at the people around him. Some of the men were glassy-eyed, others seemed deliriously happy.

  He straightened his jacket and went into the fourth block, the narrowest. There was an attempt at a superior smile on his lips but his eyes were full of anxiety. He only had to walk a few yards; he knew by heart that Golden Toes lived in the second house. There were three men at the door of it, one behind another. Alberto peered in the window: there was a tiny sitting room lighted by a red bulb, with a chair, a yellowed and unrecognizable photograph on the wall, and a small bench under the window. She must be short, he thought, disappointed. A hand took him by the shoulder.

  “Hey, there, kiddie,” the man said, his breath reeking with onions, “are you blind or just a wise guy?”

  The street lights only lit up the middle of the street and the dim glow of the red bulb scarcely reached the window. Alberto could not see the man’s face. Suddenly he was aware that the crowd of men in the block kept close to the walls, where they were almost in darkness. The street itself was empty.

  “Well?” the man said. “Answer me.”

  “What’s the matter?” Alberto asked him.

  “I don’t really give a shit,” the man said, “but I’m not a sucker. Nobody shoves his finger in my mouth, get me? Or anyplace else.”

  “Okay,” Alberto said, “but what do you want?”

  “Go get at the end of the line. Don’t try to be smart.”

  “All right,” Alberto said. “You don’t have to get sore.”

  He turned away from the window and the man let him go. He went to the end of the line and leaned against the wall, smoking four cigarettes one after the other. The man in front of him went in and came out again almost at once. As he walked away he was muttering something about the high cost of living. Then Alberto heard a woman’s voice on the other side of the door: “Come on in.”

  He crossed the empty sitting room. The pane of glass in the inside door had been painted over. I’m not scared, he told himself. I’m a man. He opened the door. The room was as small as the other. It also had a red bulb, but it seemed brighter, cruder. The room was full of bric-a-brac and for a moment Alberto felt lost. He glanced around without letting his eyes rest on anything, and when he looked at the woman stretched out on the bed her face was only a blur and he noticed only the vague dark patterns that decorated her bathrobe, mere shadows that could have been either flowers or birds. Suddenly he felt calm again. The woman sat up, and yes, it was true, she was short: her feet barely grazed the floor. Her dyed hair was black at the roots under a disorderly heap of blonde curls. Her face was heavily made up. She was smiling at him. He looked down and saw two pearly fish, lively, earthy, meaty, “good enough to eat in one bite, without any butter” as Vallano said, and completely foreign to that plump body from which they dangled, and to that formless, fatuous mouth, and to those dead eyes that were studying him.

  “You’re from the Leoncio Prado,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “First section of the Fifth.”

  “Yes,” Alberto said.

  The woman cackled. “That’s eight of them today,” she said. “And last week, Christ knows how many. I must be you guys’ mascot.”

  “This is the first time I’ve come here,” Alberto said, blushing. “I…”

  He was interrupted by another cackle, this one noisier than the first. “I’m not superstitious,” she said, still laughing. “I don’t work for free and I’ve been around enough so I don’t fall for that line. Every day there’s somebody who’s here for the very first time, I like their nerve.”

  “It isn’t that,” Alberto said. “I’ve got some money.”

  “Now that’s what I do like,” she said. “Put it on the dresser. And snap it up, General, I ain’t got all night.”

  Alberto undressed, folding each item of his clothing. She watched him indifferently. When he was naked, she lay back on the bed and mechanically opened her bathrobe. She was naked except for a drooping rose-colored brassiere. She’s a real blonde, Alberto thought. He dropped down beside her and she put her arms around him and squeezed. He could feel her belly moving u
nder his, seeking a better adjustment, a closer fit. Then she raised her legs and bent her knees, and he felt those fish rest gently on his hips for a moment, move up to the small of his back, move down over his buttocks and thighs, move slowly up and down, up and down. A few moments later her hands moved down from his shoulders to his waist, back up to his shoulders, up and down, in the same rhythm as her feet. She had her mouth next to his ear and he could hear her whispering, then sighing, then swearing. And then her hands and feet stopped moving.

  “Are we going to take a siesta, or what?” she asked.

  “Don’t get mad,” Alberto mumbled. “I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

  “Well, I know,” she said. “You jack off.”

  He tried to laugh convincingly, and made a filthy remark. The woman cackled again and pushed him to one side. She sat up in the bed and looked at him with the hardest eyes Alberto had ever seen.

  “Maybe you’re a virgin after all,” she said. “Lie down.”

  Alberto stretched out on the bed. He saw Golden Toes kneeling beside him, the light was behind her and it reddened her pale skin and darkened her hair, he thought of her as a statue in a museum, a wax figure, a performer he had seen at the circus, he was not paying attention to her hands, he could not pay attention to her busy hands or her cloying voice as she called him an idiot and a pervert, and then the objects and the symbols disappeared and all that was left was the red light enveloping him, that and a vast anxiety.

  There was a flood tide of white military caps under the clock at the San Martín Plaza, because that was the last stop for the streetcar to Callao. As the cadets poured in, the newsboys and civil guards and cab drivers and loungers out in front of the Bolívar Hotel and the Romano Bar were all completely silent, watching them intently. The cadets arrived in groups, from all directions, some of them from the local bars. They held up traffic, insulted the drivers who asked to get by, insulted the women who were daring enough to walk through the plaza, and ran back and forth shouting jokes and obscenities. As the streetcars arrived, the cadets ganged into them and the civilians let themselves be shoved to the back of the line. The Dogs swore under their breath when they were about to get on the streetcar and felt a hand on their neck and heard a voice say: “Cadets first, then Dogs.”