Conversation in the Cathedral

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  She almost didn’t mourn for Trinidad because on the day after the burial her aunt and Señora Rosario had to take her to the Maternity Hospital, the pains quite close together now, and early that morning Trinidad’s son was born dead. She was in the Maternity Hospital for five days, sharing a bed with a Negro woman who had given birth to twins and who tried to talk to her all the time. She answered her yes, fine, no. Señora Rosario and her aunt came to see her every day and brought her something to eat. She didn’t feel pain or grief, only fatigue, she ate listlessly, it was an effort for her to talk. On the fourth day Gertrudis came, why didn’t you let us know, Engineer Carrillo might think she’d quit work, it’s good you’ve got pull with Don Fermín. Let the engineer think whatever he wanted to, Amalia thought. When she left the Maternity Hospital she went to the cemetery to bring some gladioli to Trinidad. The holy picture that Señora Rosario had put there was still by the grave and the letters that his cousin Pedro Flores had scratched on the plaster with a stick. She felt weak, empty, listless, if ever she got any money she would buy a stone and I’ll have them carve Trinidad López in gold letters. She began to talk to him slowly, why did you go now that everything was all set, to scold him, why did you make me believe so many lies, to tell him things, they took me to the Maternity Hospital, his son had died, maybe you’ve met him up there. She went back to Mirones remembering the blue coat that Trinidad said is my mark of elegance and how badly she sewed the buttons for him as they fell off again. The small room was padlocked, the landlord had come with a dealer and sold everything he found, leave her something to remember her husband by Señora Rosario had begged, but they refused and Amalia what do I care. Her aunt had taken in boarders in the little house in Limoncillo and didn’t have any room, but Señora Rosario made space for her in one of her two rooms, and Santiago what trouble did you get mixed up in, why did you have to hightail it out of Pucallpa? A week later Gertrudis Lama appeared in Mirones, why hadn’t she come back to the lab, how long do you think they’ll wait for you? But Amalia wouldn’t ever go back to the lab. And what was she going to do, then? Nothing, stay here until I’m kicked out, and Señora Rosario silly, I’m never going to kick you out. And why didn’t she want to go back to the lab? She didn’t know, but she wasn’t going back, and she said it with such anger that Gertrudis Lama didn’t ask anymore. A terrible mix-up, he had to hide because of something to do with the truck, son, he didn’t even want to remember. Señora Rosario made her eat, counseled her, tried to make her forget. Amalia slept between the girls Celeste and Jesús, and the youngest of Señora Rosario’s daughters complained that she talked about Trinidad and her child in the darkness. She helped Señora Rosario wash the clothes in a trough, hang them on the line, heat up the charcoal irons. She did it almost without paying attention, her mind blank, her hands weak. Night came, dawn came, evening came, Gertrudis came to visit her, her aunt came, she listened to them and said yes to everything and thanked them for the gifts they brought. Are you still thinking about Trinidad? Señora Rosario asked her every day, and she yes, about her little son, too. You’re like Trinidad, Señora Rosario told her, you lower your head, you don’t fight, she should forget about her troubles, you’re young, she could remake her life. Amalia never left Mirones, she was nothing but an old rag, she rarely washed or combed her hair, once when she looked at herself in a mirror she thought if Trinidad saw you he wouldn’t love you anymore. At night when Don Atanasio came home, she would shut herself up in his room to talk to him. He lived in a room with such a low ceiling that Amalia couldn’t stand, and on the floor were a mattress with the stuffing coming out and a thousand odds and ends. While they were chatting, Don Atanasio would take out his bottle and have a drink. Did he think that the informers had beaten Trinidad, Don Atanasio, that when they saw he was dying they dropped him by the door of San Juan de Dios? Sometimes Don Atanasio yes, that was probably what happened, and others no, they probably let him go and he didn’t feel well and went to the hospital on his own, and other times what does it matter to you now, he’s dead, think about yourself, forget about him.

  6

  HAD IT BEEN THAT FIRST YEAR, Zavalita, when you saw that San Marcos was a brothel and not the paradise you’d thought? What hadn’t you liked, son? Not that the classes began in June instead of April, not that the professors were as decrepit as the desks, he thinks, but his schoolmates’ lack of interest when the subject of books came up, the indolence in their eyes when it was politics. The peasants were a lot like our well-bred little boys, Ambrosio. The professors were probably paid miserable salaries, Aída said, they probably worked in ministries, gave classes in private schools, who could ask anything better from them. You had to understand the students’ apathy, Jacobo said, the system made them that way: they needed to be stirred up, indoctrinated, organized. But where were the communists, where in the world were the Apristas? All in jail, all in exile? Those were backward-looking criticisms, Ambrosio, he didn’t realize it at the time and he liked San Marcos. What had become of the professor who in a whole year got through two chapters of the Synthesis of Logical Investigation published by the Revista de Occidente? Phenomenologically suspending the problem of rabies, putting in parentheses, as Husserl would have said, the grave situation created by the dogs of Lima: what sort of face would the supervisor have put on? What about the one who only gave spelling tests, the one who asked for Freud’s mistakes on his exam?

  “You’re wrong, you have to read the obscurantists too,” Santiago said.

  “It would be nice to read them in their own language,” Aída said. “I’d like to know French, English, even German.”

  “Read everything, but with a critical sense,” Jacobo said. “The progressives always seem bad to you and the decadents always good. That’s what I criticize in you.”

  “I’m only saying that The Making of a Hero bored me and that I liked The Castle,” Santiago protested. “I’m not generalizing.”

  “The Ostrovsky translation is probably bad and the Kafka one good, don’t argue anymore,” Aída said.

  What about the little old man with a fat belly, blue eyes and long white hair who lectured on historical sources? He was so good that he made me want to go into History and not Psychology, Aída said, and Jacobo yes, too bad he was a Hispanist and not an Indigenist. The classrooms, packed during the first days, were thinning out, by September only half the students attended and it wasn’t hard to find a seat in class anymore. They didn’t feel defrauded, it wasn’t that the professors didn’t know anything or didn’t want to teach, he thinks, they weren’t interested in learning either. Because they were poor and had to work, Aída said, because they were contaminated with bourgeois formalism and only wanted to get their degrees, Jacobo said; because in order to get them you didn’t have to go to class or be interested or study: you only had to wait. Was he happy at San Marcos Skinny, did the great minds of Peru really teach there Skinny, why had he become so withdrawn Skinny? Yes he was papa, they really do papa, he wasn’t withdrawn papa. You came in and went out of the house like a ghost, Zavalita, you shut yourself up in your room and didn’t show your face to the family, you were like a bear, Señora Zoila said, and Sparky you were going to go cross-eyed from so much reading, and Teté why didn’t you ever go out with Popeye anymore, Superbrain. Because Jacobo and Aída were enough, he thinks, because they were friendship which excluded, enriched and compensated for everything. There, he thinks, did I fuck myself up there?

  They had registered for the same courses, they sat in the same row, they went together to the San Marcos or National libraries, it was hard for them to go their separate ways and home to sleep. They read the same books, saw the same movies, got all worked up over the same newspapers. When they left the university, at noon and in the afternoon, they would talk for hours in El Palermo on Colmena, argue for hours in the Huérfanos pastry shop on Azángaro, talk for hours about the political news in a café and billiard parlor behind the Palace of Justice. Sometimes they would slip in
to a movie, sometimes go through bookstores, sometimes take long walks through the city as an adventure. Asexual, fraternal, the friendship also seemed eternal.

  “The same things were important to us, we hated the same things, and we never agreed on anything,” Santiago says. “That was great too.”

  “Why were you so bitter, then?” Ambrosio asks. “Was it because of the girl?”

  “I never saw her alone,” Santiago says. “I wasn’t bitter; a little worm in my stomach sometimes, nothing else.”

  “You wanted to make love to her and you couldn’t with the other one there,” Ambrosio says. “I know what it’s like to be close to the woman you love and not be able to do anything.”

  “Did that happen to you with Amalia?” Santiago asks.

  “I saw a movie about it once,” Ambrosio says.

  The university reflected the country, Jacobo said, twenty years ago those professors were probably progressives and readers, then because they had to work at other things and because of the environment they became mediocre and bourgeois, and there, sticky and tiny at the mouth of his stomach: the little worm. It was the students’ fault too, Aída said, they liked the system; and if everybody was to blame, was conforming the only thing left for us to do? Santiago asked, and Jacobo: the solution was university reform. A diminutive and acidy body in the underbrush of conversations, all of a sudden in the heat of the arguments, interfering, leading astray, distracting with flashes of melancholy or nostalgia. Parallel teaching chairs, cogovernment, popular universities, Jacobo said: everyone who was capable should come to teach, the students could get rid of bad professors, and since the people didn’t come to the university, the university should go to the people. Melancholy from those impossible dialogues alone with her that he yearned for, nostalgia for those strolls alone with her that he invented? But if the university was a reflection of the country San Marcos would never be in good shape as long as Peru was so badly off, Santiago said, and Aída if what was wanted was to cure the disease at its roots there shouldn’t be any talk of university reform but of revolution. But they were students and their field of action was the university, Jacobo said, by working for reform they would be working for the revolution: you had to go through stages and not be pessimistic.

  “You were jealous of your friend,” Ambrosio says. “And jealousy is the worst kind of poison.”

  “Jacobo was probably going through the same thing I was,” Santiago says. “But we both kept it hidden.”

  “He probably felt like getting rid of you with a magic look too so he could be alone with the girl.” Ambrosio laughs.

  “He was my best friend,” Santiago says. “I hated him, but at the same time I loved and admired him.”

  “You shouldn’t be such a skeptic,” Jacobo said. “That business of all or nothing is typically bourgeois.”

  “I’m not a skeptic,” Santiago said. “But we talk and talk and here we are in the same place.”

  “That’s right, up till now we haven’t gone beyond theory,” Aída said. “We ought to do something else besides talk.”

  “We can’t do it alone,” Jacobo said. “First we have to make contact with the progressives at the university.”

  “We’ve been there two months and we haven’t found a single one,” Santiago said. “I’m beginning to believe they don’t exist.”

  “They have to be careful and it’s logical,” Jacobo said. “They’ll turn up sooner or later.”

  And in fact, stealthily, suspiciously, mysteriously, little by little, they had been turning up, like furtive shadows: they were in the first year of Letters, right? Between classes they would usually sit on a bench in the courtyard of the Faculty, it seemed they were taking up a collection, or walking around the fountain in Law, to buy mattresses for the students in jail, and sometimes there they exchanged words with students from other faculties or other classes, who were being held in the cells of the penitentiary sleeping on the floor, and in those quick fleeting dialogues, behind the mistrust, opening a path through the suspicion, hadn’t anyone told them about the collection before? they noticed or seemed to notice a subtle exploration of their way of thinking, it wasn’t a matter of anything political, a discreet sounding, just a humanitarian act, vague indications that they were getting ready for something that would come, and even simple Christian charity, or a secret call so that they could show in the same coded way that they could be trusted: could they maybe give just one sol? They would appear alone and slippery in the courtyards of San Marcos, they would come over to chat with them for a few moments about ambiguous things, they would disappear for several days and suddenly reappear, cordial and evasive, the same cautious smiling expression on the same Indian, half-breed, Chinese, black faces, and the same ambivalent words in their provincial accents, with the same threadbare and faded suits and the same old shoes and sometimes a magazine or newspaper or book under their arm. What were they studying, where did they come from, what were their names, where did they live? Like a bald bolt of lightning in the cloudy sky, that boy in Law had been one of those who had shut themselves up in San Marcos during Odría’s revolution, a quick confidence suddenly tore through the gray conversations, and he had been imprisoned and had gone on a hunger strike in jail, and lighted them up and made them feverish, and he had only been let out a month ago, and those revelations and discoveries, and that one had been a delegate from Economics when the Federated Centers and the University Federation still functioned, awoke in them an anxious excitation, before the police had destroyed the student organizations by putting their leaders in jail, a fierce curiosity.

  “You come home late so you won’t have to eat with us and when you do us the honor you don’t open your mouth,” Señora Zoila said. “Did they cut off your tongue in San Marcos?”

  “He spoke against Odría and against the Communists,” Jacobo said. “An Aprista, wouldn’t you say?”

  “He plays silent in order to make himself more interesting,” Sparky said. “Geniuses don’t waste their time talking to ignoramuses, isn’t that right, Superbrain?”

  “How many children does young Teté have?” Ambrosio asks. “And how many have you got, son?”

  “A Trotskyite more likely, because he had good things to say about Lechín,” Aída said. “Don’t they say that Lechín is a Trotskyite?”

  “Teté two and me none,” Santiago says. “I didn’t want to be a father, but maybe I’ll decide to one of these days. The way we’re going, what difference does it make?”

  “And besides, you go around like a sleepwalker with the eyes of a slaughtered lamb,” Teté said. “Have you fallen in love with some girl at San Marcos?”

  “When I get home I see the lamp on your night table still on,” Don Fermín said. “It’s fine for you to read, but you ought to be a little sociable, Skinny.”

  “Yes, with a girl in braids who goes barefoot and speaks only Quechua,” Santiago said. “Are you interested?”

  “The old black woman used to say that every child comes with his loaf of bread under his arm,” Ambrosio says. “If it was up to me, I’d have a lot of them, I’ll say that. The old black woman, my mama, may she rest in peace.”

  “I’m a little tired when I get home. That’s why I go to my room, papa,” Santiago said. “Why don’t I stay and talk to you all? Don’t you think I’m crazy?”

  “That’s what happens to me for having spoken to you, you’re a stubborn mule,” Teté said.