“You’re already talking like a member of the family,” Santiago interrupted him, smiling. “I didn’t know that you were going with Teté, Freckle Face.”
“Hadn’t she said anything to you?” Popeye exclaimed. “It’s been going on for at least two months, Skinny. You’re completely out of touch with things.”
“I haven’t been going to the house for a long time,” Santiago said. “But I’m very happy for the both of you.”
“Your sister’s been giving me a hard time.” Popeye laughed. “Ever since school, remember? But persistence pays off, as you can see.”
They stopped at the Tambo, on the Avenida Arequipa, ordered two coffees, talked without getting out of the car. They resurrected memories held in common, reviewed their lives. He’d just got his architect’s degree, he thinks, he’d started working for a big company, while he and some colleagues planned to set up their own firm. What about you, Skinny, how have things been going for you, what are your plans?
“I’m in good enough shape,” Santiago said. “I haven’t got any plans. Just to stay on at La Crónica.”
“When are you going to get your degree as a shyster?” Popeye asked with a cautious laugh. “You’re made to order for that.”
“I don’t think I ever will,” Santiago said. “I don’t like the law.”
“Just between you and me, that’s made your father pretty depressed,” Popeye said. “He goes around telling Teté and me, work on him so he finishes his degree. Yes, he tells me everything. I get on quite well with your old man, Skinny. We’ve gotten to be chums. He’s an awfully nice person.”
“I don’t want to be a doctor of anything,” Santiago joked. “Everybody in this country is doctor of something.”
“And you’ve always wanted to be different from everybody.” Popeye laughed. “Just like when you were a kid, Skinny. You haven’t changed a bit.”
They left the Tambo, but they sat chatting for a while on the Avenida Tacna across from the milky La Crónica building before Santiago got out. They had to get together more often, Skinny, especially now that we’re practically brothers-in-law. Popeye had wanted to look him up a number of times, but you were invisible, brother. He’d pass the word to some of the people in the neighborhood who are always asking about you, Skinny, and they could have lunch together one of these days. Hadn’t you seen anybody in our class, Skinny? He thinks: the class. The cubs who were lions and tigers now, Zavalita. Engineers, lawyers, managers. Some were probably married already, he thinks, they probably had mistresses already.
“I don’t see many people because I lead the life of an owl, Freckle Face, because of the newspaper. I go to bed at dawn and get up when it’s time to go to work.”
“A real bohemian life, Skinny,” Popeye said. “It must be wild, right? Especially for an intellectual like you.”
“What are you laughing at,” Ambrosio says. “I think what he said about your papa is true.”
“It’s not that,” Santiago says. “I’m laughing at my intellectual face.”
The next day he found Don Fermín sitting up in bed reading the newspapers. He was animated, breathing easily, his color had returned. He’d been in the hospital a week and he’d been to see him every day, but always in the company of other people. Relatives he hadn’t seen for years and who looked him over with a kind of mistrust. The black sheep, the one who’d left home, the one who’d embittered Zoilita, the one who had a grubby little job on a newspaper? Impossible to remember the names of those uncles and aunts, Zavalita, the faces of those cousins; you’d probably passed them many times on the street without recognizing them. It was November and it was starting to get a little warmer when Señora Zoila and Sparky took Don Fermín to New York for a checkup. They returned ten days later and the family went to spend the summer in Ancón. You hadn’t seen them for almost three months, Zavalita, but you spoke to the old man every week on the telephone. Toward the end of March they returned to Miraflores and Don Fermín had recovered and had a tanned and healthy-looking face. The first Sunday he had lunch at the house again, he saw that Popeye was kissing Señora Zoila and Don Fermín. Teté had permission to go dancing with him on Saturdays at the grillroom of the Hotel Bolívar. On your birthday Teté and Sparky and Popeye had come to wake you up at the boardinghouse, and at home the whole family was waiting with packages. Two suits, Zavalita, shoes, cuff links, in a little envelope a check for a thousand soles that you spent in a whorehouse with Carlitos. What else was worthwhile remembering, Zavalita, what else except surviving?
*
“Drifting at first,” Ambrosio says. “Then I was a driver and, you’ll have to laugh, son, even half-owner of a funeral parlor.”
The first weeks in Pucallpa had been bad for her. Not so much because of Ambrosio’s disconsolate sadness as because of the nightmares. The white body, young and beautiful, as during the San Miguel days, would come out of the remote shadows, glimmering, and she, on her knees in her narrow little room in Jesús María, would begin to shake. It would float, grow, stop in the air surrounded by a golden halo and she could see the large purple wound in the mistress’s neck and her accusing eyes: you killed me. She would wake up in terror, cling to Ambrosio’s sleeping body, stay awake until dawn. At other times she was being chased by policemen in green uniforms and could hear their whistles, the noise of their big shoes: you killed her. They didn’t catch her, all night long they stretched their hands out toward her as she drew back and sweated.
“Don’t talk to me about the mistress anymore,” Ambrosio had told her with the face of a whipped dog the day they arrived. “I forbid it.”
Besides, right from the start she’d felt mistrust for that hot and deceptive town. They had lived first in a place overrun with spiders and cockroaches—the Hotel Pucallpa—near the half-finished square, and from the windows you could see the docks with their canoes, launches and barges rocking in the dirty water of the river. How ugly everything was, how poor everything was. Ambrosio had looked at Pucallpa with indifference, as if they were only there temporarily, and only one day when she complained about the suffocating heat had he made a vague comment: the heat was like it was in Chincha, Amalia. They’d been at the hotel for a week. Then they’d rented a cabin with a straw roof near the hospital. There were a lot of funeral parlors in the area, even one that specialized in little white boxes for children and was called the Limbo Coffin Co.
“Poor sick people in the hospital,” Amalia had said. “Seeing so many funeral parlors around, they must be thinking that they’re going to die all the time.”
“That’s what they have most of there,” Ambrosio says. “Churches and funeral parlors. You can get dizzy from all the religions they’ve got in Pucallpa, son.”
The morgue was across from the hospital too, a few steps from the cabin. Amalia had felt a shudder the first day when she saw the gloomy concrete building with its crest of vultures on the roof. The cabin was large and in the back there was a lot covered with weeds. They could plant something there, the owner, Alandro Pozo, had told them the day they moved in, have a little garden. The floor of the four rooms was dirt and the walls were discolored. Wasn’t there even a mattress? where were they going to sleep? Especially Amalita Hortensia, the bugs would bite her. Ambrosio had tapped his back pocket: they’d buy what they needed. That same afternoon they’d gone downtown and bought a cot, a mattress, a small crib, pots, plates, a portable stove, some small curtains, and Amalia, when she saw that Ambrosio was still picking things out, had become alarmed: that’s enough, you’ll use up all your money. But he, without answering, had kept on ordering things from the delighted salesman at Wong Supplies: this too, and that, the oilcloth.
“Where did you get so much money from?” Amalia had asked him that night.
“I’d been saving it up all those years,” Ambrosio says. “To set myself up and go into business, son.”
“Then you should be happy,” Amalia had said. “But you’re not. Leaving Lima bothers you.”
“I won’t have any more boss, I’ll be my own boss now,” Ambrosio had said. “Of course I’m happy, silly.”
A lie, he only started being happy later on. During those first few weeks in Pucallpa he’d been very serious, almost never speaking, his face extremely troubled. But in spite of that, he’d been very good to her and Amalita Hortensia from the very first. The day after they got there, he’d left the hotel and come back with a package. What was it? Clothes for the two Amalias. Her dress was much too big, but Ambrosio hadn’t even smiled when he saw her disappear inside the flowered frock that poured off her shoulders and kissed her ankles. He’d gone to the Morales Transportation Co. as soon as he arrived in Pucallpa, but Don Hilario was in Tingo María and wouldn’t be back until ten days later. What would they do in the meantime, Ambrosio? They’d look for a house and, until the day came when he would have to start sweating again, they’d have a little fun, Amalia. They hadn’t had much fun, she because of her nightmares and he because he probably missed Lima, even though they’d tried, spending a wad of money. They’d gone to see the Shipibo Indians, they’d eaten tons of fried rice, deep-fried shrimp and fried won tons in the Chinese restaurants along the Calle Comercio, they’d taken a boat ride on the Ucayali, a trip to Yarinacocha, and on several nights had gone to the Cine Pucallpa. The movies were doddering with old age and sometimes Amalita Hortensia would unleash her wailing in the darkness and people would shout take her out. Give her to me, Ambrosio would say, and he would quiet her by giving her his finger to suck.
Little by little, Amalia had been getting used to things, little by little, Ambrosio’s face was getting happier. They’d worked hard on the cabin. Ambrosio had bought paint and had whitewashed the front and the walls, and she’d scraped the filth off the floor. In the mornings they’d gone to the small market together to buy food and they learned to differentiate among the churches they passed: Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist, Catholic, Evangelical, Pentecostal. They’d begun to talk to each other again: you were so strange, sometimes I thought a different Ambrosio had got into your skin, that the real one had stayed behind in Lima. Why, Amalia? Because of his sadness, his tense face and his eyes which would suddenly turn off and wander away like those of an animal. You were crazy, Amalia, the one who’d stayed behind in Lima was the false Ambrosio. He felt good here, happy with this sun, Amalia, the cloudy sky back there made him depressed. She hoped it was true, Ambrosio. At night, as they had seen the people who lived there do, they too went out to sit by the street and enjoy the coolness that came up from the river and to chat, lulled by the frogs and the crickets crouching in the grass. One morning Ambrosio had come in with an umbrella: there, so Amalia wouldn’t complain about the sun anymore. So all she needed was to go out of the house with hair curlers to look like a jungle woman, Amalia. The nightmares had become farther apart, disappearing, and also the fear she felt every time she saw a policeman. The remedy had been to keep busy all the time, cooking, washing Ambrosio’s clothes, taking care of Amalita Hortensia, while he tried to convert the vacant lot into a garden. Barefoot, starting early in the morning, Ambrosio had spent hours weeding, but the growth came back quickly and stronger than before. Across from their cabin was one painted blue and white with an orchard full of fruit trees. One morning Amalia had gone to ask some advice from the neighbor woman and Señora Lupe, the wife of a man who had a farm upriver and only put in an appearance on rare occasions, had received her with affection. Of course she would help her in anything she could. She’d been the first and best friend they had in Pucallpa, son. Doña Lupe had taught Ambrosio to clear and plant at the same time, sweet potatoes here, manioc here, potatoes here. She had given them some seeds and had taught Amalia how to cook the mixture of bananas fried with rice, manioc and fish that everybody in Pucallpa ate.
2
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you got married by accident, son?” Ambrosio laughs. “Do you mean you were forced into it?”
It had started on one of those white, stupid nights which, through a kind of miracle, had been transformed into a party of sorts. Norwin had called La Crónica saying that he was waiting for them in El Patio and, after work, Santiago and Carlitos had gone to meet him. Norwin wanted to go to a whorehouse, Carlitos to El Pingüino, they flipped for it and Carlitos won. Were they expecting a wake? The nightclub was dreary and there were few customers. Pedrito Aguirre sat down with them and bought them beers. When the second show was over, the last customers left and then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the girls in the show and the boys in the band and the bartenders all ended up together in a happy round of tables. They’d started off with jokes, toasts, anecdotes and teasing, and suddenly life seemed happy, lively, spontaneous and pleasant. They drank, sang, began to dance, and next to Santiago, China and Carlitos, silent and close together, were looking into each other’s eyes as if they’d just discovered love. At three in the morning they were still there, drunk and loving one another, generous and talkative, and Santiago felt he was in love with Ada Rosa. There she was, Zavalita: short, fat-assed, dark. Her pigeon-toed feet, he thinks, her gold tooth, her bad breath, her cursing.
“A real accident,” Santiago says. “An auto accident.”
Norwin was the first to disappear, with a chorus girl in her forties who had a wild hairdo. China and Carlitos convinced Ada Rosa to go with them. They took a taxi to China’s apartment in Santa Beatriz. Sitting beside the driver, Santiago had a distracted hand on Ada Rosa’s knee. She was riding in back, dozing beside China and Carlitos, who were kissing furiously. At the apartment they drank all the beer in the refrigerator and listened to records and danced. When the light of day appeared in the window, China and Carlitos shut themselves up in the bedroom and Santiago and Ada Rosa were left alone in the living room. At El Pingüino they had kissed and here they caressed and she had sat on his knees, but now when he tried to take her clothes off, Ada Rosa reared up and began to shout and insult him. It was all right, Ada Rosa, no fighting, let’s go to sleep. He put the cushions from the easy chair on the floor, dropped down and fell asleep. When he woke up, through bluish clouds he saw Ada Rosa curled up like a fetus on the sofa, sleeping with her clothes on. He stumbled to the bathroom, bothered by a bilious heaviness and the resentment of his bones, and he put his head under the cold water. He left the house: the sun wounded his eyes and brought tears to them. He had a cup of black coffee at a cheap café on Petit Thouars and then, with vague, fluctuating nausea, he took a group taxi to Miraflores and another to Barranco. It was noon on the Town Hall clock. Señora Lucía had left a note on his bed: call La Crónica, very urgent. Arispe was crazy if he thought you were going to call him, Zavalita. But just as he was about to get into bed, he thought that his curiosity would keep him awake and he went down to phone in his pajamas.
“Are you unhappy with your marriage?” Ambrosio asks.
“My, my,” Arispe said. “A nice voice from beyond the grave, my good sir.”
“I went to a party and I’m all hung over,” Santiago said, “I haven’t slept a wink.”
“You can sleep on the trip,” Arispe said. “Get on over here right away in a taxi. You’re going to Trujillo with Periquito and Darío, Zavalita.”
“Trujillo?” A trip, he thinks, a trip at last, even if it was only to Trujillo. “Can’t I leave a little …”
“Actually, you’ve already left,” Arispe said. “A sure piece of information, a million-and-a-half winner in The Kitty, Zavalita.”
“All right, I’ll grab a shower and be right over,” Santiago said.
“You can phone the story in to me tonight,” Arispe said. “Forget about the shower and get right over here, water is for pigs like Becerrita.”
“No, I’m happy with it,” Santiago says. “The only thing is that I really wasn’t the one who made the decision. It was imposed on me, just like the job, like everything that’s ever happened to me. Nothing was ever my doing, it was more like I was their doing.”
He got dressed in a hurry, wet his hea
d again, ran down the stairs. The taxi driver had to wake him up when they got to La Crónica. It was a sunny morning, there was a bit of heat that delightfully entered the pores and lulled muscles and will. Arispe had left the instructions and money for gasoline, meals and hotel. In spite of your not feeling well and your sleepiness, you felt happy with the idea of the trip, Zavalita. Periquito sat next to Darío and Santiago stretched out on the back seat and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke up as they were getting into Pasamayo. On the right there were dunes and steep yellow hills, on the left the blue, resplendent sea and the precipice that kept getting higher, in front the highway painfully climbing the bald flank of the mountains. He sat up and lighted a cigarette; Periquito was looking into the abyss with alarm.
“The Pasamayo curves have sobered you sissies up.” Darío laughed.
“Slow down,” Periquito said. “And since you haven’t got eyes in the back of your head, it would be better if you didn’t turn around to chat.”
Darío was driving fast, but he was sure of himself. There were hardly any cars in Pasamayo, in Chancay they stopped for lunch at a truck stop by the side of the road. They started out again and Santiago, trying to sleep in spite of the jiggling, listened to them talking.
“This Trujillo business is most likely a lie,” Periquito said. “There are shitheads who spend all their time giving false tips to newspapers.”
“A million and a half soles for one single person,” Darío said. “I didn’t use to believe in The Kitty, but I’m going to start playing it.”
“Change a million and a half into females and then talk to me about it,” Periquito said.
Moribund villages, aggressive dogs that came out to meet the van with their teeth in the air, trucks parked beside the road, sporadic cane fields. They were passing milestone 48 when Santiago sat up and had another smoke. It was a straight stretch, with sand flats on both sides. The truck hadn’t taken them by surprise; they saw it glimmering in the distance at the top of a rise and they watched it coming closer, slow, heavy, corpulent, with its load of drums tied with ropes in the back. A dinosaur, Periquito said, at that instant Darío slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel, because at the very point where they were going to pass the truck, a hole ate away half the road. The wheels of the van fell into the sand, something crunched under the vehicle, straighten out! Periquito shouted and Darío tried and there we were, fucked up, he thinks. The wheels sank in, instead of climbing up the edge they skidded, and the van kept on going forward, tilting way over like a monster until, overcome by its own weight, it rolled like a ball. An accident in slow motion, Zavalita. He heard or gave a cry, a twisted, slanting world, a force that threw him violently forward, a darkness with stars. For an indefinite time everything was quiet, dark, painful and hot. He first tasted something bitter, and even though he’d opened his eyes, it took him a while to realize that he’d been thrown out of the vehicle and was stretched out on the ground and that the harsh taste was the sand that was getting into his mouth. He tried to stand up, dizziness blinded him and he fell back down again. Then he felt himself grabbed by the feet and hands, lifted, and there they were, in the background of a long, hazy dream, those strange and remote faces, that feeling of infinite and lucid peace. Would it be like that, Zavalita? Would it be that silence without any questions, that serenity without any doubts or remorse? Everything was weak, vague and alien, and he felt himself being placed on something soft that was moving. He was in a car, lying on the back seat, and he recognized the voices of Periquito and Darío and he saw a man dressed in brown.
Conversation in the Cathedral Page 56