Conversation in the Cathedral
Page 70
“No belly and your legs are still beautiful.” Robertito laughed. “Are you going to look up your ex’s ex?”
“No, but if I ever run into him he’s going to be sorry,” Queta said. “For what he said to you about Hortensia.”
“You’ll never run into him,” Robertito said. “He’s way above you now.”
“Why did you come and tell me all this?” Queta asked suddenly, stopping her wiping. “Go on, beat it, get out of here.”
“Just to see how you’d react.” Robertito laughed. “Don’t get mad. So you’ll see that I’m your friend, I’m going to tell you another secret. Do you know why I came in? Because Madame told me go see if she’s really taking a bath.”
*
He’d come from Tingo María in short stages, just in case: in a truck to Huánuco, where he stayed one night, then by bus to Huancayo, from there to Lima by train. When he crossed the Andes the altitude had made him nauseous and given him palpitations, son.
“It was just a little over two years since I’d left Lima when I got back,” Ambrosio says. “But what a difference. The last person I could ask for help was Ludovico. He’d sent me to Pucallpa, he’d recommended me to his relative, Don Hilario, see? And if I couldn’t go to him, who could I go to, then?”
“My father,” Santiago says. “Why didn’t you go to him, how come you didn’t think of that?”
“Well, it isn’t that I didn’t think of it,” Ambrosio says. “You have to realize, son …”
“I can’t,” Santiago says. “Haven’t you said you admired him so much, haven’t you said he had such a high regard for you? He would have helped you. Didn’t you think of that?”
“I wasn’t going to get your papa in any trouble, for the very reason that I respected him so much,” Ambrosio says. “Remember who he was and who I was, son. Was I going to tell him I’m on the run, I’m a thief, the police are looking for me because I sold a truck that wasn’t mine?”
“You trusted him more than you do me, isn’t that right?” Santiago asks.
“A man, no matter how fucked up he is, has his pride,” Ambrosio says. “Don Fermín thought well of me. I was trash, garbage, you see?”
“Why do you trust me?” Santiago asks. “Why weren’t you ashamed to tell me about the truck?”
“Probably because I haven’t got any pride left,” Ambrosio says. “But I did have then. Besides, you’re not your papa, son.”
The four hundred soles from Itipaya had disappeared because of the trip and for the first three days in Lima he hadn’t had a bite to eat. He’d wandered about ceaselessly, keeping away from the downtown area, feeling his bones go cold every time he saw a policeman and going over names in his mind and eliminating them: Ludovico, not a thought; Hipólito was probably still in the provinces or had come back to work with Ludovico. Hipólito, not a thought, not a thought for him. He hadn’t thought about Amalia or Amalita Hortensia or Pucallpa: only about the police, only about eating, only about smoking.
“Just imagine, I never would have dared beg for something to eat,” Ambrosio says. “But I did for a smoke.”
When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he would stop just anybody on the street and ask him for a cigarette. He’d done everything, as long as it wasn’t a steady job and they didn’t ask for papers: unloading trucks at Porvenir, burning garbage, catching stray cats and dogs for the wild animals of the Cairoli Circus, cleaning sewers, and he’d even worked for a knife grinder. Sometimes, on the Callao docks, he would take the place of some regular stevedore by the hour, and even though he had to give him a big split, he had enough left over to eat for two or three days. One day someone gave him a tip: the Odríists needed guys to put up posters. He’d gone to the place, had spent a whole night plastering the downtown streets, but they’d only paid them with food and drink. During those months of drifting, ravenous hunger, walking and odd jobs that lasted a day or two, he’d met Pancras. At first he’d been sleeping in the Parada market, under the trucks, in ditches, on sacks in the warehouses, feeling protected, hidden among so many beggars and vagrants who slept there, but one night he’d heard that every so often police patrols came around asking to see papers. So he’d begun to go into the world of the shantytowns. He’d known them all, slept once in one, another time in another, until he’d found Pancras in the one called La Perla and there he stayed. Pancras lived alone and made room for him in his shack.
“The first person who was good to me in such a long time,” Ambrosio says. “Without knowing me or having any reason to. A heart of gold, that nigger has, I tell you.”
Pancras had worked at the dog pound for years and when they became friends he’d taken him to the supervisor one day: no, there weren’t any vacancies. But a while later they sent for him. Except that he’d asked him for papers: voting card, draft card, birth certificate? He’d had to invent a lie: I lost them. Oh, well, it’s out, no work without papers. Bah, don’t be foolish, Pancras had told him, who’s going to remember that truck, just take him your papers. He’d been afraid, he’d better not, Pancras, and he’d kept on with those little jobs on the sly. Around that time he’d gone back to his hometown, Chincha, son, the last time. What for? Thinking he could get different papers, get baptized again by some priest and with a different name, and even out of curiosity, to see what the town was like now. He’d been sorry he’d gone though. He left La Perla early with Pancras and they’d said good-bye on Dos de Mayo. Ambrosio had walked along Colmena to the Parque Universitario. He went to check on bus fares and he bought a ticket on one leaving at ten, so he had time to get a cup of coffee and walk around a little. He looked in the shop windows on the Avenida Iquitos, trying to decide whether or not to buy a new shirt so that he’d return to Chincha looking more presentable than when he’d left fifteen years before. But he had only a hundred soles left and he thought better of it. He bought a tube of mints and all during the trip he felt that perfumed coolness on his gums, nose and palate. But in his stomach he felt a tickling: what would the people who recognized him say when they saw him like that. They all must have changed a good deal, some must have died, others had probably moved away from town, the city had most likely changed so much that he wouldn’t even recognize it. But as soon as the bus stopped on the Plaza de Armas, even though everything had gotten smaller and flatter, he recognized it all: the smell of the air, the color of the benches and the roofs, the triangular tiles on the sidewalk by the church. He’d felt sorrowful, nauseous, ashamed. Time hadn’t passed, he hadn’t left Chincha, there, around the corner, would be the small office of the Chincha Transportation Co., where he’d started his career as a driver. Sitting on a bench, he’d smoked, looked around. Yes, something had changed: the faces. He was anxiously observing men and women and he’d felt his heart beating hard when he saw a tired, barefoot figure approaching, wearing a straw hat and feeling his way along with a cane: blind Rojas! But it wasn’t him, it was a blind albino, still young, who went over to squat under a palm tree. He got up, started walking, and when he got to the shantytown he saw that some of the streets had been paved and they’d built some little houses with gardens that had withered grass in them. In back, where the ditches along the road to Grocio Prado began, there was a sea of huts now. He’d gone back and forth through the dusty alleys of the shantytown without recognizing a single face. Then he’d gone to the cemetery, thinking that the old black woman’s grave would probably be next to Perpetuo’s. But it wasn’t and he hadn’t dared ask the guard where she’d been buried. He’d gone back to the center of town at dusk, disappointed, having forgotten about his new baptism and the papers, and hungry. At the café-restaurant called Mi Patria, which was now named Victoria and had two waitresses instead of Don Rómulo, he had a steak and onions, sitting beside the door, looking at the street all the time, trying to recognize some face: all different. He’d remembered something that Trifulcio had told him that night just before he’d left for Lima, while they were walking in the dark: here I am in Chincha and I feel as if I’m not, I reco
gnize everything and I don’t recognize anything. Now he understood what he’d been trying to tell him. He’d wandered through still more neighborhoods: the José Pardo School, the San José Hospital, the Municipal Theater, the market had been modernized a little. Everything the same but smaller, everything the same but flatter, only the people different: he’d been sorry he’d come, son, he’d left that night, swearing I’ll never come back. He already felt fucked up enough here, son, and on that day back there, besides being fucked up, he’d felt terribly old. And when the rabies scare was over, would your work at the pound be through, Ambrosio? Yes, son. What would he do? What he’d been doing before the supervisor had Pancras bring him in and told him, O.K., give us a hand for a few days even if you haven’t got any papers. He would work here and there, maybe after a while there’d be another outbreak of rabies and they’d call him in again, and after that here and there, and then, well, after that he would have died, wasn’t that so, son?
About the Author
Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru is 1936. He is the author of some of the last half-century’s most important novels, including The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Conversation in the Cathedral. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
By the Same Author
The Cubs and Other Stories
The Time of the Hero
The Green House
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Conversation in the Cathedral
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
The Perpetual Orgy
Who Killed Palomino Molero?
The Storyteller
In Praise of the Stepmother
A Fish in the Water
Death in the Andes
Making Waves
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
The Feast of the Goat
Letters to a Young Novelist
The Language of Passion
The Way to Paradise
The Bad Girl
The Dream of the Celt
Copyright
First published in Spain as Conversacion en la catedral
First published in the USA in 1975 by Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.
Paperback edition first published in 1993
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
English translation © Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., 1974, 1975
The right of Mario Vargas Llosa to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The right of Gregory Rabassa to be identified as translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26825–2