“Time to leave! The landlord is upstairs.”
And he was gone in a flash, and without having said goodbye.
From then on, he came every night. He arrived late, when the landlord was already snoring.
There seemed to be a tacit agreement between us, for without requesting or demanding anything, he would appear in my room, make coffee, then lie down on the threadbare rug. He rarely spoke except when he was slightly drunk. What was most disturbing was his smell. It wasn’t a particularly unpleasant smell, but it was a different smell from my own, the smell of a stranger who occupied the room and gave me the sensation, even when he wasn’t there, of having been invaded.
Winter came and frost began to accumulate on the windowpanes. Torroba must have lost his jacket in the course of one or another of his adventures because he now went around in his shirtsleeves, shivering. I pitied him somewhat, seeing him lying there on the ground without any blankets. One night his cough woke me up. We spoke in the darkness. He asked me, then, if he could lie down on my bed because the floor was too cold.
“Okay,” I said, “just for tonight.”
Unfortunately his cold lasted for days, and he took advantage of it to claim a piece of my bed. It was an emergency measure, true, but it ended up becoming the norm. By the time his cough was gone, Torroba had won the right to share my pillow, my sheets, and my blankets.
To give your bed to a vagabond is a sign of surrender. From that day on, Torroba ruled supreme over my room. He gave the impression of being the occupant, and I, the clandestine guest. Many times I returned home to find him in my bed, reading and marking up my books, eating my bread, and spilling crumbs on the sheets. He even took some surprising liberties, like wearing my underwear and painting eyeglasses on my delicate Botticelli prints.
Most worrisome to me, however, was that I didn’t know if he felt any gratitude. I never heard the words thank you pass his lips. It’s true that at night, when I ran into him at one of those sordid dives, like Chez Moineau, surrounded by Swedish lesbians, Yankee queers, and potheads, he’d invite me to his table and pour me a glass of red wine. But perhaps he did that to have a laugh at my expense, so he could say, when I left, “That guy’s an imbecile I now totally own.” It’s true, I was somewhat fascinated by his temperament, and many times I found comfort in telling myself: “Maybe I have an unknown genius staying in my room.”
Finally, something extraordinary occurred. It was midnight and Torroba hadn’t shown up. I went to bed a bit worried, thinking that maybe he’d had an accident. On the other hand, I felt like I was breathing the sweet air of freedom. At two in the morning, a pebble hit the window and woke me up. When I looked out and leaned over the windowsill, I saw Torroba standing in front of the door to the hotel.
“Throw down the key, I’m freezing to death!”
The landlord always locked the door at midnight. I threw him the key wrapped in a handkerchief and went back to bed to wait for him to enter. It took him a long time; he appeared to be climbing the stairs with great caution. Finally, the door opened and Torroba appeared. But he wasn’t alone: this time he was accompanied by a woman.
I looked at them in astonishment. The woman, who was made up like a mannequin and had the long fingernails of a Mandarin, didn’t bother to greet me. She took a theatrical turn around the room and finally removed her coat, revealing a delicious body.
“That’s Françoise,” Torroba said. “She’s a friend of mine. She’ll sleep here tonight. She’s a bit stoned.”
“On the rug?” I asked.
“No, in the bed.”
As I seemed hesitant, he added, “If you don’t like that plan, you can sleep on the floor.”
Torroba turned off the light. I sat on the bed, watching the two of them moving around in the darkness. They had probably got undressed because the smell—this time a new and unfamiliar smell—enveloped me, penetrated my nostrils, and pierced my stomach like a dart. When they got into bed, I jumped up, grabbed a blanket, and lay down on the floor. I couldn’t sleep all night. The woman didn’t speak (she may have fallen asleep), but Torroba, on the other hand, shook and bellowed till dawn.
They left at noon. The whole time, we didn’t exchange a single word. Once alone, I locked the door and started pacing around among my papers and my disorder, smoking incessantly. Finally, as evening began to fall, I closed the curtains and started methodically throwing all of Torroba’s belongings into the hallway. Outside the door to my room there formed a pile of his socks, poems, books, crusts of bread, boxes, and suitcases. When there was no longer a single trace of him in my room, I turned off the light and lay down on my bed.
I started to wait. Outside, a mighty wind was blowing. After a few hours I heard Torroba’s footsteps climbing the stairs, then a long silence in front of my door. I imagined him in shock, staring at his scattered belongings.
First came a hesitant knock, then several irate knocks.
“Hey, are you there? What happened?”
I didn’t answer.
“What’s the meaning of this? Have you moved?”
I didn’t answer.
“Quit joking and open the door!”
I didn’t answer.
“Don’t pretend you don’t hear! I know you’re there. The landlord told me you were.”
I didn’t answer.
“Open up, I’m getting pissed!”
I didn’t answer.
“Open, it’s snowing, and I’m all wet!”
I didn’t answer.
“I’ll just have a coffee then leave.”
I didn’t answer.
“Here, just a minute, I want to show you a book!”
I didn’t answer.
“If you open up, I’ll bring Françoise here tonight so you can sleep with her!”
I didn’t answer.
For half an hour he kept shouting, begging, threatening, and insulting me. Every once in a while, he would back up his shouts with a kick that shook the door. His voice was growing hoarse.
“I came to say goodbye. Tomorrow I’m leaving for Spain. I’ll invite you to my house. I live on Calle Serrano, hard as that is to believe! I have servants who wear livery!”
In spite of myself, I’d gotten up from bed.
“This is how you treat a poet? Look, I’ll give you that book you saw, the one I wrote and illustrated by hand! They’ve offered me three thousand francs for it. I’ll give it to you, it’s yours!”
I went up to the door and rested my hands on the wood. I felt confused. In the darkness I groped around for the handle. Torroba kept begging. I was waiting for a sentence, a decisive one, the sentence that would impel me to move the handle my hands had found. But there was a long pause. When I pressed my ear to the door, I heard nothing. Perhaps Torroba, on the other side, was mirroring my position. A little while later I heard him pick up his things, then they fell out of his arms, then he picked them up again. Then, his footsteps down the stairs . . .
I ran over to the window and pushed aside a corner of the curtain. For once Torroba hadn’t lied: it was snowing.
Large snowflakes fell obliquely against the façade of the hotel. People were running by on the white street, pulling down their hats and buttoning up their thick coats. The café terraces were lit and full of customers drinking mulled wine and enjoying the first snow behind the protection of the transparent partitions.
Torroba appeared on the sidewalk. He was wearing a shirt and carrying in his hands, under his arms, over his shoulders, and on his head, his heteroclite property. He lifted his face and looked up at my window, as if he knew I was there spying on him and wanted to show how forsaken he was in the blizzard. He must have been saying something because his lips were moving. He then began a hesitant stagger, full of detours, retreats, doubts, and stumbles.
By the time he crossed the boulevard on his way into the Arab neighborhood, I felt that I was suffocating in this room that seemed now too big and protected to shelter my solitude. Throwing the wind
ow open, I leaned half my body out the window and over the railing.
“Torroba!” I shouted. “Torroba, I’m here! I’m in my room!”
Torroba kept walking away through the throng of pedestrians who slipped silently along on the silent snow.
“Torroba!” I insisted. “Come, there’s room for you! Don’t go, Toooorroooobaaa!”
Only at that moment did he turn and look up at my window. But just when I thought he was going to return, he raised his arm with his fist clenched in a gesture that was, more than a threat, an act of revenge, then he disappeared forever in the first snowfall.
Paris, 1970
from
NEXT MONTH I’LL SET THINGS STRAIGHT
THE WARDROBE, OLD FOLKS, AND DEATH
THE WARDROBE in Father’s room was not merely another piece of furniture but rather a house within the house. Inherited from his grandparents, it was gigantic and cumbersome and had accompanied us through all our moves, until it found its permanent place in the paternal bedroom in Miraflores.
It took up nearly half the room and almost reached the ceiling. Whenever my father wasn’t there, my brothers and I would enter it. It was a genuine baroque palace, full of knobs, moldings, cornices, medallions, and columns, every last detail carved by some demented eighteenth-century woodworker. It had three chambers, each with its own physiognomy. The door on the left was heavy, like a portal, and from its escutcheon hung an enormous key, which was itself a protean toy, for we employed it interchangeably as a gun, a scepter, and a truncheon. Behind this door, my father kept his suits and an English overcoat he never wore. It was the obligatory entryway to that universe scented with cedar and naphthalene. The central chamber, our favorite because of its variety, had four large drawers at the bottom. When father died, each of us inherited one of those drawers and established over it a jurisdiction as jealously protected as the one Father had maintained over the entire wardrobe. Above the drawers was an alcove that housed approximately thirty well-chosen books. The central chamber was topped off by a high square door, always locked, and we never knew what it contained; perhaps those papers and photos that one carries around from one’s youth and doesn’t destroy out of fear of losing part of a life that, in reality, is already lost. Finally, the chamber on the right had another door, this one covered with a beveled-glass mirror. The drawers at the bottom contained shirts and linens, and above them was a space without shelves, large enough to stand up in.
The chamber on the left communicated with the one on the right through a high overhead passageway situated behind the alcove. One of our favorite games was to enter the wardrobe through the solid wood door and appear a short while later through the mirrored one. The upper passageway was an ideal hiding place: our friends could never find us when we used it. They knew we were in the wardrobe, but they couldn’t imagine that we had scaled its architecture and were lying supine over the central chamber, as if in a coffin.
My father’s bed was located directly in front of the right-hand chamber, so that when he was propped up on his pillows to read the newspaper, he could look at himself in the mirror. He would look at himself, but more than just at himself, he would look at all those who had looked at themselves. He would muse: “Here Don Juan Antonio Ribeyro y Estada looked at himself and tied his bow tie before going to the Council of Ministers,” or “Here Don Ramón Ribeyro y Álvarez del Villar looked at himself before teaching his class at the University of San Marcos,” or “How many times did my father, Don Julio Ribeyro y Benites, look at himself here while dressing to give a speech before Congress?” His ancestors were captives there, in the depth of the mirror. He saw them and saw his own image superimposed upon theirs in that unreal space, as if once again, by a miracle, they inhabited the same time. Through that mirror, my father penetrated the world of the dead, but he also made it possible for his grandparents to find their way, through him, into the world of the living.
•
We marveled at the intelligent way summer was expressing itself, its days always clear and available for pleasure, play, and happiness. My father, who had stopped smoking, drinking, and visiting with his friends after he got married, became more accommodating, and since the fruit trees in his small orchard had offered up their greatest gifts, ripe for admiration, and since a decent dinner service had finally been acquired for the household, he decided from time to time to invite over one of his old buddies.
The first was Alberto Rikets. He was a version of my father in reduced format. As a precaution, nature had gone through the trouble to edit the copy. They shared the same pallor, the same slender physique, the same gestures, and even many of the same facial expressions. All of this because they had attended the same high school, read the same books, spent the same sleepless nights, and suffered from the same long and painful illness. During the ten or twelve years that they had not seen each other, Rikets had made a fortune working doggedly in a pharmacy, which he now owned, as opposed to my father, who had only ever managed to scrape together enough money to buy the house in Miraflores.
In those ten or twelve years, Rikets had done something else: he had had a son, Albertito, whom he brought with him on his inaugural visit. Since the children of friends rarely end up being friends among themselves, we welcomed Albertito with some apprehension. We thought he was scrawny, dimwitted, and, at moments, frankly idiotic. While my father was giving Alberto a tour of the orchard, showing him the orange tree, the fig tree, the apple trees, and the grapevines, we took Albertito with us to play in our bedroom. Albertito didn’t have any siblings, so he knew nothing of the collective games we played at home, was inept in the role of Indian, and much more inept when the sheriff riddled him with bullets. He had a very unconvincing way of falling down dead and was incapable of understanding that a tennis racket could also be a machine gun. For all these reasons we refused to share our best game with him, the wardrobe game, and focused instead on perfunctory and petty pastimes, which left everyone to their own devices, such as pushing around toy cars or building castles out of wood blocks.
We played while waiting for lunch, peering out the window at my father and his friend, who were now walking through the garden, for this was the season to admire the magnolia, the geraniums, the dahlias, the carnations, and the wallflowers. Years ago my father had discovered the delights of gardening and the profound truth in the shape of a sunflower or the blooming of a rose. Rather than spend his free days as he used to, reading wearisome texts that forced him to meditate on the meaning of existence, he spent them on simple tasks, such as watering, pruning, grafting, or weeding, tasks in which he invested true intellectual passion. His love of books had deviated to a love of plants and flowers. The entire garden was his oeuvre and like a character from Voltaire, he had reached the conclusion that happiness lies in cultivation.
“One day, I’ll buy myself a piece of land in Tarma, not like this, a real farm, and then you’ll see, Alberto, then you’ll really see what I’m capable of doing,” we heard my father say.
“My dear Perico, instead of Tarma, Chaclacayo,” his friend responded, alluding to the luxury mansion he was building there. “Almost the same climate and only forty kilometers from Lima.”
“Yes, but my grandfather didn’t live in Chaclacayo, he lived in Tarma.”
Again, his ancestors! And his childhood friends called him Perico.
•
When Albertito’s toy car rolled under the bed, he crawled after it, and then we heard him let out a victory shout. He had found a soccer ball. Until that moment and while struggling to entertain him, we had been wholly unaware that if that frail and solitary child had one secret passion, one obsession, it was to kick around a leather ball.
He had received the imaginary pass and was preparing to kick it on, but we stopped him. Playing in the room was pure madness, playing in the garden was strictly forbidden, so we had no choice but to go out to the street.
That street had been the scene of dramatic matches that we played for y
ears against the Gómez brothers, matches that lasted four or five hours and ended when it was pitch-dark, when we could no longer see goals or rivals, at which point they turned into ghostly contests, fierce and blind battles that allowed for cheating, insults, and fouls. No professional team ever invested as much hatred, fury, and vanity as we did in those childhood encounters. That’s why when the Gómezes moved away, we forsook soccer, knowing that nothing could ever compare to those feuds, and we stashed the ball under the bed. Until Albertito found it. If he wanted soccer, we’d give him soccer, no holds barred.
We set up a goal next to the wall of the house so the ball would bounce off it, and we made Albertito the goalkeeper. He bravely blocked our first shots. But then we bombarded him with low-flying kicks, just to have the pleasure of seeing him sprawled on the ground, stretched out and defeated.
Then it was his turn to kick, and I was goalie. For such a wimp he kicked like a mule, and though I blocked his first strike, my hands were left smarting. His second kick, from the side, was a perfect goal, but the third was truly prodigious: the ball passed through my arms, flew over the wall, slipped through the branches of the climbing jasmine, soared over the crown of the cypress tree, bounced off the trunk of the acacia, and disappeared into the depths of the house.
For a while we sat and waited on the sidewalk for the maid to return the ball, which is what usually happened. But nobody appeared. Just as we were about to go look for it, the back door opened, and my father emerged, carrying the ball. He looked paler than usual and didn’t say a word, but we saw him walk resolutely toward a worker who was whistling on the sidewalk across the street. When he reached him, he handed him the ball and returned to the house without even looking at us. It took the worker a moment to realize that he had just been given that ball, and when he understood, he ran off so fast that we could never have caught up with him.
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