Until one day we made our escape. I don’t remember which one of the fights — although using that word to describe those scenes in which he shouted, insulted, and lashed out while my mother wept or listened to him without a word is an exaggeration — made her decide to take the great step. Perhaps it was that episode that lingers in my memory as one of the worst of all. It was at night and we were coming home from somewhere, in the blue Ford. My mama was recounting something and suddenly mentioned a lady from Arequipa named Elsa. “Elsa?” he asked. “Elsa who?” I started to tremble. “Yes, that Elsa,” my mother stammered and tried to change the subject. “The number-one whore in person,” he hissed. He fell silent for some time and suddenly I heard my mother cry out. He had pinched her so hard on the leg that a large purple bruise formed immediately. She showed it to me later, saying that she couldn’t stand any more. “Let’s leave, Mama, let’s leave once and for all, let’s run away.”
We waited until he’d left for the office, and taking with us only a few things that we could carry by hand, we went by taxi to Miraflores, to the Avenida 28 de Julio, where Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby lived, and also Uncle Pedro, still a bachelor, who was finishing his medical training that year. It was exciting to see my aunts and uncles again and to be in this neighborhood that was so pretty, with tree-lined streets and little houses that had well-cared-for gardens. Above all, it was marvelous to feel that I was with my family once more, far from that man, and to know that I would never again hear him or see him or feel afraid. Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby’s house was small, and they had two children, Silvia and Jorgito, who were still hardly older than toddlers, but we all fit in somehow — I slept in an armchair — and my happiness knew no bounds. What would happen to us now? My mama and my aunt and uncle held long conversations which I was not allowed to participate in. In any event, I didn’t have words enough to thank God, the Virgin, and that Lord of Limpias to whom Granny Carmen was so devoted, for having freed us from that man.
A few days later, when classes were over, just as I was about to climb into the La Salle school bus that took the pupils to San Isidro and Miraflores, my heart sank: there he was. “Don’t be afraid,” he said to me. “I’m not going to do anything to you. Come with me.” I noticed that he looked very pale and had big dark circles under his eyes, as though he hadn’t had any sleep for days. In the car, talking to me in a friendly way, he explained that we’d go pick up my clothes and my mama’s and that then he’d take me to Miraflores. I was certain that that affable manner was a hidden trap and that the moment we arrived at the house on the Avenida Salaverry he would beat me. But he didn’t. He had already packed part of our clothes in suitcases and I had to help him put the rest in some sacks and, when those gave out, in a blue blanket, which we tied together by the corners. As we were doing that, I, with my soul hanging by a thread, constantly fearing that at any moment he would regret allowing me to leave, noted, in surprise, that he had removed many of the photos that my mama kept on her night table, thereby eliminating her and me, and that he had stuck pins in others. When we had finally finished packing everything, we brought it all down to the blue Ford and took off. I couldn’t believe that it would be so easy, that he would act in such an understanding way. In Miraflores, in front of Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby’s, he wouldn’t let me call the maid to unload the things. He left them outside, on the tree-lined sidewalk, and the blanket came undone and clothes and various objects spilled out over the lawn. My aunt and uncle remarked afterward that with a spectacle like that, the whole neighborhood had had an eyeful of the family’s dirty linen.
A few days later, when I came back for lunch, I noticed something strange about the expression on the faces of Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby. What had happened? Where was my mama? They passed the news on to me tactfully, as was their habit, aware that it would be a tremendous disappointment for me. My mama and papa had made up and my mama had gone back to him. And that afternoon, when I got out of school, instead of going to Miraflores, I too was to go to the Avenida Salaverry. My world came tumbling down. How could she do such a thing? Was my mama too betraying me?
At the time I was unable to understand it, only suffer it, and I emerged from each of these escapes of ours and my parents’ later reconciliations more embittered, feeling that life was full of sudden shocks, without any compensation. Why did my mother make up with him every time, knowing full well that, after having calmed down for a few days or weeks, he would begin his physical violence and his insults once again, on the slightest pretext? She did so because, despite everything, she loved him with that obstinacy that was one of the traits of her character (one that I would inherit from her) and because he was the husband that God had given her — and a woman like her could have only one husband till the end of time, even though he mistreated her and even though she had a vague semi-definite divorce decree — and also because, despite her having worked for Grace Lines in Cochabamba and in Piura, my mother had been brought up to have a husband, to be a housewife, and so she felt incapable of earning a living for herself and for her son with her own earnings alone. She did it because she felt ashamed that she and I were continuing to be supported by my grandparents, who weren’t all that well off — Grandpa had never been able to put money aside with that tribe on his back — or else we would one day come to be supported by my aunt and uncle, who were trying their best to make their way financially in Lima. I know that now, but when I was eleven or twelve years old I didn’t know it, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have understood. The only thing I knew and understood was that, every time my mother and father took up with each other again, I had to go back to being imprisoned, to loneliness and fear, and this was gradually filling my heart with bitterness toward my mother as well, with whom, from that time on, I was never again as close as I had been before I met my father.
Between 1947 and 1949 we made our escape a number of times, at least half a dozen, always to the house of Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby or to Juan and Laura’s, also in Miraflores, and each time, within a few days, the much-feared reconciliation came about. With the distance of the years, how comical those escapes, hidden refuges, tearful receptions, those makeshift beds set up for us in the living rooms or dining rooms of my aunts and uncles seem. There was always that lugging of suitcases and sacks, the goings and comings, the very embarrassing explanations at La Salle, to the Brothers and to my schoolmates, of why, all of a sudden, I would be taking the Miraflores school bus instead of the La Magdalena one and then, after a while, the La Magdalena bus once more. Had I moved from one house to another again, or hadn’t I? Because nobody moved back and forth from one house to another every so often the way we did.
One day — it was summer, so it must have been shortly after our arrival in Lima — my papa took me alone with him in the car and we picked up two boys on a street corner. He introduced me to them: “They’re your brothers.” The older one, a year younger than I was, was named Enrique, and the other one, two years younger, Ernesto. The latter had blond hair and such light blue eyes that anybody would have taken him for a little gringo. All three of us were embarrassed and didn’t know what to do. My papa took us to the beach at Agua Dulce, rented an awning, sat down in the shade, and sent us to play in the sand and take a dip in the ocean. Little by little we began to feel closer to each other. They were students at the Colegio San Andrés and spoke English. Wasn’t San Andrés a Protestant school? I didn’t dare ask them. Afterward, when we were alone, my mama told me that, after separating from her, my papa had married a German lady and that Enrique and Ernesto were the sons of that marriage. But that he had separated from his gringa wife some years before, because she too had a testy temperament and couldn’t stand his bad moods. I didn’t see my brothers again for quite some time. Until, during one of those periodic escapes — this time we had taken refuge at Aunt Lala and Uncle Juan’s — my papa came to La Salle for me when school let out. Like the time before, he made me get into the blue Ford. He looked very stern and I was terrified. “The Llosas are plotting to send you abroad,” he said to me. “Taking advantage of their family ties with the president. They’re going to have me to contend with and we’ll see who wins.” Instead of going to La Magdalena, we went to Jesús María, where he stopped in front of a group of little red brick houses, made me get out of the car, knocked, and we went in. There were my brothers. And their mama, a blond lady, who offered me a cup of tea. “You stay here until I arrange matters,” my papa said. And he went away.