Gladys and I had our birthdays on the same day, and Aunt Lala and Uncle Juan gave a party with boys and girls of the barrio on March 28, 1948. I remember my surprise when I came in and saw that there were couples dancing and that my two cousins also knew how to dance. And that the birthday party was being held not to play games but to put records on, to hear music, and to serve as a “mixer” for the boys and girls. All my aunts and uncles were there and they introduced me to some youngsters with whom I would be great friends later on — Tico, Coco, Luchín, Mario, Luquen, Víctor, Emilio, el Chino — and they even made me ask Teresita to dance. I was dying of embarrassment and felt like a robot, not knowing what to do with my hands and feet. But afterward I danced with my cousins and other girls and from that day on I began to dream romantic dreams of being in love with Teresita. She was my first sweetheart. Inge was the second, and Helena the third. I made a very formal declaration of love to the three of them. We boys rehearsed the declaration beforehand, among ourselves, and each of them suggested words or gestures so that all would not be lost when one fell for a girl. Some of them preferred to declare their love at the movies, taking advantage of the darkness at the matinee and making the declaration coincide with some romantic moment of the film, which they presumed had a contagious effect. I tried that method, once, with Maritza, a very pretty girl with dark black hair and very pale skin, and the result was farcical. Because when, after hesitating for a long time, I dared to murmur in her ear the time-hallowed words—“I like you a whole lot; I’m in love with you. Would you be my girl?”—she turned to look at me, weeping like a Mary Magdalene. Totally absorbed in the film, she had barely heard me and asked: “What’s that? What did you say?” Incapable of taking up again where I had left off, all I managed to do was to stammer what a sad movie it was, wasn’t it?
But I made my declarations to Tere, Inge, and Helena in an orthodox way, dancing a bolero at a Saturday night party, and I wrote love poems to all three of them that I never showed them. I dreamed about them all week, counting how many days were left before I saw them again and praying that there would be a party that Saturday so that I might dance cheek to cheek with my sweetheart. At the Sunday matinee I grabbed their hand in the dark, but didn’t dare kiss them. I only kissed them when we played spin the bottle, or forfeits, when my friends from the barrio, who knew that we were sweethearts, sent us away as a punishment if we lost at the game, to give each other three, four, and even ten kisses. But they were kisses on the cheek and that, according to Luchín, the one who wanted to be considered a grownup, didn’t count, because a kiss on the cheek wasn’t a smacker. Smackers were given on the mouth. But at that time couples from Miraflores twelve or thirteen years old were still more or less innocent little archangels and not many of them dared give each other real smackers. I, naturally, didn’t dare. I fell in love the way calves fall in love with the moon — a pretty expression that we used to use to define boys who were enamored of a girl — but I was abnormally timid with the girls from Miraflores.
Spending the weekend in Miraflores was an adventure in freedom, the possibility of a thousand entertaining and exciting things. To go to the Club Terrazas to play fulbito or have a swim in the pool, from which great swimmers had come. Among all sports — I liked all of them — the one I was best at was swimming. I came to master the crawl quite well and one of my frustrations was not having been able to train in the academy directed by Walter Ledgard, the Sorcerer, as did some Miraflores boys my age who later became international champions, Ismael Merino or Rabbit Villarán for instance. I was never a very good soccer player, but my enthusiasm compensated for my lack of skill and one of the happiest days of my life was the Sunday when Toto Terry, a star from our barrio, took me to the National Stadium and had me play with the youngsters of the Universitario de Deportes against those of the Deportivo Municipal. Wasn’t going out onto that enormous field, wearing the uniform of the top team, the best thing that could happen to anyone in the world? And didn’t the fact that Toto Terry, the blond “Arrow” of the U, was from our barrio prove that ours was the best one in Miraflores? That was demonstrated in a series of “Olympic Games” we organized on several consecutive weekends, in which we competed with the barrio of the Calle San Martín in cycling, field and track, fulbito, and swimming races.
Carnival was the best time in the year. We went out during the day to squirt water on people, and in the afternoons, disguised as pirates, to the masked balls. There were three children’s balls that weren’t to be missed: the one at the park in Barranco, the one at the Club Terrazas, and the one at the Lawn Tennis Club. We brought paper streamers and squirt guns full of ether, and the group from the barrio, all dressed in identical costumes, was a large, joyful one. For one of those carnivals Dámaso Pérez Prado came with his orchestra. The mambo, recently invented in the Caribbean, was all the rage in Lima too, and contestants had even been invited to a national mambo championship in the Plaza de Acho, but the archbishop, Monsignor Guevara, forbade it, threatening to excommunicate the participants. The arrival of Pérez Prado filled the Córpac airport, and there too I was with my friends, running behind the convertible with the top down that was taking the composer of “El ruletero” and of “Mambo número cinco,” greeting people right and left, to the Hotel Bolívar. Aunt Lala and Uncle Juan laughed as they watched me, almost the minute I reached the house on Diego Ferré, on Saturdays at noon, begin practicing mambo steps, all by myself, on the stairs and through the rooms, in preparation for that night’s party.
Teresita and Inge were transitory sweethearts, for just a few weeks, something halfway between a children’s game and puppy love, what Gide calls the harmless caracoles of love. But Helena was a serious and steady long-time sweetheart, an expression that meant a relationship of several months or perhaps even a year. She was a close friend of Nancy’s, and her classmate at the Colegio La Reparación. She lived in one of a group of little ocher-colored townhouses with a common entrance, in Grimaldo del Solar, a place some distance away from Diego Ferré, in which there was also a barrio. If a stranger came to make the girls of one’s own neighborhood fall in love with him it was not looked upon with favor; it constituted a violation of one’s territory. But I was very much in love with Helena, and as soon as I reached Miraflores, I ran to the townhouse in Grimaldo del Solar to see her, if only from afar, in the window of her house. I went with Luchín and my namesake Mario, who had received declarations of love from Ilse and Lucy, neighbors of Helena’s. If luck was with us, we could talk with them for a moment in the doorway of their houses. But the kids in that neighborhood moved closer to hurl insults or throw stones at us, and on one of those afternoons we were obliged to come to blows with them, because they tried to kick us out of their turf.