Helena was blond, with bright blue eyes, very pretty teeth, and a very joyful laugh. I missed her a lot in the desolation and loneliness of La Perla, in that isolated little house in the middle of a vast stretch of open countryside to which we moved in 1948. My father, besides working for the International News Service, bought lots, built houses, and then sold them; for several years that was an important source of income for him. I say this with some hesitation because his economic situation, like a fair part of his life, was a mystery to me. Did he earn good money? Did he save much of it? He lived an extremely abstemious life. He never went out to a restaurant, much less, needless to say, to those cabarets — the Cabaña, the Embassy, or the Bolívar Grill — to which my aunt and uncle sometimes went to dance on Saturday nights. In all likelihood he and my mama went to the movies once in a while, but I do not recall their ever doing that either, or perhaps they did so on the weekends that I spent in Miraflores. From Monday to Friday he came home from the office between seven and eight, and after dinner he sat down to listen to the radio, for an hour or two, before going to bed. I think that the programs of Teresita Arce’s comic series, “La Chola Purificación Chauca,” on Radio Central, ones he always laughed at, were the only diversion in that house. And my mama and I laughed too, in unison with our lord and master. He himself had built the little house in La Perla, with the help of a construction foreman.
La Perla, at the end of the 1940s, was a gigantic empty lot. Only on the Avenida de Las Palmeras and on the Avenida Progreso were there any buildings. The rest of the area, between that square of streets and the steep cliff overlooking the sea, consisted of blocks and blocks laid out as straight as a string, with street lighting and sidewalks but not a single house. Ours was one of the first in that district and in the year and a half or two that we were there, we lived in a wilderness. Toward Bellavista, a few blocks away, there was a settlement with one of those grocery stores that in Peru are still called chinos—Chinamen’s stores — and at the other end, close to the sea, the police station. My mama was afraid of being left alone there all day long, because of the isolation of the place. And one night, in fact, footsteps were heard on the roof and my father went out to find the thief. I woke up hearing shouting and it was then that I heard the two shots in the air of the mythical revolver, which he fired so as to scare the intruder off. At the time Mamaé was already living with us, for I remember the little old lady’s frightened face, as she stood in her nightdress in the cold hallway with black and white tiles that separated our rooms.
If in the little house on the Avenida Salaverry I lacked friends, in La Perla I lived the life of a fungus. I went to and from La Salle in the little interurban Lima-Callao minibus that I took on the Avenida Progreso, and got off at the Avenida Venezuela, from where it was several blocks’ walk to the school. They enrolled me as a half-boarder, so that I had my lunch at La Salle. When I got back home to La Perla, at around five, since there was still lots of time before my father came home from work, I used to go out to the vacant lots and kick a soccer ball around as far as the police station and the cliff and come back home again, and that was my daily diversion. I’m lying: the important diversion was to think about Helena and write letters and love poems to her. To write poems was another of the secret ways of resisting my father, since I knew how much it irritated him that I wrote verses, something he associated with eccentricity, bohemia, and what could horrify him most: being queer. I suppose that, for him, if it was necessary to write verses, something that remained completely unproved — in the house there was not a single book, either of poetry or of prose, outside of the ones that belonged to me, and I never saw him read anything else but the newspaper — it was most probably women who wrote them. That men should do such a thing disconcerted him, struck him as an extravagant way of wasting time, a pastime incompatible with wearing trousers and having balls.
For I read many verses and learned them by heart — Bécquer, Chocano, Amado Nervo, Juan de Dios Pesa, Zorrilla — and wrote them, before and after doing my homework, and sometimes I dared read them, on weekends, to Aunt Lala, Uncle Juan, or Uncle Jorge. But never to Helena, the inspiration and the ideal addressee of these rhetorical effusions. The fact that my papa could give me a dressing-down if he discovered me writing poems surrounded the writing of poetry with a dangerous aura, and that, of course, made it all the more exciting to me. My aunts and uncles were delighted that I was going out with Helenita, and the day that my mama met her, at Aunt Lala’s, she was very much taken by her too: what a pretty little girl and how likable. I would often hear her regret, years later, that having been able to marry someone like Helenita, her son had instead committed all the follies he had.
Helena was my sweetheart until I entered the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, in the third year of secondary school, a few days after my fourteenth birthday. And she was also my last sweetheart — in the decorous, serious, and purely sentimental connotations of the word in that milieu in those days. (What came after that, in the amorous domain, was more complicated and less mentionable.) And because of how deeply in love with Helena I was, I dared to falsify my report card one day. My teacher in the second year of secondary school at La Salle was a layman, Cañón Paredes, with whom I always got along badly. And on one of those weekends he handed me my report card with an ignominious D for “unsatisfactory.” And so I would have to go back home to La Perla. But the idea of not going to Miraflores, of not seeing Helena for another week, was intolerable and I left for my aunt and uncle’s. Once there, I changed the D to an O for highest in class, believing that my cheating would pass unnoticed. Cañón Paredes discovered it, days later, and without a word to me had the principal summon my father to the school.
What happened then still fills me with shame when even without warning my unconscious brings those images back to life. After recess, standing in line to go back into the classrooms, I saw my father appear in the distance, accompanied by Brother Agustín, the principal. My father approached the line and I realized that he knew everything and that I was going to pay the price. He gave me a terrific slap on the face that silenced and electrified the dozens of boys. Then, grabbing me by one ear, he dragged me to the principal’s office, where he began to beat me, in front of Brother Agustín, who tried to calm him down. I imagine that thanks to that beating the principal took pity on me and didn’t expel me from the school, as my misdeed deserved. My punishment was to be forbidden to go to Miraflores for several weeks.
In October 1948, the military coup of General Odría brought down the democratic government and Uncle José Luis went into exile. My father celebrated the coup as a personal victory: the Llosas could no longer boast of having a relative who was the president of Peru. I cannot recall having ever heard talk of politics after our arrival in Lima, either in my parents’ house or at my aunts and uncles’, except for an isolated phrase or two in passing against the Apristas, whom all those around me seemed to regard as scoundrels (on this subject my father agreed with the Llosas). But the fall of Bustamante and the rise to power of General Odría became the object of my father’s triumphant monologues celebrating the event, delivered straight to my mother’s wistful face, and in those same days I heard her wonder how she could send a note “to poor José Luis and María Jesús [whom the military had banished to Argentina] without your papa finding out.”