I returned to Huatica many times in those two years at Leoncio Prado, always on Saturday afternoons and always to the block with the French whores. (Years later, the poet and writer André Coyné would swear to me that their being “French” was slanderous, since they were really Belgian and Swiss.) And I went several times to a slender and pretty polilla—a vivacious little brunette, good-humored and able to make her transitory visitors feel that making love with her was something more than a mere business transaction — whom we had baptized “Goldifeet” because, as a matter of fact, hers were tiny, white, and well cared for. She became the mascot of the section. On Saturdays one found cadets in their third year — or in their fourth year — forming a line in front of the door of her little hole in the wall. The majority of the characters in my novel La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero), written using memories of my years at Leoncio Prado as a basis, are very free, distorted versions of real models, while others are completely imaginary. But the elusive “Goldifeet” is there as my memory preserves her: self-assured, attractive, vulgar, facing up to her humiliating job with indomitable good humor and giving me, on those Saturdays, for twenty soles, ten minutes of bliss.
I know very well everything that lies behind prostitution, in social terms, and I do not defend it, except for those who engage in it of their own free choice, which was doubtless not the case with “Goldifeet,” nor with the other polillas of the Jirón Huatica, driven there by hunger, ignorance, the lack of jobs, and the evil arts of the pimps who exploited them. But going to the Jirón Huatica, or later on to the brothels of Lima, is something that did not give me a guilty conscience, perhaps because paying the polillas gave me a sort of moral alibi in some way or other, disguising the filth and the cruelty of the rite with the mask of an aseptic contract that, on being fulfilled by both parties, freed the two of them of any ethical responsibility. And I believe that it would be a disloyalty to my memory and to my adolescence not to recognize, too, that in those years in which I was leaving my childhood behind, women like “Goldifeet” taught me the pleasures of the body and of the senses, taught me not to reject sex as something nasty and denigrating, but instead to experience it as a source of life and of pleasure and made me take the first steps inside the mysterious labyrinth of desire.
From time to time, I saw my friends of the barrio, in Miraflores, when I had a weekend pass, and I went with them to one party or another on Saturdays, or, on Sundays, to the matinee at the movie theaters and sometimes to soccer matches. But the military academy was imperceptibly separating me from them, to the point of converting the intimate fraternity of days gone by into a sporadic and distant relationship. It was no doubt my fault: they struck me as too childish, with their Sunday rites — matinee, an ice cream at the Crem Rica, the skating rink, sunset from the Salazar gardens — and their adolescent crushes, now that I was in a school for men who did cruel things and now that I was going to the Jirón Huatica. A fair number of my friends in the barrio were still virgins and were hoping to lose that status with the maids who worked at their houses. I remember a conversation, on one of those Saturday or Sunday afternoons, on the corner of Colón and Juan Fanning, in which, in a circle of kids from the barrio, one of them told us how he had “fucked the mestiza,” after having tricked her into taking yohimbina (a fine powder that, so it was said, drove women crazy, which we talked about endlessly as some sort of magic substance, and which, moreover, I never saw). And I remember another afternoon when some boy cousins of mine told me of the Machiavellian strategy that they had conceived in order to “get inside the slit” of one of the maidservants, someday when their parents were gone. And I remember my profound malaise on both occasions and on all of the ones when my friends, from Miraflores or from school, boasted of fucking the mestizas who worked at their houses.
That is something I never did, that always made me indignant, and doubtless was one of the first manifestations of what would later be my rebellion against the injustices and the abuses that happened every day and everywhere, with complete impunity, in Peruvian life. As regards this subject of maidservants, moreover, what, in those years, manifested itself as a trauma in the Llosa family had made me very sensitive. I have recounted how my grandparents brought from Cochabamba to Peru a lad from Saipina, Joaquín, and a newborn baby boy, Orlando, that one of the cooks abandoned in their house. The two of them had gone on living with the family, in Piura, and then later in the apartment on the Dos de Mayo, in Lima, and finally in a bigger one that my grandparents rented in a group of townhouses on the Calle Porta, in Miraflores. My uncles found a job for Joaquín, who went off to live by himself. Orlando, who had always lived among the household servants and who at the time must have been going on ten, came to resemble, more and more as he grew older, the third of my uncles — more, even, than this uncle’s legitimate children. Although the subject was never brought up in the family, it was always there and nobody dared to mention it, or, what is even worse, do anything to make up in some way for what had happened, or to lessen its consequences.
Nothing was done, or, rather, something was done that made things worse. Orlando came to have an intermediate status, a sort of limbo, that was no longer that of a servant but still not that of a member of the family. Auntie Mamaé, who had gone back to live with my grandparents on the Calle Porta, put down a mattress for him in her room, so that he could sleep there. And he ate at a little table set apart, in the same dining room but without sitting down at table with my grandparents and my uncles and the rest of us. He addressed my granny in the familiar form and called her, just as my cousins and I did, “Granny,” and called our great-aunt “Mamaé.” But he addressed my grandfather in the polite form and called him Don Pedro, and addressed my mama and my uncles with the same formal terms of address, including their father, whom he called Señor Jorge. The only ones with whom he used the familiar tú form were my girl and boy cousins and me. What that childhood must have been like, lived amid total confusion, a servant or little less for three-quarters of the family, and a relative of the rest, and the bitterness, humiliation, resentment, and pain that must have accumulated in him, like water stagnating in a well, is difficult to imagine. It is a paradox that people as generous and noble as my grandparents could, blinded by prejudices or taboos that were those of their milieu and had come to form part of their nature, aggravate, by that ambiguous status in which they caused him to live, the drama of his birth. Years later, I was one of the first of the family to treat Orlando as a relative, to present him as a cousin of mine, and I did my best to have a friendly relationship with him. But he never felt comfortable with me, nor with the rest of the family, save for Granny Carmen, to whom he was always close until the end.
Although I was never very studious at Leoncio Prado, there were certain classes I followed with great ardor. There were excellent teachers, like the one who taught world history, Aníbal Ismodes, to whose classes I lent an enthusiastic ear. And the physics teacher, a slender, elegant little highlander called Huarina, who was rumored to be a “brain.” He had done his postgraduate studies in France, and in his classes he gave the impression that he knew everything; he was able to make the most obscure experiments and the most complex laws and tables enjoyable. Of all the science courses that I’ve taken, the one I had with Professor Huarina in my second year at Leoncio Prado is the only one that entertained, intrigued, and excited me in the way that until then only history courses had done. Literature courses were taught as part of Spanish, that is to say, of grammar, and were usually unbearably boring courses in which we were required to memorize, along with the rules of prosody, syntax, and spelling, the life and works of famous authors, but not to read their books. Never, in all my years as a student, was I made to read a book, apart from the assigned textbooks. The latter included a few poems or fragments of classic texts that were difficult to understand because of the rare words and the uncommon turns of phrase, so that my memory retained little or nothing of them. If I took to any classes in school, it was the ones in history, because of the good teachers I had. Literature was a vocation that came to light outside of the classroom, in an oblique and personal way.