I do not deny that the racial factor — the obscure resentments and profound complexes associated with this subject exist in Peru, of course, and all the ethnic groups of the national mosaic are victims of it and responsible for it — played a role in the campaign. It did indeed, despite my efforts to avoid it or, once it was already there, to bring it out into the open. But the decisive factor in the election was not skin color — neither mine nor Fujimori’s — but a sum total of reasons, of which racial prejudice was only one component.
Fifteen. Aunt Julia
At the end of May 1955, Julia, a younger sister of Aunt Olga’s, arrived in Lima to spend a few weeks’ vacation. She had been divorced not long before from her Bolivian husband, with whom she had lived for several years on a hacienda in the Altiplano; since their separation, she had been living in La Paz, with a woman friend from Santa Cruz.
I had known Julia in my childhood in Cochabamba. She was a friend of my mother’s and often came to the house on Ladislao Cabrera; once, she lent me a romantic novel in two volumes — E. M. Hull’s The Sheik and Son of the Sheik—which delighted me. I remember the tall and graceful figure of that friend whom my mother and my aunts and uncles called “the little Chilean” (because, although she lived in Bolivia, she had been born in Chile, as had Aunt Olga) dancing very vivaciously at Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby’s wedding celebration, a dance that my cousins Nancy and Gladys and I spied on from a stairway until the wee hours of the night.
Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga lived in an apartment on the Avenida Armendáriz, in Miraflores, very near Quebrada, and from the windows of the living room on the second floor you could catch a glimpse of the Jesuit seminary. I used to go to their house to have lunch or dinner very often, and I remember having happened to come by one noon, on leaving the university, just after Julia had arrived and was still unpacking. I recognized her hoarse voice and her hearty laugh, her slender, long-legged silhouette. She made a few joking remarks as she greeted me—“What! You’re Dorita’s little boy, that crybaby from Cochabamba?” She asked me what I was doing these days and was surprised when Uncle Lucho told her that besides being a student working toward a degree in Letters and Law, I wrote for newspapers and magazines and had even won a literary prize. “So how old are you now?” “Nineteen.” She was thirty-two, but didn’t show her age because she looked young and pretty. When we said goodbye to each other, she said to me that if my pololas—my sweethearts — would let me, I should go to the movies with her some night. And that, of course, she’d be the one who paid for the tickets.
The truth was that I hadn’t had a sweetheart for quite some time. Except for my platonic attachment to Lea, in recent years my life had been devoted to writing, reading, studying, and being active in politics. And my relationship with women had been friendly or as a fellow militant, not sentimental. I hadn’t set foot in a brothel again since Piura, or had even one love affair. And I don’t think that that austerity had weighed too heavily on me.
I am positive, though, that on this first meeting, I didn’t fall in love with Julia, nor did I think very much about her after we said goodbye to each other, nor, probably, after the two or three times that I saw her next, always at Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s house. I’m sure of it because of something that happened a short while later. One night, after several hours at one of those conspiratorial meetings that we frequently held at Luis Jaime Cisneros’s, on coming back to the townhouse on the Calle Porta I found a note from my grandfather on my bed: “Your Uncle Lucho says you’re a cad, who agreed to go to the movies with Julita and never showed up.” And as a matter of fact, I had completely forgotten about it.
The next day I raced to a florist’s shop on the Avenida Larco and sent Julia a bunch of red roses with a card that said: “Humble apologies.” When I went to apologize in person that afternoon, after working at Dr. Porras’s, Julia did not hold my having forgotten against me and teased me a lot about the red roses.
That same day, or very soon afterward, we began going to the movies together, to the evening performance. We almost always went on foot, often to the Barranco, crossing the Quebrada de Armendáriz and walking through the little zoo that existed in those days around the lagoon. Or to the Leuro, in Benavides, and sometimes even as far as the Colina, which meant nearly an hour’s walk. We always got into an argument because I wouldn’t let her pay for the tickets. We saw Mexican melodramas, American comedies, Westerns, and gangster movies. We talked about lots of things and I began to tell her how I wanted to be a writer and how, as soon as I could, I was going off to live in Paris. She no longer treated me like a little kid, but it doubtless never entered her head that I might someday become something more than the one who took her to the movies on nights when she was free.
Because, shortly after she arrived, pesky suitors started buzzing around Julia. Among them, Uncle Jorge. He had separated from Aunt Gaby, who went off to Bolivia with their two children. The divorce, which made me very sad, was the culmination of a period of dissipation and scandalous skirt-chasing on the part of the youngest of my uncles. He had become very well off after his return to Peru, when he had begun as a low-level employee with the Wiese organization. One day, after having been promoted to the position of manager of a construction company, he disappeared. And the next morning, on the society page of El Comercio, his name turned up among the first-class passengers on the Reina del Mar, which was sailing for Europe. Coupled with his name was that of a Spanish lady with whom he had been having a not at all secret love affair.
It was a great scandal in the family and gave Granny Carmen many a crying spell. Aunt Gaby left for Bolivia and Uncle Jorge stayed for several months in Europe, living like a king and squandering money he didn’t have. Finally, he was left high and dry, in Madrid, unable to pay for his return passage. Uncle Lucho had to perform miracles to get him back to Peru. He returned with no job, no money, and no family, but still possessed of his drive and his skill, which, along with his likable nature, permitted him to get on his feet again. That was the point at which Julia arrived in Lima. He was one of the beaux who invited her out. But Aunt Olga, who was inflexible when it came to matters of manners and morals, forbade Uncle Jorge to date her sister Julia, because he was a scatterbrain and a carouser, and she subjected her sister to such close watch that it made Julia almost die laughing. “I’ve gone back to the days of having a chaperone and having to ask permission to go out,” she told me. And she also told me that Aunt Olga breathed freely when, instead of accepting invitations from her pesky suitors, she went to the movies with Marito.
Since I was already in the habit of dropping by their house all the time, and Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga often were going out somewhere, they used to take me with them and circumstances turned me into Julita’s partner. Uncle Lucho was a devotee of horse racing and sometimes we went to the racetrack, and the four of us celebrated Aunt Olga’s birthday, on June 16, at the Bolívar grill, where one could dine and dance. During one of the pieces that we were dancing to, I kissed Julia on the cheek, and when she drew her face back to look at me, I kissed her again, on the lips this time. She didn’t say anything to me but a look of stupefaction crossed her face, as though she’d seen a ghost. Later, as we were going back to Miraflores in Uncle Lucho’s car, I held her hand in the dark and she didn’t draw it away.