I went to see her the next day — we had agreed to go to the movies — and as chance would have it, nobody else was in the house. She received me, intrigued and at the same time tempted to laugh, looking at me as though it weren’t me and I couldn’t possibly have kissed her. In the living room, she said to me jokingly: “I don’t dare offer you a Coca-Cola. Would you like a whisky?”
I told her that I was in love with her and would let her do anything she pleased, except to treat me ever again like a little kid. She told me that she’d done many mad things in her life, but that this was one she wasn’t going to do. Fall in love with Lucho’s nephew — with Dorita’s son, no less! She wasn’t a woman who seduced minors, after all. Then we kissed each other and went to the evening showing at the Cine Barranco, sitting in the last row of the orchestra, where we went on kissing each other from the beginning of the movie to the end.
An exciting period of secret rendezvous began, at different hours of the day, in little coffeehouses downtown or at neighborhood movie theaters, where we talked in whispers or remained silent for long intervals, holding hands and constantly worrying that a member of the family might suddenly turn up. The secrecy and having to dissemble in front of Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga or the other relatives seasoned our love with a piquant pinch of risk and adventure that to an incorrigible sentimentalist like me made it all the more intense.
The first person to whom I revealed, in confidence, what was happening was the inseparable Javier Silva, my friend since we were young boys. He had always been my confidant in affairs of the heart and I his. He was permanently enamored of my cousin Nancy, whom he showered with invitations and presents, and she, as beautiful as she was flirtatious, played with him like a cat with a mouse. My friend till death, Javier racked his brain to make my amorous interludes with Julia easier to arrange, organizing evenings at the movies and the theater, occasions on which, moreover, Nancy always accompanied us. On one such evening we went to the Teatro Segura, to see Molière’s L’Avare, put on by Lucho Córdoba, and Javier, who could never get the better of his ostentatiousness, paid for a box, so that nobody who was in the theater could fail to see us.
Did the family suspect anything? Not yet. Their suspicions were aroused during a weekend outing at the end of June, at the Paramonga sugar plantation, where we went to visit Uncle Pedro. There was a party there, for some reason or other, and we all went out together in a motorcade: Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, Uncle Jorge, perhaps Uncle Juan and Aunt Laura too, though I’m not certain, and Julia and I. Uncle Pedro and Aunt Rosi put us up as best they could, in their house and in the guest house at the hacienda, and we spent several very enjoyable days, with walks through the cane fields, having a look at the sugar mills and refining equipment, and on Saturday night at the party, which lasted till breakfast time. While at the hacienda, Julia and I cast prudence to the winds and exchanged glances and whispers or danced in a way that aroused suspicion. I remember Uncle Jorge suddenly bursting into a little reception room where Julia and I had sat down to talk together, and on seeing us there, he raised his glass and cried: “Long live the fiancés!” The three of us laughed, but an electric current passed through the room. I felt uncomfortable and it seemed to me that Uncle Jorge had also become very uncomfortable. From that moment on I was certain that something was going to happen.
In Lima, we went on seeing each other in secret during the day, in coffeehouses downtown where we always felt on edge, and going to the movies at night. But Julia suspected that her sister and her brother-in-law smelled a rat, from the way they looked at her, especially when I came to get her to go to the movies. Or was all of that paranoia on our part, the result of our uneasy consciences?
No, it wasn’t. I discovered that by chance one night when on the spur of the moment I decided to drop in at Uncle Juan and Aunt Lala’s on Diego Ferré. From the street I saw the living room lights all on, and through the curtains, the whole family gathered together. All the aunts and uncles, but not my mother. I immediately presumed that Julia and I were the reason for this secret meeting. I went into the house, and when I appeared in the living room, they hurriedly dropped whatever subject it was that they had been talking about. Later on, my cousin Nancy, very frightened, confirmed that her parents had devoured her with questions so as to get her to tell them whether “Marito and Julita were in love.” It alarmed them that “the beanpole” could be having a love affair with a divorcée, a woman thirteen years older than he was, and they had summoned the tribe together to see what ought to be done.
I immediately foresaw what would happen. Aunt Olga would send her sister back to Bolivia and tell my parents, so that they would remind me that I was still legally a minor. (In those days one reached one’s majority at the age of twenty-one.) That same night I went to get Julia, on the pretext that we were going to the movies, and asked her to marry me.
We had been walking along the sea walls of Miraflores, between the Quebrada de Armendáriz and the Salazar gardens, which were always deserted at that hour. At the bottom of the cliff, the sea roared, and we walked along very slowly, in the damp darkness, hand in hand, stopping with every step to kiss each other. Julia started by telling me just what I expected she would: that this was madness, that I was still just a brat and she a grownup woman, that I hadn’t yet finished my studies at the university or begun to live, that I didn’t even have a real full-time job or a cent to my name and that, under those circumstances, marrying me was a crazy idea that no woman who had an ounce of sense would go along with. But that she loved me and that if I were that mad, she was too. And that we should get married right away so they wouldn’t separate us.
We agreed to see each other as little as possible, as meanwhile I made arrangements for our elopement. I set to work the next morning, without hesitating for a moment as to what I was about to do, and without stopping to think about what we’d do once we had the marriage certificate in hand. I went to wake up Javier, who was now living just a few blocks from my house, in a boardinghouse on the corner of Porta and 28 de Julio. I told him the news and after the de rigueur question — wasn’t this an utterly insane thing to do? — he asked me how he could help me. We had to get hold of a mayor, in a town not very far from Lima, who would agree to marry us despite my not being of age yet. Where? Who? I then remembered my university buddy and fellow Christian Democrat militant Guillermo Carrillo Marchand. He was from Chincha and spent every weekend there, with his family. I went to talk to him and he assured me that there would be no problems, since the mayor of Chincha was a friend of his; but he preferred to make inquiries first, so we’d know for certain before going there. A few days later he went to Chincha and came back very optimistic. The marriage ceremony would be performed by the mayor himself, who was delighted by the idea of the elopement. Guillermo brought me the list of papers that were required: certificates, photographs, requests on officially stamped paper. Since it was my mother who kept my birth certificate for me and it wasn’t prudent to ask her for it, I asked my friend Rosita Corpancho, the secretary of the Faculty at San Marcos, to help me out, and she let me remove the pertinent part of my university record so as to have it photocopied and notarized. Julia had her papers with her in her handbag.
Those were feverish days, with endless rushing about and exciting talks, with Javier, with Guillermo, and with my cousin Nancy, whom I also turned into an accomplice, asking her to help me find a little furnished room or a boardinghouse. When I told her the news, Cousin Nancy opened her eyes as wide as saucers and began stammering something or other, but I put my hand over her mouth and told her that she had to get to work immediately so the plan wouldn’t fall through, and she, who was very fond of me, immediately went about looking for a place for us to live. Efficiently: in two or three days’ time she announced to me that a lady, a co-worker of hers in a social aid program, had a townhouse divided up into tiny little apartments, near the Diagonal, and that one of them would be empty at the end of the month. It cost six hundred soles, slightly more than the pay I received for my work at Porras Barrenechea’s. Now all I had to worry about was how we were going to have enough money to eat!