To my surprise, he opened his arms for me to embrace him. I did so, without kissing him, disconcerted by the denouement of the interview, and thanking him for his words, in a way that might strike him as the least hypocritical one possible.
(That interview, sometime in the latter part of August 1955, marked my definitive emancipation from my father. Although his shadow will doubtless accompany me to my grave, and although at times, even today, all at once the memory of some scene, of some image, of the years when he had complete authority over me gives me a sudden hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, after that meeting we never had another fight. Not directly, that is to say. In all truth, we saw very little of each other. And, in the years when the two of us were still in Peru — until 1958, when I left for Europe and he went with my mother to Los Angeles — or on the rare occasions later when we both happened to be in Lima, or when I went to visit the two of them in the United States, he often made gestures and said things and took steps aimed at lessening the distance between us and erasing the bad memories, so that we could have that close and affectionate relationship that we never had. But I, my father’s son after all, never knew how to answer these overtures on his part, and even though I always tried to be polite to him, I never showed him more affection than I felt — that is to say, none whatsoever. The terrible rancor, my burning hatred of him in my childhood, gradually disappeared in the course of those years, above all as I discovered little by little how hard it had been for him during his first days in the United States, where he and my mother held down jobs as factory workers — my mother, for thirteen years, was a weaver in a textile mill, and he was employed in a shoe factory — and then working as doorkeepers and caretakers in a synagogue in Los Angeles. Naturally, even in the worst periods of that difficult adaptation to his new country, his pride did not allow my father to ask me for help or permit my mother to do so, except to buy her plane tickets to Peru, where they spent their vacations — and I believe that it was only in the last days of his life that he accepted help from my brother Ernesto, who provided him with an apartment to live in, in Pasadena.
(When we saw each other — every two, sometimes every three years, always for just a few short days — our relationship was polite but frigid. To him it was always something incomprehensible that I should have become known thanks to my books, that my name and sometimes my photograph should appear in Time or in the Los Angeles Times; this pleased him, no doubt, but also disconcerted and puzzled him and so we never spoke about my novels, until our last quarrel, the one that put us completely out of touch with each other until his death, in January 1979.
(It was a quarrel we had without seeing each other and without exchanging a single word, when we were thousands of kilometers apart, about La tía Julia y el escribidor [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter], a novel in which there are autobiographical episodes in which the father of the narrator is shown acting in much the way mine did when I married Julia. Months after the book came out I was surprised to receive a curious letter from him — I was living in Cambridge, England — in which he thanked me for acknowledging in that novel that he had been severe with me but that when all was said and done he had acted as he did for my own good “since he had always loved me.” I didn’t answer his letter. Sometime later, during one of the phone calls that I made to my mother in Los Angeles, she surprised me by saying that my father wanted to talk to me about La tía Julia y el escribidor. Foreseeing some sort of ukase, I said goodbye to her and hung up before he could get to the phone. Some days later, I received another card from him, a violent one this time, accusing me of being resentful and of slandering him in a book, without giving him a chance to defend himself, reproaching me for not being a believer and prophesying divine punishment for me. He warned me that he would circulate this letter among my acquaintances. And as a matter of fact, in the months and years that followed, I found out that he had sent dozens and perhaps hundreds of copies of it to relatives, friends, and acquaintances of mine in Peru.
(I never saw him alive again. In January of 1979 he came from Los Angeles with my mother, to spend a few weeks’ summer vacation in Lima. One afternoon, my cousin Giannina — Uncle Pedro’s daughter — phoned me to announce that my father, who had been having lunch at their house, had fallen unconscious. We called an ambulance and I took him to the Clínica Americana, where he was found to be dead on arrival. The only people who came to the wake in the funeral chapel that night to bid him a last farewell were the surviving aunts and uncles and many nieces and nephews of that Llosa family that he had so detested. In the last years of his life, he had finally made his peace with them, visiting them and accepting their invitations in the brief trips he made to Peru from time to time.)
I left my father’s office in great excitement to send Julia a telegram telling her that her exile was over and that I’d be sending her money for her plane ticket back to Peru very soon. Then I rushed over to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s to pass on the good news to them. Although I was very busy now, what with all the jobs I’d taken on, every time I had a free moment I would hurry over to their house on the Avenida Armendáriz to have lunch or dinner, because with them I could talk about my exiled wife, the only subject that interested me. Aunt Olga too had finally become accustomed to the idea that her sister’s marriage was irreversible, and she was happy that my father had agreed to Julia’s return.
I immediately began to think up ways I could buy her plane ticket. Even though I was earning more money now, renting the apartment and redeeming my typewriter and my watch, indispensable for fulfilling all my work assignments, had left me without a cent. I was looking into how I could buy the plane ticket in installments or get a loan from the bank, when a telegram from Julia arrived for me, announcing her arrival on the following day. She had stolen a march on me by selling her jewelry.
I went to the airport to meet her, along with Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, and when Aunt Olga spied her among the passengers on the plane from Santiago, she made a remark that delighted me, because it showed that the family situation was back to normaclass="underline" “Look how pretty your wife has made herself for the reunion.”
That was a very happy day, to be sure, for Julia and me. The little apartment in the townhouse on the Calle Porta was as tidy as could be and in it were fragrant flowers to welcome the bride. I had brought all my books and clothes there the evening before, with great expectations, moreover, at the prospect of finally beginning to live an independent life, in a house of my own (in a manner of speaking).
I had planned to finish my college courses and then my studies in the two Faculties — Letters and Law — that came after that, and not only because I had promised my family that I would, but also because I was certain that only those degrees would allow me to have the minimum financial security needed to devote myself to writing, and because I thought that without them I’d never get to Europe, to France, something that continued to be the main goal of my life. I was more determined than ever to try to be a writer and was convinced that I would never manage to be one if I didn’t leave Peru, if I didn’t live in Paris. I talked this over a thousand times with Julia and she, who was adventurous and fond of new things, egged me on: yes, yes, I should finish my studies and apply for the scholarship that the Banco Popular and San Marcos were awarding for postgraduate studies in Spain. Then we would go to Paris, where I would write all the novels I had in my head. She would help me.