~ ~ ~
On the streetcar. Seven-thirty in the morning. Below the lowered shades, a glimpse of the sun. Tobacco smoke. An upright old lady. Two unshaven priests. Two shop clerks. Four typists, their laps full of notebooks. One schoolboy: I. Another schoolboy: Ramón. The smell of beds and creosote. The color of the sun settles on the windowpanes from outside, like a cloud of pale translucent butterflies. A sudden excess of passengers. A sinister old lady with skin like crepe, the same crepe of her shawl, where Ramón was sitting. Ramón, hanging from a door — the driver’s door — turns his head and his eyes in opposite directions. Ramón’s glasses reflect a meek philosophical splendor. Ramón carries the last afternoon — yesterday afternoon — in his satchel. He is going to school because he is late, and he is late because he is going to school. I go with him, near him, secretly chagrined that my feet may not reach the ground. Yet, on the contrary, I can hold in my oversized hand the spines of all my textbooks. And this is a pleasure, almost a consolation, at my pedantic fourteen years of age. My life hangs from the score on my first test as a crumb of bread hangs from a spider’s web. Ramón suddenly reaches over a bald head to hand me an engraving of an angel with a constipated look on its face and a twilight that is, first and foremost, roguish. A gift from Catita: eenie, meenie, miney, mo, boarding school silliness, nuns frolicking, and a long jump rope that creates ellipses of afternoon. Catita, date of a desert palm tree. But the gentleman enjoys dates only from the palm trees pruned by “Mamère”: the only dates the unlikely Mr. Chaplain graciously accepts come in a small basket with a perfect white silk bow tied to the handle: lying butterflying, that unlikely Mr. Chaplain. Innocent dates, Palestinian dates. The outskirts of Lima. An oil factory swells its greasy belly and belches like a drunk old lady: Lima. In the morning with depths of blue, the uniformed policemen toss back and forth a whistle in diapers, and it screeches and covers its eyes with its fists. Suddenly, the shadow of the school building gets in my eyes like the night.
~ ~ ~
My first love was twelve years old and had black fingernails. In that village with eleven thousand inhabitants and a publicity agent for a priest, my then Russian soul rescued the ugliest girl from her solitude with a grave, social, somber love like the closing session of an international workers’ congress. My love was vast, dark, sluggish, with a beard, glasses, and portfolios, with sudden incidents, twelve languages, police ambushes, problems from everywhere. She would say to me, when things became sexual, “You are a socialist.” And her little soul — that of a pupil of European nuns — opened like a personal prayer book to the page about mortal sin.
My first love left me, repelled by my socialism and my foolishness. “I hope you all don’t end up socialists. ” And she swore she’d give herself to the first true Christian who came her way, even if he wasn’t yet twelve years old. Once alone, I gave up on my transcendent problems and fell truly in love with my first love. I felt a toxicomaniacal, agonizing need to inhale her scent until my lungs burst: the scent of a small school, of India ink, of enclosed spaces, of sun on the patio, of government-issued paper, of aniline, of coarse cotton cloth worn against the skin — the smell of India ink, skinny and black — almost an ebony drawing pen, a ghost of the holidays. And that was my first love.
My second love was fifteen years old. A crybaby with missing teeth, with braids of hemp, with freckles all over her body, without family, without ideas, with too much future; excessively feminine. My rival was a celluloid and rag doll with stupid, rascally jowls that did nothing but laugh at me. I had to understand an endless amount of perfectly unintelligible things. I had to say an endless amount of perfectly unsayable things. I had to get one hundreds on my exams — a suspect, shameful, ridiculous score; the chicken before the egg. I had to see her, imitate her dolls. I had to hear her cry for me. I had to suck on candies of every color and flavor. My second love abandoned me like in a tango: “An evil man. ”
My third love had beautiful eyes and legs that were very coquettish, almost cocotte. Required reading was Friar Luis de León and Carolina Invernizio. Wayward girl. I can’t imagine why she fell in love with me. I consoled myself with the twelve spelling errors in her last letter for her irrevocable decision to be my friend after almost being my lover.
My fourth love was Catita.
My fifth love was a dirty girl with whom I sinned almost at night, almost in the sea. The memory of her smells as she smelled, of shadows in a movie theater, of a wet dog, of underwear, of sweets, of hot bread — overlapping odors and each on its own almost disagreeable, like frosting on cakes, ginger, meringue, et cetera. The collection of smells made of her a true temptation for a seminary student. Dirty, dirty, dirty. My first mortal sin.
~ ~ ~
The port remained behind, with its necklace of lights and its husky silhouette of love for a man who is serious and not a spendthrift. Fifty thousand souls and a distant, very distant joy on the other side of the port — the enormous curve of the sea, the Panama Canal, the Atlantic Ocean, Grace Liners, and the et ceteras of destiny. Suddenly — he knew not how — Paris. And sixty chapters of a novel he had been writing on board: one thousand pages blackened by letters that threatened Manuel’s sanity, mad things, shouting, and all without motive. His jacket stiffened and tensed at that bundle of conflict and hysteria. Because the novel was a conflict of hysterias — a woman threw herself into the arms of a millionaire, and he bit her chin. Astral autobiography; I suppose. A silent bus made of springs and elastic bands carried Manuel to the hotel through the darkness at breathless speed. A gust of fog, cold, drizzle, and gasoline blew the curtain and left upon the windowsill the whiff of a phonograph — rubber, adultery, home remedies. That’s how a stork would have left a child in an unmarried woman’s bed: a mistake, out of fatigue, as a joke. Like in Barranco, no more and no less. He got undressed. Once naked, he did not know what to do; he wanted to go out, return to Lima, do nothing. He got into bed — early, bored and indolent — and fell fast asleep. In a moment he was back in Lima, on the Jirón de la Unión, at twelve noon. Ramón was carried through side streets in a mud-splattered Hudson that had frighteningly shaky, half-crazed windows. An ambulatory fig tree strolled down a street crowded with seminarians, streetwalkers, and geometry professors — a thousand aging gentlemen, dirty collars, sticky fingers. Manuel awoke, and now it was Paris with its smell of asphalt and its factory sounds and its public pleasures. Manuel visited the Latin American consulates; in the Louvre, under the grotesqueries of colors, a sentimental cocotte left one of her rough and dry hands between both of his cadaverous ones; he sinned twice at the Moulin Rouge; on the Pont Alexandre III, a star from Lima smiled at him on the edge of the brim of his hat. And one day — he did not know how — he awoke in Lima, wrapped in his sky-blue blanket, those silly wings tucked under his guardian angel. Now it was Lima with its smell of sun and guano and its private pleasures. Manuel did not know what to do: return to Paris, go out, do nothing. So he fell back into a deep sleep.