“I want you to give me a blowjob,” said the boy slowly, looking him in the eye and touching his knee with his five fingers.
Seven
“What are you doing here, Mayta?” exclaimed Adelaida. “What do you want?”
Rospigliosi Castle marks the border between Lince and Santa Beatriz, neighborhoods that have become indistinguishable. But when Mayta and Adelaida were married, there was a class struggle going on between them. Lince was always modest, lower-middle-class tending toward proletarian, with narrow, colorless little houses, tenements and their alleys, cracked sidewalks and rocky little gardens. Santa Beatriz, on the other hand, was a pretentious neighborhood where a few well-off families built mansions in “colonial,” “Sevilian,” or “neo-Gothic” style-like this monument to extravagance, the Rospigliosi Castle, a castle with battlements and pointed arches made of reinforced concrete. The inhabitants of Lince viewed their neighbors in Santa Beatriz with resentment and envy, while the good citizens of Santa Beatriz looked down their noses at the Linceans and scorned them.
“I’d just like a word with you,” said Mayta. “And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see my son.”
Nowadays Santa Beatriz and Lince are the same: one decayed and the other improved, until they finally met at a median point. It’s a shapeless region, inhabited by white-collar workers, business and professional people neither rich nor impoverished, but hard pressed to get to the end of the month without money problems. This mediocrity is personified perfectly by Adelaida’s husband, don Juan Zarate, an employee of the Mail and Telegraph Service with many years’ service. His photo is next to the curtainless window. Looking through that window, I can see the Rospigliosi Castle. Since the building is used by the Air Ministry, it is surrounded by coils of barbed wire and sandbag walls, behind which I can see the guards’ helmets and rifle barrels. One of those patrols stopped me as I was on my way over here and frisked me from head to toe before letting me pass. The air-force men are on edge, their fingers wrapped around their triggers. Justifiably so, given the situation we’re in. In the photo, don Juan Zarate wears a suit and a tie and looks serious. Adelaida, clinging to his arm, also looks stern.
“That’s when we got married, over in Cañete. We spent three days there, in a house that belonged to one of Juan’s brothers. I was seven months’ pregnant. Barely shows, right?”
She is right. No one could ever guess she was so far advanced in her pregnancy. The photograph must be almost thirty years old. It’s unbelievable how well preserved this woman, who for a short time was the wife of my schoolmate from the Salesian School, is.
“It was Mayta’s child,” Adelaida adds.
I pay close attention to what she says and observe her carefully. I still can’t get over the impression her looks made on me when I walked into that lugubrious little house. I’d only spoken with her over the telephone and I never thought that harsh voice could be connected to a woman who was still attractive despite her age. Her hair is gray and falls in waves to her shoulders. Her face has soft features, with prominent, fleshy lips, and deep eyes. She crosses her legs: smooth, well-rounded, long, solid. When she was married to Mayta, she must have been a knockout.
“A fine time to be remembering your son,” Adelaida exclaimed.
“I always remember him,” Mayta replied. “It’s one thing not to see him and another not to think of him. We made a deal, and I’ve stuck by it.”
But there’s something desolate about her, a depression, an air of defeat. And an absolute indifference: it doesn’t seem to matter to her that the rebels have taken Cuzco and established a government there, that there were undecipherable shots last night in the streets of Lima, not even whether or not it’s true that hundreds of Marines have just reached the La Joya base in Arequipa to reinforce the army, which seems to have collapsed all along the southern front. She doesn’t even mention the events that have all of Lima in suspense and that — despite the genuine triumph it is for me to be speaking with her — distract me with recurring images of red flags, rifle shots, and shouts of victory on the streets of Cuzco.
“This is how you stick by it — coming to my house?” said Adelaida, pushing back a curl that had fallen over her forehead. “Do you have any idea the mess you’d be making if my husband finds out?”
As I listen to her tell how her wedding to Juan Zarate was moved forward so that Mayta’s child could be born with another name and another father, in a real home, I remind myself that I am wrong to be distracted: I haven’t got much more time. Being here is my reward for being persistent. Adelaida refused to see me several times, and the third or fourth time I called, she just hung up on me. I had to insist, beg, swear that neither her name nor Juan Zarate’s nor her son’s would ever appear in what I wrote. Finally, I had to suggest to her that since this was business — I wanted her to tell me about her life with Mayta and that final meeting just hours before he went to Jauja — I would pay for her time. She’s granted me an hour of conversation for a stiff price. She will not discuss anything she considers “too private.”
“It’s something special,” insisted Mayta. “I’ll be gone in a minute, you’ll see, I swear.”
“I thought he was on the run and had no place to go,” Adelaida says. “The usual thing. Because, from when I first met him until we separated, he always felt he was being watched. Rightly and wrongly. And full of secrets, even from me.”
Did she ever love him? She couldn’t have any other reason for living with him. How did she meet him? At a fair, by the wheel of fortune at Plaza Sucre. She bet on number 17 and someone next to her bet on 15. The wheel stopped right on 15. “What luck! The little bear,” exclaimed Adelaida. Her neighbor: “It’s yours. Will you accept it as a gift? How do you do? My name’s Mayta.”
“Okay, okay, I’d rather the gossip who lives across the hall not see us together here.” Adelaida finally opened the door to him. “Five minutes and that’s it, please. If Juan finds you here, he’ll be really mad. You’ve already given me enough headaches for one lifetime.”
Didn’t she suspect from his nervousness and his fidgeting that this unusual visit had been prompted by the fact that he was on the verge of doing something extraordinary? Not in the slightest. Because, in fact, she didn’t see any sign of nerves or excitement in him. He was his normal self: calm, badly dressed, a little thinner. When they’d got to know each other better, Mayta confessed that the meeting at the wheel of fortune in Plaza Sucre was not accidentaclass="underline" he had seen her, followed her, and hung around, looking for a way to strike up a conversation.
“He convinced me that he’d fallen in love with me at first sight,” Adelaida adds in a sarcastic tone. Every time she mentions his name, she becomes bitter. Despite the fact that it all happened a long time ago, there’s an open wound somewhere inside her. “A total fraud, and I fell for it like the sucker I am. He was never in love with me. And he was so self-centered he never even realized how much he hurt me.”
Mayta took a look around: a sea of red flags, a sea of fists held high, a sea of rifles, and ten thousand throats hoarse from shouting. Being here in Adelaida’s house seemed incomprehensible to him, in the same way that it seemed incomprehensible that any son of his, even if he had someone else’s name, could live with these armchairs covered with clear plastic, surrounded by these walls and their cracked paint. Was I right to come? Wasn’t this visit merely a meaningless, gratuitous, sentimental gesture? Wouldn’t Adelaida figure something strange was going on? Was that song they were singing “The International” in Quechua?