My cousin Nancy was a year younger than me, and cousin Gladys was two years younger. They were magnificent playmates, involved in all the adventures that I invented, which were usually inspired by the films that we saw in the Roxy Cinema and the Acha Theatre on Saturday matinées or Sunday morning screenings. The serials were wonderful — three chapters per performance, with the serials lasting for several weeks — but the film that touched us, and made us cry, laugh and, above all, dream, and that we went back to see several times (it convinced me that I should become a bullfighter), was Blood and Sand with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Rita Hayworth.
There were infinite sources of fun in Cochabamba. There were outings to Cala-Cala and to Tupuraya where aunt Gaby’s family had a country house, and open-air concerts in the Plaza on Sundays at midday, after eleven o’clock mass, and the reddish meat pasties served up in a restaurant in the arcades. There were circuses that came around the time of the independence anniversary celebrations, the tightrope walkers, trapeze artists and animal tamers who made our pulses race and the wonderful clowns who made us roar with laughter. (My first platonic love was a trapeze artist in a pink leotard.) There were the exciting and very wet Carnivals — my cousins and I threw balloons full of water from the rooftops at the passers-by below — in which during the day we saw our aunts and uncles and their friends involved in intense water fights with shells, balloons, big buckets and hosepipes, and, at night, we saw them set off for the celebrations in fancy dress and wearing masks. There was Holy Week, with its mysterious processions and the visit to different churches, to pray at the Stations of the Cross. And, above all, there was Christmas, the coming of Baby Jesus (Father Christmas did not yet exist), with the presents, on the night of 24 December. The preparations for the New Year’s Eve party were long and very detailed, and these rituals stirred our imagination. With us under their feet, grandma and Mamaé sowed wheat seeds in little containers that decorated the crib. The crib figures, the shepherds, wise men, Roman soldiers, apostles, sheep, donkeys, Virgin Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus, were kept in a trunk inlaid with metal that was only opened once a year. The most important thing for me and for my cousins was to write the letter to the Son of God, asking him for the presents that he placed at the foot of our beds on Christmas Eve. Before we learned how to write, we dictated our letter to uncle Pedro and signed it with a cross. As the date approached, our nervousness, curiosity and anticipation reached indescribable extremes. On the night of 24 December, no one, not our grandparents or my mother, or uncles Juan and Lala had to encourage us to jump into bed straight after dinner. Would he come? Had he got our cards? Would he bring everything we had asked for?
I remember having asked for some pilot’s glasses, like the ones worn by Bill Barnes, some boots identical to those of the hero of a serial about explorers, skittles, Meccano pieces, but, as soon as I learned to read, I always asked for books, long lists of books that I would first select when I came out of school in a bookshop in General Acha Street, where every week we bought the magazines for the whole family: Para Tí and Leoplán for grandma, Mamaé, my mother and my aunts, and, for me and my cousins, El Peneca and Billiken (the first was Chilean and the second was Argentine).
I learned to read when I was five — in 1941 it would have been — in my first year at primary school in the Colegio de La Salle. My classmates were a year older than me, but my mother was anxious to get me into school since my pranks were driving her mad. Our teacher was Brother Justiniano, a slim, angelic little man, with white, closely cropped hair. He made us sing the letters, one after another, and then, holding hands in circles, we had to identify and spell out the syllables of each word, copy them and memorise them. From coloured spelling books with little animal illustrations, we moved to a little book of sacred history and finally onto cartoons, poems and stories. I am sure that on that Christmas in 1941, Baby Jesus placed on my bed a pile of adventure stories, from Pinocchio to Little Red Riding Hood, from the Wizard of Oz to Snow White, from Sleeping Beauty to Mandrake the Magician.
Although I cried in my first days at school — my mother had to take me to the door, holding my hand — I soon got used to La Salle and made many friends. Grandma and Mamaé so indulged me (I was a fatherless child and that made me the most spoiled grandchild and nephew in the family) that I once invited twenty classmates — Cuéllar, Tejada, Román, Orozco, Ballivián, Gumucio, Zapata — for tea at home so that we could act out some epic films in the three patios. And grandma and Mamaé prepared coffee with milk and toast and butter for everyone.
It was exactly ten blocks from the house in Ladislao Cabrera to La Salle, and I think that from my second year at primary school my mother let me go to school on my own, although I usually made the walk with a schoolmate from the neighbourhood. We went through the arcade in the Plaza, past the photographic studio of Mr Zapata, the father of my great friend Mario Zapata, whom I shared a desk with, a journalist who was murdered twenty or thirty years later in Cala-Cala. This ten-block trip, four times a day — schoolchildren had lunch at home in those days — was an expedition full of discoveries. It was, of course, obligatory to look at the bookshop windows and the posters outside the cinemas on the way. The most amazing thing that could happen to us was to come across the imposing figure of the Bishop in the middle of the street. He seemed an Olympian, semi-divine figure to us, wrapped in his purple habit, with his white beard and a big gleaming ring. With religious earnestness and a touch of fear, we would kneel to kiss his hand and to receive the few kind words that his strong Italian accent bestowed on us.
That bishop gave me and a number of my classmates our first communion when we were in the third or fourth year of primary school. It was a memorable day, preceded by many weeks of preparation that we received every afternoon in the school chapel, extra classes on religion given by the headmaster, the bald, square-jawed Brother Agustín. They were splendid classes, with stories taken from the Gospels and from the lives of the saints, miraculous, heroic, exotic and surprising stories, in which purity and faith always overcame the most terrible odds, with happy endings, when the heavens opened to receive with a choir of angels the martyred Christians who had been ripped apart in pagan coliseums by wild beasts, or who had been executed for refusing to betray the Lord, or the repentant sinners, so desperate to atone for their infamous deeds that, like the Duke of Normandy, also called Robert the Devil, they would live on all fours, like dogs, to seek the Virgin’s forgiveness. Brother Agustín told them with eloquence and passion, accompanied by large gestures, like a consummate narrator, and they stayed in our memory, sparking like fireworks. As the day approached, there were various rituals to perform: go and try on the suit, buy the white shoes, have a photograph taken in Mr Zapata’s studios, under arc lights. We took communion in a chapel adorned with fresh flowers, overflowing with the families of the communicants, and then there was a breakfast of hot chocolate and cakes served to the throng in the school patio. And then another party, this time a family one, in Ladislao Cabrera, with lots of presents for the hero of the day.