You should know that I felt nothing for the dog other than steely blue-black hatred. I was cold and angry. Hurt by too many German philosophers in translation. Wounded by watching my father go blind beneath great swaths of leather, bending and manipulating each until, like magic, a belt, or a saddle, or a soccer ball appeared. Frustrated by an absurd evening spent killing and painting for the revolution. I hated the dog. In the Arequipa of my youth, a street mutt had slept in our doorway once in a while, and mostly I had ignored it, had not petted it, but had watched it scratch itself or lick its own testicles and had never been stirred. I have loved many things, many people, but I felt no warmth toward this beast. Instead I envisioned there were stages of death, degrees of it, a descending staircase, and I wanted with all my heart to see this mutt, with its matted black fur, resting at the bottom. I called it and held my hand out. I sucked my teeth and coaxed it to me.
And it came. With a pit-pat of paws on the concrete, it crossed the avenue, as if it were coming home, as if it were somewhere else entirely, not in the midst of war. It was a beautiful dog, an innocent dog. It had a shiny black coat. It had been playing a game. Still, I felt anger toward it — for making me run, for each drop of sweat, for the heavy beating of my heart. I petted it for a moment, then grasped it by the nape of its neck, plunged the knife through its black fur, and twisted.
At that last moment, the dog struggled mightily, growling, lunging, but I held on and it did not bite me, but fell to the ground in a heap, blood gathering in a pool beneath its wound.
It groaned sadly, helplessly. I admired it as it bled: its strong white teeth, its muscular hind legs. It panted and heaved. I might have stayed there all night if not for a flash of light and gruff voice that called out. It was a police officer and he had a gun.
In Arequipa, I chiseled decorations on the saddles my father crafted each year for the parades. I helped him dye the leathers, and took the hammer and the small wedge and banged and hit and bled until each was beautiful. This is how I was raised: my father and I in the workshop, the intoxicating smell of the cured leather, the tools, each with its purpose and mythology. He taught me the meticulous process as his eyesight abandoned him. By the time I had mastered it, he was too blind to see my work. My mother would tell him, “The boy is learning,” and he glowed.
I dressed impeccably in my gray and white school uniform, and always did more than was expected of me. I placed first in my class, and took the university entrance exam at age seventeen. I was accepted to the university in Lima. My head was shaved, my father danced happily, and my mother cried, knowing I would soon leave her. Lima was known then for swallowing lives, drawing people from their ancestral homes, enveloping us in her concrete and noise. I became one of those people. I saw the city and felt its chaos and its energy; I couldn’t go home.
I have lived through Lima’s turbulent adolescence and her unbounded growth. She is mine now. I am not afraid of her, even as I am no longer in love with her. At the university I studied philosophy and then transferred to fine arts to study painting. I made angry canvases of red and black, with terrorized faces hidden beneath swaths of bold color. I painted in Rimac, just across the dirty river, in a small room with a window that looked out at the graceful contour of the colonial city. It was often cloudy, and my elderly landlady, Doña Alejandra, liked to let herself into my room to look at my work. I came upon her there, wrapped in my threadbare blanket, asleep in my chair, her chest rising in shallow breaths, on one of the handful of sunny days that I remember. Her own room had no windows.
I caught the eye of some people with a painting I exhibited at the university: a portrait of a man, eyes averted, his mouth squeezed in a tight grimace, gripping a hammer in his right hand, poised to nail a stake square into the flat of his left palm. He was blue and brown geometry against a red background. He was my father.
In the cafeteria, students stood on tables to denounce the dictator and his cronies. Slogans appeared on brick walls and were whitewashed by timid workers, only to appear again. We knew the struggle would come. It was the same all over the country. Many left school to prepare for the coming war.
My father’s blindness had hurt me. I longed to show him what I had accomplished. On my last visit home, in our small anteroom, I repainted my canvases with words, slowly, and only for him. He gazed blankly at the walls. I talked him through years of my canvases but never cracked the austere dark of his blindness. He nodded, told me he understood, but I knew I had failed him.
I returned from Arequipa and made my decision. I left the university for the last time, only three months before I was to receive my degree in the fine arts. Instead I traveled to the countryside to study explosives with my compañeros.
If I were still a painter, I could show you some truths about this place: the children, cold and hungry, lining up each morning at the well, carrying water back to their families. Five kilometers. Seven kilometers. Nine. The endless bus rides across the city, when a young man in an ill-fitting suit steps aboard to recite poetry and sell Chiclets. “It’s not charity I am asking for,” he shouts over the rattle of a dying bus. “I am selling a poem to ease your commute!” The passengers look down and away.
In 1970, a town disappeared beneath the Andes. An earthquake. Then a landslide. Not a village but a town. Yungay. It was a Sunday afternoon; my father and I listened to the World Cup live from Mexico City, Peru playing Argentina to a respectable draw, when the room shook, vaguely. And then the news came slowly; filtered, like all things in Peru, from the provinces to Lima, and then back out again to all the far-flung corners of our make-believe nation. We were aware that something unspeakable had occurred, but could not name it just yet. The earth had spilled upon itself, an angry sea of mud and rock, drowning thousands. Only some of the children were spared. A traveling circus had set up camp at the higher end of the valley. There were clowns in colorful hats and children laughing as their parents were buried.
In Arequipa, to the south, we had scarcely felt the earthquake at alclass="underline" a vase slipping off a windowsill, a picture hanging askew, a dog barking.
If I were still a painter, I would set up a canvas on that barren spot where that town once stood, select my truest colors, and show you that life can disappear just like that. “And what is this, Pintor?” you might ask, pointing to the ochre, purple, orange, and gray.
Ten thousand graves; can’t you see them?
When I was a painter, I would stroll through the city, eyes wide open. On my way home each afternoon, I passed the roadside mechanics standing along the avenue at the end of a day’s work. Stained oily black from head to toe, they were the fiercest angels, the city’s living dead. Lima was full of those worn down by living. I rushed home, reeling, sketching on napkins, papers, on my skin, all that I had seen so it would not go unrecorded. Everything meant something, hinted at an as-yet-unasked, un-dreamed-of question. There were no answers that convinced me. I painted toward those questions — a cinder block resting in an abandoned parking lot, a dented fender reflecting the streets — sometimes for a day or two or even three, catnapping in the corner of my room just as my landlady Doña Alejandra had once. I awoke well before dawn, awash in the metallic odors of paint and sweat and hunger, and I forgot my body almost completely.