“It’s cold,” Fernando offered.
“Sure is.”
It was a terrible life. Fernando felt afraid, as if his passenger were not an anonymous comrade, but the victim of an unnamable illness. Something contagious. He felt revulsion. What did comrade mean anyway? Who was this man? He wanted him out of his car, the errand over. He wanted to be home, next to his wife and child, asleep again, away from the misery this man carried with him.
They hadn’t spoken for blocks when the man said, “Oh, I know this street.” He asked Fernando to stop at the corner.
“This isn’t the place.”
“Just for a moment.” The man turned to him. “Please.”
Fernando let the car slow.
“Here,” the man said and rolled his window down. The air was cool and damp.
“What are we looking at?” Fernando asked.
The man pointed at a nondescript building across the street. It had a high, rusty fence, the kind a house thief would sneer at. The curtains were drawn, and there were no lights. “Someone you know?” Fernando asked.
“Sure.”
They sat like that for a moment. The man was sailing, he was dreaming. Fernando could see it: that despairing look of a man confronted with his vanished life. “Do you want to get out?” Fernando asked.
“Not especially.”
“Then we should go,” Fernando said after a moment. The spell was broken.
The man shook his head. “That’s right, compadre,” he said. “We should go.” He sighed and pulled out another cigarette. This time he didn’t offer. “I knew a girl there. Once.”
“How long has it been?”
“Since she died.”
They rode on. The man left his window down. Fernando didn’t complain about the cold. He pushed the gas and the engine groaned. It would be morning soon.
IV. Mother, 1984
These were the days when his mother was dying. She had in fact stopped living several years before, when her husband passed away. Fernando just out of the university. The children huddled together in Lima, and, over the course of three nights of drinking and storytelling, forgave the old man everything. Fernando’s mother sat on her own, alternately accepting and rejecting her children’s affections. She had already done her forgiving, of course, but dying was his last betrayal. She moved to her daughter’s house, where they made up a small room for her. It had a window looking out on a quiet street, and a terrace where she sat if it wasn’t too cold. But she missed him. She confessed to Fernando that she couldn’t remember what her life had been like before his father. Grief exposed all her weaknesses and showed her strengths for what they were: circumstance coupled with faith. She fell into dreams. She lost her faith.
“I’ll be dead soon,” she told her son, but nearly seven years passed this way and she was still alive. She began to forget. In the afternoons, in deep concentration, she sat down to drink her soup, cradling the bowl in her lap with a napkin spread primly across her thin legs. She smiled and nodded her head in greeting on Sundays when Fernando came to see her, but her smile was civil rather than warm. At times, she felt her family’s eyes on her and wished that she could disappear. Other days, her daughter’s children played in her room and told her jokes that made her laugh. She had to smile at their friendly disposition, even if she wondered who they might be.
Fernando still came by, but his visits were short. He could squeeze in a drink with his brother-in-law, but never two, and tried to be discreet when he looked at his watch over the rim of the raised glass.
There was hardly any time for socializing. Fernando felt weak. He often woke up dizzy, aching, unable to move, as if sleep, having let his mind go free, were jealously refusing to relinquish his body. He kept his eyes closed tightly, trying to blink away the pains that gripped his body. Unable to sleep, unable to wake, he lay on the bed immobile. Maruja worried about him. He wouldn’t let anyone see him this way except her. She wrapped ice in an old shirt and pressed it to his forehead. By midmorning, his fever had cooled, and Fernando could stand, slowly. Once he was up, he wouldn’t stop moving until the late evening, when, after telling others there was no time to rest and that the time to act was now, he would lie down to sleep, worried and brooding. The war had been killing him for a long time before he died.
This was not the man his mother would have remembered, if within her clouded memory, something had sparked a moment of lucidity. If she could have recalled Fernando, she would have described a young man who made strangers feel instantly comfortable.
“He was a Boy Scout in Arequipa, and an altar boy at the little church on the Plaza San Antonio de Miraflores. We lived in the little house on Tarapacá and walked to church every Sunday.” His comrades called him Negro, but in the family he was Nano, her youngest child, the one who cost her the most heartache and confusion. He had studied at Independencia, like his older brothers, and years later he still sang his alma mater’s hymn proudly, fighting sleep with song as he struggled to stay awake on the eighteen-hour drive back to Arequipa from Lima. He told his mother that melody was unforgettable: En tus aulas se forjaron grandes hombres… In your halls, great men were molded. He had come to Lima, entertaining little hope of being accepted to the university to study engineering. His older brothers and sister had come before him: Oscar, to the army. Elías, to study accounting. Mateo, to the national police. Enrique, to study medicine. Inés, to study pharmacology. His mother would have remembered the way she saw Fernando off at the bus station, the little bag he carried, his unconcerned smile. It was early morning at the bus station, the first shades of purple sky announcing morning in the east; Padre Alfredo, the priest, a family friend, came to see him off, to wish him luck. His mother would have remembered how sad she was to see her youngest go that morning, how she wondered what she would occupy her day with now, if not waiting for little Nano to come home.
That first year in the city, he sent letters home nearly every week. He had refused to live with his brother or sister, wanting to strike out on his own. Of course they sent him money from Arequipa, which he acknowledged gratefully in his letters. His correspondence was full of a young man’s awe at living alone, with enthusiastic descriptions of his boardinghouse in Barrios Altos, of the crowded neighborhood with its teeming street life, panegyrics to Lima and the opportunities it seemed to promise. These were letters that Fernando would have been embarrassed to read later, but his mother had held them nearly sacred at the time. Of course both had forgotten them, and perhaps this was just as well.
She might have remembered his childhood friends, his crew of mischievous, quick-witted boys, nearly all of whom made their way to Lima eventually. If Fernando had ever brought José Carlos around to see her, it might have jogged something in her memory — an image, a flicker. The two boys had been inseparable. She’d found them once, not even eight years old, discussing with great seriousness the creation of a superhero who would be a combination of the two of them, an amalgam of their unique virtues. She had lingered in the doorway, listening, laughing to herself. Having humbly appraised their various qualities, the two boys had left the most contentious topic for last: a name for their conqueror.