“No, no, ask, Hugo, please.” Señor Azcárate leaned toward my father. My father’s silence was studied. “How long has Marisol worked with us?” Azcárate asked. “I’ll tell you: long enough so that she’s family.” He smiled, then turned to me, speaking as if to a child of five. “You’re family, Chino, you know that? Your father, he’s family too.”
I nodded, perplexed. Finally, my old man spoke, and this time he went straight to the point. “I was hoping, if it’s possible, if anyone from Chino’s new school would be doing work on their house…”
“I really couldn’t say.”
“No, but if they were, could you put in a word for me? For my business?”
It was Don Hubert Azcárate’s favorite kind of favor: the kind he could fulfill. The kind that confirmed his own charity. He was a nice man, he really was. He promised that he would. My father smiled happily. “Thank Señor Azcárate, Chino,” he told me. I shook the engineer’s veiny hand. Then my father thanked him effusively. The two men embraced. “You don’t know what this means to me,” my old man said.
My mother appeared with the coffee.
All my life, I’ve been Chino. In Pasco, in Lima. At home, in my neighborhood. The way some people are Chato or Cholo or Negro. I hear those two syllables and look up. There are thousands of us, of course, perhaps hundreds of thousands, here and everywhere that Spanish is spoken. No nickname could be less original. There are soccer players and singers known as Chino. One of our crooked presidents lived and died by his moniker: chino de mierda. Still, it is my name, and always was my name. Until I started at Peruano Británico. There, I was called Piraña.
Piranhas were already a phenomenon in Lima by the time I started high school. The authorities had ordered investigations and organized police sweeps. There were news reports and shocking images. A city on the brink. In packs of fifteen or twenty, they would swarm a car and swiftly, ruthlessly undress it. Hubcaps, mirrors, lights. The crawling commute held the prey in place — the owner of the car, helpless, honking his horn frantically, aware perhaps that the wisest thing was to do nothing at all. To wait for them to pass. But that was only an option for a while. More audacious crews started breaking windows, taking briefcases, cell phones, watches, sunglasses, radios. Full service, people joked darkly. A new kind of crime, sociologists said. And an astute observer — of the kind who traffic in phrases — named them piranhas.
At morning roll call in the courtyard of my new school, my class lined up single file. I found my place in the order of last names, Uribe, almost at the back. Ugaz in front of me. Ventosilla behind me. My uniform was neat and pressed and I looked, from a distance perhaps, just like all the others. The teacher called us off, and one by one we marched to our new classroom. It wasn’t until recess that afternoon that my classmates sought me out. “Oye, you play?” The kid held a soccer ball in his hands. He kicked it to me. I passed it back, making sure I used good form. I introduced myself as Oscar or Chino. “César,” he answered. We formed a team. We grabbed a kid with glasses and put him in goal. We played. We scored and were scored on. We yelled and sweated and cursed and then, when I took the ball from a kid on the other team, he called a foul, dropping to the floor, and held his ankle, grimacing. In San Juan, I would have called him a pussy, and that would’ve been that. But he yelled, “Oye! Oye!” and we stopped. “That’s a foul here, huevón,” he said, frowning. “Where the hell are you from?”
I didn’t have to respond, but I did. I could have said any place in the city, but I didn’t. “San Juan de Lurigancho,” I answered.
Of course, eventually they would have found out where I was from. They would have seen me walking back to the Avenida Arequipa to catch the bus home. They would have known that I didn’t live in La Molina or Surco. But perhaps if they hadn’t learned this detail on the very first day, if they had known me better, they wouldn’t have associated me with the criminal reputation of my district.
“San Juan?” he said, breaking into a cruel smile. “Oooooohh…Habla Piraña!”
I met Tonio the next morning at eight-thirty in front of San Francisco. He was already painted and dressed. I was still shaking off sleep and a red wine headache. He introduced me to his partner, a yellow-faced clown named Jhon.
“You’re the reporter?” Jhon asked suspiciously.
“Be nice,” said Tonio.
He pulled an oversize polka-dotted suit from his backpack. It was white with green dots. It fit me like a garbage bag. Tonio declared it perfect. Jhon agreed. A pair of green shoes was next; I wiggled my feet into them. They were twice the length of my forearm. Then Tonio handed me a mirror and three plastic canisters of face paint, each the size of a roll of film. “You take care of that,” he said, holding out a thin brush.
I felt outside of myself, the details of the previous night’s conversation so hazy and wine soaked, I couldn’t recall exactly how I had ended up there or what commitments I had made. In the mirror, I watched myself transform. I put red circles on my cheeks. Jhon passed me a nose. It was an oversize red Ping-Pong ball cut in half and threaded by a rubber band. It fit nicely. Finally, Tonio pulled a worn jester’s hat from the bottom of his bag. The pointy edges fell limply in my face. It would have to do.
Walking through the city, one-third of a trio of clowns, I was surprised to find how relaxed I was, and how invisible. You’d think the world’s gazes would congregate upon us, on our loud costumes and our hand-painted smiles, but most people simply ignored us, walked past without a glance; only children smiled and pointed, sometimes waved. Jhon and Tonio chatted about soccer, I watched and listened in a daydream. We were ghosts in the multitude, three more citizen-employees of the great city, awake and alive on a Thursday morning.
We let a few buses pass because they were too empty. “It’s bad luck at the beginning of the day,” Tonio explained. Finally, Tonio nodded as a more crowded bus approached. We pushed past the ticket collector and were instantly onstage, all eyes on us. “Señores y Señoras, Damas y Caballeros!” We stood in a row, Tonio in the center, yelling over the asthmatic rattle of the engine. “I am not here asking for charity! In fact, I am a rich man! This is my bus! This is my driver! And this,” Tonio bellowed, pointing to the ticket collector, hanging halfway out the bus door, calling the route, “this is my mascot!”
Jhon was the chorus, echoing every pronouncement Tonio made, in the stereotypical voice of a drunk lifted from a Rubén Blades song. He pretended to fall, and Tonio made sheepish apologies for his drunken partner, who had spent the night before “celebrating the purchase of a new three-story home in San Borja!”
I felt useless. I flashed my dumb clown smile and tapped my fingers against my chest. I could feel my face paint drying to an uncomfortable film, affixing an unnatural contortion to the muscles of my face. I was dazed, almost seasick, as the bus sped along the avenue. They were talking but I could barely hear them. Tonio was wrapping up. “My humble servant — God bless the poor deaf-mute — will be passing by your seats now to collect your fare.” He bowed low and then nodded at me.
We weren’t selling anything; this was a bold conceit Tonio had devised to cut costs. It was our bus; I passed down the aisle, collecting everyone’s fare. “Pasajes, pasajes a la mano,” I murmured, just as a ticket collector would. Some passengers, napping, barely opening their eyes, handed me a coin without thinking. Some dropped loose change in my hand, some even thanked me. Most ignored me, looking away, even men and women who had watched the act and smiled.