When Aunt Julia and I were divorced, copious tears were shed in my vast family, because everyone (beginning, naturally, with my mother and father) adored her. And when, a year later, I married again, a cousin of mine this time (the daughter of Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho, by some odd coincidence), it created less of an uproar within the family than the first time (it consisted for the most part of a great flurry of gossip). This time, however, there was a perfectly planned conspiracy to force me to marry in the Church, in which even the archbishop of Lima was involved (he was, it goes without saying, a relative of ours), who hastened to sign the dispensations authorizing the union. But by that time the family was already panic-proof and could predict (which is tantamount to saying forgave beforehand) my blackest misdeeds.
I had lived with Aunt Julia in Spain for a year and in France for five, and later I went on living with my cousin Patricia in Europe, in London first and then in Barcelona. In those days I had an arrangement with a magazine in Lima: I sent it articles and in return received a plane ticket that allowed me to come back to Peru every year for a few weeks. These trips, thanks to which I saw my family and friends, were very important tome. I was planning to go on living in Europe indefinitely, for a great many reasons, but above all because I had always been able to find work there – as a journalist, translator, lecturer, or professor – that left me free time. When we arrived in Madrid the first time, I'd said to Aunt Julia: 'I'm going to try to be a writer; I'm not going to accept anything but jobs that won't take me too far afield from literature.' 'Shall I cut a slit in my skirt, put on a turban, and go hustle clients on the Gran Vía starting today?' she said. But I was really very lucky. Teaching Spanish at the Berlitz School in Paris, writing news bulletins at France-Presse, translating for UNESCO, dubbing films in the studios at Gennevilliers, or preparing programs for the French national radio-television network, I had always found jobs that brought in enough to live on yet allowed me to devote at least half of each day exclusively to my writing. The problem was that everything I wrote had to do with life in Peru. As time and distance began to blur my perspective, I felt more and more insecure about my writing (at the time I was obsessed with the idea that fiction should be 'realistic'). But I found the very thought of living in Lima inconceivable. When I remembered the seven simultaneous jobs I'd held there, which together had earned me barely enough to feed us, left me scarcely any time to read, and given me no opportunity to write except on the sly in the few slack moments during my work day or at night when I was already dead tired, my hair stood on end and I vowed to myself I'd never live that way again, even if it meant dying of starvation. Moreover, Peru had always seemed to me a country of sad people.
Hence the agreement I had, first with the daily Expreso and then with the magazine Caretas, to write articles in exchange for two plane tickets a year, was a real stroke of luck. That month that Patricia and I spent in Peru each year, usually in winter (July or August), enabled me to steep myself in the atmosphere, the landscapes, the lives of the people that I had been trying to write about in the previous eleven months. It was tremendously useful to me (I don't know if this was true in purely material terms, but certainly it was true psychologically), a kind of 'energy injection,' to hear Peruvian spoken again, to hear all round me those turns of phrase, expressions, intonations that put me back in the midst of a milieu I felt viscerally close to but had nonetheless moved far away from, thus missing out each year on the innovations, losing overtones, resonances, keys.
My visits to Lima were, thus, vacations during which I literally didn't rest for a second and from which I returned to Europe exhausted. Just between the countless relatives of my vast forest of a family and my numerous friends, we had invitations to lunch and dinner every single day, and the remainder of my time was occupied doing background research for my writing. One year, for instance, I'd taken a trip to the Alto Marañón area to see, hear, and smell from close up a world that was the scene of the novel I was writing, and another year, accompanied by diligent friends, I had systematically explored the nocturnal haunts – cabarets, bars, brothels – that were the locales of the dissipated life led by the protagonist of another story. Mixing work and pleasure – since I never considered this 'research' a duty but, rather, a task that always enriched my life and was a most enjoyable diversion in itself, above and beyond the literary benefits that I might gain from it – I did things on these trips that in earlier days, when I lived in Lima, I had never done, and that now that I've returned to Peru to live I never do either: going to little popular clubs and to theaters to see indigenous folk dances, wandering about the tenements of slum districts, strolling through sections of town that I was not very familiar with or didn't know at all, such as El Callao, Bajo el Puente, and Los Barrios Altos, betting at the racetrack, nosing about in the catacombs of colonial churches and the (supposed) house of La Perricholi.
That year, however, I devoted my time to more bookish research. I was writing a novel that took place in the era of General Manuel Apolinario Odría (1948–56), and during my month's vacation in Lima I went to the periodicals section of the Biblioteca Nacional a couple of mornings each week, to leaf through newspapers and magazines from those years and even read, somewhat masochistically, some of the speeches the dictator's advisors (all lawyers, to judge from the forensic rhetoric) wrote for him. On leaving the Biblioteca Nacional around noon I would walk down the Avenida Abancay, which was beginning to turn into an enormous market of itinerant peddlers. On the sidewalks a dense crowd of men and women, many of them dressed in ponchos and peasant skirts, sold the most heterogeneous collection of wares imaginable, everything from needles and hairpins to dresses and suits, laid out on blankets or newspapers spread out on the ground or at stands knocked together out of wooden crates, oil drums, and canvas awnings, plus all sorts of things to eat, of course, prepared right there on the spot in little braziers. This Avenida Abancay was one of the thoroughfares in Lima that had changed the most. Jam-packed now and possessed of a distinct Andean flavor, a street on which it was not rare to hear Quechua spoken amid the strong odor of fried food and pungent seasonings, it in no way resembled the broad, austere avenue frequented by white-collar workers and an occasional beggar down which, ten years before, when I was a first-year student at the university, I used to walk on my way to that same Biblioteca Nacional. There in those blocks, one could see, and touch, in a nutshell, the problem of the migration from the countryside to the capital, which in that decade had doubled the population of Lima and caused to spring up like mushrooms, on the hillsides, the dunes, the garbage dumps, that ring of slums where thousands and thousands of people ended up, rural folk who had left the provinces because of the drought, the back-breaking working conditions, the lack of prospects for a better future, hunger.
Getting to know this new face of the city, I walked down the Avenida Abancay toward the Parque Universitario and what had previously been San Marcos (the various faculties had been moved to the outskirts of Lima and the building where I had studied humanities and law was now occupied by a museum and offices). I was visiting the place not just out of curiosity and a certain nostalgia but also for literary reasons, since, in the novel I was working on, a number of episodes took place in the Parque Universitario, in the main classroom building of San Marcos, and in the secondhand bookstores, the billiard parlors, and the filthy café-bars of the neighboring streets. As a matter of fact, I was standing in front of the pretty Chapel of Illustrious National Heroes that morning, gawking like a tourist at the peddlers in the vicinity – bootblacks, vendors hawking pastries, ice cream, sandwiches – when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was – twelve years older, but the same as ever – Big Pablito.
We gave each other a big bear hug. He really hadn't changed at all: he was the same sturdily built, smiling mestizo with the asthmatic wheeze, who barely lifted his feet off the ground as he walked and thus seemed to skate through life. He didn't have a single gray hair, despite the fact that he must have been close to sixty by then, and his straight hair was carefully slicked down with quantities of brilliantine, like an Argentine of the 1940's. But he was much better dressed than when he was (theoretically) a newsman at Radio Panamericana: a green plaid suit, a loud tie (it was the first time I'd ever seen him wearing one), and brightly polished shoes. And on his index finger was a gold ring with an Inca design. I was so pleased to see him that I suggested we go have a cup of coffee together. He agreed and we ended up at a table in the Palermo, a little combination bar-and-grill also linked in my memory to my years at the university. I told him I wouldn't ask him how life had treated him since one look at him sufficed to show that it had treated him very well.
Glancing down at the gold ring on his finger, he smiled complacently. 'I can't complain,' he admitted. 'After all the hard times I went through, my luck changed in my old age. But first, let me buy you a glass of beer, just because I'm so glad to see you.' He called the waiter over, ordered us Pilseners, good and cold, and gave a hearty laugh, which brought on one of his traditional fits of asthmatic wheezing and gasping. 'They say that once a man gets married he's a goner. Well, it was exactly the opposite with me.'
As we drank our beer, Big Pablito, with pauses forced on him by his bronchia, told me that when television arrived in Peru, the Genaros had made him a doorman, with a maroon uniform and a kepi, at the studios they had built on the Avenida Arequipa for Channel 5.
'From a newsman to a doorman – it sounds like I was demoted,' he said with a shrug. 'And I'll admit it was a demotion, as far as titles are concerned. But I ask you, can you eat a title? They raised my salary – that's what really counts.' Being a doorman wasn't killing work: announcing visitors, telling them where the various departments were located, making the spectators waiting to attend broadcasts form orderly lines. The rest of his time he spent discussing soccer with the policeman stationed on the corner. But then, in addition – and he clacked his tongue, savoring a pleasant memory – after a few months, one of his duties was to go every noon to buy those pasties filled with meat and cheese that they make at the Berisso, a place on Arenales, a block away from Channel 5. The Genaros were crazy about them, and so were the office clerks, the actors, the announcers, the producers, to whom Big Pablito also brought back empanadas, and earned good tips for doing so. It was on these trips back and forth between the television station and the Berisso (his uniform had earned him the nickname of the Fireman among the kids of the neighborhood) that Big Pablito had struck up an acquaintance with his future wife. She was the woman who made these delicious, crusty delicacies: the cook at the Berisso.
'She was impressed by my uniform and my general's kepi. She took one look at me and fell at my feet.' Big Pablito laughed, choked, drank a sip of his beer, choked and wheezed some more, and went on. 'A gorgeous brunette. Twenty years younger than yours truly. A pair of tits so firm a bullet wouldn't pierce them. Like I'm telling you, Don Mario, a real eyeful.'
He'd begun by striking up a conversation with her and dishing out compliments, she'd laughed, and they'd started going out together, just like that. They'd fallen in love and had a romance straight out of a movie. The brunette had energy to spare, was filled with ambition, and had her head chockful of plans. She was the one who'd decided they should open a restaurant. And when Big Pablito asked 'What'll we use for money?' she had said: what they'd both have coming when they left their jobs. And though it seemed utter madness to him to trade certainty for uncertainty, she'd had her way. The severance pay the two of them received was enough to buy a tiny little place on the Jirón Paruro, and they had had to ask everybody they knew to lend them money to buy tables and kitchen equipment, and Big Pablito himself had painted the walls and the name of the place over the door: The Royal Peacock. The first year they'd barely made enough to live on and had worked like slaves. They'd get up at the crack of dawn to go to La Parada, the wholesale market, to buy the best ingredients and pay the lowest prices, and they did everything themselves: she cooked and he waited on table and acted as cashier, and the two of them swept and cleaned up. They slept on mattresses they laid out each night between the tables after they closed up. But from the second year on, they drew more and more customers. So many that they'd had to take on a boy to help in the kitchen and another to wait on table, and after a while they were even obliged to turn clients away because there was no more room. And then the brunette had had the idea of renting the place next door, which was three times as big. They'd done so and hadn't regretted it. They'd even put tables on the second floor now, and had a little place of their own to live in across the street from The Royal Peacock. Seeing as how they got along so well together, they got married.
I congratulated him, and asked him if he'd learned to cook.
'I've got an idea,' Big Pablito suddenly said. 'Let's go hunt up Pascual and we'll have lunch at the restaurant. I'd like the two of you to be my guests, Don Mario.'
I accepted, because I've never discovered how to refuse invitations, and also because I was curious to see Pascual. Big Pablito had told me he was now the editor of a weekly scandal sheet, that he too had come up in the world. They saw each other regularly – Pascual was a steady customer at The Royal Peacock.
The office of the weekly Extra was a fair distance away, on a street off the Avenida Arica, in Breña. We took a bus there that didn't exist in my day. We had to wander around the neighborhood for some time, because Big Pablito didn't remember the exact address. We finally found it, in a narrow little alleyway behind the Cine Fantasía. From the outside it was evident that Extra hadn't exactly struck it rich: a sign bearing the name of the weekly was hanging precariously from one nail between two garage doors.
Once inside, one could see that the two garages had been converted into one office by simply making an opening in the wall between them, without even squaring it up or roughing off the edges, as though the mason had abandoned the job before he was half done. The opening was partitioned off by a cardboard screen, scribbled all over, as in the toilets of public buildings, with dirty words and obscene drawings. On the walls of the garage we'd first come into, amid damp spots and dirt stains, were photos, posters, and front pages of Extra: one recognized certain well-known faces of soccer players and singers, and those, apparently, of criminals and victims. Each front page was full of screaming headlines, and I managed to make out phrases such as 'Kills Mother So As To Marry Daughter,' and 'Police Raid Masked Ball: All Men!' This garage appeared to be used as the copy room, the darkroom, and the 'morgue' of the weekly. The place was so cluttered that it was hard to thread our way through it: little tables with typewriters, on which two guys were hurriedly typing, piles of unsold returned copies of the paper that a kid was doing up into bundles and tying up with string; in one corner was an open standing wardrobe full of negatives, photos, plates; and behind a table, one of whose legs had been replaced by three bricks, a girl in a red sweater was noting down moneys received in an account book. The things and the people in the place seemed to be in sad straits. Nobody stopped us or questioned us or answered us when we said hello.
On the other side of the screen, in front of walls also covered with sensational front pages, there were three desks, each with a little square of cardboard on which the function of its occupant was written, by hand, in ink: editor-in-chief, chief copy editor, managing editor. When they saw us enter the room, two persons bending over, looking at galleys, raised their heads. The one standing was Pascual.
He gave each of us a friendly hug. Unlike Big Pablito, he'd changed quite a lot: he'd gotten fat and had a paunch and a double chin, and somehow there was a look about him that made him seem almost an old man. He'd grown himself a very odd, almost Hitlerian mustache, which was turning gray. He greeted me with what were clearly signs of great affection, and when he smiled, I saw that he had lost some of his teeth. He then introduced me to his colleague, a swarthy, dark-haired man in a mustard-colored shirt, who remained sitting at his desk.
'The editor of Extra,' Pascual said. 'Dr. Rebagliati.'
'I almost put my foot in my mouth,' I told Pascual as I shook hands with Dr. Rebagliati. 'Big Pablito told me that you were the editor.'
'We've gone downhill, but not that far,' Dr. Rebagliati said. 'Have a seat, have a seat.'
'I'm chief copy editor,' Pascual explained to me. 'This is my desk.'
Big Pablito told him we'd come to take him off to The Royal Peacock to celebrate the good old days at Panamericana. Pascual was all for it, but he hoped we wouldn't mind, we'd have to wait for him a few minutes, he had to take the galleys there on his desk round to the printer's on the corner, it was urgent because they were just putting the edition to bed. He went off and left me sitting face to face with Dr. Rebagliati. When the latter learned that I lived in Europe, be devoured me with questions. Was it true that Frenchwomen were pushovers, as he'd always heard? Were they as expert and as shameless in bed as they were reputed to be? Was it true that females in every country had their very own special tricks? He'd personally heard, for instance, extremely interesting things (Big Pablito's eyes rolled in delectation as he listened to him) from people who'd traveled a lot. Was it true that Italian women were crazy about sucking cock? That Parisian women weren't ever satisfied unless one bombarded them from behind? That Scandinavian women made out with their own fathers? I answered Dr. Rebagliati's verborrhea as best I could as he contaminated the atmosphere of the little room with his lustful, seminal intensity, and regretted more and more having allowed myself to be trapped into accepting an invitation to this repast that would no doubt end up at some ungodly hour. Amazed and all worked up by the editor's sociologico-erotic revelations, Big Pablito laughed and laughed. When Dr. Rebagliati's curiosity eventually wore me out, I asked if I could use his phone.
A sarcastic look came over his face. 'It's been cut off for a week now, because we haven't been able to pay the bill,' he said with brutal frankness. 'Because, as you can very well see, this rag is going under and all of us imbeciles who work here are going under with it.'
And he immediately went on to tell me, with masochistic pleasure, that Extra had been born in the Odría era, under very favorable auspices: the regime placed ads in it and slipped it money under the table to attack certain individuals and defend others. Moreover, it was one of the few publications that were allowed to appear, and it had sold like hotcakes. But once Odría had been ousted, cutthroat competitors had appeared on the scene and Extra had gone broke. And it was at that point that he had taken it over, when it was already on its last legs. And he had gotten it back on its feet, by changing its policy, by turning it into a scandal sheet. Everything had gone smoothly for a while, despite the debts hanging round its neck like a millstone. But in the last year, with the price of paper going up and up, the mounting expenses at the printer's, the campaign waged against it by its enemies, and the loss of advertising revenue, things had gone sour. Moreover, they had lost several court suits brought by riffraff accusing them of libel. And now the panic-stricken owners had offered all the stock to the editors so that the creditors wouldn't get everything when the rag went into bankruptcy. Which was about to happen any day now, since in the last few weeks the situation had become tragic: there was no money for the payroll, employees were making off with typewriters, selling the desks, stealing everything that was of any value, getting what they could before everything caved in.
'It won't last another month,my friend,' he repeated, snorting with a sort of pleased disgust. 'We're already corpses – can't you smell the rot?'
I was about to tell him that indeed I could, when the conversation was interrupted by a skeletonlike little figure, so thin that he entered the room through the narrow opening without any need to push the screen aside. He had a rather ridiculous German-style haircut and was dressed like a tramp, in worn blue overalls and an old patched shirt under a grayish sweater that was much too tight for him. The most unusual thing about his attire was his footgear: faded red tennis shoes, so old that one of them had a length of string tied around the end of it as though the sole were loose or about to fall off. The minute he laid eyes on him, Dr. Rebagliati began to read him the riot act.
'If you think you can go on making a fool of me, you're wrong,' he said, approaching him with such a threatening air that the skeleton gave a little leap backward. 'Weren't you to bring the stuff on the arrival of the Monster of Ayacucho last night?'
'I brought it, sir. I was here with all the pertinent details half an hour after the patrolmen brought the decedent into the Prefecture,' the little man declaimed.
I was so dumfounded that I must have looked as though I were in a daze. The perfect diction, the warm timbre of the voice, the words 'pertinent' and 'decedent' could only have come from him. But how, with that physique and getup, could this scarecrow that Dr. Rebagliati was eating alive possibly be the Bolivian scriptwriter?
'Don't lie; have the courage at least to own up to your faults. You didn't bring the material and Gumball couldn't finish his article and the facts are going to be all wrong. And I don't like articles with factual errors, because that's bad journalism!'
'I brought it, sir,' Pedro Camacho answered, in a terrified but polite tone of voice. 'I found the office here closed. It was eleven-fifteen on the dot. I asked a passerby the exact time, sir. And then, because I knew how important this material was, I went to Gumball's house. And I waited for him out on the sidewalk till two in the morning, but he didn't come back home to sleep. It isn't my fault, sir. The patrolmen who were bringing the Monster in got caught in a rock slide that blocked the highway and didn't arrive till eleven instead of nine. Don't accuse me of dereliction of duty. For me, Extra comes first, even before my health, sir.'
Little by little, not without an effort, I related, I compared what I remembered of Pedro Camacho with what was before me. The bulging eyes were the same, though they had lost their fanaticism, their obsessive gleam. The light in them now was dim, opaque, fleeting, panicked. And his facial expressions and gestures, his manner of gesticulating as he spoke, that unnatural movement of his arm and hand that made him look like a circus barker, were the same as before, as was his incomparable, measured voice, as spellbinding as ever.
'What happens is that you're too tightfisted ever to take a bus or a jitney, you always arrive everywhere too late, that's the pure and simple truth of the matter,' Dr. Rebagliati fumed hysterically. 'Don't be so stingy, damn it, spend the four pennies it costs to take a bus and get where you're supposed to be on time!'
But the differences were greater than the resemblances. The principal change in his appearance was due to the haircut. Having the locks that had come down to his shoulders shorn and what was left cropped so close to his skull that his head appeared to be shaved had made his face look more angular, smaller; it had lost character and authority. Moreover, he was a very great deal thinner; he looked like a fakir, a specter almost. But what really kept me from recognizing him at first was his attire. I had never seen him dressed in anything but black, the funereal, shiny suit and the little bow tie that were inseparable from his person. Now, with this pair of stevedore's overalls, this much-mended shirt, these tennis shoes with string tied round them, he looked like a caricature of the caricature he had been twelve years before.
'I assure you that things don't turn out the way you think, sir,' he said, standing his ground. 'I've demonstrated to you that I arrive at any assigned destination faster on foot than in those pestilential public vehicles. It's not out of niggardliness that I walk places, but in order to fulfill my duties more diligently. And frequently, sir, I run.'
In this respect, too, he was the same as before: his total lack of a sense of humor. He spoke without the slightest spark of wit, or even of emotion, in an automatic, depersonalized way, though the things he was saying would have been unthinkable coming from him in the old days.
'That's enough of your nonsense and your manias. I'm too old to bamboozle.' Dr. Rebagliati turned to us, taking us as witnesses. 'Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? That a person can make the rounds of the commissariats of Lima faster on foot than by bus? And this gentleman wants me to swallow shit like that.' He turned once again to the Bolivian scriptwriter, who hadn't taken his eyes off him or given the rest of us so much as a sidelong glance. 'I don't have to remind you, because I imagine that you remember it every time you sit down with a plate of food in front of you, that we're doing you a big favor around here by giving you work when we're in such terrible straits that we have to let reporters go, not to mention messengers. You could at least be grateful and do your job properly.'
At this point Pascual came back in, announcing from the screen: 'Everything's all set, the edition's gone to press,' and apologizing for having made us wait.
I walked over to Pedro Camacho as he was about to leave. 'How are you, Pedro?' I said, holding out my hand. 'Don't you remember me?'
He looked me up and down, squinting his eyes and bringing his face closer, looking surprised, as though this were the first time in his life that he'd ever seen me. Finally, he extended his hand, shook mine briefly and ceremoniously, made his characteristic bow, and said: 'Pleased to meet you. My name is Pedro Camacho.'
'But this can't be,' I said, feeling quite distraught. 'Have I gotten as old as all that?'
'Stop pretending you've had one of your attacks of amnesia,' Pascual said, clapping him on the back so hard he staggered. 'Don't you remember how you spent all your time cadging coffees at the Bransa off him, either?'
'No, it was verbena-and-mint tea,' I joked, scrutinizing Pedro Camacho's face, at once politely attentive and indifferent, for some sign of recognition.
He nodded (I saw his nearly bare skull) and gave me a very brief, courteous smile that exposed his teeth to the air for a second or so. 'Highly recommended for the stomach, an excellent digestive, and moreover it burns up fat,' he said. And then rapidly, as though making a concession in order to be free of us: 'Yes, it's possible, I don't deny the fact. We might indeed have met before.' And he added: 'It's been my pleasure.'
Big Pablito had also walked over to him. He put an arm around his shoulder, in a paternal, mocking gesture. As he rocked him back and forth, half affectionately and half derisively, he turned to me and said: 'The thing is, Pedrito doesn't want to remember when he was somebody, now that he's a fifth wheel around this place.' Pascual laughed, Big Pablito laughed, I pretended to laugh, and even Pedro Camacho gave a little forced smile. 'He even tries to make out that he doesn't remember either Pascual or me.' He patted him on his nearly bare pate, as though he were a little dog. 'We're going to have lunch together to celebrate those days when you were king. You're in luck, Pedrito, you'll have a good hot meal today. I want you to come along as my guest!'
'I'm most grateful, colleagues,' he answered immediately, making his ritual bow. 'But it's not possible for me to come with you. My wife is waiting for me. She'd worry if I didn't come home for lunch.'
'She's got you tied to her apron strings, you're her slave, aren't you ashamed of yourself?' Big Pablito said, rocking him back and forth again.
'Have you gotten married?' I asked, dumfounded, unable to imagine Pedro Camacho with a home, a wife, children. 'Well, congratulations, I always thought you were a confirmed bachelor.'
'We've celebrated our silver wedding anniversary,' he replied in his usual precise, aseptic tone of voice. 'A wonderful wife, sir. Self-sacrificing and unbelievably good-hearted. We were separated, due to circumstances that life brings in its train, but when I needed help, she came back to lend me every possible aid. A wonderful wife, as I said. She's an artiste, a foreign artiste.' I saw Big Pablito, Pascual, and Dr. Rebagliati exchange a mocking look, but Pedro Camacho appeared not to notice. After a pause, he went on: 'Well, have a good time, colleagues, I shall be with you in thought.'
'Watch out that you don't let me down again, because it'll be the last time,' Dr. Rebagliati warned him, as the scriptwriter was disappearing behind the screen.
Pedro Camacho's footfalls had not yet died away – he must have been heading for the street door – when Pascual, Big Pablito, and Dr. Rebagliati burst into peals of laughter, winking at each other, exchanging sly looks, and pointing to the opening he had just left by.
'He's not as dumb as he pretends to be, he comes on as the devoted spouse to hide the fact that his wife makes him wear horns,' Dr. Rebagliati crowed. 'Every time he talks about his wife I feel a terrible urge to say to him: "Stop using the word 'artiste' for what in good Peruvian we call a cheap stripteaser."'
'You can't imagine what a monster she is,' Pascual said to me, with the look of a kid who's just seen a bogeyman. 'An Argentine years past middle age, fat as a sow, with bleached hair and makeup an inch thick. She sings tangos half-naked, at the Mezzanine, that nightclub for penniless wretches on the skids.'
'Shut your traps, don't be ungrateful, you've both screwed her,' Dr. Rebagliati said. 'And I have too, for that matter.'
'Singer or not, she's a whore,' Big Pablito exclaimed, his eyes blazing. 'I know what I'm talking about. I went to see her at the Mezzanine and after the show she made a pass at me and offered to give me a blow job for twenty libras. I said no, old girl, you haven't got any teeth left and what I go for is nice little nips on the cock. So not even if you do it for free, not even if you pay me. Because I swear, Don Mario, she doesn't have a tooth in her head.'
'They'd been married before,' Pascual told me as he rolled down his shirtsleeves and put his suitcoat and tie back on. 'In Bolivia, before Pedrito came to Lima. It seems she left him to go off whoring around somewhere back there. They got together again when he was put in the mental asylum. That's why he goes around saying that she's such a self-sacrificing woman. Because she went back to him when he was crazy.'
'He's as grateful to her as a dog, because it's thanks to her that they have food on the table,' Dr. Rebagliati corrected him. 'You don't think they can live on what Camacho earns gathering information for us at police stations, do you? They eat on what she brings in from whoring around, otherwise he'd have gotten t.b. long ago.'
'To tell the truth, Pedrito doesn't need much to eat on,' Pascual said. And he explained. 'They live in a back alley in Santo Cristo. He's really come down in the world, hasn't he? My colleague, Dr. Rebagliati here, doesn't believe me that he was somebody in the days when he wrote soap operas, when they mobbed him for autographs.'
We left the room. In the garage next door the young girl working on the account books, the reporters, and the kid bundling up return copies had all gone home. They had turned out the light and the jumble of office furniture and the disorder now had a certain eerie air about it. As we went out into the street, Dr. Rebagliati closed the door and locked it. Walking abreast, the four of us headed toward the Avenida Arica in search of a taxi. To make conversation, I asked why Pedro Camacho was just a messenger and not a reporter.
'Because he doesn't know how to write,' Dr. Rebagliati answered predictably. 'He's pretentious, he uses words that nobody understands, the negation of journalism. That's why I keep him on to make the rounds of the police stations. I don't need him, but he entertains me, he's my buffoon, and what's more, he costs less than an office boy.' He laughed obscenely and asked: 'Well now, to put it bluntly, am I or am I not invited to that lunch of yours?'
'Of course you are, that goes without saying,' Big Pablito answered. 'You and Don Mario are the guests of honor.'
'Pedro Camacho's a guy with all sorts of weird ideas,' Pascual said, returning to the subject as we were heading for the Jirón Paruro in the taxi. 'He refuses to take a bus, for instance. He goes everywhere on foot; he says it's quicker. The very thought of how far he walks every day makes me tired; just making the rounds of the police stations in the middle of town takes him a good many miles. You saw the state his shoes were in, didn't you?'
'He's a fucking skinflint, that's what,' Dr. Rebagliati said disgustedly.
'I don't think he's a tightwad,' Big Pablito defended him. 'He's just a wee bit touched in the head, and on top of it, a guy whose luck has run out.'
The lunch went on and on for hours, a succession of Peruvian dishes, multicolored and burning hot, washed down with cold beer, and there was a little of everything at it, risqué stories, anecdotes from bygone days, all sorts of gossip about one person or another, a pinch of politics, and I was obliged to try to satisfy, once again, the editor's tireless curiosity regarding the women of Europe. There was even the threat of a fistfight at one point when Dr. Rebagliati, drunk now, began to go too far with Big Pablito's wife, a brunette of around forty who was still very attractive. But by straining my ingenuity, I contrived to keep the three of them from saying another word about Pedro Camacho all during that endless afternoon.
By the time I arrived at Aunt Olga's and Uncle Lucho's (who had gone from being my wife's sister and brother-in-law to being my parents-in-law), night was falling. My head ached and I felt depressed. Cousin Patricia received me with a distinctly unfriendly look on her face. She told me that with all my alibis about gathering documentation for my novels I might well have been able to pull all kinds of fast ones on Aunt Julia and make her play dumb, not daring to say a word to me so people wouldn't think she was committing a crime of lèse-culture. But as far as she, Patricia, was concerned, she couldn't care less whether she committed crimes of lèse-culture, and therefore the next time I left the house at eight in the morning on the pretext that I was going to the Biblioteca Nacional to read the speeches of General Manuel Apolinario Odría and came back at eight in the evening with bloodshot eyes and reeking of beer, and no doubt with lipstick stains on my handkerchief, she'd scratch my eyes out or break a plate over my head. My cousin Patricia is a girl with lots of spirit, quite capable of doing precisely what she's promised.
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