The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa
Enrique left Luciano’s office more dejected than when he came in. He felt sad, convinced that in his life things would never be as they had been before that horrifying visit.
5
The Den of Gossip
“I asked for monstrous tits, a belly, an enormous ass.” Rolando Garro was angry, shaking the photographs as if about to throw them into the face of the intimidated photographer, who took a step back. “And you bring me a fine-looking young lady. You didn’t understand me, Ceferino. Was what I said so difficult that your tiny little brain couldn’t get it?”
“I’m sorry, señor,” stammered Ceferino Argüello. The photographer for Exposed was an ageless, skinny mestizo crammed into old blue jeans and a pair of rubber flip-flops, with lank, straight hair that fell to his shoulders, and heavy eyebrows. He looked at the editor of the magazine with nervous eyes, dying of fear. “I can go back to the show tonight and take some others for you, señor.”
Garro didn’t seem to have heard him. He attacked him with his stare and the fury in his voice.
“I’m going to explain it to you again and see if this time the subject gets into that brontosaurus head of yours,” he said with muffled rage. From his desk he dominated the entire small room that was the editorial office of the magazine, in a big old two-story house on Calle Dante, in Surquillo, and he could observe that the half dozen editors and reporters all had their heads buried in their computers or papers; none of them, not even Estrellita Santibáñez, the nosiest of them all, even dared to turn their eyes to spy on the hard time he was giving the photographer. At that hour of the morning there was already the noise of trucks, the shouts of peddlers, and an intense going and coming of pedestrians in the area around the nearby market.
“Of course, I understand you very well, señor,” the photographer murmured. “I give you my word I do.”
“No! You didn’t understand a thing!” Rolando Garro shouted, and Ceferino Argüello moved back another step. “It isn’t a question of giving her publicity or raising the one-eyed cow’s fees. It’s a question of sinking and defeating her, of discrediting her forever. It’s a question of their throwing her out of the show because she’s ugly and old and can’t move her ass. These pictures are going to illustrate an article where we say that the one-eyed cow is turning the show at the Monumental into a hodge-podge that nobody can stand. Because besides not knowing how to dance or sing, she’s turned into a hideous monster and doesn’t belong on the stage; she belongs in horror movies. Do you understand or don’t you get it yet?”
“Of course I understand, señor,” the photographer repeated. He was livid and could barely speak, and it was obvious he wanted to get out of there right away. “I swear on my mother I do.”
“Fine.” The editor threw the photos in his hand to the floor. He pointed at them and said to Ceferino Argüello, “Throw this trash in the trash, please.”
He saw the photographer squat down to pick them up, and then awkwardly withdraw. Total silence reigned in the crowded space, which must have been the house’s dining room before it was transformed into the editorial office of a weekly magazine. Because of the lack of space, the rough desks touched one another, and the peeling walls were crowded with faded covers of old issues of Exposed, with spectacular nudes and shrieking headlines. Rolando Garro sat down again at his desk, which was up on a platform, affording him a complete view of all the personnel. He tried to calm down. Why did the bad photos of the one-eyed cow irritate him so much? Had he been too hard on poor Argüello, who, without realizing it or meaning to, had performed a great service by bringing him the photos from Chosica? Maybe. He had humiliated him in front of the entire office. Anybody with a little dignity would have quit. But he was too poor to afford the luxury of dignity, and besides, he was probably married with kids, so he’d swallow the humiliation and stay at Exposed because the pittance he earned here was what allowed him to survive. True, he’d hate him a little more. On the other hand, the question of the photos from Chosica kept Ceferino tied to him. Bah, he said to himself, amused; if things went well, he’d give him a nice present. That people hated him wasn’t anything that kept Rolando Garro awake. It even gave him a certain satisfaction: being hated meant being feared, being acknowledged. Something that Peruvians did very well: licking the boots that kicked them. The proof: Fujimori and the Doctor. Well, forget about the broken-down Ceferino and get to work.
In fact, he was angry not with him but with the one-eyed cow. Why? Because he had seen and heard her on television a couple of months ago, on a program as popular as Magaly’s, no less, saying it was a shame that magazines like Exposed existed, where artists were subjected to campaigns designed to discredit them and to slanders concerning their private lives. And the one-eyed cow said all this while widening her big bulging eyes and vigorously denying that the police had found her making love to some guy in a taxi, as the yellow-press magazine of Señor Rolando Garro had stated. He imagined the one-eyed cow naked in an old jalopy; he imagined screwing a piece of human garbage like her. Sickening! Who was the poor bastard whose cock wound up inside a fat pig like her? From that day on, he had it in his head to wreck her life and make her lose her job. But he needed a good investigation to finish her off. That was taken care of. The woman he called Shorty had done some excellent research, as always. The world would fall down around the cow’s ears, they’d throw her out, and she’d have to work as a whore to keep from starving to death. Garro had warned the administrator of the Monumental, spelling it out for him: “As long as you keep the one-eyed cow dancing in the show, I’ll make things hot for you, compadre.” It was a formula that made scriptwriters for radio and television tremble, not to mention producers and dancers in music hall shows or on the small screen, and of course, all the animal life that the one-eyed cow called “artists.”
He stood up and called Julieta Leguizamón. Shorty was so small that, seen from the back, anyone would have taken her for a child. She was dark, with kinky hair, always dressed in sweatpants or jeans, a wrinkled blouse, and basketball sneakers, skinny and frail, but still there was something impressive about her: her big eyes were incisive and intelligent, imbued with a strange immobility and fearlessness, which Rolando Garro thought he had seen only in certain animals. They seemed to bore into people, making them feel uncomfortable, as if all their shame were visible to anyone looking at them.
“How’s the article coming along, Shorty?”
“It’s coming, I don’t have much left to do,” she said, staring at him with those eyes that never blinked, that were generally cold with everybody except him, for Shorty evinced a doglike devotion to Rolando. “Don’t worry; I’ve found out lots of new things about One-Eye. They’ll make life pretty hot for her, I swear. When she was young she was in reform school for some minor crime. It’s false that she was a professional singer and dancer in Mexico. There’s no proof. She’s had two abortions with a very popular midwife, a black woman I know from Five Corners. They call her Dreamer, just imagine. And, best of all, One-Eye’s daughter is in the women’s prison for trafficking drugs.”
“That’s terrific, Shorty.” Rolando patted his star reporter on the arm. “More than enough material to send her to hell.”
“I’m almost finished.” Shorty smiled at him and went back to her desk.
“She always comes through,” Rolando thought, watching her sit down in the chair to which she had added a cushion so she would reach the top of the desk. Shorty was his great discovery. She had showed up at the magazine a couple of years back in frayed jeans, her sneakers with no laces, and some handwritten sheets that, with no preamble, she handed to him as she boldly said: “I want to be a reporter and work at Exposed, señor.” Rolando asked about her credentials: where she had studied and past work experience in the field.
“I don’t have any,” Shorty confessed. “I brought you this piece that I wrote. Read it, please.”
There was something about her that he liked, and he read it. In those four pages
He began to diagram the next issue of Exposed with the material he had. He still had twenty-four hours to take all of it to the printer, but it was better to do a little work in advance so that the last day, the day the magazine closed, wouldn’t be the usual madhouse. But it would be, no way around it, inevitably there were last-minute things to change or add to what had been planned.
How old was Rolando Garro? Garro didn’t know, and probably no one else did either. Or what his real surname was. In the orphanage where his mother had abandoned him, they named him Lázaro because, apparently, it was on San Lázaro Day that nuns from the Convent of Las Descalzas found him whimpering on the ground at the entrance to the institution they administered at the corner of Junín and Huánuco Alleyways, in the Barrios Altos district of Lima. Albino and Luisa Torres, who adopted him, didn’t like the name and changed it to Rolando. He remembered having been named Rolando Torres as a child, but at a certain point and for mysterious reasons, his surname was changed and he began to be called Rolando Garro. That was the name on his identity card and his passport. He didn’t think about his mysterious origins much except in extraordinary circumstances; for example, the days in his house in Chorrillos when he had to take the pills that sedated him and made him sleep for ten hours straight (he awoke as confused and bewildered as a zombie). He tried not to take them except on days when he was perturbed or depressed, but the psychiatrist had told him that, given his devilish psychological constitution, those states of mind were not a good idea, for he ran the risk of really going crazy or becoming permanently withdrawn. What would happen if he lost his mind? He would have to live like a beggar on the streets of Lima. Because Rolando, ever since he had run away from his adoptive parents when they told him he wasn’t their biological son but that they had found him in an orphanage, had been as solitary as a toadstool. And surely he would continue that way for as long as he lived, for although he’d had some adventures with women, he had never been able to maintain a stable relationship with any of them: they all broke it off because of his perverse character, unless he was the one who sent them on their way first.
His adoptive parents revealed that he had been an abandoned baby when he was in the fifth year of secondary school at the Colegio Nacional Ricardo Palma, in Surquillo, right here, not far from where Exposed was located. That night he ran away from home, stealing all the money his adoptive father kept hidden in his bedroom in a leather briefcase, hidden behind a loose brick. A little more than six hundred soles allowed him to sleep for a few days in run-down boardinghouses in the center of Lima. To survive he took every possible kind of job, from washing cars in parking lots to unloading trucks in La Parada Market. One day he found his vocation at the same time that he discovered his talent: journalistic blabbermouth.
It happened in a boardinghouse on Ocoña Avenue where he would have lunch for a few soles; it was a fixed menu: soup, rice and beans, and compote. A reporter from Late News whom he would see in the dining room told him he was tracking down a possible adultery involving Sandra Montero and her partner in crime Felipe Cailloma, about which contradictory rumors were flying in the world of show business. Wouldn’t he like to give him a hand? His instinct told Rolando it would be a good idea. He said yes. He stationed himself like a guard dog at the door of the building where the female television host and entertainer lived, and in less than twenty-four hours he had followed Sandra and discovered that she was meeting Felipe (they were both married to other people, so they were committing a double adultery) at a house of assignation in Pueblo Libre, at a corner of the Plaza Bolívar. The information allowed Late News to photograph the adulterers in their underwear.
This was how the journalistic career of Rolando Garro had begun: as a tipster on scandals for Late News, the paper that, with Raúl Villarán at its head, introduced yellow journalism to Peru. He moved from informant to a reporter who specialized in show business, that is, the gossip and scandals kept alive in the world of showgirls, minor singers, radio actresses and actors, owners of cabarets, music hall impresarios, and dancers in parades, a form of life that Rolando Garro, as he moved up and became a columnist, a director of radio and then television programs, had come to know like the palm of his hand: to use as he pleased and help to ruin without pity. He had a public delighted to follow his revelations, accusing singers and musicians of being faggots, his morbid explorations of the private lives of public persons, his “first fruits” exposing the base and shameful acts that he always exaggerated and at times invented. He succeeded in everything he undertook. But he never stayed too long with any one thing, because the scandals, the great secret of his popularity—he found them out or provoked them—usually got him into judicial, police, and personal trouble that he sometimes emerged from the worse for wear. The directors of newspapers, radio stations, and television channels eventually threw him out because of the protests and threats they received and because Garro was capable at times, in the frenetic performance of his duties, of making them the victims of the very scandals he fostered and stirred up. Sometimes he earned a great deal of money, which he squandered with both hands and then he lived, down and out, on his scant savings, and sometimes on the street. He didn’t have friends, he had transient accomplices, and, of course, masses of enemies, which meant he lived in a state of permanent turmoil that did not fail to flatter his vanity.
Exposed had already lasted three years. Things were going well for him now, people said it was thanks to the Doctor, who, according to the rumors, had become a Maecenas to the weekly, the secret master of its rather marginal existence. The magazine was a relative success as far as sales were concerned but had almost no advertisements, so it could barely pay its expenses. Rolando Garro increased his personal income by extorting showgirls and producers with threats to reveal their secret peccadilloes, and receiving money from people who wanted to harm other people—competitors and enemies—by discrediting and ridiculing them. Many suits had been filed against him, but he had survived all those risks, which he considered inherent to the type of journalism he practiced and in which, no doubt, he had achieved a twisted kind of brilliance.
But all that was nothing compared with what, thanks to Shorty and the poor wretch Ceferino Argüello, he now had in his hands. He closed his eyes and remembered the shocked face of the engineer Enrique Cárdenas when he handed him the package of photographs. He had always thought that someday an opportunity would make him famous, powerful, rich, and perhaps all three at the same time. And he was sure this was the marvelous gift from the gods that had finally fallen from heaven into his hands.
“I finished the article, boss. One-Eye will shit fire,” said Shorty, handing him some pages and staring at him with those eyes that emitted a cheerful, cold wickedness.
6
A Wreck of Show Business
Juan Peineta walked out of the Hotel Mogollón, on the third block of Huallaga Concourse, followed by Serafín. It was still early and the center of Lima was half deserted. He saw street sweepers, emollient peddlers—“relics of a past time,” he imagined—night owls after a long night, and the usual beggars and vagrants dozing at the corners and in doorways. Some early-rising turkey buzzards picked at the garbage scattered on the street, cawing. He tried one more time to remember what his name had been when he was very young, before he began to use the artist’s surname that everyone knew him by (well, back when he was known): Was it Roberto Arévalo? No, nothing like that. He still had some papers in the pile of documents that he kept in a cardboard box in his small room at the Mogollón, his birth certifica
They had reached the corner of Emancipación, and Serafín, as he always did at streets and avenues with heavy traffic, stopped and waited for Juan to pick him up. Juan did, carried him across the avenue, and deposited him on the ground on the other side. His relations with Serafín were some three years old. “The years of my decline,” he thought. No, his real decline—changing his job, betraying his vocation—came from further back, ten years at least, perhaps more. One day he went into his room in the Hotel Mogollón—well, calling it a room was a great exaggeration, it was a hole, really, a den—and he saw a cat lying on his bed. The one small window in the room was open. That’s how the cat got in. “Out, out!” He shooed him away with his hands, and the cat, frightened, jumped to the floor; then Juan noticed that the animal could barely walk; he dragged his hind legs as if they were lifeless. And half stretched out on the floor, he had begun to cry the way cats cry, with long, low meows. He felt sorry for the animal, picked it up, put it on the bed, and even shared the little bottle of milk he drank at night before going to sleep. The next day he took him to the Municipal Veterinary Clinic, which was free. The veterinarian who examined the animal said that the kitten’s legs weren’t broken, only bruised by a blow he had received, perhaps from those street urchins who amused themselves using their slingshots to stone stray animals in Lima; he’d be better soon, with no need for remedies or splints. That was when, after naming him Serafín—for Serafín Álvarez Quintero, a poet who was one of his specialties when he was a professional reciter of poetry—he adopted him. The little cat became his companion and friend. A very special companion, of course, a libertine; at times he would disappear for several days and then return suddenly as if nothing had happened. Juan Peineta would always leave the small window in his dismal little room open so that the cat could come and go as he wished.