The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa
A strange little animal, Serafín. Juan Peineta had never been able to tell whether the cat loved him or was indifferent to him. Perhaps he loved him the way cats love, that is, without the slightest sign of sentiment. At times he would curl up in his arms, but it wasn’t a demonstration of affection; the fact was he was enjoying his greatest pleasure: having Juan scratch his neck and belly. Sometimes he would recite what remained in his memory of the old poems from his repertoire: José Santos Chocano, Amado Nervo, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Juan de Dios Peza, Juana de Ibarbourou, Gabriela Mistral—remnants of poems that hadn’t wandered away from his mind—and usually Serafín would listen with an attention that moved him, “an attention equivalent to applause,” he told himself.But at other times, with an indifference that resembled scorn, Serafín would turn away and leave him reciting to ghosts while the cat applied himself to smoothing his whiskers and falling asleep. “He’s an egoist and ungrateful,” Juan Peineta thought. Yes, no doubt about it, but he’d become fond of him. In fact, he was the only living creature for whom he felt affection—that is, except for Willy the Ruletero and fat Crecilda, another victim of the slanderous Rolando Garro—because all the others had been dying and leaving him more alone with each passing day. “That’s what you are, Juan Peineta,” he repeated to himself for the hundredth time: “an orphan.”
What he did remember very clearly was his old love for the genius of Peruvian song, Felipe Pinglo, and his own age: seventy-nine. There he was, resisting the avalanche of time. Unfortunate, perhaps, but healthy, his only ailments those inherent to his age—some deafness; poor vision; dead sex; a slow, uncertain step; a cold or flu in the winter—nothing to worry about from the physical point of view, though mentally his memory was worse each day, and it wasn’t impossible that he would end up transformed into a phantom of himself, not knowing who he was, or what his name was, or where he was. He laughed when he was alone: “What a sad ending for the famous Juan Peineta!”
Had he been famous? In a certain sense he had, especially during the time when he recited in coliseums, between performances of folkloric dances and singers. The applause was enormous after they heard Bécquer’s “The Dark Swallows Will Return,” Chocano’s “He was a sad Inca with a dreaming brow, / ever sleeping eyes, and a smile of bitter gall,” Neruda’s “Tonight I can write the saddest verses,” or “I like it when you’re silent because it’s as if you were absent,” or the lyrics to the waltzes of Felipe Pinglo, his specialty. They would ask for his autograph. “Señor Poet,” they called him, but he corrected them right away with the modesty that always characterized him: “Not a poet, señora, just a reciter.” He also recited on the radio, though never on television, the mortal enemy of poetry. At times he had recited in private homes, at parties or receptions—first communions, weddings, birthdays, funerals—occasions when they tended to pay him very well. But Juan had never cared too much about earning money; what he liked was reciting, transmitting the words of poets, those sensitive geniuses, such beautiful sentiments accompanied by the lilting music of good poetry. He recalled that at times he recited with so much emotion that his eyes would fill with tears.
He had inherited his love and unbounded admiration for Felipe Pinglo from his father, who knew Pinglo and even was his companion at musical gatherings and songfests of the bard, who in his brief life—born in 1899, he died at the age of thirty-seven—had elevated Peruvian music with his compositions to heights not attained by the waltz, the polka, or the marinera or tondero folk dances either before or after his prolific existence. Juan had known him only through the stories and anecdotes of his father, who, in spite of not being a singer or playing any instrument, had been part of the bohemian life and Peruvian songfests in Barrios Altos. There, in that neighborhood, Felipe Pinglo had thought up a good number of the compositions that would make him famous. Juan’s father told him that he had been in the Alfonso XIII Theater in Callao in 1930 when the singer Alcides Carreño gave the first performance of Pinglo’s most famous waltz, “El Plebeyo.” When Juan Peineta and Atanasia were married, they went to lay the bride’s bouquet of gardenias at the foot of the statue that immortalized the Peruvian bard in front of the little house where he had been born, on the fourteenth block of Junín Alleyway, a few steps from Five Corners, the navel of Barrios Altos. When he died, Felipe Pinglo had left some three hundred waltzes and polkas. Juan Peineta knew a good number of them by heart, and he had copied many others into a thick student notebook. A source of artistic pride had been including in his reciter’s repertoire some texts of the waltzes of Felipe Pinglo, who, in his opinion—he always said this to the audience before reciting—was as great a poet as he was a musician and composer. The truth is that Juan had a good deal of success reciting, as if they were poems without music, the lyrics of “Hermelinda,” “El plebeyo,” “La oración del labriego,” “Rosa Luz,” “De vuelta al barrio,” and “Amelia,” Pinglo’s first well-known song, composed when he was still a boy. Before reciting their lyrics, he would entertain the audience by recounting anecdotes (both true and invented) about the immortal bard: his sad, sickly life, his poverty, the modesty of his daily existence, the way he introduced cadences from the North American fox-trot and the one-step, which were very popular at the time, into Peruvian music and, above all, that the first musical instrument he played was the harmonica and how, because he was left-handed, he had to play the guitar backward, which, he said, had allowed him to discover new tonalities and accents for his compositions.
Juan Peineta had met Atanasia while he was reciting. He didn’t like to think about Atanasia, because he lost control of his feelings, became sad and depressed, and none of that was good for his health. But now it was difficult to remove Atanasia from his memory: there she was, in the first row at the Club Apurímac de Lima, in her little gray skirt, her green blouse, her white shoes, listening to him with fervor and applauding madly. She had eyes that gave off sparks; when she laughed, she had dimples in her cheeks and you could see her small, even teeth. After his number he had introduced himself to her, and she said she was a telephone operator at the Central Post Office in Lima, single, and not seeing anyone. The party at the Apurímac went on for a while, they drank, danced to waltzes, boleros, a few huaynitos, and this was the beginning of the relationship that would end in their engagement and a marriage that had lasted for many years. Juan Peineta felt that fat tears had begun to run down the wrinkles in his face. This usually happened when Atanasia, taking advantage of some carelessness on his part, suddenly got into his head.
He reached the Church of the Nazarenes, and Serafín, who knew that cats were not allowed in the church—the pious old women there had made his life very difficult—immediately climbed the little tree at the entrance to wait for him. Mass hadn’t begun and Juan sat in the first row—there weren’t very many people yet—and, saddened by the memory of Atanasia, dozed off. A little bell awakened him. They were reading the gospel of the day, and he wondered whether being tardy to the service would be acceptable in the eyes of God, or have no effect at all on the balance sheet of good and bad deeds that would decide his future in the next life. He had been very Catholic ever since he was a boy, but his religiosity had increased substantially with old age and forgetfulness. He had always gone to Mass on Sundays; now he also went to processions, rosaries, rogations, and the holy sermons on Friday in the parish church of the Good Death.
When he left the church, Serafín appeared, wrapping himself around his feet. During his return to the Hotel Mogollón—some three-quarters of an hour at his prudent, very slow pace—he thought about the episode of The Three Jokers, a key moment in his artistic career. Like everyone else in Lima, he knew the program. Atanasia and he would watch it on Saturday nights in the small house in Mendocita where they had lived since their marriage. With what he earned through his recitals and her salary as a telephone operator, they had been able to rent this house, which Atanasia arranged and furnished with her invariable good taste. Things were going pretty
It was a great surprise when the manager of Radio Libertad told him that América Television had called, asking for him. And had left an urgent message for him to call the producer, no less a personage than Don Celonio Ferrero, the magician and master of the small screen, who invited him to take some refreshment with him in a cafeteria near the television station. Señor Celonio Ferrero was tall and well dressed, wearing a waistcoat, tie, and rings; his nails were buffed, his watch gleamed with diamond chips, and he was so sure of himself that Juan Peineta felt constrained and dwarfed next to that demigod.
“I don’t have much time, Juan Peineta, my friend, so I’ll get right to the point,” he said as soon as they sat down and had ordered two coffees. “Tiburcio, one of the Three Jokers, is dying. Cancer of the liver. Bad luck, poor man. Or maybe too much alcohol. So young. He’ll be able to work only until the end of the month. A problem, because he’s left me with an opening in the most popular program on Peruvian television. Do you want to replace him?”
Surprise made Juan Peineta’s jaw drop. Was he suggesting that he, an artist of poetry, replace a vulgar and utterly tasteless clown?
“Close your mouth before a fly goes in,” Señor Celonio Ferrero said with a laugh, giving him a little pat. “Yes, I know, my offer is like winning the lottery. But I’ve got it in my head that you are the ideal person to replace that mestizo Tiburcio. These intuitions of mine are never wrong. I heard you recite not too long ago at the Club Arequipa, and I laughed out loud. That’s when I told myself: ‘This guy could be one of my Three Jokers.’”
Juan Peineta was so offended, he felt like standing and telling this arrogant man that he was an artist and his proposal had wounded his professional honor, and end the conversation then and there. But Don Celonio Ferrero beat him to it:
“I’m sorry, my friend, but I don’t have much time,” he repeated, consulting his aerodynamic watch. “I’m offering ten thousand soles a month to start. If you work out, we can talk about a raise, if you don’t work out, our agreement ends after the fourth week. I’ll give you a couple of days to think it over. It’s been a pleasure to meet you and shake your hand, Señor Juan Peineta.”
He paid the bill, and Juan watched him walk away with long strides toward the television station. Ten thousand a month? Had he heard correctly? Yes, that’s what he had said. Juan had never seen so much money. Ten thousand a month? He went back home, his head in a whirl, knowing deep down that it would be impossible not to accept a job that would pay him a fortune like that.
“That was when you ruined your career as an artist,” he thought once again, as he had been doing for many years. “You sold yourself out of greed, you renounced poetry for playing the clown, you stabbed art out of sheer avarice. That’s when your decline began.”
They had reached the Hotel Mogollón in time to sit down in the small lounge at the entrance, next to Sóceles, the hotel guard, to listen to Radio Popular and the nastiness and venom of Rolando Garro on his program Red Hot: Truth and Lies About Show Business.
Before he went to sleep, Juan Peineta wrote a letter in his tremulous, tortuous hand to Radio Popular, protesting in his own name and in the name of many listeners the “pestilential vulgarity that the man named Rolando Garro vomits in his program; he should more appropriately be called the Slanderous Gossipmonger. How shameless, what a discredit to the station!” He signed his name and placed the letter in an envelope. He’d mail it tomorrow.
7
Quique’s Agony
“Something’s wrong with you, darling, something very serious,” Marisa said to him. “I’m sorry, but you have to tell me about it.”
“Nothing’s wrong, Blondie.” He tried to reassure her, forcing a smile. “Like everybody else, I’m concerned about the nightmare we’re living in this country, that’s all.”
“We’ve had terrorism in Peru for a long time,” she insisted. “I may be a fool, but not as big a fool as you think, Quique. You’re not eating, you’re not sleeping, you’re falling apart. Just yesterday your mother said to me: ‘Enrique’s getting very thin; has he been to see the doctor?’ What’s going on? I’m your wife, aren’t I? I can help you. Whatever it is, you have to tell me.”
They were eating breakfast on the covered terrace of the penthouse in San Isidro, she in robe and slippers, and Enrique already showered, shaved, and dressed, ready to leave for the office. There was fog, and you couldn’t see the ocean in the distance, or the gardens of the Golf Club at the foot of their building. The orange juice, boiled egg, buttered toast, and marmalade that Quintanilla, the butler, had set in Quique’s place were untouched; he’d had only a cup of coffee. He saw Marisa’s face twist with worry; he saw her blue eyes shining as if she were about to cry, and he felt sorry for his wife. He approached her and kissed her cheek. Marisa put her arms around his neck.
“Tell me, Quique,” she pleaded. “Whatever it is, tell me about it, sweetheart. Let me share it with you, help you. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Marisa darling.” He embraced her. “I don’t like to alarm you. But, well, since you insist, I’ll tell you about it.”
Marisa moved away from him, and Enrique saw that his wife had grown pale; her lips were trembling. Mechanically, she arranged her blond hair and looked at him with wide eyes, waiting. In his confusion, he said to her: “You look as beautiful as ever, more than ever. It must be the first time since we married that we haven’t made love for ten days.
“Nothing’s happened yet, but something might.” As he spoke, very slowly, he searched eagerly for what to invent. “I’ve received threats, Blondie. Anonymous ones, of course.”
“From terrorists?” she stammered. “From the Shining Path? From the MRTA?”
“I don’t know yet. Perhaps from terrorists, that’s possible. Or common criminals. They want money, of course. But don’t be frightened. I’ve consulted Luciano, we’re taking steps to see what it’s about. For the sake of what you love best, don’t say a word to anyone, darling. It might be much worse if word about this gets out.”
“How much have they asked for?” she asked.
“They haven’t told me an amount, not yet,” he said. “Just threats for the moment. I swear that from now on I’ll keep you up to date on everything. Besides, it might be a bad joke from some lowlife who wants to sour our lives.”
“Have you gone to the police?” Marisa had taken his hand and was pressing it. “Have you reported it to them? They ought to give us protection, you especially. You can’t expose yourself this way, Quique. My God, I knew that sooner or later what happened to Cachito would happen to us.”
“Now you’re the one who’s frightened,” he said, caressing her cheek. “Do you see why I didn’t want to say anything to you, Blondie?”
He looked at his watch: 8:15. He stood up.
“I have an appointment with Luciano precisely to talk about this,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “I beg you not to worry, Marisa. Nothing’s going to happen, I swear. I’ll keep you in the loop about everything, I promise.”
He went down to the garage. The driver was waiting for him, he got into his car, and when they drove out to the street they encountered one of those gray overcast days typical of Lima’s winter; the dampness blurred the windows of the Mercedes-Benz, and made his clothing feel wet. Enrique had the impression it was entering every pore of his body. On the Zanjón, traffic was already very heavy. Had he done the right thing telling Marisa those lies? Well, perhaps they weren’t lies. Maybe that lout of a reporter was connected to the Shining Path or the MRTA. Anything was possible. Agustín, the chauffeur, drove with his usual prudence, and Enrique?