‘This is an impressive book. In writing it the author demonstrates great talent, as well as great courage.’
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘No one that reads this book will be able to look at their family in the same way again.’
Gabriela Wiener
‘An extraordinary family story … Renato Cisneros delivers here the captivating narrative of a strange and disturbing filiation.
A loving and lucid puzzle.’
Le Monde (France)
‘People should read this novel to learn more about themselves.’
Jorge Edwards
‘Cisneros is a phenomenon in Latin America today.’
Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, El País (Spain)
‘A book so intelligent and moving, you wish it would never end.’ Libération (France)
‘The Distance Between Us is the story of a villain told from love. It dwells in the humanity hidden behind the themes left by war. It also narrates that other war: the one which all of us wage against our parents to become the persons we are.’
Santiago Roncagliolo
‘The Distance Between Us goes far and appeals to the reader exactly because there is so little distance between what is written and what was lived.’
Alberto Fuguet
‘“Just as a father is never prepared to bury his son, a son is never prepared to dig up his father”(…) It is within this tension that this magnificent novel lies, full of drama and suspense from the very first page.
Edmundo Paz Soldán
Renato Cisneros
THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN US
Translated by
Fionn Petch
Contents
Renato Cisneros with his father (1980)
To my brothers and sisters,
who had a father named like mine.
‘I am a man of sad words. Why did I feel so guilty? If my father always brought absence, and the river brought perpetuity.’
The Third Bank of the River
João Guimarães Rosa
Chapter 1
I’m not here to tell the story of the woman who had seven children with a priest. All I’ll say for now is that her name was Nicolasa Cisneros and she was my great-great-grandmother. The priest she fell in love with, Gregorio Cartagena, was a high-ranking bishop in Huánuco, in the Peruvian Sierra, in the years before and after independence. Over the four decades of their relationship, both did what they could to avoid the repercussions of the scandal. Since Gregorio could not or would not acknowledge his offspring legally, he passed himself off as a distant relative, a friend of the family, so he could stay close to them and watch them grow up. Nicolasa reinforced the lie by filling out the baptism certificates with false information. This is how she came to invent a fictitious spouse, Roberto Benjamín, a ghost who played the role of legal husband and father. The day the children found out that Roberto had never existed and that Father Gregorio was their biological father, they resolved to break with their past, with their bastard origin, and made their second, maternal surname the only one, relegating Benjamín to a middle name.
Nor will I say anything here about the last of those illegitimate children, Luis Benjamín Cisneros, my great-grandfather. Nothing except the fact that his school friends nicknamed him ‘The Poet’. And that he was such a single-minded character that at the age of seventeen, he decided he was going to win the love of Carolina Colichón, the mistress of President Ramón Castilla. What’s more, he succeeded. By the time he was twenty-one they had three daughters together. The five of them lived hidden away in a squalid room in the middle of Lima, fearing retaliation. Early one morning, at the urging of his mother, who had just discovered the beleaguered life he was leading, Luis Benjamín left Peru and set sail for Paris, where he wrote romantic novels and guilt-ridden letters. Two decades later, he returned to Lima as a diplomat, married a young lady of fourteen, and became a father again, producing five further children. The next-to-last of these, Fernán, was my grandfather.
Fernán became a journalist and at the age of twenty-three was hired as an editor at La Prensa. After just two years he became the editor-in-chief, following the imprisonment of the entire editorial board under the dictatorship of Augusto Leguía. He too suffered harassment from the regime and in 1921 was exiled to Panama, although he ultimately took up residence in Buenos Aires. By then, he already had five children with his wife, Hermelinda Diez Canseco, as well as a new-born baby with his mistress, Esperanza Vizquerra, my grandmother. Both women followed him to Argentina, where Fernán managed to support both families, while avoiding any contact between them.
But this novel isn’t about him, either. Or perhaps it is, but that’s not my intention. This novel is about my father, Lieutenant General Luis Federico Cisneros Vizquerra, ‘El Gaucho’ Cisneros, third son of Fernán and Esperanza, born in Buenos Aires on 23 January 1926, died of prostate cancer in Lima on 25 July 1995. It’s a novel about him or someone very like him, written by me or someone very like me. It’s not a biographical novel. Not a historical novel. Not a documentary novel. It’s a novel conscious of the fact that reality occurs only once and that any reproduction made of it is condemned to adulteration, to distortion, to simulacrum.
I have tried and failed several times to embark on this novel. Everything I wrote invariably ended up in the bin. I couldn’t figure out the right texture for the copious material I’d collected over the years. It’s not that I’ve clarified everything by now, but spitting out these first paragraphs anchors me, gives me purchase, provides an unexpected solidity. The doubts haven’t dissolved, but somewhere in the depths I can make out the glimmering granular light of a certainty. All I know for sure is that I’m not going to write a novel about my father’s life,