five or six years old. My blue swimming costume has a red waistband and a fish embroidered on the left hand side in the same colour. The elaborate dive is about to take place. After my body pierces the water, causing the minimum disturbance to its calm surface, you’ll dive after me, producing a thrilling tsunami; without resurfacing, advancing like a slow submarine or tame shark, you’ll swim the length of the pool. We loved putting on this show for an audience. I felt so good up there, so essential, so brave, a leading player. That was our ritual, perhaps the only one we shared in those years. I’d climb up your back like a steep stairway of vertebrae, and once at the top, on the broad platform of your shoulders, holding onto your hands, your wet hair between my ankles, I’d prepare myself for the dive straight into the pool. Click! You’d follow straight after. We’d hear the distorted echo of the applause from under the water.
That year, the Army sent you on a tour of several northern cities as General Commander of the First Military Region. We moved to Piura. Your office was adjacent to the house, so you were your own neighbour. Your daily commute took ten steps. If I were to return to that house I might find it had shrunk, but at the time it seemed huge. It had two floors connected by a wooden staircase with a banister and very broad bottom steps. There was always a bustle of people around: drivers, butlers, staff. The photograph shows the sliding glass doors that led from the terrace inside, where the chairs of the informal dining room can be glimpsed, and its mosquito-screened windows. Everything exudes the tarnished hue of the 80s. Behind us is a large pot with plants, undoubtedly placed there by my mother, Cecilia Zaldívar. I think I already said how much I like this photo. It’s an X-ray of our complicity. My body looks like a prolongation of yours. An appendage emerging from it. Your half-naked body is an autonomous engine, the machine that assembles me, supports me and then thrusts me into the world. The parabolic leap is only made possible by the strength and determination of your grip on me. It’s hard to say whether you’re the one who lets go of me or if I’m the one who breaks free of the organism we comprise together. However it may be, there’s harmony in the structure and beauty in the manoeuvre. For years this photograph has stood on a shelf of my bookcase, leaning against the spines. It’s like a postcard freezing a moment that has the duty to remain unforgettable.
One afternoon in 2006, as I was reading Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, I glanced at the photo. There it was, within the sphere of my gaze. In two separate passages in the novel – parts seven and eight of ‘The Book of Memory’ – Auster narrates the marine exploits of two characters who are engaged in a search for their respective fathers: Jonah and Pinocchio. One biblical and one literary figure. I’d always felt sympathy for both, for their rebellion against their nature, for aspiring to become more than they were born to be. Jonah didn’t want to become just any old prophet. For Pinocchio it wasn’t enough to be a living marionette. Jonah refuses the mission God entrusts to him – preaching to the pagans of Nineveh – and flees from Him by boarding a ship. During the crossing a great storm is unleashed. Jonah knows it is the work of God and asks the sailors to cast him into the sea in order to calm the waters. They do as he asks. The storm ceases and Jonah sinks beneath the waves, until he finds himself in the stomach of a whale, where he remains for three days. Amid the resounding echoes of this solitude, Jonah prays for his life. God hears his prayers, forgives his disobedience and orders the great beast to vomit him up onto the shore. He is saved. Something similar occurs with Pinocchio. In Carlo Collodi’s novel, Geppetto’s boat is overturned by a huge wave. Half-drowned, the old carpenter is dragged by the current towards a great asthmatic shark that swallows him ‘like a piece of pasta’. The brave Pinocchio searches for Geppetto unflaggingly. Once he finds him, he lifts him up on his shoulders and waits for the shark to open its mouth so he can swim to safety in the darkness of the night. Jonah is rescued from the waters by his father. Pinocchio rescues his father from the waters. Auster asks himself, or I ask myself: is it true that you have to dive into the depths and save your father in order to become a real man? Since I read The Invention of Solitude the photograph of Piura is no longer just the photograph of Piura. It has become a talisman, the kind of photo that’s taken at a certain moment in time, but whose significance isn’t revealed until much later. Now I understand far better the watery ritual enacted by that child of five or six. Every time I look at the photograph, that child charges me with the same inescapable mission: dive into the water. Find your father.
Sullana, 26 April 1949
My dear brothers and sister,
This time I am the one to write, given your silence. Though I take up my pen only rarely to scribble a few lines and send proof of my fondness for you, this time I am doing so to offer you a more detailed account of my life.
I was released from Piura hospital two days ago, having left my appendix in a glass jar. If one day, in the not too distant future, I become president of Peru, this diminutive organ might be exhibited like a museum piece. It was something so swift and violent that I’ve still not got used to the idea that it’s been taken out of me. The first sign something was wrong was in the early morning of the 18th, the first and final such attack in my whole damn life, and six hours later I was marching to the gallows of the operating theatre, where a murderous hand awaited me. I fell asleep in an instant. After the operation, performed by Commander Núñez, I slept for eighteen hours straight.
All of this happened and I’m now back in the barracks with thirty days of sick leave. Fortunately I had my savings, which have now been drained. Apart from this, life continues with the same monotony as usual. Colonel Gómez wrote to me and I have answered him. I also received a letter from our mother. I frequently correspond with El Chino Falsía and we have promised to keep in touch.
As for my Betty, she has replied to me, but in such different terms than I had hoped. She tells me that I am wrong to blame her mother for losing my letters, that it is true there is another man in her life, though she does not dare to tell me who he is. She also asks me to return all her letters. I, meanwhile, still as enamoured of her as I was four years ago, have answered her with a letter that I fear leaves me playing the wretched role of the fool. I don’t know what to do. So many things can happen before the year’s end…
The leather jacket and the shirt have still not reached me. When you send them, please also send some bed sheets, and nothing else.
Remember me to the rest of the family. If I start to mention everyone, I’ll need four more sheets of paper and that would be a sacrilege. A big, big hug to you all. My heart remains with you.
Disillusioned, the Gaucho pushes forward his proposal of marriage to Lucila. Suddenly, he wants to be married as soon as possible, and furiously embraces an illusion marred by silent contradictions. On 28 January 1950, the day of his engagement, he writes to Lucila:
Today one of my greatest desires has started to become a reality. I want you to know, my sweet maiden, that I shall spare no effort until my utmost dream comes true.
The first to congratulate him on his engagement are friends from Sullana, the captains Miranda and Ritz, both of whom are married to cousins of Lucila. They would go riding at weekends and share the small successes and anxieties of a military career constantly subject to the sway of political events.
The Gaucho’s brother and sister Juvenal and Carlota travel to Sullana to meet their future sister-in-law and establish relations with the new family.
From Rio de Janeiro, where he remained as ambassador, Fernán Cisneros exchanges cables with the Mendiola family to formally request the hand of their daughter Lucila in his son’s name. A few days later he writes to the Gaucho to tell him: ‘My son, the lines written by your fiancée have convinced us that she is a good girl, conscientious and serious, and ready to share in your destiny.’ My grandfather added a few further solemn thoughts on married life – which sound rather ridiculous, coming from a man who secretly maintained two parallel households over a period of two decades.
The religious marriage between the Gaucho and Lucila takes place at eleven o’clock in the morning of Saturday 21 June 1952 in the church of Our Lady of the Pillar of San Isidro, in Lima. There is a photo album containing at least fifty photographs of this day. My father boasts his military gala uniform and Lucila a pearl-coloured dress. They look happy as they emerge from the tunnel formed by the crossed swords.
I