this right. I was jealous because I’ve never seen a photo of my parents’ wedding? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ I asked.
‘No. The point is that there’s a connection – a symbolic one, if you like – between what happened to your father and what you feel is happening to you.’
‘Why my father and not my mother? She was there too, she took part, she agreed to things.’
‘But it was your father, not your mother, who took the decision to build a second marriage on shifting sands. Look, even when a person comes into the world through maternal desire, he structures himself on the basis of identification and transference with the paternal figure. It’s the father who determines his identity. Leaving the mother’s womb, he’s incorporated into culture through the father. It’s the father who sets him on his path, who grants him language. The mother generates love, trust, but the father gives him the tools to occupy a place in the world, you see?’
For a moment it annoyed me to hear Colmenares talking about my parents as if he knew them better than I did, but his logic struck me. It jolted me from scepticism into astonishment. It was as if he’d suddenly shed light on information that was lodged within me without my knowing. I couldn’t grasp everything that was fragmenting and coalescing in my mind; I only remember feeling exhausted, overwhelmed. I was experiencing something like a mental cramp. His words caused a shock, a tremor in me that – I sensed – would become a breaking point. Once the session was over, back in the street, delaying my return home, I went back over Elías’ theory and thought about all the other links that might exist between my father’s unexamined life and my own. I felt rising panic. The one thing that calmed me was realising that the oppressive memory of Pierina had abruptly loosened its grip on my throat. The ghost of my former girlfriend hadn’t been banished altogether, but it had been displaced by the scale of the new task before me. For that was what I now felt: that I had a task. I didn’t know what it involved, but I was ready to find out.
Chapter 2
One day in 1929, during a lunchtime break at San Marón School in Buenos Aires, nine-year-old Juvenal Cisneros beats a fellow pupil in a maths quiz. The other boy accuses him of cheating and gives him a shove. Juvenal pushes back, and soon their fists are swinging – a trifling incident that would soon grow serious. Someone pulls them apart. But as the other boy moves away, bitter with defeat, he yells over his shoulder ‘At least I don’t share my dad, like you do!’ For minutes afterwards, once the youngsters returned to their classrooms and peace has been restored, these words continue to ring in Juvenal’s ears. In fact, he’ll continue to hear them for the rest of his life. ‘At least I don’t share my dad, like you do.’ The next morning, he gets up and decides to follow his father. Fernán’s teaching jobs and his work as a journalist at La Nación have secured a more comfortable lifestyle for the family. Gone are the dingy hotels and rented rooms of his early years as an exile: the flat at 400 Suipacha St.; the room with the shared bathroom at 330 Cerrito St.; the tenement at 2200 Paraguay St. Now they live at 865 Esmeralda St., in flat number 20 of an old sand-coloured mansion house with cold tiles and exposed pipes in the entrance hall. Juvenal tells his mother, Esperanza, that he has to be at school early and descends the chipped marble staircase. He passes through the front gate and spots his father on the corner. He follows his route for one, three, six, seven, ten blocks, trying not to lose sight of him. Heading down Córdoba Ave., he crosses Maipú, Florida, and San Martín before turning right on Reconquista. Then he turns again on Corrientes before zig-zagging across Sarmiento, then Rivadavia. He’s not sure what he’s doing there or what he hopes to find. It feels foolish to be chasing the silhouette of this man who now seems more mysterious than ever. Yet it also feels urgent. Could there be any truth in what the boy yelled at him? Who do I share my dad with? If he had a secret, wouldn’t he tell me? Of course he would, Juvenal answers his own question, and he quickens his step to keep sight of that patch of blue advancing unhurriedly down the pavement. Juvenal watches as his father stops before a shop window, perhaps considering a gift for him or his siblings – and he feels like an idiot for doubting him, for being swayed by the blethering of a spiteful kid. But as much as he wants to believe that this pursuit is senseless, a stronger force impels him to keep playing detective. Rounding yet another corner, Juvenal tries to talk himself into abandoning the mission – What am I doing here? What will they say at school? Won’t they have called my mother already? – and gradually slows his pace, but without taking his eyes off the target. Just two more blocks, he tells himself, ashamed now, wishing he could run to catch up with his father and embrace him, apologise for questioning the exclusiveness of his love, beg for forgiveness. So he allows Fernán to pull further ahead and starts to feel like the danger has passed. Then, turning the next corner, at the junction of Tacuarí and Moreno, Juvenal sees what he most feared – or what, deep down, he had hoped to discover. He will never be able to erase the scene from his memory. There, on the other side of Belgrano Ave., his father is leaving the pavement and entering a house, holding hands with two children. A boy and a girl, older than Juvenal. The boy must be about 14, the girl 15 or 16. Frozen behind a newsstand, Juvenal watches as these total strangers kiss and hug his dad as blithely and spontaneously as he himself does every night when he gets home to Esmeralda St., and he feels something collapse inside him. The scene is a revelation. Perhaps too much so. The front door closes behind them, and only then does Juvenal notice how much bigger the house is than where he lives, and he is filled with a rage beyond his years – a heat and a pain that immediately turn into tears, no matter how hard he tries to hold them back. ‘Hey, kid, you ok?’ the newspaper seller asks. But the kid is too distressed to answer, and he sets off at a run, in every direction and none, cursing himself for not having gone straight to school that morning. And as he runs, his face crumpled, tears flowing freely, he wonders who these other children could be. He doesn’t know that their names are Mincho and Rosario. He doesn’t know there are three more inside: Fernando, Moruno and María Jesús. All are his father’s children with Hermelinda Diez Canseco. He doesn’t know that he, Juvenal, is actually the first of the seven offspring born to a beautiful but impure relationship. But he does understand something, he makes a connection – and suddenly, as he runs, he thinks of Lima, of the room where he was born, in a yard beside the ghostly Matusita house, at the junction of Sol and España streets, a bedroom where his mother was always alone, and now, on the streets of Buenos Aires, this past solitude suddenly makes all the sense in the world. Juvenal keeps running aimlessly; there’s no way he’s going to school now, and he wonders how long his father has been going to that big house, the sight of which he wishes he could expel from his mind, but cannot.
Juvenal said nothing about what he had seen until many years later, far into adulthood. He kept it to himself, and only he knew how deeply the discovery had changed him.
When his brother Gustavo, at the age of sixty, discovered their father’s hidden letters and all the echoed truths they contained – the existence of the priest, Cartagena; Luis Benjamín’s illegitimacy; Fernán’s adultery – he proposed to Juvenal that they write a book together. It made sense: Juvenal was the older brother, the only one who had studied literature, and he had become a much loved and respected intellectual in Peru. If there was anyone in the family who had been called to illuminate these centuries of darkness, it was he. From the outset, though, Juvenal responded to his younger brother’s investigations and discoveries with unwavering disinterest. He wanted nothing to do with the past. Undeterred, Gustavo kept insisting that they collaborate on the project, until one day Juvenal cut him off with a curt statement that he wouldn’t fully understand for many years: ‘To me, our father was nothing more than a man who came home at midnight and left at six in the morning.’
* * *
When my uncle Gustavo first told me the story of the pursuit across Buenos Aires, I was stunned. I couldn’t stop thinking about my uncle Juvenal, about his reticence to discuss certain details from his childhood. The image of the boy secretly making his way through the city streets, ultimately glimpsing his own father’s hidden life, made me feel both astonished and empty. Thanks to the letters Gustavo later entrusted to me, I was able to reconstruct those years when my grandfather Fernán – out of fear, out of his inability to express himself – perpetuated this gruelling strategy of conjugal survival: he’d spend the night with my grandmother