even though they were talking about returning to a country they had never visited. How do you return to a place you have never been? They never felt the weight of this contradiction because they accepted that they lived in a kind of imaginary Peru, a bubble made of the countless references provided by their parents; of their grandfather Luis Benjamín’s lines of poetry; of the pages of the history books that reached their hands; of the postcards sent from Lima by relatives they had never met; of the voices of cousins, uncles and aunts who visited Buenos Aires and told them about everything they’d see in Peru.
Soon these mental pictures of the country would come to an end: in 1947, one by one, the Cisneros Vizquerra siblings returned to Peru. Once they had settled in Lima, while maintaining the family fraternity and solidarity, they began to dedicate themselves to their own very different fields: Juvenal studied Medicine and Linguistics; Carlota, Psychology; my father continued his career in the Army; Gustavo became an industrial engineer; Adrián a civil engineer and Reynaldo – oh Reynaldo! – uncle Reynaldo, the wildcard uncle, the one who studied Tourism, who became the king of public relations, a frustrated designer, and ended up a bon vivant always ready to live large, even if he didn’t have a penny in his pocket. Everything they’d seemed to share during their childhood in Argentina changed during their adulthood in Peru. While they lived in Buenos Aires, they were bound together by the future. Peru was a shared goal. Once they had reached it, their greatest similarity would be their past.
* * *
The Gaucho was twenty-one when he had to leave Argentina. How hard it was to put Buenos Aires behind him. Not only because he was leaving behind his childhood friends – Pepe Breide, Tito Arenas, ‘El Chino’ Falsía – or because he was interrupting his Army training, but because it meant he would be dangerously far from Beatriz. Beatriz Abdulá.
This is a name that I heard around the house since I was very young. An almost mythical name, even though it only belonged to – my father claimed – ‘a lass I knew in Argentina’, an account my uncles and aunts echoed in chorus when I asked them, overcome with curiosity at the idea of my father in love for the first time. Even my mother spoke of Beatriz without jealousy, almost fondly. But no one offered many details. Instead of placating my desire to know, this laconic response made it more acute. What was this Beatriz like? What kind of relationship did they have? Why did it end? Who broke up with who? The Gaucho said she was just a lass he’d known, but the emptiness in his eyes when he spoke contradicted his words. I didn’t trust his story, like with everything he said about the feelings that marked his childhood and adolescence. He was always editing events, cutting and pasting them so that his children wouldn’t see what he concealed behind the montage. He didn’t like losing, either in life or in the account he presented of his life, and so during his lifetime Beatriz Abdulá was just that: a childhood crush, a girlfriend of no real importance, a scant memory that it wasn’t worth turning over or digging into.
A year ago I went to the Peruvian Army’s Permanent General Archive, located in a pavilion of the general headquarters known as the ‘Pentagonito’ (or Little Pentagon) of San Borja. There I was received by a tall, brown-skinned, heavily moustachioed colonel who pulverised the bones in my hand with his greeting, asked me a series of irrelevant questions and told me just how much he admired the wonderful, exemplary man General Cisneros Vizquerra had been. He then allowed me to examine my father’s personal file. Sitting behind his desk in his office with its tinted windows, he warned me that I must maintain total secrecy with regard to the confidential material I was about to see.
‘This is the intellectual property of the Armed Forces. If anyone finds out you’ve been here, I’m the one with his neck on the line.’
‘Don’t worry, colonel. I won’t say a word,’ and I pulled an imaginary zip closed over my lips.
‘That’s what journalists always say, and then they screw us.’ Now the colonel was laughing.
‘Take it easy, I’m not here as a journalist.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I’m very grateful for the opportunity.’
‘One more thing, Cisneros. Since your father was a Minister of State and Chief of Staff of the Joint Command, his file is kept on a special shelf and it’s not supposed to be moved without orders from higher up. I’m turning a blind eye to this, you understand?’
‘I understand. I just want to see the papers, perhaps make a few copies.’
‘Copies? Impossible! They told me you just wanted to take a look.’
‘Alright, alright, forget it. I’ll just read the file, that’s all.’
‘Don’t try and pull the wool over my eyes, Cisneros,’ he warned. His nose flared and the tips of his moustache stood erect for a moment.
In the adjacent room, on a small table set up for the purpose, a thick file was waiting for me containing a series of classified documents relating to my father’s career. Standing beside the table, a deputy intelligence official, Paulo Pazos, was waiting to greet me. He had been given the task of keeping an eye on me to make sure I complied with the colonel’s instructions and I didn’t exceed the permitted time. ‘You have two hours,’ Pazos informed me. Shit, I thought, two hours to go through the documents that summarise the thirty-two years, four months and twenty-four days my old man was part of the Army.
The room was humid and cold, like a kitchen in the early morning. There was no one but the deputy official and me. To my good fortune, he was sensitive to the needs of journalism – as a kid he’d wanted to be a reporter, but his family didn’t have the money to send him to university or the journalism college – so when I told him I could get hold of a press pass from the newspaper I worked for that would help him pursue his undercover intelligence missions, he whispered: ‘You can’t use the photocopier but you can take photos of the papers with your mobile. I saw nothing.’
I set about leafing through and taking pictures of the hitherto unseen documents for many long minutes. There, for example, were my father’s report cards from Argentina, both the San Martín military high school and the National Military College, where he studied between 1942 and 1947. He got top marks in Maths and Spanish, average in History, poor in Geography, and a fail in Languages. I was surprised to see he scored highly in Music, Drawing and Singing. I can’t recall ever having seen him draw anything. Nor hear a complete song emerge from his mouth. He would mumble boleros, tangos, ranchera songs, a few waltzes, but didn’t sing them, or only sang them when accompanied by his brothers or old Army friends. He did like whistling. He was always whistling. In the house, the car, the office, walking along the pavement. I remember how the sound of his whistle traversed the windows like a flying insect, penetrating our bedrooms on weekend mornings. We could tell from his whistle if he was in a good or bad mood. My mother and he had a special tune they would whistle to call and acknowledge each other, borrowed from The Song of Forgetting, one of my grandfather’s favourite operettas.
His average score in exams was 6.35 out of 10. A normal score, slightly above the median. In all his school workbooks, however, there were exercises marked as fails. Two or three in each, the score written in red. I wished I could have had these reports in hand years later to compare them with mine, to gather strength in the face of the punishments he imposed on me, demanding the outstanding performance he’d never delivered himself. When I would bring home a marked exam for him to sign, he would immediately clench his fist and box me round the ears the same number of times as the number of points by which I’d fallen short of the maximum, 20. Regardless of the subject. If I got a 13 in Chemistry or in English, he’d thwack me on the head seven times with his knuckles. If I got 15 in Literature or in Sciences, that was five thumps. If I’d failed an exam in History or Civics, as well as the beating, I was grounded for a month. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d dole out tasks to complete at home, from washing the cars to polishing his twenty pairs of shoes.
Thinking about how he might react caused me such anguish that I once stole the exam paper of a kid in my class who had got 20 in chemistry. I’d failed it, with a score of 7. When I was handed my paper, I started to shake. I didn’t think twice: the bell rang for break, I waited until the classroom had emptied, pretending