A Fish in the Water: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

the human species to continue to exist and for me to have been born.
    The job as prefect of Piura was the last steady one my grandfather Pedro ever had. I believe that during the years that the family lived there, until Odría’s military coup in 1948, which brought down José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, it was quite happy. Grandpa’s salary must have been very modest, but Uncle Lucho, who was working at the Romero Company, and my mother, who had found a job in the Piura branch of the Grace Line, contributed to meeting the household expenses. The prefecture had two patios and several mucky garrets where bats nested. My friends and I explored the garrets on our hands and knees, in hopes of catching one of those winged rats and making it smoke, since we held firmly to the belief that a bat in whose mouth anyone managed to place a cigarette could be killed off with a few puffs, since it was an avid smoker.
    The Piura of those days was a very small and happy place, with prosperous and good-humored hacienda owners—the Seminarios, the Checas, the Hilbcks, the Romeros, the Artázars, the Garcías—with whom my grandparents and my aunts and uncles established ties of friendship that were to last throughout their lives. We went on outings to the pretty little beach at Yacila, or to Paita, where bathing in the ocean always involved the risk of being attacked by stingrays (I remember one lunch, at the Artadi house, when my grandfather and Uncle Lucho, who had gone swimming at low tide, got stung by a ray and how a fat black woman cured them, right there on the beach, by heating their feet with her brazier and squeezing lemon juice on their wounds), or to Colán, at that time just a handful of little wooden houses built on pylons amid the vastness of that gorgeous sandy beach full of sparrow hawks and seagulls.
    At the Yapatera hacienda, belonging to the Checas, I rode horseback for the first time and heard England spoken of in a rather mythical way, since my friend James MacDonald’s father was British, and both he and his wife—Pepita Checa—revered that country, which they had more or less reproduced in those arid reaches of the highlands of Piura (at their house at the hacienda five o’clock tea was served and the conversation was in English).
    That year in Piura that was to end on the Eguiguren embankment with the revelation concerning my father lingers in my memory like a jigsaw puzzle: vivid, isolated, exciting images. The young Civil Guard who kept watch over the back door of the prefecture and made Domitila, one of the housemaids, fall in love with him by serenading her with the song Muñequita linda , in a voice filled with exaggeratedly heartfelt feeling, and the excursions with a bunch of my schoolmates along the dry riverbed and the sand pits of Castilla and Catacaos to watch the prehistoric iguanas or see the donkeys fornicating, hidden among the carob trees. The dips in the swimming pool of the Club Grau, our efforts to sneak into the films for grownups at the Variedades movie theater and the Municipal, and the expeditions, which filled us with excitement and guilt-ridden consciences, to spy from the shadows on that green house, the Casa Verde, built in the open countryside separating Castilla from Catacaos, concerning which myths redolent of sin circulated. The word puta , whore, filled me at one and the same time with horror and fascination. Going to post myself in the vicinity of that building, so as to see the wicked women who lived there and their night visitors, was an irresistible temptation, though I knew full well that I was committing a mortal sin and I would be obliged to go to confession afterward to reveal it.
    And the stamps that I began to collect, spurred on by the collection that my Grandpa Pedro had—a collection of rare postage stamps, triangular, multicolored, from exotic countries and in exotic languages, that my great-grandfather Belisario had collected and the two volumes of which were one of