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

the treasures that the Llosa family had lugged all over the world—which he allowed me to look through if I’d been a good boy. The parish priest of the Plaza Merino, Father García, an aged, grouchy man from Spain, was also a stamp collector and I used to come to exchange duplicate stamps with him, in bargaining sessions that sometimes ended with one of those fits of rage of his that my friends and I took great delight in arousing. The other family keepsake was the Opera Book that Granny Carmen had inherited from her parents, a lovely old illustrated volume with red and gold backings, which contained the plots of all the great Italian operas and some of their main arias, and which I spent hours reading and rereading.
    The gusty winds of local politics in Piura—where the political forces were more in equilibrium than they were in the rest of the country—touched me only in a confused way. The bad guys were the members of the APRA party, who had betrayed “Uncle José Luis” and were making life impossible for him there in Lima; the leader of APRA, Víctor Raúl de la Torre, had attacked my grandfather in a speech, there in Piura in the Plaza de Armas, the main square, accusing him of being a “prefect who was against the APRA.” (I went in secret to have a look at that APRA demonstration, despite my family’s having forbidden me to do so, and I discovered my schoolmate Javier Silva Ruete, whose father was a dyed-in-the-wool Aprista, waving a placard bigger than he was that read: “Maestro, young people acclaim you.”) But despite all the evils that the APRA embodied, there were, in Piura, a few decent Apristas, friends of my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, men like Jaime’s father, Dr. Máximo Silva, Dr. Guillermo Gulman, and Dr. Iparraguirre, our family dentist, with whose son we organized evening theatrical performances in the entry hall of his house.
    The mortal enemies of the Apristas were the Urristas of the Unión Revolucionaria (the Revolutionary Union), headed by the Piuran Luis A. Florez, whose bastion was the district of La Mangachería, celebrated for its chicherías , which sold the cheap fermented chicha that is the drink of the poor, along with its picanterías , where highly spiced dishes were served, and its music. Legend had it that General Sánchez Cerro—the dictator who was the founder of the UR, the Unión Revolucionaria, and who was murdered by an Aprista on April 30, 1933—had been born in La Mangachería and because of that all the people of the district were Urristas, and all the huts made of adobe and wild cane in this district of dirt streets and churres and piajenos (the words for children and donkeys in Piuran slang) displayed on their walls a faded image of Sánchez Cerro. Besides the urristas, there were the Socialists, whose leader, Luciano Castillo, was also a Piuran. The street fights between Apristas, Urristas, and Socialists were frequent, and I was aware of it because in those days—when a street demonstration often turned into fisticuffs—I wasn’t allowed to go out of the house and more police came to guard the prefecture, which at times did not prevent the Aprista hoodlums, once their demonstration was over, to creep as close as they could to throw stones at our windows.
    I felt very proud to be the grandson of somebody so important: the prefect. I went with Grandpa to certain public functions—inaugurations, the parade on national holidays, ceremonies at the Grau barracks—and was puffed up with pride when I saw him presiding over the meetings, receiving the salutes of the military, or delivering speeches. With all the lunches and public ceremonies he had to attend, Grandfather Pedro had found an excuse for the avocation he had always had and which he encouraged in his oldest grandson: composing poems. He did so with the greatest of ease, on the slightest pretext, and when it came his turn to speak, at banquets and official functions, he often read verses