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

written for the occasion.
    Only thirty or forty years later did I learn about the two things that were to decide my future life and that occurred in that year of 1946. The first of them was a letter that my mother received one day from Orieli, my father’s sister-in-law. She had read in the newspapers that my grandfather was prefect of Piura and presumed that Dorita was with him. What had her life been like? Had she remarried? And how was Ernesto’s young son? She had written the letter following instructions from my father, who, driving in his car to his office, had heard on the radio news of the appointment of Don Pedro J. Llosa Bustamante as prefect of Piura.
    The second was a trip of a few weeks that my mama had made to Lima, in August, for a minor operation. She telephoned Orieli, who invited her to come have tea with her. On entering the little house in Magdalena del Mar where Orieli and Uncle César lived, she spied my father, in the living room. She fell into a faint. They had to pick her up off the floor, stretch her out in an armchair, bring her to with smelling salts. Seeing him for a moment was enough for those five and a half hellish months of her marriage and her abandonment and the eleven years of silence on the part of Ernesto J. Vargas to be erased from her memory.
    No one in the family learned about that meeting or about the secret reconciliation or the epistolary conspiracy that went on for several months, setting up the ambush that had already begun to take place that afternoon, on the Eguiguren embankment, beneath the bright sun of early summer. Why didn’t my mother tell her parents and her brothers that she had seen my father? Why didn’t she tell them what she was going to do? Was it because she knew that they would have tried to dissuade her and would have predicted what awaited her?
    Gamboling about with happiness, believing and not believing what I had just heard, I hardly listened to my mother as we headed for the Hotel de Turistas, while she repeated to me that if we ran into my grandparents, or Auntie Mamaé or Uncle Lucho or Aunt Olga, I was not to say a word about what she had just revealed to me. In my excitement, it never entered my mind to ask her the reason for all the mystery, why it had to be kept a secret that my papa was alive and had come to Piura and that within a few minutes I was going to meet him. What would he be like? What would he be like?
    We went inside the Hotel de Turistas and, the moment we crossed the threshold of a little reception room that was on the left, a man dressed in a beige suit and wearing a green tie with little white raised dots got up out of his chair and came toward us. “Is this my son?” I heard him say. He leaned down, put his arms around me, and kissed me. I was disconcerted and didn’t know what to do. My face was frozen in a false smile. My consternation was due to the difference between this flesh-and-blood papa, gray at the temples and with such sparse hair, and the handsome young man in a merchant marine uniform whose photo was standing on my night table. I had something of the feeling that it was a con game: this papa didn’t look like the one I had thought was dead.
    But I didn’t have time to think about that, for the man was saying that we should come have a ride around Piura in his car. He spoke to my mama with a familiarity that I didn’t much care for and that made me just a little jealous. We went out onto the main square, full of scorching sunlight and people as it was on Sundays, when there were open-air band concerts, and climbed into a blue Ford, with him and my mother in the front seat and me in the back. As we were leaving, a classmate of mine, Espinoza, slender and swarthy-skinned, came by on the sidewalk and was sauntering over to the car in his easygoing way when the car took off and all the two of us could do was wave goodbye to each other.
    We drove around the downtown area for a while and all of a sudden the man who was