Mario Vargas Llosa: A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

That was probably true of my father. More intimately and decisively than by his bad disposition or his jealousy, his life with my mother was ruined by the sensation, which never left him, that she came from a world of names that meant something — those Arequipa families that boasted of their Spanish forebears, of their good manners, of the purity of the Spanish they spoke — that is to say, families from a world superior to that of his own, impoverished and brought to ruin by politics.

My paternal grandfather, Marcelino Vargas, had been born in Chancay, a town not far from Lima, and learned the métier of radio operator, which he was to teach my father in the brief calm interludes of his frenzied existence. But the passion of his life was politics. He entered Lima through the Cocharcas gate with Pierola guerrilla fighters on March 17, 1895, when he was a young lad. And later on he was a faithful follower of the charismatic liberal leader Augusto Durán, at the latter’s side throughout all his political vicissitudes, living for that reason a life of continual ups and downs, the prefect of Huánuco one day and deported to Ecuador the next, and many a time a jailbird and an outlaw. This life on the run forced my grandmother Zenobia Maldonado — whose photographs show her with an implacable expression — to perform all sorts of miracles in order to feed her five children, whom she brought up and educated practically all by herself (she had eight children, but three of them died shortly after they were born). My father used to say, in a voice full of emotion, that she had no compunction about whipping him and his brothers till she drew blood when they misbehaved.

They must have lived in great poverty, for my father studied at a public secondary school — the Colegio Guadalupe — which he left at the age of thirteen so as to contribute to his family’s support. He worked as an apprentice in an Italian shoemaker’s shop, and then, thanks to the rudiments of radiotelegraphy that Don Marcelino taught him, in the post office as a radio operator. In 1925 my grandmother Zenobia died and that same year my father was in Pisco, working as a telegrapher. One day with a friend he bought a ticket in the Lima lottery that won first prize: a hundred thousand soles! With his share, fifty thousand, a fortune in those days, he went off to Buenos Aires (which, in the affluent Argentina of the 1920s, was to Latin America what Paris was to Europe), where he led a dissipated life that made his fortune dwindle very quickly. With what little he had left, he was prudent enough to complete his studies in radiotelephony, at Trans Radio, from which he received a professional diploma. A year later he won a competitive examination as a junior operator in the Argentine merchant marine, where he remained for five years, plying all the seas in the world. (There existed from this period a photograph of him, very handsome, in a navy-blue uniform, that stood on my night table during my entire childhood in Cochabamba, and apparently I kissed it when I went to bed, saying good night to “my beloved papa who’s in heaven.”)

He returned to Peru around 1932 or 1933, having been hired by Panagra as a flight operator. He spent more than a year in those little pioneer airplanes flying through the unexplored Peruvian skies until, in 1934, he was assigned to the Tacna airport, where that meeting of March 1934, thanks to which I came into the world, took place.

His transient and varied life did not free my father from the tortuous rancors and complexes that constitute the psychology of Peruvians. In some way or other and for some complicated reason, my mother’s family came to represent for him what he had never had, or what his family had lost — the stability of a middle-class home and fireside, the strong network of relations with other families like his own, the reference point of a tradition and a certain social distinction — and, as a consequence, he conceived an enmity toward that family that came to the surface to the slightest pretext and turned into insults against “the Llosas” in his fits of rage. In all truth, these feelings had almost no basis in fact in those years — the mid-1930s. The Llosa family, which for some generations after the arrival in Arequipa of the first of their lineage — the field marshal Don Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno — had been well-off and possessed of aristocratic airs, had gradually come down in the world until, in my grandfather’s generation, it was a middle-class Arequipa family of modest means. It was true, nonetheless, that the family had solid ties to the little world of “society” and was firmly established. This latter fact was, in all likelihood, what that rootless being without a family and without a past, my father, was never able to forgive my mother for. My grandfather Marcelino, after Doña Zenobia’s death, had put the finishing touch on his adventurous life by doing something that filled my progenitor with shame: going off to live with an Indian woman who braided her hair and wore wide skirts, in a little village in the central Andes, where he reached the end of his life, a nonagenarian with countless offspring, having worked as a stationmaster for the national railway system. Not even the Llosas gave rise to such invective as that inspired in my father by Don Marcelino, on the rare occasions when he mentioned him. His name was taboo in my father’s house, as was everything else related to him. (And, no doubt for that reason, I always harbored a secret liking for the grandfather I had never known.)

My mother became pregnant with me shortly after marrying. She spent the first months of her pregnancy by herself in Lima, with the occasional company of her sister-in-law Orieli. Domestic quarrels followed one upon the other and life was very hard for my mother, yet her passionate love for my father never flagged. One day, Granny Carmen sent word from Arequipa that she would come to Lima to be at my mother’s side during her lying-in. My father had been entrusted by Panagra with the job of going to La Paz to open the company office there. As though it were the most natural thing in the world he said to his wife: “Go have the baby in Arequipa instead.” And he arranged everything in such a way that my mother hadn’t the least suspicion of what he was plotting to do. On that morning in November 1935, he said goodbye like an affectionate husband to his wife, who was five months pregnant.

He never phoned her again or wrote to her or gave any signs of life till eleven years later, that is to say, till very shortly before that afternoon when, on the Eguiguren embankment of Piura, my mother revealed to me that the father whom up until that moment I had believed was in heaven was still on this earth, alive and wagging his tail.

“You’re not telling me a fib, Mama?”

“Do you think I’d lie to you about a thing like that?”

“Is he really and truly alive?”

“Yes.”

“Am I going to see him? Am I going to meet him? Where is he, then?”

“Here in Piura. You’re going to meet him right now.”

When at last we were able to talk about it, many years after that afternoon and many years after my father had died, my mother’s voice still trembled and her eyes filled with tears, remembering how upset she was in those days, in Arequipa, when, in the face of the sudden total silence of her husband — no telephone calls, no letter, no message informing her of his whereabouts in Bolivia — she began to suspect that she had been abandoned and that, given his famous bad disposition, she would no doubt never see him again or have any news of him. “The worst of the whole thing,” she says, “was the gossip. What people made up: the rumors, the lies, the whispering campaigns. I was so ashamed! I didn’t dare set foot outside the house. When someone came to visit my parents, I shut myself up in my room and turned the key.” Luckily, Grandpa Pedro, Granny Carmen, Mamaé and all her brothers had behaved very well, cosseting her, protecting her, and making her feel that, even though she had been abandoned by her husband, she would always have a home and family.