the door, which then opens by itself like in a haunted house. The owner, shaking, emerges with his hands in the air. Now he is all acquiescence. The bruiser stands by nervously, an iron bar in his hand. One more whisky, dammit! my father stammers, his eyes full of tears of rage.
A few weeks after this event, which undoubtedly cost him more than one warning back in the barracks, my father learns that Beatriz has a new suitor. He doesn’t yet know that he has been betrayed. The news leaves him so low that he asks his superiors for immediate transfer to any province in the country. I don’t care where, he replies dejectedly when they ask him if he has any preference. The only thing the Gaucho wants is to leave Lima, where his desolation leaves him exposed every day to the intrusive questions of family and friends. He can’t deal with their pestering any longer.
He needs a change of air, to grapple with himself. He needs hard work, retreat, countryside, distance, solitude. They send him to northern Peru, to the heat and light of Sullana, as platoon commander of the 7th cavalry regiment. During the more than fifteen hours the journey north takes – alternating his thoughts with the views of the flat, leaden outlines of coastal cities like Chimbote, Chiclayo, Piura – the Gaucho decides to erase Beatriz, to remove her memory as if it were an enormous mound of earth that obstructed the sole window of his house, preventing the light from entering. The indignation of knowing she was with another man somewhat helps in this task. He takes up the challenge, without melodrama, a question of pure mental effort, like when he confronted mathematical problems deftly at school. But since he also suffers from pride and arrogance, he sets himself an additional feat: to find a substitute, someone to cover the hole left by Betty. Hadn’t she done the same? It wouldn’t be too hard, not when there were always so many women around soldiers, excited by the boots and the epaulettes of the uniform – and even more so in the provinces, thought the Gaucho. It was during the final leg of the journey to Sullana that he persuaded himself of this: he had to find another woman. He never imagined he would find her so quickly.
* * *
Lucila Mendiola fulfilled the fundamental characteristic that my father sought in women: she was difficult to win over. An aristocratic and pious young woman, she was the daughter of Ildefonso Mendiola, twice mayor of the city of Sullana. A girl who wouldn’t go out with just anyone. As soon as he caught a glimpse of her on his first stroll around the city plaza, he was disarmed: her eyes the colour of every shade of the sea, the gypsy skirt, the heavy necklaces that hung against her bony chest. If my father had read the poetry of Federico García Lorca, he would have felt that this woman had escaped from his verses.
‘Who’s that skinny lass with the green eyes?’ he asked the man walking beside him, Captain Miranda.
‘Don’t even look at her,’ Miranda replied curtly. ‘She’s the mayor’s daughter.’
‘So?’
‘She won’t pay you any attention. In any case, she’s engaged.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since two weeks ago.’
‘In two weeks’ time, she’ll be mine.’
In the end it took not two but seven weeks for him to execute his boast. The last thing the Gaucho needed was a woman who was already engaged, but he stubbornly pursued Lucila Mendiola and did everything he could for her to break off her engagement to an estate owner from a neighbouring town. He even deceitfully seduced a friend of the betrothed couple, little Brígida Garrido, so little that from afar she resembled a sparrow.
Faking an interest in Brígida secured him direct access to Lucila’s inner circle. That was how he managed to start talking to the young Mendiola, to beguile her with his Buenos Aires accent, to flatter her with the poetry he borrowed from the books penned by his own father. When he finally won Lucila’s full attention and began to promenade beside her around the central plaza, poor Brígida Garrido understood the wretched role she had played and shut herself up in a convent, never to leave again.
As the months passed, once his obsession with finding a mate had been satisfied, the Gaucho learned to love Lucila and her family. The Mendiola family received him in Sullana as the Abdulá family had never done in Buenos Aires. They made him feel welcome, appreciated, and even took care to make his convalescence more comfortable following an operation for appendicitis.
All this despite the fact that Don Ildefonso Mendiola, the mayor, had hated the military ever since a lieutenant by the name of Lizárraga had left his eldest daughter Norma stranded at the altar. With second lieutenant Cisneros, this prejudice faded. Such esteem, such domestic affection amid that pastoral setting, served to deepen and strengthen the Gaucho’s initially uncertain sentiments towards Lucila.
I still have in my possession a series of little cards from my father on which he wrote messages to Lucila, all infused with florid rhetoric.
May we commemorate together many thirtieths of the month, my love. Yours, Lucho. 30 July 1948.
God willing, I may come to be worth something in this life, if only that I may lay it at your feet as the greatest proof of my adoration and idolatry. Yours, Lucho. September 1948.
All I ask of you, my love, is that you never take from me the blessing of adoring you for the rest of my life. October 1948.
For my adored Lucila, my love, my life, my hope, my world, my obsession. You are everything to me, but above all you are mine. February 1949.
In those same days, however, the immaculate name of Beatriz still sent shivers up his spine.
* * *
There is a photograph someone took of us in Piura in 1980. A while back I removed it from a family album. I like to look at it. You’re standing at the end of the swimming pool in the enormous house we lived in that year. You’re wearing a bathing costume patterned in blue and white squares (I still remember the texture of the damp suit hanging in the garden). The hairless legs, the wet hair, the blurred moustache, the blurred nipples. The sun throws slashes of light across your milky skin. Your muscles still evoke the robust horse rider you once were. Poised on your shoulders like a child acrobat on a giant, I’m just about to dive into the still waters of the swimming pool. My arms are outstretched, my eyes fixed on the tiles. Our shadow appears against the faded green background, and it trembles where it crosses the water. I’m five or six years old. My blue swimming costume has a red waistband and a fish embroidered on the left hand side in the same colour. The elaborate dive is about to take place. After my body pierces the water, causing the minimum disturbance to its calm surface, you’ll dive after me, producing a thrilling tsunami; without resurfacing, advancing like a slow submarine or tame shark, you’ll swim the length of the pool. We loved putting on this show for an audience. I felt so good up there, so essential, so brave, a leading player. That was our ritual, perhaps the only one we shared in those years. I’d climb up your back like a steep stairway of vertebrae, and once at the top, on the broad platform of your shoulders, holding onto your hands, your wet hair between my ankles, I’d prepare myself for the dive straight into the pool. Click! You’d follow straight after. We’d hear the distorted echo of the applause from under the water.
That year, the Army sent you on a tour of several northern cities as General Commander of the First Military Region. We moved to Piura. Your office was adjacent to the house, so you were your own neighbour. Your daily commute took ten steps. If I were to return to that house I might find it had shrunk, but at the time it seemed huge. It had two floors connected by a wooden staircase with a banister and very broad bottom steps. There was always a bustle of people around: drivers, butlers, staff. The photograph shows the sliding glass doors that led from the terrace inside, where the chairs of the informal dining room can be glimpsed, and its
