a novel about him or someone very like him, written by me or someone very like me. It’s not a biographical novel. Not a historical novel. Not a documentary novel. It’s a novel conscious of the fact that reality occurs only once and that any reproduction made of it is condemned to adulteration, to distortion, to simulacrum.
I have tried and failed several times to embark on this novel. Everything I wrote invariably ended up in the bin. I couldn’t figure out the right texture for the copious material I’d collected over the years. It’s not that I’ve clarified everything by now, but spitting out these first paragraphs anchors me, gives me purchase, provides an unexpected solidity. The doubts haven’t dissolved, but somewhere in the depths I can make out the glimmering granular light of a certainty. All I know for sure is that I’m not going to write a novel about my father’s life, but rather about my father’s death: about what that death unleashed and revealed.
To do that, I have to go back to April 2006.
To what was going on in my life then.
I’d been avoiding psychoanalysis for months. The end of my relationship with Pierina Arbulú – five years together, two years living together – had devastated me. I was struggling to admit that my depression called for treatment. I’d come and go from the newspaper office where I worked. I’d come and go from my apartment. I’d get up in the mornings, think, sleep. Especially sleep. And I was barely eating.
A friend put me in touch with Elías Colmenares, a psychoanalyst who received patients in a two-storey house on La Fuente Ave., near the corner of 28 de Julio St., in Miraflores. Since I lived just three blocks away, I agreed to try him out for purely geographical reasons. That was my excuse, at least. The day I saw him for the first time, Elías had just turned fifty. He had broad, rosy cheeks. His lively eyes, blue as mouthwash, stood out between his nose and the black line of his eyebrows. We entered a room, he closed the door, we sat down. Despite all his hyperactive tics, Colmenares conveyed an oceanic calm. His speech, varied and comfortable, resembled the room where he saw his patients: a portrait of Lacan, a yellow satin couch, puppets of Freud and Warhol and Dalí suspended from the ceiling, a gladiolus in a pot, a cactus, copies of Picasso prints, a chessboard with two armies of wooden gargoyles lined up facing each other, a glass jar full of lollipops, miniature lamps, tourist guides to Athens, Prague, Rome, novels by Kundera and García Márquez, LPs by Dylan and Van Morrison. Depending on the details that caught a patient’s attention, the room could have been the sanctuary of a restless adult or the refuge of an awkward adolescent. In our first two sessions, I was the only one to speak at all. Elías invited me to explain why I’d come, and I felt a moral obligation to summarise my relationship with Pierina. I barely talked about anything else. I didn’t mention my family or my tedious job. I briefly mentioned my father’s death, but I focused on Pierina: on how she’d entered and exited my life, altering it, splitting it in two, like a bullet piercing a body and destroying its vital organs. From the leather sofa that served as his throne, Colmenares watched me, nodded, cleared his throat, completed the sentences I couldn’t finish with teacherly aplomb. It wasn’t until the third session that we had something resembling a real conversation. I was in the middle of a monologue about how horribly jealous I’d become in my last months with Pierina, and I was blaming myself for having caused the break-up by harassing her, attempting to trail and control her. I’d stopped acting like a boyfriend and become more like a police officer, I admitted, not looking at Colmenares, my gaze buried in the terracotta-coloured rug that covered the parquet floor. I was getting fed up with my own narrative, leading me as it did to reconstruct the fights that wore away at our relationship, the silences that hurt more than the insults, the insults that hurt more than the slammed doors, the slammed doors that recurred like bells tolling the hour. Suddenly, a silence fell that seemed to last an eternity. Colmenares broke it by changing the subject altogether.
‘Tell me something. Your parents – how did they meet?’
‘Weren’t we talking about something else?’ I responded, interlocking my fingers in my lap.
‘I think the change might be useful,’ Colmenares pressed, crossing one leg over the other.
‘Well, I don’t know, let me think,’ I said. I glanced upward, as if scanning the air for information that I should have been able to find in my memory. ‘They met at the Ministry of the Economy when it was still known as the Treasury.’
‘Could you be more specific? What were the circumstances? Who introduced them?’
‘My mother was a secretary in the office of Minister Morales Bermúdez. My father was the deputy minister or advisor. I suppose it must have been Morales who introduced them. My dad was still married to his first wife at the time.’
‘What was her name?’
‘She was called Lucila. Lucila Mendiola.’
‘Was called? You mean she’s dead?’
‘Yes, she died a few years ago.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘Barely. I saw her twice: at the wake for my father’s mother, Esperanza, and at my father’s wake.’
‘Do you remember what she was like?’
‘She was a very difficult woman. She came from an influential family from Sullana. That’s where she met my father. They say that when he once fell ill with appendicitis, she looked after him with such devotion and he felt so grateful that he married her out of a combination of love and duty. I don’t really know. They married and had three children. My three older siblings.’
‘Who’s the they who told you all this?’
‘My mother, my aunts and uncles.’
‘Go on.’
‘The problems began over the years. When my mother appeared in my father’s life, his marriage to Lucila was already in pieces. But she refused to sign for divorce, no matter how many times he asked her. My parents married outside of Peru, in the United States, in a registry office in San Francisco.’
‘And why wouldn’t Lucila have wanted to grant him the divorce?’
‘Resentment, spite, pride, something like that, I guess. Seeing her husband in love with another woman, a younger woman, she must have felt, I don’t know, humiliated or ridiculed. I’m speculating. What’s certain is that she wouldn’t give in. For us she became a kind of witch, the villain of the story. Perhaps she believed she could hold on to my father if she didn’t sign the papers, but she was wrong. Lucila never forgave him for leaving home, abandoning her, abandoning their children. I think she underestimated his feelings for my mother; maybe she thought it was just another dalliance, the whims of a womanising military man. She didn’t imagine he’d dare to leave altogether, much less that he’d remarry and have three more children.’
‘If they never divorced, then Lucila was still officially his wife when she died…’
‘In the legal sense, yes.’
‘So how were your parents able to marry? Why San Francisco?’
‘I don’t know. All I know is that a relative who was an ambassador helped them sort it out. It was a question of opportunity. It could have been Canada, Panama or anywhere else. In any case, it was a very quick, small ceremony, a formality. No guests.’
‘And witnesses?’
‘None. I don’t know. I’m not sure.’
