Juvenal keeps running aimlessly; there’s no way he’s going to school now, and he wonders how long his father has been going to that big house, the sight of which he wishes he could expel from his mind, but cannot.
Juvenal said nothing about what he had seen until many years later, far into adulthood. He kept it to himself, and only he knew how deeply the discovery had changed him.
When his brother Gustavo, at the age of sixty, discovered their father’s hidden letters and all the echoed truths they contained – the existence of the priest, Cartagena; Luis Benjamín’s illegitimacy; Fernán’s adultery – he proposed to Juvenal that they write a book together. It made sense: Juvenal was the older brother, the only one who had studied literature, and he had become a much loved and respected intellectual in Peru. If there was anyone in the family who had been called to illuminate these centuries of darkness, it was he. From the outset, though, Juvenal responded to his younger brother’s investigations and discoveries with unwavering disinterest. He wanted nothing to do with the past. Undeterred, Gustavo kept insisting that they collaborate on the project, until one day Juvenal cut him off with a curt statement that he wouldn’t fully understand for many years: ‘To me, our father was nothing more than a man who came home at midnight and left at six in the morning.’
* * *
When my uncle Gustavo first told me the story of the pursuit across Buenos Aires, I was stunned. I couldn’t stop thinking about my uncle Juvenal, about his reticence to discuss certain details from his childhood. The image of the boy secretly making his way through the city streets, ultimately glimpsing his own father’s hidden life, made me feel both astonished and empty. Thanks to the letters Gustavo later entrusted to me, I was able to reconstruct those years when my grandfather Fernán – out of fear, out of his inability to express himself – perpetuated this gruelling strategy of conjugal survival: he’d spend the night with my grandmother Esperanza; leave the house on Esmeralda St. early in the morning to spend the first part of the day with his wife Hermelinda and his older children, taking advantage of the fact that the younger children were at school; and then he’d go off to work at La Nación before returning to his lover and their children late at night. These younger children, these hidden children, grew up with my grandfather’s endless stories about Peru. He never stopped reminding them that they were Peruvian, even though they’d been born in Argentina, and he made clear that the family’s mission was to return to Lima someday. They understood that their father had been forced out of the country, that they were foreigners, and they grew up waiting for Leguía’s dictatorship to fall so they could avenge their exile and see their homeland at last. Meanwhile, they had to talk like Peruvians. Esperanza pulled their ears every time she heard them say che or vos like their Argentinian schoolmates, and she warned the boys not to fall in love so they wouldn’t suffer when it was time to leave. My father, ‘El Gaucho’, was to disregard this last piece of advice.
From Esmeralda they moved to 3104 Avellaneda St. and two years later to an upper-floor flat at 611 Boyacá St., an apartment with two huge windows.
My grandfather had employed Fernando, the oldest of his ‘official’ children, as his personal secretary when the Peruvian government assigned him a diplomatic post in Argentina. Every night, Fernando would accompany his father to the corner of Boyacá and Méndez de Andes. He would usually leave him there and continue on home. One night in 1936, he changed his mind.
‘Can we go all the way to your doorstep?’ Fernando said, not entirely sure of his own next move.
‘Sure,’ Fernán replied naturally. He didn’t sense what was coming.
They walked in silence for a few more steps until they reached the front door of number 611. Fernán moved towards his twenty-nine year old son to kiss him goodnight. Fernando drew back.
‘Now can I come up, Dad?’ he asked.
His voice tore apart the night.
‘What for?’ said Fernán, his jaw tense, his eyes incredulous.
‘Do you really think I haven’t worked it out?’
‘What do you want to come up for?’ Fernán repeated stubbornly, trying to postpone the moment of truth, his gaze now fixed on the bunch of keys clinking in his clumsy hands.
‘I want to meet the rest of my family!’ Fernando shouted and pressed the bell.
Esperanza was observing the scene from a window, and when she went down to open the door a minute later she found them in each others’ arms, sobbing uncontrollably. My uncle Gustavo recalls what happened next as if it were a movie. Fernando, the older brother, whom the Cisneros Vizquerra children had never seen, climbs the stairs. From the living room he hears the footsteps on the wooden treads. They sound like shots. Esperanza, nervously drying her hands on a tea towel, receives him at the top of the stairs and opens her arms in welcome. Behind her, hidden among her skirts like shy dwarves, are Carlota, Luis Federico – my father – and Gustavo, their eyes as wide as plates. Further back, Juvenal is curled up at one end of a sofa, concealing his curiosity behind a comic book. In another room, Reynaldo is asleep in his cot. They all stare at the apparition with a mix of terror and curiosity. The children have never seen this man before, but they sense that they know him or should know him. Fernando’s eyes shine moistly in the dim, almost orange light of the single bulb hanging in the centre of the room. Fernán says something, Esperanza says something in reply. Everything is brief and stiff. Then the visitor moves his lips, addressing his siblings. His words, awkward and imprecise as they are, hit with the force of an earthquake.
* * *
A year after this encounter – after Hermelinda Diez Canseco had died and several of her children had moved to Peru – Fernán and Esperanza felt at liberty to marry in Buenos Aires. My aunt Carlota and my uncle Gustavo served as acolytes in the church where the ceremony was held. There is just one photograph of that day in 1937, a photo in which my grandmother Esperanza wears the benevolent smile of someone receiving a much-delayed reward. Flanking them are two couples, their friends and witnesses, the Arriolas and the Pancorvos. Father López, a Franciscan priest who lived in Argentina, completes the group. The exact date is uncertain, but it was summer, that atrocious summer of 1937 when Buenos Aires suffered a plague of locusts that swarmed in from the pampas, where they’d devastated the crops; descending on the city, they darkened the sky and caused panic on the streets. This horde of voracious, battle-hardened insects took over downtown Buenos Aires for days. On the day of the wedding, Fernán had to repeatedly use his cane to shoo away the locusts that were blinding him.
The years following their marriage were perhaps the most memorable of their exile. With nothing left to hide, Fernán dedicated himself to his children. He educated them, took them to school, led them on walks through the city and the countryside. The children would always picture their father as the man who took them shopping, rode trams, drafted documents for the Chaco Peace Conference, shaved in front of the mirror wearing his long-johns, and always carried around the youngest, Adrián, when he was an infant. Fernán recited French and Spanish poets to them, taught them to comb their hair in a side parting, and composed improving verses that he’d frame and hang on the bathroom door – ditties that my father and his siblings would recite from memory whenever they met for lunch, years later, in a display of gratitude for a period filled with discovery and upheaval.
If the fair Cisneros lass
and the fine Cisneros lads
don’t give their hides a scrub
every morning when they wake,
she’ll never be a lady,
and gents they’ll never make.
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