broadcasts and follow the ins-and-outs of the General Benavides government. The apparatus became a kind of family pet. Everyone took care of it, taking turns to manipulate its various buttons and dials, and making sure nothing scratched or damaged it. The Cisneros Vizquerra children spent hours huddled around that radio, as if it were an oracle or a bonfire. The news would transport them to distant countries they’d quickly locate on the globe that spun on a metal axis at the corner of their father’s desk. This device also brought them news from the Spanish Civil War, which they followed attentively, though they were predisposed by the political views of Fernán. He distrusted the communists and admired Francisco Franco and Colonel José Moscardó, who had preferred to sacrifice his own son over surrendering the Alcázar de Toledo – a story my father would tell me with tears in his eyes fifty years later, at the dining table of our home in Monterrico, and which so moved me that I felt a sudden respect for Colonel Moscardó and pity for his son, Luis, who at the other end of the telephone tells his father not to worry about him, that he knows he’s going to be shot, but the Alcázar won’t surrender, and so the colonel asks him to commend his soul to God, to cheer for Spain, and promises him he’ll be a national hero as he bids him farewell, saying goodbye, my son, I embrace you.
* * *
My grandfather Fernán returns to Peru on 12 August 1951, during the administration of General Odría, thirty years after having been forced to board a ship bound for Panama. He returns in his sixtieth year, thirty of them spent in exile. He returns as a diplomat, but he still identifies as a journalist and poet. He lives with the Cisneros Vizquerra children in a house in the Pardo district. From there, he heads into central Lima every day, walking down the street now known as Jirón de la Unión, along the stretch previously known as Baquíjano that was home to the offices of La Prensa, traversing the streets where a retail store now stands in the place of the former Palais Concert, and crossing at the corner of Mercaderes and Plateros, opposite Casa Welsch, the building where my grandmother Esperanza had worked as a young lady.
Fernán subsequently moves his whole family to a house on La Paz St., near the Quebrada de Armendáriz avenue that cuts down to the sea, where decades later I would live with my parents and siblings. There, Fernán resumes writing lectures and essays that would never be published. In early 1953, returning from one of his walks, he feels tired and dizzy – symptoms of pulmonary emphysema, which will render him bedridden and dependent on an oxygen cylinder the shape and hue of a naval artillery shell. His son, my father, sees him arrive home that first afternoon and senses something worrisome in his face, an expression of fear or bewilderment. It’s the same expression I’ll see in his own face much later, in 1995, after his first heart attack.
On 17 March 1954, Fernán answers a call from Pedro Beltrán, editor of La Prensa, who invites him to his house opposite the San Marcelo church. In his haste, my grandfather leaves an article unfinished on his desk – only the title is legible: ‘This Time, the Real Crisis’ – and asks his son Mincho to accompany him. Beltrán welcomes them in and offers them cognac; over the course of the conversation, he formally invites Fernán to return to writing a column for the newspaper. Fernán is overjoyed. Little does he know that within a few minutes this joy will kill him.
There he is, trading ideas on possible names for the new column (Disappearing Lima, Eminent Peruvians, Luminaries of Lima, Landscapes) and discussing the frequency and length of the articles with Don Pedro – when he suddenly struggles to breathe and feels a stabbing pain. It’s his heart, which has begun to burst. Beltrán lays him on the floor. Seeing that his left arm is stiff, he runs to call a doctor who lives nearby, who arrives only to confirm the severity of the heart attack. At his side, Mincho sees his father’s leg shudder in a spasm, and all he can do is cross himself.
Beside me is a folder containing the front pages from the following day, Thursday, 18 March 1954. ‘Cisneros died yesterday. His life was a paragon of civic values,’ La Prensa. ‘Fernán Cisneros is dead,’ El Comercio. ‘The poet of noble causes has died,’ Última Hora. ‘Fernán Cisneros passed away yesterday,’ La Nación. ‘Deep sadness at the death of Cisneros,’ La Crónica. The headlines continue in further cuttings: ‘Journalism is in mourning across the nation.’ ‘Just as he returned to writing, Cisneros left us.’ ‘Sudden demise of the former editor of La Prensa.’ ‘A life dedicated to Peru.’ There are cables from newspapers in Uruguay, Mexico and Argentina announcing his death, as well as a series of reports from the wake, held in the editorial offices of La Prensa, and about the burial in the Presbítero Maestro cemetery.
I also have photographs of the ceremonies held on the centenary of his birth, in November 1982, at the Academia Diplomática and in the Miraflores park that bears his name: Parque Fernán Cisneros. I appear in some of these photos, aged seven, alongside my father, siblings, cousins. I still remember that sunny day in the park and the unveiling of the commemorative plaque and bust, which describes Fernán as a ‘poet, journalist and diplomat’. Further down, the plaque quotes the verse that we would repeat at countless breakfasts and lunches: ‘Birth, life, death – these are not the worst. True tragedy is to live without smiling. Everything grows beautiful with love. Birth, life, death.’ A sweet, sad verse that cloaks more truthful would-be epitaphs: the worst is not to die, but not to know; tragedy is not failing to smile, but remaining silent.
It is precisely because of the things that Fernán failed to do or say – far more than those he did and said – that I acknowledge myself as his grandson, and as the son of that other silent man, the Gaucho, who admired and loved his father in the same way that I loved mine, with the same love shot through with mystery and distance that is the only way to love a man of over fifty who indolently brings you into the world, uninterested in really accompanying you, and then imposes himself as the guiding force of your universe, the architect of everything you touch, everything you say, everything you see – though not everything you feel. And it’s precisely because I can feel something that he was unable to show me that I can tolerate the thousands of questions spawning in the space beyond the limits of the world he designed for me. Questions that arise in the darkness he never knew how to explore, perhaps because he’d inherited the very same from his own father too: discipline and distance; protocol and absence; awareness of duty, of force of will, of conduct. A responsible vision of the future, and beneath all of this a failed or clumsy love forged of letters and dedications, of verses and songs, of pompous and rhetorical words – but empty of affection, of closeness, of any warmth that might leave a visible trail a century later.
Chapter 3
Mexico City, 14 July 1940
My darling Esperanza,
I’ll begin by asking once again for a letter from our little Gaucho, in case that helps persuade him. And tell him I don’t want any old letter, but an account of everything he thinks, wants, and does. I think it’s time for a father to understand his son’s mind.
As a result of the nervous condition he suffered in his early years, our dear son has an understandable and painful inferiority complex that must be eradicated from his spirit. My impression is that he has often held clear intentions to return to formal study, but he is troubled and embarrassed by the belief that he has no knack for it. It’s a common situation. He is proud, so he doesn’t admit it, and since he won’t admit it, his spiritual confusion discourages him. He doesn’t study because he doesn’t like it, and he doesn’t like it because he doesn’t think he’s up to it. So he doesn’t attend school and deceives us all. Now, skipping school might be innocent enough today, but tomorrow it could lead him down the road to ruin. Therefore, I believe that you should return him to a boarding school, on my orders – but darling, allow him to choose which one. Or at least let him believe that he is choosing it. Talk up the virtues of the military college, for example. Don’t let him suspect that it is about punishing him or putting him on the right path. That way, he can enter the school with his head held high. Of course, this is my preferred choice of college because it will teach him love for discipline, for structure and for
