all an amateur tango dancer, one capable of the most complex choreography I ever saw: dancing with Carlota, foreheads pressed together, hands on each others’ backs, switching their legs back and forth like swords in a forest? Perhaps he doubted or repressed his own abilities, not wanting to risk giving them full rein. Or perhaps someone persuaded him it was too feminine, and he ended up a soldier out of sheer stubbornness, so that no one could look down at him, obstinately proving to anyone who doubted his skills that he was perfectly capable of mastering even things that didn’t interest him in the least. If his parents believed that his lack of discipline had no remedy and that he would refuse to enter the military college, then he would show them just how wrong they were. When in April 1941 his father learned that he had enrolled, he wrote from Mexico: ‘However happy you may feel, your absent father is even happier.’
My father did not choose to become a soldier, but once he joined the Army he found the lifestyle to be compatible with something he’d always sought from the domestic sphere during the exile of my grandfather Fernán: order. An order that would quell the chaos. An order that would restore authority. He embraced the Army with an unfaltering dedication because he needed something to order his head and his life. Nevertheless, in the barracks he found a way not to entirely abandon the artist he carried within, to open up a tiny source of sustenance: joining the cavalry. It made sense. After all, the horse demands of its rider the same as ballet does of dancers: correct posture, strong calves, balance, a sense of space and serenity. A serene dancer never loses the rhythm. A serene horseman controls not just the steed he mounts, but also the wild animal he carries inside. And that’s what my father was: a wild animal. His character drove him to escape, flee and disappear into the plains, like a dispossessed gaucho who rides off until he is no more than a trembling point of light in the distance.
* * *
After his third year at the National Military College, in September 1942 he received another letter from his father in Mexico, the final one I uncovered in my Uncle Gustavo’s files.
Serene and strong, you have embarked on a course determined by fate, and I will always follow your steps closely in my heart, as I accompany you now from afar with a deep emotion that is both born of my affection for you and mindful of my responsibility. I am certain that we will continue loving and understanding each other in life not only as father and son, but also as best friends, with a shared interest in maintaining the tradition of integrity, seriousness and patriotism that marks our family name.
The father declares to his son his responsible affection and promises his friendship. But it’s a friendship based on our most well-tested family tradition: that is to say, a rhetorical friendship defined by geographical distance. The letter confirms as much with the expression: ‘You have embarked on a course determined by fate.’
In 1943, only four years remained before my father left Argentina to pursue this course. Ever since they were little, he and his siblings had all adopted a mandate: to return to the country where their parents were born and from which their father had been exiled. And that was the word they used: to return, even though they were talking about returning to a country they had never visited. How do you return to a place you have never been? They never felt the weight of this contradiction because they accepted that they lived in a kind of imaginary Peru, a bubble made of the countless references provided by their parents; of their grandfather Luis Benjamín’s lines of poetry; of the pages of the history books that reached their hands; of the postcards sent from Lima by relatives they had never met; of the voices of cousins, uncles and aunts who visited Buenos Aires and told them about everything they’d see in Peru.
Soon these mental pictures of the country would come to an end: in 1947, one by one, the Cisneros Vizquerra siblings returned to Peru. Once they had settled in Lima, while maintaining the family fraternity and solidarity, they began to dedicate themselves to their own very different fields: Juvenal studied Medicine and Linguistics; Carlota, Psychology; my father continued his career in the Army; Gustavo became an industrial engineer; Adrián a civil engineer and Reynaldo – oh Reynaldo! – uncle Reynaldo, the wildcard uncle, the one who studied Tourism, who became the king of public relations, a frustrated designer, and ended up a bon vivant always ready to live large, even if he didn’t have a penny in his pocket. Everything they’d seemed to share during their childhood in Argentina changed during their adulthood in Peru. While they lived in Buenos Aires, they were bound together by the future. Peru was a shared goal. Once they had reached it, their greatest similarity would be their past.
* * *
The Gaucho was twenty-one when he had to leave Argentina. How hard it was to put Buenos Aires behind him. Not only because he was leaving behind his childhood friends – Pepe Breide, Tito Arenas, ‘El Chino’ Falsía – or because he was interrupting his Army training, but because it meant he would be dangerously far from Beatriz. Beatriz Abdulá.
This is a name that I heard around the house since I was very young. An almost mythical name, even though it only belonged to – my father claimed – ‘a lass I knew in Argentina’, an account my uncles and aunts echoed in chorus when I asked them, overcome with curiosity at the idea of my father in love for the first time. Even my mother spoke of Beatriz without jealousy, almost fondly. But no one offered many details. Instead of placating my desire to know, this laconic response made it more acute. What was this Beatriz like? What kind of relationship did they have? Why did it end? Who broke up with who? The Gaucho said she was just a lass he’d known, but the emptiness in his eyes when he spoke contradicted his words. I didn’t trust his story, like with everything he said about the feelings that marked his childhood and adolescence. He was always editing events, cutting and pasting them so that his children wouldn’t see what he concealed behind the montage. He didn’t like losing, either in life or in the account he presented of his life, and so during his lifetime Beatriz Abdulá was just that: a childhood crush, a girlfriend of no real importance, a scant memory that it wasn’t worth turning over or digging into.
A year ago I went to the Peruvian Army’s Permanent General Archive, located in a pavilion of the general headquarters known as the ‘Pentagonito’ (or Little Pentagon) of San Borja. There I was received by a tall, brown-skinned, heavily moustachioed colonel who pulverised the bones in my hand with his greeting, asked me a series of irrelevant questions and told me just how much he admired the wonderful, exemplary man General Cisneros Vizquerra had been. He then allowed me to examine my father’s personal file. Sitting behind his desk in his office with its tinted windows, he warned me that I must maintain total secrecy with regard to the confidential material I was about to see.
‘This is the intellectual property of the Armed Forces. If anyone finds out you’ve been here, I’m the one with his neck on the line.’
‘Don’t worry, colonel. I won’t say a word,’ and I pulled an imaginary zip closed over my lips.
‘That’s what journalists always say, and then they screw us.’ Now the colonel was laughing.
‘Take it easy, I’m not here as a journalist.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I’m very grateful for the opportunity.’
‘One more thing, Cisneros. Since your father was a Minister of State and Chief of Staff of the Joint Command, his file is kept on a special shelf and it’s not supposed to be moved without orders from higher up. I’m turning a blind eye to this, you understand?’
‘I understand. I just want to see the papers, perhaps make a few copies.’
‘Copies? Impossible! They told me you just wanted to take a look.’
‘Alright, alright, forget it. I’ll just read the file, that’s all.’
‘Don’t try and pull
