Читать книгу The Distance Between Us - Renato Cisneros - Страница 8

Chapter 2

One day in 1929, during a lunchtime break at San Marón School in Buenos Aires, nine-year-old Juvenal Cisneros beats a fellow pupil in a maths quiz. The other boy accuses him of cheating and gives him a shove. Juvenal pushes back, and soon their fists are swinging – a trifling incident that would soon grow serious. Someone pulls them apart. But as the other boy moves away, bitter with defeat, he yells over his shoulder ‘At least I don’t share my dad, like you do!’ For minutes afterwards, once the youngsters returned to their classrooms and peace has been restored, these words continue to ring in Juvenal’s ears. In fact, he’ll continue to hear them for the rest of his life. ‘At least I don’t share my dad, like you do.’ The next morning, he gets up and decides to follow his father. Fernán’s teaching jobs and his work as a journalist at La Nación have secured a more comfortable lifestyle for the family. Gone are the dingy hotels and rented rooms of his early years as an exile: the flat at 400 Suipacha St.; the room with the shared bathroom at 330 Cerrito St.; the tenement at 2200 Paraguay St. Now they live at 865 Esmeralda St., in flat number 20 of an old sand-coloured mansion house with cold tiles and exposed pipes in the entrance hall. Juvenal tells his mother, Esperanza, that he has to be at school early and descends the chipped marble staircase. He passes through the front gate and spots his father on the corner. He follows his route for one, three, six, seven, ten blocks, trying not to lose sight of him. Heading down Córdoba Ave., he crosses Maipú, Florida, and San Martín before turning right on Reconquista. Then he turns again on Corrientes before zig-zagging across Sarmiento, then Rivadavia. He’s not sure what he’s doing there or what he hopes to find. It feels foolish to be chasing the silhouette of this man who now seems more mysterious than ever. Yet it also feels urgent. Could there be any truth in what the boy yelled at him? Who do I share my dad with? If he had a secret, wouldn’t he tell me? Of course he would, Juvenal answers his own question, and he quickens his step to keep sight of that patch of blue advancing unhurriedly down the pavement. Juvenal watches as his father stops before a shop window, perhaps considering a gift for him or his siblings – and he feels like an idiot for doubting him, for being swayed by the blethering of a spiteful kid. But as much as he wants to believe that this pursuit is senseless, a stronger force impels him to keep playing detective. Rounding yet another corner, Juvenal tries to talk himself into abandoning the mission – What am I doing here? What will they say at school? Won’t they have called my mother already? – and gradually slows his pace, but without taking his eyes off the target. Just two more blocks, he tells himself, ashamed now, wishing he could run to catch up with his father and embrace him, apologise for questioning the exclusiveness of his love, beg for forgiveness. So he allows Fernán to pull further ahead and starts to feel like the danger has passed. Then, turning the next corner, at the junction of Tacuarí and Moreno, Juvenal sees what he most feared – or what, deep down, he had hoped to discover. He will never be able to erase the scene from his memory. There, on the other side of Belgrano Ave., his father is leaving the pavement and entering a house, holding hands with two children. A boy and a girl, older than Juvenal. The boy must be about 14, the girl 15 or 16. Frozen behind a newsstand, Juvenal watches as these total strangers kiss and hug his dad as blithely and spontaneously as he himself does every night when he gets home to Esmeralda St., and he feels something collapse inside him. The scene is a revelation. Perhaps too much so. The front door closes behind them, and only then does Juvenal notice how much bigger the house is than where he lives, and he is filled with a rage beyond his years – a heat and a pain that immediately turn into tears, no matter how hard he tries to hold them back. ‘Hey, kid, you ok?’ the newspaper seller asks. But the kid is too distressed to answer, and he sets off at a run, in every direction and none, cursing himself for not having gone straight to school that morning. And as he runs, his face crumpled, tears flowing freely, he wonders who these other children could be. He doesn’t know that their names are Mincho and Rosario. He doesn’t know there are three more inside: Fernando, Moruno and María Jesús. All are his father’s children with Hermelinda Diez Canseco. He doesn’t know that he, Juvenal, is actually the first of the seven offspring born to a beautiful but impure relationship. But he does understand something, he makes a connection – and suddenly, as he runs, he thinks of Lima, of the room where he was born, in a yard beside the ghostly Matusita house, at the junction of Sol and España streets, a bedroom where his mother was always alone, and now, on the streets of Buenos Aires, this past solitude suddenly makes all the sense in the world. 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.

Around this time, Fernán purchased a shortwave radio so he could listen to Peruvian National Radio 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.