A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

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My mama took me by the arm and led me out into the street by the service entrance of the prefecture. We walked along toward the Eguiguren embankment. It was the final days of 1946 or the first days of 1947, but exams at the Salesian school were already over, I had finished the fifth grade, and summer in Piura, with its white light and asphyxiating heat, had already come.

“You already know it, of course,” my mama said, without her voice trembling. “Isn’t that so?”

“Know what?”

“That your papa isn’t dead. Isn’t that so?”

“Of course. Of course.”

But I didn’t know that, or even remotely suspect it, and it was as if the world had left me paralyzed with surprise. My papa, alive? And where had he been all the time I thought he was dead? It was a long story that up until that day — the most important day in my life till then and, perhaps, in my later life, too — had been carefully hidden from me by my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my great-aunt Elvira — Mamaé—and my aunts and uncles, that vast family with which I spent my childhood, first in Cochabamba and then, once my grandfather Pedro was appointed mayor of this city, here in Piura. An episode in a cruel and vulgar serial, which — I gradually discovered this later, as I went about reconstructing it with facts from here and there and imaginary additions in places where it turned out to be impossible to fill in the blanks — had made my mother’s family (my only family, in fact) terribly ashamed and ruined my mother’s life when she was still little more than an adolescent.

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