Conversation in the Cathedral (87 page)

Queta opened her eyes and sat up in the tub: Robertito was wiping off some drops that had landed on his pants.

“Cayo Shithead?” Queta said. “I don’t believe it. Is he here in Lima?”

“He’s come back to Peru,” Robertito said. “It turns out that he has a house in Chaclacayo with a pool and everything. And two big dogs the size of tigers.”

“You’re lying,” Queta said, but she lowered her voice because
Robertito
signaled her not to talk so loud. “Has he come back, really?”

“A beautiful house, set smack in the middle of an enormous garden,” Robertito said. “I didn’t want to go. I told Madame, it’s a whim, you’re going to be disappointed, and she didn’t pay any attention to me. Still thinking about her deal with him. He’s got capital, he knows that I treat my partners right, we were friends. But he treated us like a couple of beggars and threw us out. Your ex, Quetita, your ex’s ex. What a swine he was.”

“Is he going to stay in Peru?” Queta asked. “Has he gotten into politics again?”

“He said he was just passing through.” Robertito shrugged his
shoulders
. “You can imagine how loaded he must be. A house like that, just to stop off in. He’s living in the United States. He’s exactly the same, I tell you. Old, ugly and nasty.”

“Didn’t he ask you anything about …?” Queta said. “He must have said something to you, didn’t he?”

“About the Muse?” Robertito said. “A swine, I tell you, Quetita. Madame talked to him about her, we felt so awful about what happened to the poor thing, he must have heard. And he didn’t bat an eye. I didn’t feel so bad, he said, I knew that the madwoman would come to a bad end. And then he asked about you, Quetita. Yes, yes. The poor thing’s in the hospital, imagine. And what do you think he said?”

“If he said that about Hortensia, I can imagine what he’d say about me,” Queta said. “Come on, don’t keep my curiosity waiting.”

“Tell her, just in case, that I won’t give her a nickel, that I’ve given her enough already.” Robertito laughed. “That if you went to see him to try to extort anything from him, that’s why he’s got the Great Danes. Those very words, Quetita, ask Madame, you’ll see. But don’t do that, don’t even mention him to her, she came back so distraught, he’d treated her so badly that she doesn’t ever want to hear his name again.”

“He’ll pay for it someday,” Queta said. “You can’t be such a shit and live so happily.”

“He can, that’s why he’s got money,” Robertito said. He started to laugh again and leaned a little closer to Queta. He lowered his voice: “Do you know what he said when Madame proposed a little business deal to him? He laughed in her face. Do you think I’m interested in the business of whores, Ivonne? That all he was interested in now was decent business. And then and there he told us you know the way out, I don’t want to see your faces around here again. Those very words, I swear. Are you crazy, what are you laughing about?”

“Nothing,” Queta said. “Hand me the towel, it’s got cold and I’m freezing.”

“I’ll dry you too, if you want,” Robertito said. “I’m always at your command, Quetita. Especially now that you’ve got more pleasant. You’re not as grouchy as you used to be.”

Queta got up, stepped out of the tub and came forward on tiptoes, dripping water on the chipped tiles. She put one towel around her waist and another over her shoulders.

“No belly and your legs are still beautiful.” Robertito laughed. “Are you going to look up your ex’s ex?”

“No, but if I ever run into him he’s going to be sorry,” Queta said. “For what he said to you about Hortensia.”

“You’ll never run into him,” Robertito said. “He’s way above you now.”

“Why did you come and tell me all this?” Queta asked suddenly, stopping her wiping. “Go on, beat it, get out of here.”

“Just to see how you’d react.” Robertito laughed. “Don’t get mad. So you’ll see that I’m your friend, I’m going to tell you another secret. Do you know why I came in? Because Madame told me go see if she’s really taking a bath.”

*

He’d come from Tingo María in short stages, just in case: in a truck to Huánuco, where he stayed one night, then by bus to Huancayo, from there to Lima by train. When he crossed the Andes the altitude had made him nauseous and given him palpitations, son.

“It was just a little over two years since I’d left Lima when I got back,” Ambrosio says. “But what a difference. The last person I could ask for help was Ludovico. He’d sent me to Pucallpa, he’d recommended me to his relative, Don Hilario, see? And if I couldn’t go to him, who could I go to, then?”

“My father,” Santiago says. “Why didn’t you go to him, how come you didn’t think of that?”

“Well, it isn’t that I didn’t think of it,” Ambrosio says. “You have to realize, son …”

“I can’t,” Santiago says. “Haven’t you said you admired him so much, haven’t you said he had such a high regard for you? He would have helped you. Didn’t you think of that?”

“I wasn’t going to get your papa in any trouble, for the very reason that I respected him so much,” Ambrosio says. “Remember who he was and who I was, son. Was I going to tell him I’m on the run, I’m a thief, the police are looking for me because I sold a truck that wasn’t mine?”

“You trusted him more than you do me, isn’t that right?” Santiago asks.

“A man, no matter how fucked up he is, has his pride,” Ambrosio says. “Don Fermín thought well of me. I was trash, garbage, you see?”

“Why do you trust me?” Santiago asks. “Why weren’t you ashamed to tell me about the truck?”

“Probably because I haven’t got any pride left,” Ambrosio says. “But I did have then. Besides, you’re not your papa, son.”

The four hundred soles from Itipaya had disappeared because of the trip and for the first three days in Lima he hadn’t had a bite to eat. He’d wandered about ceaselessly, keeping away from the downtown area, feeling his bones go cold every time he saw a policeman and going over names in his mind and eliminating them: Ludovico, not a thought; Hipólito was probably still in the provinces or had come back to work with Ludovico. Hipólito, not a thought, not a thought for him. He hadn’t thought about Amalia or Amalita Hortensia or Pucallpa: only about the police, only about eating, only about smoking.

“Just imagine, I never would have dared beg for something to eat,” Ambrosio says. “But I did for a smoke.”

When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he would stop just anybody on the street and ask him for a cigarette. He’d done everything, as long as it wasn’t a steady job and they didn’t ask for papers: unloading trucks at Porvenir, burning garbage, catching stray cats and dogs for the wild animals of the Cairoli Circus, cleaning sewers, and he’d even worked for a knife grinder. Sometimes, on the Callao docks, he would take the place of some regular stevedore by the hour, and even though he had to give him a big split, he had enough left over to eat for two or three days. One day someone gave him a tip: the Odríists needed guys to put up posters. He’d gone to the place, had spent a whole night plastering the downtown streets, but they’d only paid them with food and drink. During those months of drifting, ravenous hunger, walking and odd jobs that lasted a day or two, he’d met Pancras. At first he’d been sleeping in the Parada market, under the trucks, in ditches, on sacks in the warehouses, feeling protected, hidden among so many beggars and vagrants who slept there, but one night he’d heard that every so often police patrols came around asking to see papers. So he’d begun to go into the world of the shantytowns. He’d known them all, slept once in one, another time in another, until he’d found Pancras in the one called La Perla and there he stayed. Pancras lived alone and made room for him in his shack.

“The first person who was good to me in such a long time,” Ambrosio says. “Without knowing me or having any reason to. A heart of gold, that nigger has, I tell you.”

Pancras had worked at the dog pound for years and when they became friends he’d taken him to the supervisor one day: no, there weren’t any vacancies. But a while later they sent for him. Except that he’d asked him for papers: voting card, draft card, birth certificate? He’d had to invent a lie: I lost them. Oh, well, it’s out, no work without papers. Bah, don’t be foolish, Pancras had told him, who’s going to remember that truck, just take him your papers. He’d been afraid, he’d better not, Pancras, and he’d kept on with those little jobs on the sly. Around that time he’d gone back to his hometown, Chincha, son, the last time. What for? Thinking he could get different papers, get baptized again by some priest and with a different name, and even out of curiosity, to see what the town was like now. He’d been sorry he’d gone though. He left La Perla early with Pancras and they’d said good-bye on Dos de Mayo. Ambrosio had walked along Colmena to the Parque Universitario. He went to check on bus fares and he bought a ticket on one leaving at ten, so he had time to get a cup of coffee and walk around a little. He looked in the shop windows on the Avenida Iquitos, trying to decide whether or not to buy a new shirt so that he’d return to Chincha looking more presentable than when he’d left fifteen years before. But he had only a hundred soles left and he thought better of it. He bought a tube of mints and all during the trip he felt that perfumed coolness on his gums, nose and palate. But in his stomach he felt a tickling: what would the people who recognized him say when they saw him like that. They all must have changed a good deal, some must have died, others had probably moved away from town, the city had most likely changed so much that he wouldn’t even
recognize
it. But as soon as the bus stopped on the Plaza de Armas, even though everything had gotten smaller and flatter, he recognized it all: the smell of the air, the color of the benches and the roofs, the triangular tiles on the sidewalk by the church. He’d felt sorrowful, nauseous, ashamed. Time hadn’t passed, he hadn’t left Chincha, there, around the corner, would be the small office of the Chincha Transportation Co., where he’d started his career as a driver. Sitting on a bench, he’d smoked, looked around. Yes, something had changed: the faces. He was anxiously
observing
men and women and he’d felt his heart beating hard when he saw a tired, barefoot figure approaching, wearing a straw hat and feeling his way along with a cane: blind Rojas! But it wasn’t him, it was a blind albino, still young, who went over to squat under a palm tree. He got up, started walking, and when he got to the shantytown he saw that some of the streets had been paved and they’d built some little houses with gardens that had withered grass in them. In back, where the ditches along the road to Grocio Prado began, there was a sea of huts now. He’d gone back and forth through the dusty alleys of the shantytown without recognizing a single face. Then he’d gone to the cemetery, thinking that the old black woman’s grave would probably be next to Perpetuo’s. But it wasn’t and he hadn’t dared ask the guard where she’d been buried. He’d gone back to the center of town at dusk, disappointed, having forgotten about his new baptism and the papers, and hungry. At the café-restaurant called Mi Patria, which was now named Victoria and had two waitresses instead of Don Rómulo, he had a steak and onions, sitting beside the door, looking at the street all the time, trying to recognize some face: all different. He’d remembered something that Trifulcio had told him that night just before he’d left for Lima, while they were walking in the dark: here I am in Chincha and I feel as if I’m not, I recognize everything and I don’t recognize anything. Now he understood what he’d been trying to tell him. He’d wandered through still more
neighborhoods
: the José Pardo School, the San José Hospital, the Municipal Theater, the market had been modernized a little. Everything the same but smaller, everything the same but flatter, only the people different: he’d been sorry he’d come, son, he’d left that night, swearing I’ll never come back. He already felt fucked up enough here, son, and on that day back there, besides being fucked up, he’d felt terribly old. And when the rabies scare was over, would your work at the pound be through,
Ambrosio
? Yes, son. What would he do? What he’d been doing before the supervisor had Pancras bring him in and told him, O.K., give us a hand for a few days even if you haven’t got any papers. He would work here and there, maybe after a while there’d be another outbreak of rabies and they’d call him in again, and after that here and there, and then, well, after that he would have died, wasn’t that so, son?

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru is 1936. He is the author of some of the last half-century’s most important novels, including
The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
and
Conversation in the Cathedral
. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Cubs and Other Stories

The Time of the Hero

The Green House

Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

Conversation in the Cathedral

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

The Perpetual Orgy

Who Killed Palomino Molero?

The Storyteller

In Praise of the Stepmother

A Fish in the Water

Death in the Andes

Making Waves

The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

The Feast of the Goat

Letters to a Young Novelist

The Language of Passion

The Way to Paradise

The Bad Girl

The Dream of the Celt