The Time of the Hero

  “Nothing,” Gamboa said. “Nothing serious.”

  “But how did he take such a beating without making a sound? His face is a real mess. We’ll have to put the whitey on the Academy boxing team. Or is he on it already?”

  “No,” Gamboa said. “I don’t think so. But you’re right, we’ll have to put him somewhere.”

  The rest of that day I just wandered around, and a woman gave me some bread and a little milk. When it got dark I slept in a ditch again, near Progreso Avenue. This time I really got some sleep, and didn’t wake up until the sun was high. There wasn’t anybody around, but I could hear the cars going by on the avenue. I was starving, I had a headache, and I kept shivering the way you do when you’re coming down with the grippe. I walked into Lima and got to Alfonso Ugarte about noon. I waited for Teresa to come out of school with the other girls, but she didn’t appear. I walked around in the center of town, in places where there were lots of people, the San Martín Plaza, Unión Street, Grau Avenue. Later I went to the Reserva Park, dead tired. I drank some water from a faucet in the park, but it made me vomit. I lay down on the grass, and in a little while I saw a cop coming toward me, making signals from a distance. I got up and ran as fast as I could, and he didn’t chase me. It was already dark by the time I got to my godfather’s house on Francisco Pizarro Avenue. I thought my head was going to split and I was shaking all over. It wasn’t wintertime and I thought, I must be sick. Before knocking, I thought, His wife’s going to answer the door and turn me away. If she does, I’ll go to the police station. At least they’ll give me something to eat. But it was my godfather that came to the door. He stood there looking at me, not recognizing who I was, though it was only two years that he hadn’t seen me. I told him my name. He was blocking the doorway with his body. There were lights inside and I could see his round, bald head. “You?” he said. “I can’t believe it, godson. I thought you were dead too.” He told me to come in, and inside he asked me, “What’s wrong, godson, what’s the trouble?” I said, “Excuse me, godfather, but I haven’t had anything to eat for two days.” He grasped my arm and called his wife. They gave me a bowl of soup, a steak with beans, dessert. Afterward they both asked me lots of questions. I made up a story for them: “I ran away from home to work in the jungle with this guy and I was there two years, it was a coffee plantation, then they fired me and I got back to Lima without a centavo in my pocket.” Later I asked them about my mother and my godfather told me she’d died six months ago, from a heart attack. “I paid all the funeral expenses,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. It was a very good funeral.” And he added, “Tonight you can sleep in the back patio, and tomorrow we’ll see what we can do with you.” His wife gave me a blanket and a mat. Next day, my godfather took me to his store and put me to work behind the counter. We were the only two that worked there. He didn’t pay me anything, but at least I had food and shelter, and they treated me well, even though I had to work hard all day. I got up before six, made breakfast, and took it to their bedroom. Then I went to the market with a shopping list she made out for me. After that, I went to the store and waited on customers all day. At first, my godfather stayed with me all the time, but later on he left me in charge and didn’t come in, and at night I’d have to show him my accounts. When I got back to the house I fixed supper—his wife taught me to cook—and then I went to bed. I didn’t think about leaving, even though I was fed up with not having any money. I had to cheat the customers the best I could, overcharging them or shortchanging them, that was the only way I could buy a pack of Nacional, and I had to smoke on the sly. The reason I didn’t leave was that I was still afraid of the police. After a while, things got a lot better. My godfather had to go up into the mountains on business, and he took his daughter with him. I was scared when I heard he was taking a trip, because I remembered his wife didn’t like me. Still, she hadn’t made any trouble for me during all the time I’d been living with them, she just told me to do this, do that. And on the very day my godfather left, she changed. She was friendly with me, told me stories, laughed all the time. And when she went to the store at night and I started to show her my accounts, she said, “Never mind, I know you’re not a thief.” One night she showed up at the store before it was nine o’clock. She seemed very nervous. I could tell right away what she was up to. She was using all the gestures and looks and giggles of the whores in the Callao whorehouses when they’re drunk and on the make. I felt good, because I remembered how many times she’d turned me away when I was looking for my godfather, and I thought, Now I can get revenge. She was fat and ugly, and she was taller than me besides. She said, “Look, close the store and let’s go to the movies. I’m inviting you.” We went to a movie house in the center of town. She said it was showing a wonderful picture, but I could tell she didn’t want them to see us together in the neighborhood, because everybody knew how jealous my godfather was. It was one of those horror films, so she acted scared, grabbed my hands, nudged me with her knee. Or she put her hand on my thigh, pretending it was an accident, and left it there for a while. I wanted to laugh out loud. But I just played stupid and didn’t respond to her advances. She must’ve been furious. When the movie let out we walked back to the house and she began to talk to me about women, she told me filthy stories though without using any bad words, then she asked me if I’d ever had any love affairs. I said no and she said, “Liar! You men are all alike.” She made sure I understood she was treating me as a man. I wanted to tell her, You look just like one of the whores at “Happy Land,” the one they call Emma. When we got to the house I asked her if she wanted me to fix supper, but she said, “No. Let’s have some fun. There’s never any fun in this house. Open a bottle of beer.” Then she started telling me how bad my godfather was. She hated him: he was a miser, an old imbecile, I forget what else. She made me drink by myself. She wanted to get me drunk to see if I’d pay more attention to her. A while later she turned the radio on and said, “I’m going to teach you to dance.” She grabbed me in a bear-hug and I let her drag me around, but I kept on playing stupid. Finally she asked me, “Haven’t you ever been kissed by a woman?” She didn’t have a speck of shame, she rammed her stinking tongue down to my tonsils and pinched me all over. Then she hauled me into her room and got undressed. She didn’t look so ugly when she was naked, she still had a good firm body. She was embarrassed because I was looking at her without coming near her, so she turned out the light. She made me sleep with her the whole time my godfather was away. “I love you,” she said, “you make me very happy.” She never stopped talking about how she hated her husband. She gave me money, and bought me clothes, and after he came back she made him take me along with them every week when they went to the movies. She’d hold my hand in the darkness when my godfather couldn’t see what she was doing. One day I told her I wanted to enter the Leoncio Prado Military Academy and I asked her to persuade her husband to pay the tuition and the other expenses. She almost went crazy, she tore her hair and called me selfish, ungrateful, cruel. I told her I’d clear out if she didn’t do it and finally she agreed. One morning a few days later my godfather said to me, “Do you know what, my boy? We’ve decided to make a real man out of you. I’m going to enroll you in the Military Academy.”

  “Don’t move, even if it burns,” the attendant said. “If it gets in your eye you’ll be seeing fireworks.”

  Alberto saw the iodine-soaked wad of gauze approaching his face, and he gritted his teeth. A fierce pain ran through his whole body like a shudder; he opened his mouth and shrieked. Then the pain restricted itself to his face. With his good eye he could see the Jaguar over the attendant’s shoulder. The Jaguar looked back at him, indifferently, from a chair at the far side of the room. Alberto felt dizzy from the smell of iodine and alcohol. It almost made him vomit. The infirmary was white, and the tile floor reflected the blue-white glare of the fluorescent lights. The attendant had thrown away the piece of gauze and was soaking another one, meanwhile whistling between his t
eeth. Would it hurt as much this time? When he was being punched by the Jaguar on the floor of the cell, struggling in silence, he had not felt any pain, only humiliation. Because almost as soon as they began fighting, he knew he would lose: his fists and boots hardly touched the Jaguar, he grappled with him and knew almost at once that he should release that hard and amazingly elusive body which advanced and retreated, always present, always evading his blows. The worst part was the butting: Alberto raised his elbows, tried to jab with his knees, went into a crouch, and it was all useless, the Jaguar’s head rammed against his arms, separated them, and found its way to his face. He thought confusedly of a hammer pounding an anvil. Then he let himself drop to the floor, in order to catch his breath. But the Jaguar would not wait until he got up, would not stop proving he had won. He leaped on top of him and continued to beat him with those tireless fists until Alberto managed to stand up and run to the far corner of the cell. Seconds later he was down on the floor again. The Jaguar straddled him and went on punching him until he lost consciousness. When Alberto opened his eyes he was sitting on the cot beside the Jaguar, hearing him gasp for breath. He had scarcely had time to gather his wits when Gamboa’s voice boomed in the cell.

  “There you go,” the attendant said. “Now we’ll have to wait till it dries. Then I’ll bandage it. Don’t move around, and don’t touch it with your dirty fingers.”

  The attendant left the room, still whistling between his teeth. Alberto and the Jaguar looked at each other. Alberto felt curiously calm: his anger had vanished. Even so, he tried to speak in an insulting tone.

  “Why are you looking at me?”

  “You’re a squealer,” the Jaguar said. His pale eyes regarded Alberto coldly. “That’s the rottenest thing a man can be. There’s nothing worse, nothing filthier. A squealer! You make me puke.”

  “Some day I’ll get even,” Alberto said. “You think you’re real tough, right? I promise you, some day you’ll be kneeling at my feet. Do you know what you are? You’re a criminal. You ought to be in prison.”

  “Squealers like you,” the Jaguar said, without paying any attention to what Alberto was saying, “should never’ve been born. Maybe they’ll screw me on account of what you told them. But I’m going to tell the whole section, the whole Academy, that you’re a squealer. You ought to be dying of shame for what you’ve done.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” Alberto said. “And as soon as I can get out of the Academy, I’m going to tell the police you’re a murderer.”

  “You’re crazy,” the Jaguar said in a flat voice. “You know I haven’t killed anybody. Everybody knows the Slave shot himself accidentally. You know it too, you squealer.”

  “You’re not worried at all, are you? Because the colonel, the captain, everybody here, they’re all like you, they’re your accomplices, they’re just a gang of bastards. They don’t want anybody to talk about what happened. But I’m going to tell the whole world that you killed the Slave.”

  The door opened. The attendant was carrying a bandage and a roll of adhesive tape. He bandaged Alberto’s whole face, only leaving open his good eye and his nose and mouth. The Jaguar laughed.

  “What’s the matter?” the attendant asked him. “What’re you laughing at?”

  “Nothing,” the Jaguar said.

  “Nothing? Don’t you know that only lunatics laugh at nothing?”

  “Really?” the Jaguar said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “There,” the attendant said to Alberto. “Okay, you’re next.”

  The Jaguar sat down in the chair where Alberto had been. The attendant, whistling even more enthusiastically, dipped a cotton swab in the iodine. The Jaguar only had a few scratches on his face and a small bruise on his neck. The attendant began swabbing his face with elaborate care. He was whistling furiously now.

  “You shit!” the Jaguar yelled, pushing the attendant away with both hands. “You stupid Indian! You peasant!”

  Alberto and the attendant laughed.

  “You did it on purpose,” the Jaguar said, covering his eye with his hand. “Damn fairy.”

  “Why did you move your head?” the attendant asked. “I told you if it got in your eye it’d burn like hell.” He made him raise his face. “Take your hand away. Let some air get at it, that’ll stop the burning.”

  The Jaguar removed his hand. His eye was red and full of tears. The attendant treated it. He had stopped whistling, but his tongue, just the tip of it, protruded from between his lips like a small, pink snake. After using a swab of iodine, he put on some small bandages. Then he washed his hands and said, “That’s it. Now sign right here.”

  Alberto and the Jaguar signed the report book and left the infirmary. The day was even clearer now, and except for the wind that swept across the field, it was as if summer had finally, definitely arrived. The cloudless sky seemed infinitely deep. They walked across the parade ground. No one was in sight, but when they passed the mess hall they could hear the voices of the cadets and the rhythms of a creole waltz. As they walked by the officers’ quarters they met Lt. Huarina.

  “Halt,” he told them. “What’s all this?”

  “We fell down, Sir,” Alberto said.

  “You won’t get passes for a month, not looking like that.”

  They went on toward the barracks, in silence. The door of Gamboa’s room was open, but they hesitated to enter, standing outside and looking at each other.

  “Well, what’re you waiting for?” the Jaguar asked. “He’s your bosom buddy.”

  Alberto knocked once.

  “Come in,” Gamboa said.

  The lieutenant was sitting down, holding a letter. He put it away quickly as soon as they entered, then stood up, walked over to the door, and closed it. He motioned toward the bed with a brusque gesture. “Sit there.”

  Alberto and the Jaguar sat down on the edge of it. Gamboa picked up a chair and set it in front of them; it was turned around, and when he sat facing them he rested his arms on its back. His face looked damp, as if he had just finished washing it. His eyes were tired, his shoes were dirty, and his shirt was partly unbuttoned. He rested his cheek on one hand, while the other drummed on his knee. He looked at the two cadets intently.

  “All right,” he said after a moment, with a gesture of impatience. “Now you know what it’s all about. I suppose I don’t need to tell you what you’ve got to do.”

  “I don’t know anything, Sir,” the Jaguar said. “I only know what you told me yesterday.”

  The lieutenant questioned Alberto with his eyes.

  “I haven’t told him a thing, Sir.”

  Gamboa stood up. It was obvious that he felt uncomfortable, that he disliked the interview.

  “Cadet Fernández presented an accusation against you. You know what it was. The authorities have decided that it lacks a foundation.” He spoke slowly, seeking impersonal words and phrases; now and then there was a small, stiff smile on his lips. “This affair isn’t to be discussed any further, not even here and now. It’s something that both harms and offends the Academy. Since the matter is closed, you’re to go back to your section and behave with the most absolute discretion. The smallest infraction you commit will be severely punished. The colonel in person ordered me to tell you that if there’s any indiscretion, you’ll both suffer the consequences.”

  The Jaguar had listened to Gamboa with his head bowed. But when the officer finished, he raised his eyes to his.

  “Now do you see, Sir? I told you it was just a slander this dirty squealer made up.” He nodded contemptuously toward Alberto.

  “It wasn’t a slander,” Alberto said. “You’re a murderer.”

  “Shut up!” Gamboa roared. “Shut up, you little farts!”

  Automatically, Alberto and the Jaguar came to attention.

  “Cadet Fernández,” Gamboa said, “two hours ago—in my presence—you withdrew your accusation against your comrade. You can’t bring up this affair again without suffering a very harsh punishment. And I
’ll see to that punishment myself. I think I’ve made the situation perfectly clear.”

  “But Lieutenant,” Alberto stammered, “when I was in front of the colonel I didn’t know what to do, that is, I couldn’t do anything else. He didn’t give me a chance to do anything. Besides…”

  “Besides,” Gamboa said, interrupting him, “you’re in no position to accuse anybody, to judge anybody. If I were running this Academy, you’d be out in the street. I hope that from now on you’ll stop selling your pornography, unless you don’t want to graduate.”

  “Yes, Sir. But that’s something else. I…”

  “You told the colonel you withdraw the accusation. So shut your mouth and keep it shut.” Gamboa turned to the Jaguar. “As for you, I guess it’s possible you didn’t have anything to do with the death of Cadet Arana. But you’re still in plenty of trouble. I can tell you right now, don’t laugh at the officers any more. I’ll be watching you, believe me. Now get out, both of you, and don’t forget what I’ve told you.”

  Alberto and the Jaguar departed, and Gamboa closed the door behind them. Outside, they could hear the far-off confusion of voices and music. The waltz had given way to a marinera. They crossed the parade ground. The wind had died, and as they walked across the field each blade of grass was erect and motionless.

  “The officers are shits,” Alberto said without looking at the Jaguar. “All of them. Even Gamboa. I thought he was different.”

  “Did they find out about the stories?” the Jaguar asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve screwed yourself.”

  “No,” Alberto said. “They blackmailed me. I agreed to withdraw the accusation, they agreed to forget about the stories I used to sell. The colonel didn’t put it like that, but that’s what he meant, all right. It’s hard to believe they could be such sons of bitches.”