The Neighborhood

  His experience with the Three Jokers had been, depending on how you looked at it, a great success or the worst mistake of his life. A success because he had earned more money than he ever had before. He and Atanasia could indulge their whims, including a vacation in Cusco and a trip to Machu Picchu, and he had become better known than in all his years as a reciter. All over Peru! They published his photograph in the papers, people recognized him and approached him on the street to ask for his autograph. He never imagined that anything like this could happen to him. But it was a catastrophe because, instead of feeling happy playing the clown, he felt unfortunate and always had to endure an oppressive sense of guilt: he had betrayed poetry, art, and his vocation as an orator.

  The worst thing was that in the program The Three Jokers, they even had him recite. That is to say, begin to recite on any pretext, just so the other two jokers could shut him up by slapping him with blows that knocked him to the floor and made the audience that attended the taping of the program roar with laughter, not to mention the myriad viewers they had throughout Peru. These were the worst moments of each program for Juan Peineta: making a laughingstock of divine poetry. “The dark swallows will return,” and wham, “Shut up, asshole,” a hard slap to the face, down to the floor, and laughter. “Green, oh I love you, green, green wind,” and wham, “There the faggot goes again with his little verses,” a hard slap, down on the floor with legs spread wide, and booming laughter.

  They had taught him all the tricks of clowning, and he had learned them with no difficulty. Clap his hands when they slapped him so that it seemed they were hitting much harder than they really were, and fall down bending his legs and arms to lessen the impact. Break into booming laughter with his mouth wide open or sob like a baby and even really cry when necessary according to the demands of the script. He complied with everything and did the best he could, like a good professional. But he never got used to that moment in all the episodes of The Three Jokers, when he, on any pretext, began to recite at the top of his voice—“Tonight I can write the saddest verses”—and his companions, who’d had enough, sent him to the floor with a punch to the nose. He thought it was contemptible, that he was committing a crime against poetry, dealing a low blow to the best in himself.

  He never became a friend of the other two members of the Jokers. They never accepted him as an equal, they were constantly bringing up Tiburcio, the one who had disappeared, making innuendos, rubbing it in that Juan was not and never would be as good a comedian or as good a person or as good a buddy as the other man. But perhaps Juan recognized at times that he hadn’t done very much to win the sympathy and friendship of the other two. The truth is, he felt contempt for them because they were uncouth and coarse, because they didn’t even know about the art or feel the least respect for the occupation by which they earned a living. Eloy Cabra had been a provincial circus clown before joining The Three Jokers, and he lived and worked to get drunk and go to brothels where, he boasted, the girls gave him discounts because he was on television and famous. The other “joker,” Julito Ceres, had been a guitarist who played Peruvian music and had won the Competition for Mimics on América Television, where he had pocketed two thousand soles imitating the president of the republic, Chabuca Granda, and two Hollywood actors. He wasn’t as coarse and primitive as Eloy Cabra, but, in spite of being better mannered, he expressed the greatest contempt for Juan Peineta’s profession; he thought recitation was for fairies and faggots, and he always let Juan know this with wounding gibes that he added to the script when it was time to record the program.

  Juan Peineta didn’t get along well with the scriptwriter, either. He was named Corrochano, but at the station everyone called him Maestro, perhaps because he always wore a scarf and a tie. He wrote scripts for several programs, using different pseudonyms, and had a tiny office that he called the Sanctuary, because no one was allowed to enter without the permission of the all-powerful writer. How could a man like him, a lawyer, so well dressed, and so pleasant and well spoken with everybody, write scripts that were so vulgar and ridiculous, so obnoxious, so tasteless, so stupid? The explanation was that this was what people liked: the program’s ratings broke all records, and it had led the polls ever since its creation.

  Why didn’t he give up playing a comic in The Three Jokers when he felt disgusted with himself for doing what he did? For practical reasons. With the ten thousand soles a month, which increased to twelve thousand and then fourteen thousand, he and Atanasia could buy clothes, go to movies and restaurants, even save for the trip to Miami, his wife’s great dream, even greater than her other dream: having a child. But this never happened; the doctors told them it was impossible. Atanasia suffered from a defect in her reproductive system that caused the eggs to disintegrate as soon as they were formed. In spite of her diagnosis, she insisted on receiving treatment, which was very expensive and did no good.

  Juan had reached the point of crying with impotence and frustration after taping shows that were particularly humiliating for him. And he never lost his nostalgia for the good times when he was a reciter. At times he declaimed one of the verses he knew by heart—there were many of them—in front of a mirror (Campoamor’s “Write me a letter, Father / I know who it’s for”) or his wife, and his heart contracted with sadness when he thought how he had been brought down as an artist, moving from reciter to comedian.

  With this in his past, he must have felt pleased with the campaign that, without his knowing how or why, was unleashed against him in The Latest, a campaign that, after a few months of great anguish, would end his career as a television clown. The story of the campaign was incredible. In spite of so much time having gone by, it still kept him awake at night. But with his loss of memory, he didn’t remember it very well, and at times he had the sensation that his mind distorted things.

  The proverb said, “Welcome, trouble, if you come alone,” and Juan Peineta could affirm that in his case it was absolutely true. Because the attacks against him in The Latest coincided with Atanasia’s headaches. At first they responded to acetaminophen, but since, in the end, the tablets did nothing for her, they went to the Hospital del Seguro. After they’d waited close to two hours, the doctor who examined her said it was a problem with her vision and transferred her to an oculist. And, in fact, this doctor diagnosed farsightedness and prescribed eyeglasses that, for a time, relieved her migraines.

  How did the attacks in The Latest begin? Juan Peineta’s memory was confused. Someone told him that in Rolando Garro’s column, which everyone in radio and television read religiously, he had said that The Three Jokers on América Television had deteriorated since Tiburcio had died and been replaced by Juan Peineta, a coliseum reciter who was boring when he told jokes and wasn’t even good at taking the slaps that his two companions gave him (“deservedly so”) whenever he threatened to recite on the program.

  He didn’t see that column or the other ones where, apparently, that reporter continued to criticize him until one day Eloy Cabra warned him, at the end of a taping: “These attacks aren’t good for us, either, they can fuck up our ratings. You have to do something to stop them.” And what could Juan Peineta do to make that individual stop attacking him?

  “A nice visit and a little gift for Señor Garro,” Eloy Cabra murmured, winking at him.

  “Ah, caramba,” he said, surprised. “Is that how things work?”

  “That’s how things work with mercenary reporters,” Eloy Cabra explained. “Better take care of it soon. That Garro is very influential and can make our ratings fall. And we’re not going to allow that, not us, or the producer, or the channel. Listen to what I’m telling you, my friend.”

  Eloy Cabra’s threat irritated him so much that instead of giving the little gift that his colleague on The Three Jokers had advised, Juan Peineta wrote a letter to the editor of The Latest complaining about “the unjust and unjustified attacks” on him, the victim, by the television columnist. He said that if the campaign did not cease, he w
ould have recourse to the courts.

  Later he would recognize that he had been imprudent, that all by himself he had plunged into the quicksand that would swallow up his career as a comedian. Because, instead of stopping, from then on the reporter’s attacks against him multiplied, not only in his column in The Latest but also on a program he had on Radio Colonial, where every day he called him the most inept “pseudo-actor” on Peruvian television, who was ruining The Three Jokers, the most popular comedy program when “the inadequate Juan Peineta replaced the sorely missed and much-admired Tiburcio Lanza and left the show without viewers.”

  During that same period they discovered that Atanasia had a brain tumor, the real cause of her periodic headaches. Suddenly she became mute. She opened her mouth, moved her lips—her eyes full of despair—and emitted guttural sounds instead of words. Finally, the doctor who examined her, a general practitioner, sent her to a neurosurgeon. He said that everything indicated the presence of a brain tumor, but this would have to be verified with an MRI. Since the wait for this test in the Public Health System was several weeks—or perhaps months—Juan took Atanasia to a private clinic for the MRI. Yes, it was a tumor and the neurosurgeon said they had to operate. But first she had to receive chemotherapy to shrink it. Juan recalled that period of chemotherapy as if it were a slow nightmare. After each treatment Atanasia was so weak she could barely move. She never recovered her voice, and soon she couldn’t get out of bed. The Public Health neurosurgeon said then that, given the señora’s condition, he wouldn’t risk putting her under the knife. They had to wait until she recovered a little.

  They were in the midst of this when Juan Peineta was summoned again by Señor Ferrero and his gold rings and fluorescent watch to have coffee near América Television. He told Juan then that he had to leave the program. He said, with characteristic brutality, the ratings were falling, the announcers were complaining, the surveys were categorical: Juan had lost the favor of the public and was dragging down his colleagues. He tried to protest, saying that it was all the result of Señor Rolando Garro’s campaign against him, but Señor Ferrero was very busy, he couldn’t waste time with idle gossip, and said he should go today to the cashier’s office to arrange his termination. The channel, he added to raise his spirits, would give him more money than he was entitled to as a special bonus.

  Six months later Atanasia died without having surgery and Juan Peineta could not find another job as either a reciter or a comedian. He never had regular employment again, just miserable occasional jobs, paid sometimes in tips. From then on he would say to the few friends he had left—he kept losing them at the same time that he lost his memory of all of them except for a few: Ruletero and Crecilda—that the misfortunes of his life were due to a son of a bitch named Rolando Garro, a reporter whose mug he hadn’t ever seen in person.

  From then on he devoted himself to revenge. That is, to making life difficult for the cause of all his ills. He became something like an ineradicable vice. He listened to all of Garro’s radio and television programs and read everything he published in order to criticize him knowledgeably. He sent letters—signed with his own name—to the owners and directors of television and radio stations, magazines, and newspapers, accusing Garro of everything from minor gaffes to defamation and vileness, which he revealed, and a thousand evil deeds that were true or that he imagined, threatening the reporter with legal actions he couldn’t even initiate. Did these missives have any negative effect on the professional life of Rolando Garro? Probably not, judging by the popularity of his disclosures, gossip, and betrayals among the lowbrow public for whom he produced his columns and programs. At times Juan Peineta went to the extreme of showing up alone with a placard in front of América Television, accusing Garro of taking his job and killing his wife. The guards at the station would push him away. Among people in show business, none of whom remembered his good periods, Juan Peineta began to be known, humorously, as “the lunatic with the letters, the sworn enemy of Rolando Garro.”

  11

  The Scandal

  Every day, from Monday to Friday, Chabela was the first to hear the alarm clock. Yawning, she got up to brush her teeth and wash her face, and then she went to their bedroom to wake her two daughters and get them ready for school. The girls had stayed up late doing homework, and it was harder than usual for their mother to wake them. When she went downstairs with them to the first floor, the cook and Nicasia, the maid, had prepared breakfast. Luciano appeared a short while later, showered, shaved, dressed, his shoes gleaming, ready to leave for the office. But before that he took the girls outside to wait for the bus from the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Academy, which stopped at the door of the large house in La Rinconada, surrounded by a garden filled with tall trees—ficus from India, sequoias from North America, and even a couple of Andean pepper trees—where the tiles in the pool were already sparkling. Chabela watched from the living room, still in her robe, as the girls climbed into the bus; punctual as always, it stopped at the front door at 7:30 every morning. Luciano returned to the house to pick up his briefcase and say goodbye to his wife. Also as usual, he was as well groomed as a fashion model.

  “Why don’t we go to the movies this afternoon?” she said, nuzzling her cheek up to his. “It’s been ages since we’ve seen a film on the big screen, Luciano. It’s not the same always watching them on TV. Let’s go to Larcomar, it’s so nice.”

  “Once and for all, I have to build that screening room at the back of the garden,” said Luciano. “So we can have our cinemateque and watch movies right here at home.”

  “You’ve promised me that so often, I don’t believe it anymore,” Chabela said with a yawn.

  “I swear I’ll build it this summer,” her husband responded, moving toward the street door. “I’ll try to leave the office early, though I can’t promise. Find a good film, just in case. I’ll call you, in any event. Ciao, darling.”

  She watched him back the car out of the garage and drive away, waving goodbye, and she waved, too, from behind the curtain. It was a gray, damp day, the sky dark with leaden clouds and so ugly it seemed to foretell something sinister. Chabela thought sadly that there were still so many months to go before summer returned. She missed her little beach house in La Quipa, swimming in the ocean, long walks in the sand. She hadn’t slept very well the night before and felt tired. Should she take a short swim in the heated pool? No, she’d go back to bed for a while. She went up to her bedroom, took off her robe, and slipped between the sheets. The curtains were still closed and there was semidarkness and a profound silence throughout the house. At ten she had Pilates and then yoga at the gym, so she still had time; she closed her eyes to doze for a little while longer.

  Two days earlier, she and Marisa had had lunch together, and when they got back from El Central, in Miraflores, after a delicious meal, they had gone to Marisa’s bedroom, in her penthouse in San Isidro, and made love. “Also delicious,” she thought. And that same night, she and Luciano had made love. “What excess, Chabelita,” she laughed, half-asleep. The truth was that things were going pretty well in her life; there were no complications at all stemming from her new relationship with her best friend. If it hadn’t been for terrorism and kidnappings, in reality one would have lived very well in Lima. She and Marisa continued to see each other, as they had before, but now they also shared their little secret: they took their pleasure together. Too bad Marisa was so tense because of Quique’s nerves, what could be worrying him and eating him alive, he wouldn’t open his mouth and tell his wife what was wrong. Marisa had dragged him to Dr. Saldaña, at the Clínica San Felipe, but after examining him the doctor found him in excellent health and simply prescribed some mild pills to help him sleep. Could Quique have a girlfriend? Impossible, anybody but him; as Marisa would say, “My husband was born a saint, so it’s no credit to him that he’s faithful.” “Not to mention Luciano,” Chabela thought. “They’ll both go straight to heaven.”

  She fell asleep, and when sh
e awoke it was already 9:15. She had just enough time to get to the gym for the Pilates class. She was putting on her sweat suit and sneakers when Nicasia, the maid, came to tell her that Señora Ketty was calling, and it was urgent. “She’s so tiresome,” Chabela thought. But “urgent” piqued her curiosity, and instead of declining to take the call, she picked up the receiver.

  “Hello, Ketty darling,” she said hurriedly. “What is it? Let me say that I’m in a terrible hurry, I don’t want to miss my Pilates and yoga classes.”

  “Have you seen Exposed, Chabelita?” Ketty greeted her in a voice from beyond the tomb.

  “Exposed?” asked Chabela. “What’s that?”

  “A magazine,” said Ketty, sounding alarmed. “You’re not going to believe it, Chabelita. Send out for it right now. You’ll faint, you’ll be so shocked, I swear.”

  “Will you please stop all the mystery, Ketty,” Chabela protested, feeling apprehensive. “What’s happened? What’s in that magazine?”

  “I’m embarrassed to tell you, Chabela. It has to do with Enrique. Yes, Quique. You won’t believe it, I swear. I know you and his wife are very good friends. What poor Marisa must be going through, I feel sorry for her. How mortifying, Chabela. I’ve never felt as embarrassed as I was when I saw that magazine, I’ll tell you. Incredibly obscene, you’ll see!”

  “Will you tell me what the hell you’ve seen?” Chabela interrupted in a fury. “Stop beating around the bush, Ketty, please.”

  “I can’t tell you, you’ll have to see it with your own eyes. And don’t swear at me, please, my ears are ringing,” Ketty complained. “I’m embarrassed, I’m horrified. It’s awful, Chabela. They’re not talking about anything else in Lima. Two friends have already called me, in shock. Send somebody to buy it right now. Exposed, yes, that’s what it’s called. I didn’t know it existed either, until now.”