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By Root 1051 0

that word), they would have taken me for (as a poetic, esoteric, very popular expression of those days went) a cojudo a la vela—an ass under full sail. I didn’t feel the slightest scorn for them for not reading literature, nor did I consider myself superior because I was having a romance with a real, grownup woman who’d had lots of experience, but the truth of the matter was that on those nights, as we poked around graves under the eucalyptus and pepper trees of Surco, or splashed about beneath the stars of Santa Rosa, or drank beer and haggled over prices with the whores at Nanette’s, I was bored, and found my thoughts dwelling more on my “Dangerous Games” (which had not appeared in El Comercio this week either) and on Aunt Julia than on what they were saying.

When I told Javier about my disappointing reunion with my old neighborhood gang of buddies, he stuck out his chest and replied: “It’s because they’re still just kids. But you and I are men now, Varguitas.”

Twelve.

In the dusty downtown section of the city, halfway down the Jirón Ica, is an old house, with balconies and jalousies, on whose walls ravaged by time and uncivilized passersby (sentimental hands that inscribe hearts and arrows and scribble names of women, perverted fingers that engrave sex organs and dirty words) one can still see, as from a great distance, faint traces of the original paint, that color used in colonial days to adorn aristocratic mansions: indigo blue. The building (once the residence of marquises?) is today a rickety, oft-repaired structure that has miraculously withstood not only earthquakes but the gentle winds of Lima, and even its fine mists. Riddled by termites from top to bottom, full of ratholes and shrews’ nests, it has been divided and subdivided countless times, courtyards and rooms that need turns into hives, in order to house more and more tenants. A teeming multitude of modest means lives within (and risks being crushed to death beneath) its fragile walls and shaky ceilings. Occupying the second floor, in half a dozen rooms full of tumbledown furniture and bric-a-brac, perhaps not the most beautiful quarters imaginable, yet morally impeccable, is the Pensión Colonial.

It is owned and run by the Berguas, a family of three that came to Lima from the stony Andean city of innumerable churches, Ayacucho, over thirty years ago and that here (O Manes of life) has gradually declined physically, economically, socially, and even psychically, and will doubtless give up the ghost in this City of Kings and be reincarnated as fish, birds, or insects.

Today the Pensión Colonial is undergoing a painful decadence, and its boarders are humble, insolvent persons, in the best of cases little provincial parish priests come to the capital to deal with some archiepiscopal formality or other, and in the worst of cases little peasant women with purplish cheeks and vicuña eyes who keep their few coins knotted in pink handkerchiefs and recite the rosary in Quechua. There are no servants in the pensión, of course, and Señora Margarita Bergua and her daughter, a forty-year-old spinster who answers to the perfumed name of Rosa, are saddled with all the work of making the beds, cleaning, doing the shopping, preparing the meals. Señora Margarita Bergua (as the diminutive ending of her name might indicate) is a skinny little runt of a woman, with more wrinkles than a raisin, who, curiously enough, smells of cats (there are no cats in the pensión). She works without stopping from dawn to dark, and as she harriedly hurries through the house, through life, her movements are spectacular, for one of her legs is eight inches shorter than the other and hence she wears an elevator-type shoe, with a wooden platform resembling the box of boys who shine shoes on the street, built for her many years ago by a skillful sculptor of altarpieces back in Ayacucho, which makes the floorboards shake as she drags it along. She has always been thrifty, but over the years this virtue has degenerated into an obsession, and today there is no denying the fact that the harsh