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By Root 1005 0

’d laughed, and they’d started going out together, just like that. They’d fallen in love and had a romance straight out of a movie. The brunette had energy to spare, was filled with ambition, and had her head chockful of plans. She was the one who’d decided they should open a restaurant. And when Big Pablito asked “What’ll we use for money?” she had said: what they’d both have coming when they left their jobs. And though it seemed utter madness to him to trade certainty for uncertainty, she’d had her way. The severance pay the two of them received was enough to buy a tiny little place on the Jirón Paruro, and they had had to ask everybody they knew to lend them money to buy tables and kitchen equipment, and Big Pablito himself had painted the walls and the name of the place over the door: The Royal Peacock. The first year they’d barely made enough to live on and had worked like slaves. They’d get up at the crack of dawn to go to La Parada, the wholesale market, to buy the best ingredients and pay the lowest prices, and they did everything themselves: she cooked and he waited on table and acted as cashier, and the two of them swept and cleaned up. They slept on mattresses they laid out each night between the tables after they closed up. But from the second year on, they drew more and more customers. So many that they’d had to take on a boy to help in the kitchen and another to wait on table, and after a while they were even obliged to turn clients away because there was no more room. And then the brunette had had the idea of renting the place next door, which was three times as big. They’d done so and hadn’t regretted it. They’d even put tables on the second floor now, and had a little place of their own to live in across the street from The Royal Peacock. Seeing as how they got along so well together, they got married.

I congratulated him, and asked him if he’d learned to cook.

“I’ve got an idea,” Big Pablito suddenly said. “Let’s go hunt up Pascual and we’ll have lunch at the restaurant. I’d like the two of you to be my guests, Don Mario.”

I accepted, because I’ve never discovered how to refuse invitations, and also because I was curious to see Pascual. Big Pablito had told me he was now the editor of a weekly scandal sheet, that he too had come up in the world. They saw each other regularly—Pascual was a steady customer at The Royal Peacock.

The office of the weekly Extra was a fair distance away, on a street off the Avenida Arica, in Breña. We took a bus there that didn’t exist in my day. We had to wander around the neighborhood for some time, because Big Pablito didn’t remember the exact address. We finally found it, in a narrow little alleyway behind the Cine Fantasía. From the outside it was evident that Extra hadn’t exactly struck it rich: a sign bearing the name of the weekly was hanging precariously from one nail between two garage doors.

Once inside, one could see that the two garages had been converted into one office by simply making an opening in the wall between them, without even squaring it up or roughing off the edges, as though the mason had abandoned the job before he was half done. The opening was partitioned off by a cardboard screen, scribbled all over, as in the toilets of public buildings, with dirty words and obscene drawings. On the walls of the garage we’d first come into, amid damp spots and dirt stains, were photos, posters, and front pages of Extra: one recognized certain well-known faces of soccer players and singers, and those, apparently, of criminals and victims. Each front page was full of screaming headlines, and I managed to make out phrases such as “Kills Mother So As To Marry Daughter,” and “Police Raid Masked Ball: All Men!” This garage appeared to be used as the copy room, the darkroom, and the “morgue” of the weekly. The place was so cluttered that it was hard to thread our way through it: little tables with typewriters, on which two guys were hurriedly typing, piles of unsold returned copies of the paper that a kid was doing up into bundles and tying up with string; in one corner