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By Root 1164 0

some of my belongings to the National Pawnshop, in the Plaza de Armas. Since, moreover, I had deep-rooted Spanish prejudices with regard to the relations between men and women and never allowed Aunt Julia to pick up a check, my financial situation became dramatic. To remedy it, I began to do something that Javier reprovingly called “prostituting my pen,” that is to say, writing book reviews and articles for literary supplements and periodicals published in Lima. I wrote under a pseudonym so as to feel less ashamed at how bad they were. But the two or three hundred extra soles they brought me each month were a big help in making ends meet.

These secret meetings in downtown cafés of Lima were really quite innocent: long, romantic conversations, holding hands, gazing into each other’s eyes, and if the topography of the establishment permitted it, rubbing knees. We kissed each other only when nobody could see us, something that rarely happened, since at these hours the cafés were always full of cheeky, nosy office clerks. We talked about ourselves, naturally, about the risks we were running of being surprised by some member of the family, about ways of getting around this danger; we told each other in minute detail everything we had done since the last time we’d been together (a few hours before, that is to say, or the previous day), but on the other hand we never made any sort of plans for the future. This was a subject that by tacit agreement was banished from our conversations, no doubt because both of us were equally convinced that our relationship was destined not to have a future. Nonetheless, I think that what had begun as a game little by little became serious in the course of these chaste meetings in the smoke-filled cafés of downtown Lima. It was in such places that, without our realizing it, we gradually fell in love.

We talked a great deal about literature as well; or rather, Aunt Julia listened and I talked, about the Paris garret (an indispensable ingredient in my vocation) and about all the novels, plays, essays I’d write once I’d become a writer. The afternoon that Javier discovered us together in the Cream Rica on the Jirón de la Unión, I was reading my story on Doroteo Martí aloud to Aunt Julia. I had given it the medieval-sounding title of “The Humiliation of the Cross,” and it was five pages long. It was the first story of mine that I’d ever read her, and I did so very slowly so as to conceal my anxiety as to what her verdict would be. The experience had a devastating effect on the susceptibility of the future writer.

As I read on, Aunt Julia kept interrupting me. “But it wasn’t like that at all, you’ve turned the whole thing topsy-turvy, that wasn’t what I told you, that’s not what happened at all…” she kept saying, surprised and even angry.

I couldn’t have been more upset, and broke off my reading to inform her that what she was listening to was not a faithful, word-for-word recounting of the incident she’d told me about, but a story, a story, and that all the things that I’d either added or left out were ways of achieving certain effects: “Comic effects,” I emphasized, hoping she’d see what I was getting at. She smiled at me, if only out of pity for my misery.

“But that’s precisely the point,” she protested vehemently, not giving an inch. “With all the changes you’ve made, it’s not a funny story at all any more. What reader is going to believe that such a long time goes by between the moment the cross begins to teeter and the moment it comes crashing down? The way you’ve told it, what’s there to laugh at?”

Even though I’d already decided—feeling utterly crushed and secretly humiliated—to toss the story about Doroteo Martí in the wastebasket, I’d nonetheless launched into a passionate, pained defense of the rights of literary imagination to transgress reality, when I suddenly felt a tap on the shoulder.

“If I’m interrupting, please tell me and I’ll clear out immediately, because I hate being a nuisance,” Javier said, drawing up a chair, sitting down, and asking the waiter to bring him a cup of coffee.