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By Root 1007 0

The first time in my life I ever got drunk, I was keeping Javier company, helping him drown his troubles in wine and beer in a little bar in Surquillo the day he found out that Nancy had given herself to an agronomy student named Eduardo Tiravanti (a boy who was very popular in Miraflores because he could put a lighted cigarette in his mouth and then take it out and go on smoking it as though that were the most natural thing in the world). Javier was weeping and sniveling, and in addition to serving as a shoulder to cry on, I’d been assigned the mission of taking him back to his pension and putting him to bed once he’d reached a comatose state (“I’m going to get plastered to the gills,” he’d warned me, imitating Jorge Negrete). But I was the one who succumbed, with spectacular fits of vomiting and an attack of the d.t.’s in the course of which—according to Javier’s vulgar version of events—I had climbed up onto the bar counter and harangued the topers, night owls, and rowdies who constituted the clientele of El Triunfo: “Lower your pants, all of you: you’re in the presence of a poet.”

He had never quite forgiven me for the fact that instead of taking care of him and consoling him on that sad night, I’d obliged him to drag me through the streets of Miraflores to my grandparents’ villa in Ocharán, so far gone that he’d handed my remains over to my terrified grandmother with the imprudent comment: “Señora Carmencita, I think Varguitas is about to die on us.”

Since that time, little Nancy had by turns taken up with and thrown over half a dozen boys from Miraflores, and Javier, too, had had several steady girlfriends. But instead of making him forget his great love for my cousin, they made it all the more intense, and he continued to phone her, visit her, invite her out, declare his feelings, taking no note of the refusals, insults, affronts, broken dates he suffered at her hands. Javier was one of those men who are able to put passion before vanity and it didn’t really matter to him in the slightest that he was the laughingstock of all his friends in Miraflores, among whom his tireless chasing after my cousin was a constant source of jokes. (One of the boys in our neighborhood swore that he’d seen Javier approach little Nancy one Sunday after Mass and make her the following proposal: “Hi there, Nancyta, nice morning, shall we go have a drink together? a Coke, a sip of champagne?”) Nancy sometimes went out with him—usually when she was between boyfriends—to the movies or a party, and Javier would then have great hopes and go around in a state of euphoria. That was the mood he was in now, talking a blue streak as we ate our chitling sandwiches and drank our coffee in the little café on the Calle Belén called El Palmero. Aunt Julia and I rubbed knees underneath the table and sat there holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes as we vaguely listened to Javier babbling on and on, like background music, about little Nancy.

“She was impressed by my invitation,” he was telling us. “Because which of those guys in Miraflores, who are always flat broke, ever invites a girl to a bullfight, can you tell me that?”

“And how did you manage to scrape up the money?” I asked him. “Did you have a winning lottery ticket?”

“I sold the boardinghouse radio,” he told us, without the slightest regret. “They think it was the cook and they’ve fired her for stealing.”

He explained to us that he’d worked out a foolproof plan. In the middle of the corrida he’d surprise Nancy by offering her a gift that would melt her heart: a Spanish mantilla. Javier was a great admirer of the Mother Country and everything connected with it: bullfights, flamenco music, Sarita Montiel. He dreamed of going to Spain (as I dreamed of going to France) and the idea of giving Nancy a mantilla had occurred to him when he’d seen an ad in the paper. It had cost him a month’s salary from the Reserve Bank, but he was certain that the investment would pay off. He explained how he planned to go about it. He would take the mantilla to the bullfight, discreetly wrapped in plain