moving their shoulders, their small breasts, their bottoms, as no
Miraflores girl did, and probably allowing the boys liberties the girls
didn't even dare to imagine. But, if they were so free, why didn't
either Lily or Lucy want a steady boyfriend? Why did they turn down
all of us who fell for them? Lily hadn't said no only to me; she also
turned down Lalo Molfino and Lucho Claux, and Lucy had turned
down Lover, Pepe Canepa, and the early-maturing Julio Bienvenida,
the first Miraflores boy whose parents, even before he finished
school, gave him a Volkswagen for his fifteenth birthday. Why didn't
the Chilean girls, who were so free, want boyfriends?
That and other mysteries related to Lily and Lucy were
unexpectedly clarified on March 30,1950, the last day of that
memorable summer, at the party given by Marirosa Alvarez-
Calderon, the fat little pig. A party that would define an era and
remain forever in the memories of everyone who was there. The
Alvarez-Calderon house, at the corner of 28 de Julio and La Paz, was
the prettiest in Miraflores, and perhaps in Peru, with its gardens of
tall trees, yellow tipa flowers, liana vines, rose-bushes, and its binetiled
pool. Marirosa's parties always had a band and a swarm of
waiters serving pastries, canapes, sandwiches, juice, and different
kinds of nonalcoholic drinks all night, parties for which the guests
prepared as if we were ascending to heaven. Everything was going
wonderfully until, with the lights turned down, a crowd of girls and
boys surrounded Marirosa and sang "Happy Birthday," and she blew
out the fifteen candles on the cake and we got in line to give her the
required embrace.
When it was the turn of Lily and Lucy to give her a hug,
Marirosa, a happy little pig whose rolls of fat overflowed her pink
dress with the bow in the back, kissed them on the cheek and
opened her eyes wide.
"You're Chileans, right? I'm going to introduce you to my aunt
Adriana. She's Chilean too, she just arrived from Santiago. Come on,
come on."
She took them by the hand and led them inside the house,
shouting, "Aunt Adriana, Aunt Adriana, I have a surprise for you."
Through the glass of the long picture window, an illuminated
rectangle that framed a large living room with a fireplace, walls with
landscapes and oil portraits, easy chairs, sofas, carpets, and a dozen
ladies and gentlemen holding glasses, I saw Marirosa burst in a few
seconds later with the Chilean girls, and I also saw, pale and fleeting,
the silhouette of a very tall, very well-dressed, very beautiful woman
with a cigarette in a long holder, coming forward to greet her young
compatriots with a condescending smile.
I went to drink some mango juice and sneak a Viceroy between
the cabanas at the pool. There I ran into Juan Barreto, my friend and
classmate at the Colegio Champagnat, who had also come to hide in
these abandoned places to have a smoke. He asked me point-blank,
"Would you care if I asked Lily, Slim?"
He knew that even though it looked as if we were going steady,
we weren't, and he also knew—like everybody else, he pointed
out—that I had asked her three times and three times she had
turned me down. I replied that I cared a lot, because even though
Lily had turned me down this wasn't a game she was playing—it's
the way girls were in Chile—but in fact she liked me, it was as if we
were going steady, and besides, that night I'd begun to ask her again
for the fourth and definitive time, and she was about to say yes
when the cake with the fifteen candles for the fat little pig
interrupted us. But now, when she came out after talking to
Marirosa's aunt, I'd go on asking her and she'd say yes and after
tonight she would be my absolutely genuine girlfriend.
"Well, then, I'll have to ask Lucy," said Juan Barreto with
resignation. "The lousy thing is, compadre, the one I really like is
Lily."
I encouraged him to ask Lucy and I promised to put in a good
word for him so she'd say yes. He and Lucy and Lily and I would be a
sensational foursome.
Talking with Juan Barreto next to the pool and watching the
couples on the dance floor as they moved to the beat of the Ormeno
Brothers Orchestra—they might not have been Perez Prado but they
were very good, what trumpets, what drums—we smoked a couple of
Viceroys. Why had it occurred to Marirosa to introduce her aunt to
Lucy and Lily just at that moment? What were they babbling about
for so long? They were ruining my plan, damn it. Because it was
true, when they announced the cake with the fifteen candles I had
begun my fourth—and successful this time, I was sure—declaration
of love to Lily after convincing the band to play "I Like You," the best
bolero for proposing to girls.
They took forever to come back. And they came back
transformed: Lucy very pale, with dark circles under her eyes, as if
she'd seen a ghost and was recovering from the strong effects of the
next world, and Lily in a rage, an embittered expression on her face,
her eyes flashing, as if there in the house those fashionable ladies
and gentlemen had given her a very hard time. Right then I asked
her to dance, one of those mambos that was her specialty—"Mambo
No. 5"—and I couldn't believe it, Lily couldn't do anything right, she
lost the beat, became distracted, made mistakes, stumbled, and her
little sailor's hat slipped, making her look fairly ridiculous. She
didn't even bother to straighten it. What had happened?
I'm sure that by the time "Mambo No. 5" was over, the entire
party knew because the fat little pig made it her responsibility to tell
everyone. What pleasure that gossip must have felt as she told
everything in detail, coloring and exaggerating the story while she
opened her eyes wide, wider, with curiosity and horror and joy!
What unhealthy happiness—what satisfaction and revenge—all the
girls from the neighborhood must have felt, the ones who so envied
the Chilean girls who came to Miraflores to revolutionize the
customs of the children graduating into adolescence that summer!
I was the last to find out, when Lily and Lucy had already
mysteriously disappeared, without saying goodbye to Marirosa or
anybody else—"Champing at the bit with embarrassment," my aunt
Alberta would declare—and when the awesome rumor had spread all
over the dance floor and cleared away the boys and girls who forgot
about the band, their boyfriends and girlfriends, and making out,
and went off to whisper, repeat, be alarmed, be exalted, and open
wide their eyes brimming over with malice: "You know? You found
out? You heard? What do you think? Can you believe it? Can you
imagine? Imagine! They're not Chileans! No, no they weren't!
Nothing but a story! They're not Chileans, they don't know a thing
about Chile! They lied! They fooled us! They invented everything!
Marirosa's aunt found them out! What a pair of bandits, what
bandits!"
They were Peruvians, that's all they were. Poor things! Poor
things! Aunt Adriana, who'd just arrived from Santiago, must have
had the surprise of her life when she heard them speak with the
accent that had fooled us but which she identified immediately as
fake. How bad the Chilean girls must have felt when the fat little
pig's aunt, suspecting the farce, began to ask about their family in
Santiago, the neighborhood where they lived in Santiago, the school
they attended in Santiago, about the relatives and friends of their
family in Santiago, making Lucy and Lily swallow the bitterest pill of
their short lives, becoming crueler and crueler until she hounded
them from the living room and they were in ruins, spiritually and
physically demolished, and she could proclaim to her relatives and
friends and the stupefied Marirosa: "In a pig's eye they're Chileans!
Those girls never set foot in Santiago, and if they're Chileans, I'm
Tibetan!"
That last day of the summer of 1950—I had just turned fifteen
too—was the beginning of real life for me, the life that separates
castles in the air, illusions, and fables from harsh reality.
I never knew with any certainty the complete story of the false
Chileans, and neither did anyone else except the two girls, but I did
hear conjectures, gossip, fantasies, and supposed revelations that,
like a wake of rumors, followed the counterfeit Chileans for a long
time even after they ceased to exist—in a manner of
speaking—because they were never again invited to parties, or
games, or teas, or neighborhood get-togethers. Malicious gossips
said that even though the decent girls from Barrio Alegre and
Miraflores no longer had anything to do with them and looked away
if they passed them on the street, the boys, the fellows, the men did
go after them, in secret, the way they went after cheap girls—and
what else were Lily and Lucy but two cheap girls from some
neighborhood like Brena or El Porvenir who, to conceal their
origins, had passed themselves off as foreigners and slipped in
among the decent people of Miraflores?—to make out with them, to
do those things that only half-breeds and cheap girls let men do.
Later on, I imagine, they began to forget about Lily and Lucy,
because other people, other matters eventually replaced that
adventure of the last summer of our childhood. But I didn't. I didn't
forget them, especially not Lily. And even though so many years
have gone by, and Miraflores has changed so much, as have our
customs, and barriers and prejudices have been obscured that once
had been flaunted with insolence and now are disguised, I keep her
in my memory, and evoke her again at times, and hear the
mischievous laugh and see the mocking glance of her eyes the color
of dark honey, and watch her swaying like a reed to the rhythms of
the mambo. And still think that, in spite of my having lived for so
many summers, that one was the most fabulous of all.
2
The Mexico Lindo was on the corner of Rue des Canettes and Rue
Guisard, near Place Saint-Sulpice, and during my first year in Paris,
when money was very tight, on many nights I'd station myself at the
restaurant's back door and wait for Paul to appear with a little
package of tamales, tortillas, carnitas, or enchiladas that I would
take to my garret in the Hotel du Senat to eat before they got cold.
Paul had started out at the Mexico Lindo as a kitchen boy, and in a
short time, thanks to his culinary skills, he was promoted to chef s
assistant, and by the time he left it all to dedicate himself body and
soul to the revolution, he was the restaurant's regular cook.
In those early days of the 1960s, Paris was experiencing the fever
of the Cuban Revolution and teeming with young people from the
five continents who, like Paul, dreamed of repeating in their own
countries the exploits of Fidel Castro and his bearded ones, and
prepared for that, in earnest or in jest, in cafe conspiracies. In
addition to earning his living at the Mexico Lindo, when I met him a
few days after my arrival in Paris, Paul was taking biology courses at
the Sorbonne, which he also abandoned for the sake of the
revolution.