B004QGYWDA EBOK (19 page)

He got out of bed and began to dress, but in his terrified haste he tried to put on the wrong shoe, he buttoned his shirt up wrong, he could not find his belt, his hands trembled so much that he could not tie his shoelaces.

“From now on, when I come down to breakfast I want to see you at the table waiting for me. With your hands and face washed and your hair combed. Do you hear me?”

He ate breakfast with him after that, changing his tactics to suit whatever mood his father was in. If he saw that he was smiling, with calm eyes and a smooth forehead, he asked him questions that would flatter him, listened to him with the profoundest attention, nodded his head, opened his eyes wide, asked him if he would like him to wash the car. On the other hand, if he saw that his father’s expression was stern, if his greeting went unanswered, he kept silent and listened to his threats with bowed head, as if repentant. There was less tension at lunch because his mother ate with them and diverted his father’s attention. His parents talked to each other and he could get through the meal unnoticed. The torment ended in the evening. His father came home late, and he was able to eat before he arrived. From seven o’clock on, he would tag after his mother, complaining that he was tired, he felt sleepy, he had a headache. Then he would gobble his food and run up to his room. Sometimes he was still undressing when he heard his father parking the car. He would turn out the light and hide under the covers. An hour later he would get up, finish undressing in the dark, put on his pajamas and get into bed again.

Now and then he went out for a walk in the morning. Salaverry Avenue was deserted at ten o’clock, but occasionally a half-filled streetcar went rumbling by. He walked down to Brazil Avenue and stopped at the corner. He never crossed over, because his mother had told him not to. He watched the cars disappearing in the distance, in the direction of the center of town, and he thought of the Bolognesi Plaza at the end of the avenue, remembering it from the day his parents took him out for a drive: the noisy swarm of cars and buses, the crowded walks, the mirror-like tops of the automobiles reflecting the brilliant lines and letters of the electric signs. Lima frightened him, it was too big, you could lose yourself in it and never find your way home; the people on the street were total strangers. In Chiclayo he had gone out for walks alone: the people he met patted his head and called him by his name, and he smiled at them. He had seen them many times, in his house, in the main plaza, at Mass on Sundays, on the beach at Eten.

Then he walked down to the end of Brazil Avenue and sat on one of the benches in that little semicircular park on the edge of the cliffs, above the ash-gray sea. The parks in Chiclayo—there were only a few of them, he knew them all by memory—were also old like this one, but the benches did not have this rust, this moss, this sadness that made you feel so lonely under the gray sky as you listened to the melancholy mumble of the ocean. Sometimes, while he was sitting with his back to the sea, looking down Brazil Avenue and remembering the highway from the north that had brought him to Lima, he wanted to cry, to cry out. He recalled his Aunt Adelina coming back from the store and asking him with a smile in her eyes, “Can’t you guess what I found?” and taking out a package of caramels or a piece of chocolate, which he grabbed from her hand. He recalled the sun, the white light that bathed the streets all year long, keeping them warm and pleasant; he recalled the excitement of Sundays, the trips to Eten, the hot yellow sand, the clear blue sky. He looked up: gray clouds everywhere, without a single break in them. He went back to his house, walking slowly, dragging his feet like an old man. He thought: When I grow up I’ll go back to Chiclayo. And I’ll never come to Lima again.

Lt. Gamboa opened his eyes. The only light that came in through the window of his room was the dim glow of the far-off lights of the parade ground; the sky was black. A few seconds later his alarm clock went off. He got up, rubbed his eyes, and collected his towel, soap, razor, and toothbrush. The hallway and the washroom were in darkness, and there was no sound from the nearby room: as usual, he was the first one up. Fifteen minutes later, back in his room, he heard the other alarm clocks go off. The dawn was beginning now: far away, behind the yellow glow of the lights, a dim blue light grew steadily stronger. He put on his field uniform without hurrying, and then left his room. Instead of crossing by the barracks of the cadets, he went to the guardhouse through the open field. It was rather cold and he had not put on his jacket. The soldiers on guard saluted him and he returned their salute. The lieutenant on duty, Pedro Pitaluga, was dozing hunched over in a chair, his head in his hands.

“Attention!” Gamboa barked.

Pitaluga jumped up, his eyes still closed. Gamboa laughed.

“Don’t horse around, man,” Pitaluga said as he sat down again. He scratched his head. “I thought it was the Piranha. I’m dead tired. What time is it?”

“Almost five. You’ve still got forty minutes to go. That’s not so long. Why do you try to sleep? It’s the worst thing you can do.”

“I know,” Pitaluga said, yawning. “I’ve violated the regulations.”

“Yes,” Gamboa said with a grin. “But that isn’t why I said it. If you try to sleep sitting up, you feel terrible afterward. The best thing is to do something. That way, the time goes by without your even noticing it.”

“Do what? Talk with the soldiers? Yes, Lieutenant, no, Lieutenant. Brilliant conversation. And the next thing you know, they’re asking you for a furlough.”

“I always study when I’m Officer of the Guard. It’s the best time. I can’t study during the day.”

“Sure,” Pitaluga said, “you’re the model officer. By the way, what got you up so early?”

“Today’s Saturday. Don’t you remember?”

“Field exercises,” Pitaluga said. He offered a cigarette to Gamboa but he refused it. “One thing about this duty, I get out of the exercises.”

Gamboa remembered their years at the Military School. Pitaluga was in the same section with him. He was a poor student but an excellent marksman. Once, during the annual maneuvers, he waded into the swollen river, dragging his horse behind him. The water came up to his shoulders, and the horse neighed with terror. The others begged him to come back, but Pitaluga managed to overcome the current and reach the other side, soaking wet and happy. Their captain congratulated him in front of everybody, telling him, “You’re a real man.” But now Pitaluga was always complaining about his duties, especially the field exercises. He was like the soldiers and cadets, all he thought about was getting a pass. The others had a good excuse: they were only in the army for the time being. Most of the soldiers had been dragged out of their mountain villages by force and put into the ranks; as for the cadets, most of them were in the Academy because their families wanted to get rid of them for a while. But Pitaluga had chosen his career. And he was not the only one: every two weeks Huarina invented some new illness for his wife in order to get a pass; Martínez drank in secret while he was Officer of the Guard, and everyone knew his thermos of “coffee” was full of pisco. Why not ask for a discharge? Pitaluga was getting fat, he never studied, he was always dead drunk when he came back from a pass. He’ll be a lieutenant for years and years, Gamboa said to himself. But then he thought: Unless he’s got political connections. Gamboa loved the military life for exactly the same reasons that the others hated it: discipline, rank, field exercises.

“I’m going to use the telephone.”

“At this time of the morning?”

“Yes,” Gamboa said. “My wife is up by now. She’s leaving at six.”

Pitaluga made a vague gesture, then put his head in his hands again, like a turtle drawing into its shell. Gamboa’s voice at the telephone was low and gentle, he asked a number of questions, mentioned pills against nausea and the cold, insisted on a telegram, repeated “Are you all right?” several times, and murmured a brief good-by. Pitaluga dropped his arms to his sides, and his head dangled like a bell. Then he blinked a few times and smiled without enthusiasm. “You sound like a honeymooner,” he said. “You talk to her as if you just got married yesterday.”

“We’ve been married three months,” Gamboa said.

“I got married a year ago. And I’ll be damned if I want to talk to her. She’s a terror, just like her mother. If I called her up at this hour, she’d scream her head off, she’d call me everything she could think of.”

Gamboa smiled. “My wife’s very young,” he said. “She’s only eighteen. We’re going to have a baby.”

“I’m sorry,” Pitaluga said. “I didn’t know. You’ve got to take precautions.”

“I want to have a son.”

“Of course,” Pitaluga said. “I can tell that. So you can make a soldier out of him.”

Gamboa looked surprised. “I don’t know if I’d like him to be a soldier,” he muttered. He looked Pitaluga up and down. “In any case, I wouldn’t want him to be a soldier like you.”

Pitaluga stood up. “What kind of a crack is that?” he asked bitterly.

“Bah,” Gamboa said. “Forget it.”

He turned and left the guardhouse. The sentries saluted him again. One of them had his cap down over his ear. Gamboa was on the point of bawling him out for it, but then he stopped: there was no use having any hard feelings with Pitaluga, who had buried his head in his hands again. This time, Pitaluga could not doze off. He swore, and then shouted to one of the soldiers to bring him a cup of coffee.

When Gamboa reached the patio of the Fifth, the bugler had already sounded reveille at the Third and the Fourth and was about to sound it in front of the barracks of the last Year. He saw Gamboa, lowered the bugle from his lips, came to attention and saluted. The soldiers and cadets at the Academy all knew that Gamboa was the only officer there who returned the salutes of those under him in a correct military fashion. The others merely gave them a nod, sometimes not even that. Gamboa folded his arms and waited for the reveille to end. He looked at his watch. There were a few cadet sentries in the doorways of the barracks. He looked them over one by one. When they found themselves in front of him, the cadets put on their caps and straightened their ties, then came to attention and saluted. Then they turned and disappeared into the barracks. The usual racket had begun. A moment later Pezoa came running up.

“Good morning, Lieutenant.”

“Good morning. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Lieutenant,” the noncom said. “Why, Lieutenant?”

“You ought to be in the patio when the bugler gets here. It’s your duty to go through the barracks and hurry them up. Don’t you know that?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Then what are you doing here? Get into the barracks. If the Year doesn’t fall in in seven minutes, I’ll hold you responsible.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

Pezoa went into the first sections on the run. Gamboa remained standing in the center of the patio, glancing now and then at his watch. He could hear the confused welter of sounds that poured out from all around the patio and converged on him as the guy-ropes of a circus tent converge on the center pole. He could sense, without entering the barracks, all the emotions the cadets were feeling and expressing: their anger at being awakened so early, their exasperation at having so little time to make their bunks and get dressed, the impatience and excitement of those who liked to shoot and play soldier, the disgust of those who would go out and flounder around in the fields without caring what they did, just doing it because they had to, and the suppressed happiness of those who would come back from the field exercises to take a shower, change into their blue and black dress uniforms, and go out on pass.

At seven past five Gamboa blew a long blast on his whistle. He could hear curses and protests, but at almost the same moment the barracks doors burst open and spilled out a dark green mass of cadets, who pushed and shoved and swore as they hurried to fall in, still adjusting their uniforms as they ran, but only using one hand because they were holding up their rifles with the other. The day had not yet fully dawned, that second Saturday in October; it was the same as other dawns, other Saturdays, other days of field exercises. Suddenly Gamboa heard a loud metallic crash and then a curse.

“Whoever dropped that rifle, come here!” he shouted.

The racket stopped abruptly. All the cadets looked straight ahead with their rifles at their sides. Pezoa tiptoed over to the lieutenant and stood at his side.

“I said, whoever dropped that rifle, come here!”

The silence was broken by the sound of boots on the concrete. The eyes of the whole battalion turned toward Gamboa. The lieutenant glared at the cadet for a moment, then said, “Your name.”

The boy stammered his name, company, and section.

“Inspect his rifle, Pezoa,” the lieutenant said.

The noncom rushed up to the cadet, seized his rifle, and inspected it ceremoniously: he looked it all over, turned it this way and that, opened and closed the bolt, checked the sights, tested the trigger.

“Scratches on the stock, Sir,” he said. “And it isn’t properly oiled.”

“How long have you been in the Academy, Cadet?”

“Three years, Sir.”

“And you still don’t know how to take care of your rifle? You should never let it fall on the ground. It’s better to crack your skull than to drop your rifle. A soldier’s gun is as important to him as his balls. You protect your balls, don’t you, Cadet?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Good,” Gamboa said. “You should take the same care of your rifle. Go back to your section. Pezoa, mark him down for six points.”

The noncom took out his notebook and wrote in it, after wetting the point of the pencil with his tongue.

Gamboa gave the order to march. After the last section of the Fifth had entered the mess hall, he went to the officers’ mess. He was the first one there. A few minutes later the lieutenants and captains began to arrive. The officers of the Fifth—Huarina, Pitaluga and Calzada—sat down next to Gamboa.

“Snap it up, Indian,” Pitaluga said. “You should serve an officer the minute he comes in.” The soldier who was waiting on them murmured an apology, but Gamboa was not listening: the sound of an airplane cut through the dawn and the lieutenant’s eyes explored the damp gray sky. Then he lowered them and looked at the open field. The fifteen hundred rifles of the cadets were stacked in groups of four, each of the four supporting the others by the muzzle. The vicuña wandered aimlessly among the straight rows of pyramids, sniffing at them.

“Have they decided anything at the officers’ meetings?” Calzada asked. He was the heaviest of the four. He was chewing a piece of bread and he talked with his mouth full.

“Yesterday,” Huarina said. “It ended late, after ten o’clock. The colonel was furious.”

“He’s always furious,” Pitaluga said. “On account of what he finds out or what he doesn’t find out.” He nudged Huarina. “But you shouldn’t kick. You’ve been lucky this time. You’ve got something that’s going to look good on your service record.”

“Yes,” Huarina said. “It wasn’t easy.”

“When are they going to strip off his insignia?” Calzada asked. “That’ll be fun to watch.”

“Monday at eleven.”

“They’re born delinquents,” Pitaluga said. “They never learn. Don’t they know what’s what? It’s a plain case of breaking and entering. We’ve expelled half a dozen cadets just since I’ve been here.”

“They don’t come to the Academy because they want to,” Gamboa said. “That’s the trouble.”

“You’re right,” Calzada said. “They think like civilians.”

“Sometimes they think we’re priests,” Huarina said. “One cadet even wanted me to hear confession, he wanted me to give him advice. Believe it or not.”

“Half of them are sent here so they won’t turn out to be gangsters,” Gamboa said. “And the other half, so they won’t turn out to be fairies. It’s their parents’ fault.”

“You’d think the Academy was a reform school,” Pitaluga said, pounding his fist on the table. “Everything’s done halfway in Peru, and that’s why everything goes wrong. The soldiers we get are filthy, they’re crawling with lice, and they’re all thieves. But you can beat some civilization into them. After a year in the army, the only thing Indian about an Indian is his looks. But it’s the opposite with the cadets, they go from bad to worse. The ones in the Fifth are even worse than the Dogs.”

“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Calzada said. “It’s a damned shame we aren’t allowed to beat them up. If you even raise your hand they put in a complaint, and then there’s a great big stink.”

“Here comes the Piranha,” Huarina murmured.

The four lieutenants stood up. Captain Garrido greeted them with a nod. He was a tall man, with a pallid face, somewhat greenish about the cheekbones. They called him the Piranha because, like that savage fish of the Amazon basin, his double row of enormous gleaming teeth protruded beyond his lips, and his jaws were always working. He handed a sheet of paper to each of them.

“Instructions for the field exercises,” he said. “The Fifth goes out beyond the plowed fields to the open ground on the other side of the hill. You’ll have to hurry. It’ll take us almost an hour just to get there.”

“Shall we have them fall in or do you want us to wait for you, Captain?” Gamboa asked.

“Go ahead,” Garrido said. “I’ll catch up with you.”

The four lieutenants left together. When they reached the field, they spread out in a straight line. Then they blew their whistles. The uproar in the mess hall grew louder and a moment later the cadets came pouring out. They grabbed their rifles, ran to the parade ground, and fell in by sections.

A little later the battalion went out through the main gate of the Academy, between the rigid sentries, into Costanera Avenue. The pavement was clean and shining. The cadets, three abreast, widened the formation in such a way that the lateral columns were on either side of the avenue and the middle column in the center of it. When the battalion reached Palmeras Avenue, Gamboa ordered a turn toward Bellavista. As they went down the slope, under the great curved leaves of the trees, the cadets could see an indistinct mass at the far end: the buildings of the Naval Arsenal and the port of Callao. At each side there were the tall old houses of La Perla with their vine-covered walls, their rusted bars protecting gardens of all sizes. By the time the battalion was approaching Progreso Avenue, the morning had begun to come alive: barefooted women with baskets and sacks of vegetables stopped to watch the cadets; a pack of dogs ran along beside the battalion, leaping and barking; sick-looking, dirty little boys escorted it the way dolphins escort a ship at sea.