Free A Fish in the Water: A Memoir by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

me not to do it again. His cold way of speaking and the steely look in his eyes is what I remember best of those first days in Lima, a city I detested from the very first moment. I was lonely, I missed my grandparents, Auntie Mamaé, Uncle Lucho, my friends from Piura. And I was bored, shut up in the house, not knowing what to do to occupy myself. Shortly after we arrived, my father and mother enrolled me in the sixth grade of the La Salle primary school, but classes didn’t begin until April and it was only January. Was I going to spend the summer shut up inside the house, seeing the clanging San Miguel streetcar go by every so often?
    Around the corner, in a little house identical to ours, Uncle César lived with Aunt Orieli and their sons Eduardo, Pepe, and Jorge. The first two were a little older than I was and Jorge was my age. My uncle and aunt were affectionate toward me and did their best to make me feel a part of the family, taking me one night to a Chinese restaurant on the Calle Capón—the first time I’d ever tasted Chino-Peruvian food—and my cousins took me with them to soccer games. I remember very vividly the visit to the old stadium on the Calle José Díaz, sitting in the cheap seats, watching the classic Alianza Lima-Universitario de Deportes match. Eduardo and Jorge were fans of the Alianza and Pepe of the U, and like him, I too became a rooter for this top-notch team, and soon I had, in my room, photographs of its star players: the spectacular goalie Garagate, the guard and captain Da Silva, the blond Toto Terry, “the Arrow,” and above all the very famous Lolo Fernández, the great center forward, the gentleman of the field and a scorer. My cousins had a barrio , a gang of friends from the neighborhood with whom they got together in front of their house to talk and kick a soccer ball around and make shots at the goal, and they would call to me to come play with them. But I never managed to belong to their barrio , in part because, unlike my cousins, who could go outside on the street anytime and have their friends over to their house, this was forbidden me. And partly because, although Uncle César and Aunt Orieli, as well as Eduardo, Pepe, and Jorge, always made gestures to me to come closer, I kept my distance. Because they were the family of that man who was my father, not my family.
    After we’d been in La Magdalena for only a short while, I burst out crying one night at dinnertime. When my father asked what was the matter, I told him I missed my grandparents and that I wanted to go back to Piura. That was the first time he had a fight with me, without hitting me, but raising his voice in a way that scared me, and looking at me with a fixed stare that from that night on I learned to associate with his fits of rage. Up until then I had been jealous of him, because he had stolen my mama from me, but from that day on I began to be afraid of him. He sent me up to bed and a little while later, having already climbed into bed, I heard him reproaching my mother for having brought me up as a flighty little boy, and making extremely cruel remarks about the Llosa family.
    From then on, every time we were alone, I began to torment my mother for having brought me to live with him, and demand that we escape together to Piura. She tried to calm me down, told me to be patient, to do my best to win my papa’s affection, for he found me hostile and resented this. I shouted back at her that that man didn’t matter to me, that I didn’t love him and never would, because the people I loved were my aunts and uncles and my grandfather and grandmother. Those scenes exasperated her and made her cry.
    Across from our house, on the Avenida Salaverry, there was a bookstore in a garage. It sold books and magazines for children and I spent every bit of my pocket money buying Penecas, Billikens , and an El Gráfico , an Argentine sports magazine with nice illustrations in color along with whatever books I could, by