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

Salgari, Karl May, and above all Jules Verne; Verne’s Michael Strogoff, or The Courier of the Czar and Around the World in Eighty Days had set me to dreaming of exotic countries and lives that were out of the ordinary. I never had enough pocket money to buy everything I wanted to, and the bookstore owner, a little man with a beard and all bent over, sometimes lent me a magazine or a book of adventures, on condition that I bring it back all in one piece within twenty-four hours. In those first long and gloomy months in Lima, in 1947, reading was my escape from that loneliness I suddenly found myself lost in, after having lived surrounded by relatives and friends, accustomed to their pleasing me in every possible way and looking on my bad behavior as if it were a joke. In those months I grew used to fantasizing and to dreaming, to seeking in my imagination, which those magazines and little storybooks aroused, an alternative life to the one I had, imprisoned and solitary. If I already had had the seeds of a storyteller within me, they began to take firm root in this stage, and if I didn’t have them, they must have been planted then and there and begun to send out their first shoots.
    Worse than not ever going out and spending hours on end in my room was a new sensation, an experience that during those months took possession of me and from then on was my companion: fear. Fear that that man would come home from the office with that paleness, those dark circles under his eyes, and that little swollen vein in his forehead that foretold a storm brewing, and would start insulting my mama, making her account to him for all the things she’d done in the last ten years, asking her what lewd behavior she’d gone in for while he was separated from her, and cursing out all the Llosas, one by one, grandparents, aunts and uncles, all of whom he shat on—yes, shat on—even though they were relatives of that poor weakling who was the president of the Republic, on whom, naturally, he shat as well. I felt panicked. My legs trembled. I wanted to shrink to nothing, to disappear. And when, overexcited by his own fit of rage, he sometimes flung himself at my mother to hit her, I wanted to die for real, because even dying seemed preferable to the fear I felt.
    He gave me a beating too, every so often. The first time was on a Sunday, as Mass let out at the parish church in La Magdalena. For some reason I was being punished and was not to leave the house, but I had supposed that the punishment did not include missing Mass, and with my mama’s permission, I went to church. As I came out, amid the crowd of people, I saw the blue Ford, at the foot of the steps. And I saw him, standing motionless in the street, waiting for me. By the look on his face, I knew what was going to happen. Or perhaps I didn’t, for it was toward the very beginning and I still didn’t know him. I may have imagined that, as my uncles had sometimes done when they couldn’t stand my misbehavior any longer, he would cuff me on the head or pull my ears and five minutes later the whole thing would be forgotten. Without a word, he gave me such a hard slap on the face that it threw me to the ground; he hit me again and then pushed me into the car, where he began to say those terrible dirty words that made me suffer as much as his blows. And, once we got back home, as he forced me to beg his pardon, he went on beating me, as he warned me that he was going to straighten me out, to make a little man of me, because he wouldn’t allow his son to be the sissy the Llosas had raised.
    Then, along with the terror, he made me feel hatred. The word is cruel and it seemed so to me too, at that time, and all of a sudden, at night, when, huddled in my bed, hearing him shout at my mother and insult her, I wanted all the misfortunes in the world to happen to him—for Uncle Juan, Uncle Lucho, Uncle Pedro, and Uncle Jorge to ambush him and give him a thrashing someday, for instance. I was