Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Copyright

About the Book

Can a son be forgiven for the sins of his father?

Adrian Ormache is a prosperous lawyer living in Lima. He has the perfect life: a great career, beautiful wife, two doting and intelligent daughters. But when his mother dies a series of events devastate his entire view of the past, his parents, and his country.

Adrian’s mother leaves a letter indicating that she was being blackmailed. Confused, Adrian talks to his brother, who tells him that their long dead father Colonel Ormache, who led military operations against the ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas during the terrible Peruvian Civil War of the 1980’s, was not quite the hero Adrian had always considered him to be: he routinely had POWs and civilian women raped, tortured and executed. His mother’s blackmailer is revealed to be one of the Colonel’s former subordinates. When Adrian confronts him the man gives him the name of the one prisoner whom the Colonel spared and kept as a lover – Miriam.

Adrian becomes obsessed with finding Miriam. His search is cathartic and all-consuming, a journey that takes him into a country that is a far-cry from the stable, civilised Lima he’s used to, a people still haunted by a harrowing, ongoing war, and some truths about his family – and himself – that he could never have imagined.

Winner of the Premio Herralde de novela for world’s best Spanish novel.

About the Author

Born in Lima, Peru, in 1954, Alonso Cueto spent his childhood in Paris and Washington, returning to Lima at the age of seven. He studied literature at the Universidad Católica del Perú and later at the University of Texas, Austin. In 1985 he married Kristin Keenan Atwood, with whom he has two children. He lives in Lima.

The Blue Hour

Alonso Cueto

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY
Frank Wynne

For Quinta Chipana and his friends in Vilcashuamán

A young prisoner, an underage girl, was persuaded to spend the night in the bedroom of one of the senior officials of Los Cabitos. [. . .] On the morning of 3 March, the prisoner escaped.

Ricardo Uceda, Muerte en el Pentagonito

‘Yeah,’ I said, and, almost without realising it, added, ‘maybe a person isn’t only responsible for what they do, but also for what they see or read or hear.’

Javier Cercas, The Speed of Light

I

NOT LONG BEFORE this story begins, a photograph of me appeared in the ‘Society Pages’ of Cosas magazine.

It was a full-page photo. I was smiling, facing the camera, head held high, wearing a designer suit, my right hand resting gently on the shoulder of my beautiful wife Claudia. I looked the part – that effortless elegance some people can pull off when we know the paparazzi are around. My tie was neatly knotted, my hair elegantly tousled, the ring that bore witness to fifteen years of happy marriage visible on the fourth finger of my left hand. Standing next to me, Claudia, my business partner Eduardo and his wife Milagros . . . all four of us turned towards the camera, holding glasses of whisky, an affectionate smugness in our smiles, as though we’d just been awarded a prize for being the happiest couples that night.

One day, over breakfast, Claudia handed me the magazine open at the photo. Later that day my sister-in-law called me at the office. ‘You look like the perfect couple,’ she said. I was flattered but not surprised that the photo was the biggest on the page.

Back then, I was often in the papers and I think I always looked good. Statistics, so to speak, were in my favour: I was forty-two, earned $9,000 a month and weighed twelve and a half stone – the perfect weight given that I was six foot one. I spent an hour every day at the gym. In addition, I was a partner in a prestigious law firm with a list of over a hundred major clients. I had a lot of work, but I had a lot of help at the office. I remember back then a friend enviously telling me that every time he saw me I looked happier.

I’d always wanted to be a lawyer. At school, I’d once written an essay entitled ‘The Law in Everyday Life’. My basic thesis was that all social relationships – including love and friendship – are based on an implicit contract. Fathers, children, husbands, wives, lovers, friends, siblings come to an unspoken agreement about how they behave, and habit establishes the boundaries of the contract. Should one of the parties deviate from that behaviour, they are breaking their promise and hence violating that tacit contract. The law was based on human relationships. Or that was what I believed back then.

As a boy, I wasn’t only interested in the law. I also had fantasies about being a writer. I even wrote a swashbuckling adventure novel once.

I’ve been brooding over my frustrated vocation as a writer for a couple of weeks now.

I’ve been thinking about it because I wanted to write this story down. I’m not sure why. I certainly don’t ever want to come face to face with someone who’s read it (I’ve hired a ghost writer to put his name and imprimatur to it).

In the book, I call myself Adrián Ormache. But I’m sure some people will work out who I am. They’ll recognise me, or my wife Claudia. My wife Claudia. It feels strange calling her that. As though she were a stranger. The arc of her name reminds me of a rainbow – at least that’s what I told her the night we met at a party twenty years ago; it was a ridiculous chat-up line, but she thought it was funny.

At the point when this story begins, Claudia was the perfect wife. She dressed well, accompanied me to cocktail parties and was friends with the wives of other lawyers.

You couldn’t find a better wife, my mother-in-law used to tell me. And she was right. Claudia’s impeccable taste in clothes and her faultless manners invariably impressed friends and acquaintances. She would organise sumptuous informal dinners, the tables groaning with platters of meats and salads and desserts. Eminent lawyers – the del Prados, the Muñizes, the Rodrigos – would linger into the early hours and were always effusively kind when they said goodnight. The guests included prominent members of congress like Carlos Ferrero and Lourdes Flores; President Belaúnde himself came once. They were good friends.

I liked it when my daughters saw these people coming to our house. We have two daughters who are completely adorable – corny, but that’s the only word that springs to mind.

These days, the elder, Alicia, is studying law at the Universidad Católica. She is happy in her vocation. She’ll be a lawyer like me. She is a beautiful, smart woman – and I’m not just saying that because I’m her father. She’s at the age when she thinks she knows everything, but she’s still sweet, even indulgent with her elders. She is – and I don’t think this is an exaggeration – exceptionally intelligent. Our younger daughter, Lucía is a sensitive, rather dreamy girl, still scared of spiders, still afraid of the dark. She has a vivid imagination and a desperate need for approval and is constantly telling jokes and stories. With her green eyes, her silken hair and her long legs, she is one of the most beautiful young women I’ve ever seen. Her chattiness these days belies the efforts she had to make, as the younger child, to be noticed in a house with three grown-ups.

Lucía is a huge fan of grunge; she and her friends shut themselves away in her room and listen to Kurt Cobain. Back when she turned thirteen, I bought her a bass guitar. Thankfully, it’s not too loud. It hardly matters, though; our house in San Isidro is 5,000 square feet so there’s room enough for everyone – including the maid, the cook and Claudia’s driver – to get away from her playing.

Before her obsession with playing bass, Lucía was great company. She used to tell me stories, confide in me about her problems and those of her little friends; she’d hug me and ask for a kiss. These days, those hugs are among my most precious memories. I miss those moments and I feel that, after everything that’s happened, they now belong to the past. Back then my daughter was hugging a different man, a man who has gone for ever.

My wife Claudia had inherited her mother’s skill for changing nappies, answering questions, soothing the girls’ fears. She read child psychology books about typical behaviour from the ages of seven to ten and eleven to thirteen. My mother-in-law had given her daughters a loving, well-balanced education and sent them out into the world armed with a mixture of strength, moral rectitude and a reasonable love of their fellow man, and Claudia was instilling these same values in Alicia and Lucía. It should be said, however, that her parenting skills were underpinned by our financial security. My practice was going pretty well thanks to a good working relationship with my clients (if I do say so myself). In addition, my in-laws had managed to amass a considerable fortune in the many years they had worked at their factory. My father-in-law was outlandishly generous when it came to inviting us on holidays. He would stump up for the best five-star hotels, open a tab for me at the bar, buy presents for the girls. The Caribbean was among his favourite places, and as a result, Claudia and I sported a healthy tan even in the winter.

I was not immune to vanity. I enjoyed having a nice house, a wife who was beautiful, loving and a perfect hostess, two dutiful daughters who worked hard at school. I’m not ashamed to say that I liked to dress well. And yet these things I loved, sometimes (and that part of my life seems so long ago now) . . . what I’m trying to say is that sometimes I felt gripped by a sort of pain, a hand squeezing my throat making it difficult to move, to do even the most ordinary things. From the simple matter of getting up in the morning, brushing my hair and getting dressed to everything else: facing the world, dealing with the noise and clamour of the day, meeting my responsibilities, the gruelling effort required to dress, to shave, refashion myself and emerge transformed into a gentleman.

Maybe it was this heaviness I felt, this general ache, that triggered my dreams. They were not depressing dreams but rather vivid scenes in which I felt free to act on my desire to indulge in wanton violence.

A good example: I’m naked. I dimly realise I’m in my father-in-law’s house at an elegant dinner party, a buffet. My father-in-law looks at me and smiles. There are lots of people in black tie helping themselves from the buffet. Suddenly I have something in my hand. What is it? It’s a bottle of ketchup. I unscrew the top and spray tomato sauce all over the table. The white tablecloth is spattered red. My father-in-law is not smiling now, but the other guests congratulate me. Suddenly I realise that it’s not a bottle of ketchup. It’s a gun. A gun. And it seems the most natural thing in the world to use it. I start shooting at everyone and they die laughing. Finally, I fire a bullet into my temple. I wake up. Dream over.

Though somewhat grotesque, they were always entertaining.

Another recurring dream. I punch my father-in law on the jaw in his own house while his whole family clap and cheer. He gets to his feet and I hit him again. And so on and so on.

These violent visions were like powder flashes. I was astonished, I laughed to see myself do such things. But I succumbed to these images with a certain pleasure.

Maybe I’m making too much of it. It wasn’t really like that. I felt basically content with my family, my job, my friends and acquaintances. I got on well with my father-in-law, who constantly invited me to go on trips with him (I often declined). I liked to sit at home on the terrace gazing out over the swimming pool. I felt proud and happy to be able to invite friends round. I didn’t need to do anything to maintain the solid wall surrounding me. Success was like a sleeping pill. I wanted things to carry on like this for ever. The dazzle of my designer suits was my gift to myself. My voice, a precise, leisurely drawl, gave a glossy patina to conversation – to quote an admiring comment Claudia once made.

And then, one morning some years ago, everything changed. On the day my mother died. The death of my mother has probably been the most important event in my life.

It had been a long illness and when her time came, I was expecting it. Even so, when I heard that she was dead, it plunged me into a grief that I will never get over (does anyone ever really get over anything?).

The morning her nurse, Norma, rang and gave me the news, the words were like blows all over my body. ‘The señora has passed away. I was in the kitchen and I heard a noise. I rushed to her bathroom and found her just lying there on the floor, I didn’t know what to do. She’d been washing her hands – she’s been washing her hands all the time recently.’

I’ve often pictured her, standing gazing at herself in the mirror – her blue dressing gown, her slender frame, shoulders held high – just before she collapsed. It’s as though I can hear everything, the dull thud of her body, the rustle of arms and fabric falling, and the silence until she is found.

I drove over to her house and I was alone when I finally saw her as she was: an ethereal body sprawled on the bathroom tiles, swathed in her dressing gown, legs crossed, mouth open in amazement.

The hairbrush had fallen from her grasp and was lying in a corner. In a last flirtation with the world, my mother had just brushed her hair. She made a handsome corpse, ready to receive guests at her wake. I cradled her, tried to talk to her, but though I have had little experience of death, I realised that what I was holding was not a body but a piece of meat. And yet her face looked somehow magical. Calling an ambulance was merely respecting the formalities, a reflexive gesture of hope. I can still feel the fabric of her dressing gown, the last trace of warmth on her skin, still see the funereal paleness of her cheeks. Though some years have passed, that pain has never left me, the admiration I felt – that I still feel for her – the admiration, the love, the gratitude I feel for her . . . all these things I carry with me.

My mother had died with strategic suddenness – no rituals, no goodbyes, no pronouncements, no family reunions. She had made her will well in advance. From time to time, in a soft voice, with no drama, she had been making small bequests.

‘Keep whatever you want from the clothes and the shoes, the rest you should give to the Carmelite parish church in Sicuani. I’m leaving you the big mahogany clock, you can take it when it’s all over.’

These were not dramatic statements, just simple instructions she would give as she was getting into the car, or on the phone just before she said goodbye. Don’t talk like that, I would say, before she changed the subject. She had told me now. She was perfectly serene.

Claudia was by my side at the hospital and at the funeral home. With her help, I let our relations know. The most important and the most distant, obviously, being my brother Rubén who was living in New Jersey.

And so, after many years, I got to see him again.

My brother Rubén. That afternoon, in the airport, waiting for him, I was distracted by grief. The traffic jam on the motorway, the harassed taxi drivers, the two filthy urchins in the parking lot who begged me to let them wash my car.

When Rubén came through customs, I rushed over and hugged him.

The premature paunch, the beginnings of a double chin, the coarse teeth. The paunch was the result of too much high living funded by his successful career in New Jersey. As we drove from the airport to the church, Rubén reminisced about Mamá. His voice faltering, high-pitched, ragged with sobs.

‘I keep thinking about Mamá, I can’t get her out of my mind; I can still hear her voice, still see her. I have all these memories playing over and over in my head. That time she made me a cake with icing-sugar strawberries spelling “Rubén”, that time I broke my leg and she stayed with me holding my hand, the times she’d pick me up from school and we’d have lunch together. What mother does that?’

Sitting there in the car next to me, Rubén sometimes threw up his hands and let out a howl.

We arrived at the Iglesia de Fátima for the vigil. Seeing the coffin, he threw his arms around it, pressed his face to the lid and wept. At first loudly, and then in great wails. Some of our relatives came over to hug him or pat him on the back.

He and I sat together through the night, getting to our feet every now and then to accept condolences. The following day, he walked with me at the head of the funeral cortège. From time to time he wiped away his tears. He had been the last to leave the vigil and the first to arrive for the funeral. For my part, I had spent the night repeating the same litany to friends and relatives: thank you; thank you for coming; thanks; yes, it was very sudden; she’d had cancer and she’d beaten it; it was a heart attack that killed her.

Claudia never left my side except to comfort Lucía when she was crying. Alicia was holding up better. I watched everyone from a distance: friends, colleagues, relatives in groups, chatting, smiling, asking questions. I saw them through the grief, the politeness and the hugs as through a thick pane of glass. In the end, my whole body ached from greeting all these people.

It all went so fast: the slow, measured procession to the cemetery, the last words of the priest, the coffin lowered between the flowers and wreaths. Then the slow procession home. That day I talked to people I hadn’t seen in years . . . To uncles and cousins, to all the friends who came to express their condolences. Everyone was there. It was like a party; Mamá was the guest of honour, but it was my brother and I who greeted everyone.

Rubén had inherited our father’s rasping voice, calloused fingers and tubercular nose. He was, in a certain sense, his reincarnation. With age he grew more and more like him; a gnome slowly turning into the ogre that begot him. My father’s face – an image I pieced together from fragmented memories of the few occasions I had seen him – had been a craggy wilderness. It was difficult to imagine Mamá’s delicate fingers caressing it. It was as though the images came to me from opposite extremes. On one side, the whispered echoes of lullabies my mother sang to me, her slender figure waiting for me at the breakfast table. On the other, my father’s hoarse stony laugh, his red-raw knuckles.

Papá. I had done everything in my power to put the few memories I had of him out of my mind.

His death had caused me only the vaguest twinge of sorrow, a dutiful, obligatory grief. The day before, I had gone to visit him at the Military Hospital. I found him leaning back against the bedrails. He had a ragged beard, his pyjamas were stained and he was talking incessantly to a priest.

That day, when he saw me come in, he sat up and opened his arms wide.

‘Hijo, you came, I can’t fucking believe you finally came.’

Papá’s hoarse voice which came out in short barks, his grubby striped pyjamas, the eyes tight shut, the hands thrown up; I didn’t know what to say to him, he babbled on at me, his hands raised, about the things I’d done wrong, about how we hadn’t seen each other since and how now . . .

‘I’ve got so much to tell you. How are the girls? Good?’

‘They’re fine.’

‘That’s good, but there’s something I need to tell you, hijo, listen, if you ever . . . Have you seen Rubén recently?’

‘No, no, I haven’t seen him.’

‘OK, but listen, there’s something I want to ask you. There’s a girl, a woman I knew a long time ago . . . I don’t know, maybe you can find her – I want you to find her if you can – I knew her during the war. Up in Huanta, when I was stationed in Ayacucho. She was from round there. I’m begging you, please. Before I die.’

He was saying something like this when the nurse came in with his injection.

‘Get out. Get out, can’t you see I’m talking to my son? As I was saying, hijo, this woman, she was from Huanta . . .’

‘Hey, Papá, take it easy, let the nurse give you the injection.’

They told me later that he argued with the nurses that night, with the duty doctor.

‘Get my son Adrián here,’ he screamed, trying to rip the IV out of his arm, ‘I want him here right now.’

Eventually he calmed down. The next day he woke up, asked for his breakfast, then curled into a ball and stayed that way. He was dead.

At the vigil, my mother and I came to leave a spray of flowers, talked to a few of his friends and left. All told, we weren’t there more than an hour. The rest of the time was spent organising the formalities for the burial and accepting vague expressions of sympathy.

My mother, from whom I inherited my idealism, my melancholy nature, my militant optimism and my passion for music and literature, had committed the sin that is derived from such virtues. Her innocence had spoiled her; in a sense it had perverted her. Her first, her only contact with the outside world had been meeting my father.

Mamá had been a gentle, slim, refined, dreamy girl who, after a conscientious education at the Colegio Belén, had found herself at a party talking to a Marine cadet who wore a dark uniform glittering with insignia. According to my aunts, my father’s gallant posturing – the uniform, the heroism decked out with courtesy, the insolent cheerfulness – created a fantasy figure in my mother’s mind. It deceived her.

My father in full dress uniform had shown up unannounced at my mother’s house and she had blithely gone with him, climbed into his Chevrolet and listened to his tales of naval school.

‘Hello, Beatriz . . .’ he had said, offering his hand to lead her down the front steps.

‘You look so pretty, my little queen. We were taken out to sea at six this morning and forced to swim for two hours. It’s amazing, seeing the world from down there, the wonderful underwater world – some day I’ll take you with me to explore the depths of the ocean.’

My grandfather’s tantrums and my grandmother’s sad resignation – may they both rest in peace – were all for nothing. My mother had decided to marry this officer who promised to give her a life of adventure that, according to her, he had never had.

My father’s one talent had been his ability to keep up the facade during their courtship to hide what he truly was . . . he had kept it up until they were married and my mother finally slept with him (I don’t think she had counted on this, seeing him sleeping next to her, seeing him wake up). After that, she had to put up with the late-night drinking binges, the early mornings waiting up for him, the screaming matches . . .

In keeping with the good manners instilled in her as a child, my mother had been a model divorcee. She never spoke ill of her ex-husband because she never spoke of him at all. Nor did she ever go out with another man – although several passionate suitors beat a path to her door. Perhaps her silence was an admission of her foolish naivety. She had a variety of stock phrases she used when Papá’s name came up in conversation – ‘I wonder what he’s doing these days?’, ‘Let’s hope he’s doing well for himself.’ Once she sent him a document by courier.

My mother gave herself over to the exquisite rituals of her solitude – classical music in the drawing room, blue-and-white trouser suits, conversations with friends. And yet, she once confessed to Aunt Flora that an ex-husband is a millstone a wife is never free of.

‘People will say you used to be married to him. There’s nothing you can do about that.’

I would never be free of him either. I saw him quite regularly while I was in secondary school, much less when I was at university, and only five or six times after he got back from Ayacucho where he’d done a number of tours of duty – caimans he once told me soldiers called their stints in a war zone.

Over time, I came to agree with my mother’s subtle, unspoken contempt. Her discretion was a mark of her sophistication but it had a practical purpose too, since, as an aunt later told me, my mother thought it important that we be proud of our surname. Since we were stuck with it, it was better to give it some prestige through our own exemplary behaviour conveniently underscored by a deliberate artlessness. Only once, and at my insistence, did my mother ever speak to me about her relationship with my father.

‘To tell you the truth, I think that I only realised who I really was after we split up,’ she told me. ‘Before . . . I don’t know, I was so naive, I genuinely believed my life would be this wonderful adventure, I don’t know what I was thinking. And now I’m on my own, and I accept that. But I know my marriage had its compensations, at least I have you and Rubén, I have my darling granddaughters, I have my friends. I barely have a minute to myself: I have the book club, the knitting club where we make clothes for poor children, my music group, my card games. I lead a full life, Adrián, what with you and the girls – if your brother would just write a bit more often, everything would be perfect . . . but, well, I suppose he’s busy . . .’

Otherwise, from time to time, I had my own ideas about my father. Sometimes I liked to give in to my fantasies, to pretend to myself that he had been a great soldier, a hero in the war against the Shining Path – Sendero Luminoso, a guy brave enough to go to Ayacucho and tackle a group of organised murderers. Who would do something like that?

More than once I had talked to Alicia and Lucía with a certain respect, even a vague admiration about their soldier grandfather. A child with a stable family environment invariably has more things in life she can be sure of – that was how Claudia and I reasoned. My mother agreed, obviously.

‘What’s important is that the girls know they come from good stock, that the weapons they have as they go out into the world are the result of family tradition, of effort and discipline,’ Claudia said to me. ‘Like every soldier, your papá was a man of discipline and that’s obviously got to mean something.’

And so, for many years, I lived with the certainty that my father had been in Ayacucho in the early eighties waging war against the communist terrorists of Sendero Luminoso, that he had done something to defend our country and that, for this, we owed him our respect.

Besides, as kids, Rubén and I had always been excited and thrilled to see him. Whenever he came to visit, he would take us to the cinema and afterwards we’d eat pollo con papas liberally seasoned with fatherly advice (you’ve got to work hard in this life, it’s no good being a shiftless layabout), and his cheesy jokes (what did one egg say to the other egg?).

The insolent, cheerful shadow of my father sometimes flitted through my mother’s fortress. I looked out onto the world from its high windows. Even as a little boy, I felt comfortable and happy in those lonely rooms. My mother had never set foot outside. The delicate courage she had taken such pride in during her first months as a divorcee had set like concrete; her fortress was now impervious.

Marriage had been a difficult cross for her to bear, my aunt Flora told me.

‘She put up with your father for two and a half years. She made his breakfast, she made his dinner, she went with him to his reunions with his army buddies, twice, with heartbreaking tenderness, she bore him children and she patiently put up with her role as a meek, submissive wife. That all changed the third time he stayed out all night. The very same afternoon she stood in front of him in the living room, told him in no uncertain terms that she was disgusted with his gambling and his womanising, and gave him his marching orders from the house and the family. He listened to her in disbelief. The very same evening I watched him move out for good. She gave him precise instructions about the suitcase she’d packed. Not long after that, she took a job in my uncle Lucho’s studio.’

All this I was told by my aunt Flora, who – herself a militant spinster – followed my mother’s misfortunes like a soap opera in which she was simultaneously the privileged viewer, the narrator and one of the supporting cast.

My aunt Flora told me that my mother’s first inkling of what he was like came within days of their wedding.

‘I think even at that stage she realised something was wrong. Well, after the shock of that first realisation, she became determined to get shot of him. Your father only made it worse with his boorishness and his coarse manners at the table and in conversation. I can’t think how she hadn’t noticed it before. Well, anyway, when they’d been married three years, she finally decided to divorce him,’ Flora told me.

‘You and Rubén were only babies at the time. So, anyway, your mother phoned your father. He’d been living in an apartment since they separated. And she said, “I need to send over divorce papers. Can you make sure you’re at home at seven o’clock?” And your father said, “Listen, you little bitch, I won’t have you divorcing me. I’ll take you to court.” So your mother said, “Take me to court – you’ll only end up paying more alimony.” And then in a soft voice she said simply, “I’ll send a courier with the papers at seven. It’s in your best interests to sign, Alberto. You have to do this one thing for me. Don’t be a pig-ignorant fool.” Those were her very words.’

After the divorce, my mother had a little more colour in her cheeks. She threw herself into raising Rubén and me with a passion, having come through the catastrophe with some shreds of dignity intact. She had proved to the world that she could rise above her misfortunes. Her courage was the result of the tragedy of her lost illusions. She refused to see my father, speak to him, or ask about him; she made sure she was always impeccably dressed, kept her head high, a smile on her face, organised afternoons of tea and music with friends – these were the hallmarks of her grace in the face of tragedy. It was a grace she had constantly tried to pass on to us. She advised us to always keep our cool.

‘When you have a problem,’ she used to say to us, ‘you need to put the problem in perspective and consider every possible solution before making a decision.’

She was also obsessed with clothes.

‘What you wear is a reflection of who you are on the inside,’ she told us many times.

One of my mother’s abiding obsessions during our childhood was that we be well dressed. She liked to buy us jackets, shirts and ties from Harry’s in Miraflores. I always wore mine but Rubén was never really comfortable wearing his, nor was he ever really comfortable in the big white-carpeted living rooms of our house. As soon as he could, he went off to live in the US. He had been back for short visits several times since. And although she had rarely said so, my mother never stopped missing him.

Thankfully, this was something I didn’t talk to him about during the few days he spent in Lima for her funeral. My mother’s sadness was a subject which, I felt, he didn’t deserve.

II

WHILE RUBÉN WAS here, I saw him almost every day. Together, we read her will which left everything to us in equal parts. We talked to the lawyer, had a meeting with the solicitor. We gave away some of the things in the house. Meanwhile, I went through the process of mourning alone – the patient self-control during calls offering condolences, the toll taken by insomnia, the release of tears, reading the notices in the newspapers, the gradual acceptance of her absence, the lucidity of empty spaces, the cards and letters that still came for her.

One night, at a dinner at Aunt Flora’s house, I sat next to Rubén. Seeing him close up, I was struck again by how different we were: my close-cropped hair and grey suit, his thick greasy mane and leather jacket; my cheerful, circumspect pronouncements and his harsh, curt sentences dotted with swear words.

He had put on quite a bit of weight, and obesity simply highlighted his other shortcomings. He swaggered through a world that revolved around him. The love handles and the sagging jowls called attention to the fatty deposits in his veins, the coarseness about his face with its bushy eyebrows and beady eyes; the man did not simply walk, he insulted the world with his body. The hoarse voice was a product of the obesity. He looked faintly ridiculous and slightly repulsive, yet somehow I still felt close to him. The duty of memory in my mother’s tearful eyes whenever she talked about Rubén. This was no time to reproach him for his meagre letters to her, or his failure to contribute to her medical bills. It was better this way, it gave me the moral high ground, something I had often said to her.

A week after the funeral, the day before he was due to fly back to New Jersey, Rubén and I had lunch. We’d agreed to meet up at his hotel, since it was convenient for both of us (Claudia didn’t think much of Rubén and I didn’t want to put her through another meal with him at our house; to tell the truth, I wasn’t too keen on our daughters spending time with him either).

At 2 p.m., the appointed time, I was just arriving at the Hotel César. I parked in the car park and walked a couple of blocks along the Calle Diez Canseco.

I don’t know why I paid particular attention to the state of the pavement that day, it was something I didn’t usually notice; the cement was cracked and pitted with holes, boards covering certain sections. A dank smell seemed to rise from the dusty crevices and potholes.

I bumped into Rubén as he was getting out of a taxi. He was laden with shopping bags.

‘I’ve got this gringa girlfriend who wants me to bring her back some alpaca. It’s fantastic stuff, she’ll love it.’

I told him to take it up to his room, that I’d meet him in the dining room.

I had a coffee and read the papers while I waited. He showed up a little while later, his hair wet and his bovine eyes glittering. He sat down opposite me and waved to a waiter.

‘A pisco sour, make it a double.’

‘Coming right up, señor.’

I ordered the same. I was hoping the drink would help me deal with this conversation.

The hotel dining room was full of fair-haired tourists. It made the place feel strange, like a parallel universe inhabited entirely by blond beautiful people, in which Rubén and I looked like ethnic dolls in a display case. The tourists stared at us with faint smiles as though wondering if they could have us gift-wrapped to take home.

After the pisco sour, I ordered duck with rice which the waiter, thumb and index finger forming a circle, enthusiastically recommended.

‘It’s very good, señor.’

Rubén ordered the same with a portion of frijoles and a fried egg on the side. When he asked after the family I said, ‘Fine, everyone’s fine,’ and quickly shut up as though I had just confessed a secret. He said he would have liked to see my daughters.

‘Some other time,’ I said. ‘They’ve got a lot on at school at the moment, exams coming up . . .’

‘Let’s get another pisco sour. Two more pisco sours, señor . . . You not having another one?’

‘Better not, I’ve already had one and I have work this afternoon.’

‘So, anyway, when are we going to see each other again, dickhead?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Hey, I wrote to you and you never answered.’

‘It’s just I’ve had a lot of things going on, what with work and Mamá dying, you know.’

‘You should have written, you should have told me, in the end I was the one who had to phone you, remember?’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘OK, let’s forget it, I’m going to order dessert. Another pisco sour and a mazamorra, señor.

‘You want the truth, the truth is the US is a great country,’ he said, ‘but gringos can’t make pastries like you get here. In the States, they’re all flour, there’s nothing like a mazamorra, I’ll tell you.’

I lit a cigarette.

I felt unexpectedly comfortable, sprawled in a chair here next to Rubén, with waiters dancing attendance on us. The food was good. It was a perfect day.

Rubén wolfed down his mazamorra, and told three dirty jokes in a row, leaning over now and again to punch me in the arm. He talked about his ex-wife, about his visits to high-class brothels, about how much money he was capable of spending in a single night. Then he explained what he called his philosophy of life:

‘Fuck today, my friend, for tomorrow you might be fucked. Just look at Mamá.’

‘I don’t think she ever had fun in her whole life,’ he went on. ‘She should have travelled, should have come to see me in New Jersey.’

‘She had fun in her own way,’ I said.

‘What do you mean in her own way?’

‘For some people, having fun means not going out – they like staying at home, reading a book, listening to music, watching a film.’

‘Jesus, bro, you’re full of shit.’

We went on talking about Mamá; he asked me about her last months, I told him she had prayed a lot, listened to music, had tea with her friends, that sometimes she had asked after him. Eventually, I told him what I had always believed.

‘I think splitting up with Papá was the best thing that could have happened to Mamá.’

Rubén’s face tightened. He raised a finger and shook it sternly.

‘What are you saying that for?’ he said. ‘Papá was a great guy. I mean, Mamá was great too but she wasn’t the right woman for him.’

‘Of course she wasn’t.’

‘Anyway, she always looked down her nose at him. I mean, what was a man like that to do with a stuck-up society lady like her? Don’t get me wrong, I have every respect for my mother. My mamá is always here,’ he thumped at his chest, ‘and I’d beat the shit out of anyone who ran her down. But Papá was great too, I mean, he was a regular guy, he may have had his faults, but he was decent. That’s how people are, that’s what men are like, you see what I’m saying? I don’t agree with you at all.’

‘I don’t know, I think they were completely different people. To me Papá always seemed so macho.’

Rubén went on eating, took a sip of his pisco sour and stared at me. Something suddenly flared in his eyes.

‘I never thought of him as macho.’ Rubén paused, glanced out the window, then thumped the table. ‘You want to know something? I saw him cry his eyes out one night. He hugged me and said he didn’t have any money. “A poor old solider like me,” that’s how he put it, “I don’t even have enough to put clothes on my back, by the time I pay the electricity and the water I barely have enough to buy food.” He puffed out his chest and thumped it. “Me,” he said, “who fought for my country against terrorists,” then he raised a finger, “but at least I have my sons. At least I have my two sons.” He said it over and over, thumping his chest.’

The image of my father thumping his chest seemed slightly grotesque though I didn’t say anything. But I was determined to defend my mother.

‘If Mamá married Papá it was probably out of a romanticism fed by too much music and too many love stories. Marrying him was a silly mistake. Personally, I think she fell in love with Papá’s uniform, with some image she had of him, but not with him. Later, when she got to know him, that’s when disappointment set in.’

Rubén wiped his mouth with a napkin, then quickly raised his finger and wagged it from side to side.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.

‘No?’

He finished his pisco and immediately ordered another one.

‘You know I used to bring him to New York every year for New Year. Well, the last time he came with some friends of his. Two friends it was.’

It irked me to think Papá had spent more time in the US with Rubén than he had with me in Lima. But in a sense it was understandable. It didn’t take a genius to work out that my father would have felt more comfortable spending time with my brother than with me.

‘So what did you do?’

‘I took him to Ranch X, him and his mates,’ he said. ‘A brothel like you wouldn’t fucking believe. You walk in and there’s this huge fountain,’ he flung his arms wide, ‘and this pretty little thing comes right up to us. “Hi guys, nice to fuck you.” I swear, that’s what she says and offers you a drink. The place is fucking awesome, we had a ball. Obviously I picked up the tab, because the Peruvians were all flat broke. But I swear, the old man was amazed. I tell you, when it comes to whores, the gringos have us beat. In the States they’re tall and attentive, they know how to look after a guy. Gringo women can be ladies when they want to be.’

The waiter brought the glass of pisco which he knocked back. He then ordered a beer and a coffee and started chewing on a toothpick.

‘So, how did Papá seem when he visited?’ I asked.

I felt strange. Only now, with my mother dead, could I allow myself to show any concern for my father.

‘Fine. He was fine. I mean, OK, he was in a bit of a bad way because he was scared. He was convinced someone was going to go poking their nose into all that shit about Ayacucho and the war. He was a bit worried about journalists too, at least that’s what he told me.’

‘What?’

‘Well, he’d been a bit of a bastard, the old man, there was some stuff he didn’t want getting out.’

The waiter brought the beer and the coffee.

I took a sip of water.

‘A bit of a bastard? How do you mean?’

He lifted his glass, seemed to be muttering into the beer, then he went on.

‘You know what Papá did, right?’ he said, poking at his teeth with the toothpick. ‘You know what sort of shit he was up to when he was posted up in Huanta, the kind of things he did when he was working at the barracks?’

‘Sure, he was fighting terrorists. Like lots of people back then. Had to be fucking difficult.’

‘No, not that . . . Like I said, he could be a bit of a cabrón, the old man.’

He took a sip of his coffee and sat staring at the swirling liquid. It was a thick cappuccino. There was a fleck of white foam on his upper lip. The waiter stood next to us, hands clasped.

‘Anything else I can get for you, señores?’

Rubén ordered a brandy and insisted I drink something. Every time I suggested something he shook his head.

‘So, a glass of mineral water, señor?’

‘Please.’

Rubén sat staring at me harshly.

‘For Christ’s sake, have a drink.’

‘I told you, I have work this afternoon.’