The Distance Between Us Read online

  ‘This is an impressive book. In writing it the author demonstrates great talent, as well as great courage.’

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  ‘No one that reads this book will be able to look at their family in the same way again.’

  Gabriela Wiener

  ‘An extraordinary family story … Renato Cisneros delivers here the captivating narrative of a strange and disturbing filiation.

  A loving and lucid puzzle.’

  Le Monde (France)

  ‘People should read this novel to learn more about themselves.’

  Jorge Edwards

  ‘Cisneros is a phenomenon in Latin America today.’

  Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, El País (Spain)

  ‘A book so intelligent and moving, you wish it would never end.’ Libération (France)

  ‘The Distance Between Us is the story of a villain told from love. It dwells in the humanity hidden behind the themes left by war. It also narrates that other war: the one which all of us wage against our parents to become the persons we are.’

  Santiago Roncagliolo

  ‘The Distance Between Us goes far and appeals to the reader exactly because there is so little distance between what is written and what was lived.’

  Alberto Fuguet

  ‘“Just as a father is never prepared to bury his son, a son is never prepared to dig up his father”(…) It is within this tension that this magnificent novel lies, full of drama and suspense from the very first page.

  Edmundo Paz Soldán

  Renato Cisneros

  THE DISTANCE

  BETWEEN US

  Translated by

  Fionn Petch

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Translator’s Note

  Copyright

  Renato Cisneros with his father (1980)

  To my brothers and sisters,

  who had a father named like mine.

  ‘I am a man of sad words. Why did I feel so guilty? If my father always brought absence, and the river brought perpetuity.’

  The Third Bank of the River

  João Guimarães Rosa

  Chapter 1

  I’m not here to tell the story of the woman who had seven children with a priest. All I’ll say for now is that her name was Nicolasa Cisneros and she was my great-great-grandmother. The priest she fell in love with, Gregorio Cartagena, was a high-ranking bishop in Huánuco, in the Peruvian Sierra, in the years before and after independence. Over the four decades of their relationship, both did what they could to avoid the repercussions of the scandal. Since Gregorio could not or would not acknowledge his offspring legally, he passed himself off as a distant relative, a friend of the family, so he could stay close to them and watch them grow up. Nicolasa reinforced the lie by filling out the baptism certificates with false information. This is how she came to invent a fictitious spouse, Roberto Benjamín, a ghost who played the role of legal husband and father. The day the children found out that Roberto had never existed and that Father Gregorio was their biological father, they resolved to break with their past, with their bastard origin, and made their second, maternal surname the only one, relegating Benjamín to a middle name.

  Nor will I say anything here about the last of those illegitimate children, Luis Benjamín Cisneros, my great-grandfather. Nothing except the fact that his school friends nicknamed him ‘The Poet’. And that he was such a single-minded character that at the age of seventeen, he decided he was going to win the love of Carolina Colichón, the mistress of President Ramón Castilla. What’s more, he succeeded. By the time he was twenty-one they had three daughters together. The five of them lived hidden away in a squalid room in the middle of Lima, fearing retaliation. Early one morning, at the urging of his mother, who had just discovered the beleaguered life he was leading, Luis Benjamín left Peru and set sail for Paris, where he wrote romantic novels and guilt-ridden letters. Two decades later, he returned to Lima as a diplomat, married a young lady of fourteen, and became a father again, producing five further children. The next-to-last of these, Fernán, was my grandfather.

  Fernán became a journalist and at the age of twenty-three was hired as an editor at La Prensa. After just two years he became the editor-in-chief, following the imprisonment of the entire editorial board under the dictatorship of Augusto Leguía. He too suffered harassment from the regime and in 1921 was exiled to Panama, although he ultimately took up residence in Buenos Aires. By then, he already had five children with his wife, Hermelinda Diez Canseco, as well as a new-born baby with his mistress, Esperanza Vizquerra, my grandmother. Both women followed him to Argentina, where Fernán managed to support both families, while avoiding any contact between them.

  But this novel isn’t about him, either. Or perhaps it is, but that’s not my intention. This novel is about my father, Lieutenant General Luis Federico Cisneros Vizquerra, ‘El Gaucho’ Cisneros, third son of Fernán and Esperanza, born in Buenos Aires on 23 January 1926, died of prostate cancer in Lima on 25 July 1995. It’s a novel about him or someone very like him, written by me or someone very like me. It’s not a biographical novel. Not a historical novel. Not a documentary novel. It’s a novel conscious of the fact that reality occurs only once and that any reproduction made of it is condemned to adulteration, to distortion, to simulacrum.

  I have tried and failed several times to embark on this novel. Everything I wrote invariably ended up in the bin. I couldn’t figure out the right texture for the copious material I’d collected over the years. It’s not that I’ve clarified everything by now, but spitting out these first paragraphs anchors me, gives me purchase, provides an unexpected solidity. The doubts haven’t dissolved, but somewhere in the depths I can make out the glimmering granular light of a certainty. All I know for sure is that I’m not going to write a novel about my father’s life, but rather about my father’s death: about what that death unleashed and revealed.

  To do that, I have to go back to April 2006.

  To what was going on in my life then.

  I’d been avoiding psychoanalysis for months. The end of my relationship with Pierina Arbulú – five years together, two years living together – had devastated me. I was struggling to admit that my depression called for treatment. I’d come and go from the newspaper office where I worked. I’d come and go from my apartment. I’d get up in the mornings, think, sleep. Especially sleep. And I was barely eating.

  A friend put me in touch with Elías Colmenares, a psychoanalyst who received patients in a two-storey house on La Fuente Ave., near the corner of 28 de Julio St., in Miraflores. Since I lived just three blocks away, I agreed to try him out for purely geographical reasons. That was my excuse, at least. The day I saw him for the first time, Elías had just turned fifty. He had broad, rosy cheeks. His lively eyes, blue as mouthwash, stood out between his nose and the black line of his eyebrows. We entered a room, he closed the door, we sat down. Despite all his hyperactive tics, Colmenares conveyed an oceanic calm. His speech, varied and comfortable, resembled the room where he saw his patients: a portrait of Lacan, a yellow satin couch, puppets of Freud and Warhol and Dalí suspended from the ceiling, a gladiolus in a pot, a cactus, copies of Picasso prints, a chessboard with two armies of wooden gargoyles lined up facing each other, a glass jar full of lollipops,
miniature lamps, tourist guides to Athens, Prague, Rome, novels by Kundera and García Márquez, LPs by Dylan and Van Morrison. Depending on the details that caught a patient’s attention, the room could have been the sanctuary of a restless adult or the refuge of an awkward adolescent. In our first two sessions, I was the only one to speak at all. Elías invited me to explain why I’d come, and I felt a moral obligation to summarise my relationship with Pierina. I barely talked about anything else. I didn’t mention my family or my tedious job. I briefly mentioned my father’s death, but I focused on Pierina: on how she’d entered and exited my life, altering it, splitting it in two, like a bullet piercing a body and destroying its vital organs. From the leather sofa that served as his throne, Colmenares watched me, nodded, cleared his throat, completed the sentences I couldn’t finish with teacherly aplomb. It wasn’t until the third session that we had something resembling a real conversation. I was in the middle of a monologue about how horribly jealous I’d become in my last months with Pierina, and I was blaming myself for having caused the break-up by harassing her, attempting to trail and control her. I’d stopped acting like a boyfriend and become more like a police officer, I admitted, not looking at Colmenares, my gaze buried in the terracotta-coloured rug that covered the parquet floor. I was getting fed up with my own narrative, leading me as it did to reconstruct the fights that wore away at our relationship, the silences that hurt more than the insults, the insults that hurt more than the slammed doors, the slammed doors that recurred like bells tolling the hour. Suddenly, a silence fell that seemed to last an eternity. Colmenares broke it by changing the subject altogether.

  ‘Tell me something. Your parents – how did they meet?’

  ‘Weren’t we talking about something else?’ I responded, interlocking my fingers in my lap.

  ‘I think the change might be useful,’ Colmenares pressed, crossing one leg over the other.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, let me think,’ I said. I glanced upward, as if scanning the air for information that I should have been able to find in my memory. ‘They met at the Ministry of the Economy when it was still known as the Treasury.’

  ‘Could you be more specific? What were the circumstances? Who introduced them?’

  ‘My mother was a secretary in the office of Minister Morales Bermúdez. My father was the deputy minister or advisor. I suppose it must have been Morales who introduced them. My dad was still married to his first wife at the time.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘She was called Lucila. Lucila Mendiola.’

  ‘Was called? You mean she’s dead?’

  ‘Yes, she died a few years ago.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘Barely. I saw her twice: at the wake for my father’s mother, Esperanza, and at my father’s wake.’

  ‘Do you remember what she was like?’

  ‘She was a very difficult woman. She came from an influential family from Sullana. That’s where she met my father. They say that when he once fell ill with appendicitis, she looked after him with such devotion and he felt so grateful that he married her out of a combination of love and duty. I don’t really know. They married and had three children. My three older siblings.’

  ‘Who’s the they who told you all this?’

  ‘My mother, my aunts and uncles.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The problems began over the years. When my mother appeared in my father’s life, his marriage to Lucila was already in pieces. But she refused to sign for divorce, no matter how many times he asked her. My parents married outside of Peru, in the United States, in a registry office in San Francisco.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t Lucila have wanted to grant him the divorce?’

  ‘Resentment, spite, pride, something like that, I guess. Seeing her husband in love with another woman, a younger woman, she must have felt, I don’t know, humiliated or ridiculed. I’m speculating. What’s certain is that she wouldn’t give in. For us she became a kind of witch, the villain of the story. Perhaps she believed she could hold on to my father if she didn’t sign the papers, but she was wrong. Lucila never forgave him for leaving home, abandoning her, abandoning their children. I think she underestimated his feelings for my mother; maybe she thought it was just another dalliance, the whims of a womanising military man. She didn’t imagine he’d dare to leave altogether, much less that he’d remarry and have three more children.’

  ‘If they never divorced, then Lucila was still officially his wife when she died…’

  ‘In the legal sense, yes.’

  ‘So how were your parents able to marry? Why San Francisco?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I know is that a relative who was an ambassador helped them sort it out. It was a question of opportunity. It could have been Canada, Panama or anywhere else. In any case, it was a very quick, small ceremony, a formality. No guests.’

  ‘And witnesses?’

  ‘None. I don’t know. I’m not sure.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a photo of this wedding?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘But do you know if there are photos from that day?’

  ‘As far as I know, no. No photos.’

  ‘What about the certificate?’

  ‘The certificate? I have no idea! It never occurred to me to ask my parents for their marriage certificate. Is that something people do?’

  ‘What I mean is, is there any record of this marriage?’

  ‘What else do you want me to say, Elías? I’ve never seen a photo. It’d never even crossed my mind.’

  Elías Colmenares uncrossed his legs and leaned forward to sit on the edge of the sofa.

  ‘There’s the link. Don’t you see?’ he asked.

  ‘What link?’

  ‘Think about it. You’re the product of a marriage that emerged amid uncertainty, that was formalised only under great strain, far away, under another country’s laws, perhaps even in another language, without witnesses, without announcements, almost in secret. A marriage without evidence. There are no files, no photos, nothing to prove what happened in that registry office. What I’m trying to say is that your parents’ marriage has all the appearance of a myth. You’re the child of a myth. To some extent, we all are. What you’ve described surely happened, but there’s no proof. As the product of this union, there’s a root of uncertainty planted in your unconscious. Isn’t that what you said you felt whenever you read Pierina’s emails – uncertainty?’

  ‘Let me see if I’ve got this right. I was jealous because I’ve never seen a photo of my parents’ wedding? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ I asked.

  ‘No. The point is that there’s a connection – a symbolic one, if you like – between what happened to your father and what you feel is happening to you.’

  ‘Why my father and not my mother? She was there too, she took part, she agreed to things.’

  ‘But it was your father, not your mother, who took the decision to build a second marriage on shifting sands. Look, even when a person comes into the world through maternal desire, he structures himself on the basis of identification and transference with the paternal figure. It’s the father who determines his identity. Leaving the mother’s womb, he’s incorporated into culture through the father. It’s the father who sets him on his path, who grants him language. The mother generates love, trust, but the father gives him the tools to occupy a place in the world, you see?’

  For a moment it annoyed me to hear Colmenares talking about my parents as if he knew them better than I did, but his logic struck me. It jolted me from scepticism into astonishment. It was as if he’d suddenly shed light on information that was lodged within me without my knowing. I couldn’t grasp everything that was fragmenting and coalescing in my mind; I only remember feeling exhausted, overwhelmed. I was experiencing something like a mental cramp. His words caused a shock, a tremor in me
that – I sensed – would become a breaking point. Once the session was over, back in the street, delaying my return home, I went back over Elías’ theory and thought about all the other links that might exist between my father’s unexamined life and my own. I felt rising panic. The one thing that calmed me was realising that the oppressive memory of Pierina had abruptly loosened its grip on my throat. The ghost of my former girlfriend hadn’t been banished altogether, but it had been displaced by the scale of the new task before me. For that was what I now felt: that I had a task. I didn’t know what it involved, but I was ready to find out.

  Chapter 2

  One day in 1929, during a lunchtime break at San Marón School in Buenos Aires, nine-year-old Juvenal Cisneros beats a fellow pupil in a maths quiz. The other boy accuses him of cheating and gives him a shove. Juvenal pushes back, and soon their fists are swinging – a trifling incident that would soon grow serious. Someone pulls them apart. But as the other boy moves away, bitter with defeat, he yells over his shoulder ‘At least I don’t share my dad, like you do!’ For minutes afterwards, once the youngsters returned to their classrooms and peace has been restored, these words continue to ring in Juvenal’s ears. In fact, he’ll continue to hear them for the rest of his life. ‘At least I don’t share my dad, like you do.’ The next morning, he gets up and decides to follow his father. Fernán’s teaching jobs and his work as a journalist at La Nación have secured a more comfortable lifestyle for the family. Gone are the dingy hotels and rented rooms of his early years as an exile: the flat at 400 Suipacha St.; the room with the shared bathroom at 330 Cerrito St.; the tenement at 2200 Paraguay St. Now they live at 865 Esmeralda St., in flat number 20 of an old sand-coloured mansion house with cold tiles and exposed pipes in the entrance hall. Juvenal tells his mother, Esperanza, that he has to be at school early and descends the chipped marble staircase. He passes through the front gate and spots his father on the corner. He follows his route for one, three, six, seven, ten blocks, trying not to lose sight of him. Heading down Córdoba Ave., he crosses Maipú, Florida, and San Martín before turning right on Reconquista. Then he turns again on Corrientes before zig-zagging across Sarmiento, then Rivadavia. He’s not sure what he’s doing there or what he hopes to find. It feels foolish to be chasing the silhouette of this man who now seems more mysterious than ever. Yet it also feels urgent. Could there be any truth in what the boy yelled at him? Who do I share my dad with? If he had a secret, wouldn’t he tell me? Of course he would, Juvenal answers his own question, and he quickens his step to keep sight of that patch of blue advancing unhurriedly down the pavement. Juvenal watches as his father stops before a shop window, perhaps considering a gift for him or his siblings – and he feels like an idiot for doubting him, for being swayed by the blethering of a spiteful kid. But as much as he wants to believe that this pursuit is senseless, a stronger force impels him to keep playing detective. Rounding yet another corner, Juvenal tries to talk himself into abandoning the mission – What am I doing here? What will they say at school? Won’t they have called my mother already? – and gradually slows his pace, but without taking his eyes off the target. Just two more blocks, he tells himself, ashamed now, wishing he could run to catch up with his father and embrace him, apologise for questioning the exclusiveness of his love, beg for forgiveness. So he allows Fernán to pull further ahead and starts to feel like the danger has passed. Then, turning the next corner, at the junction of Tacuarí and Moreno, Juvenal sees what he most feared – or what, deep down, he had hoped to discover. He will never be able to erase the scene from his memory. There, on the other side of Belgrano Ave., his father is leaving the pavement and entering a house, holding hands with two children. A boy and a girl, older than Juvenal. The boy must be about 14, the girl 15 or 16. Frozen behind a newsstand, Juvenal watches as these total strangers kiss and hug his dad as blithely and spontaneously as he himself does every night when he gets home to Esmeralda St., and he feels something collapse inside him. The scene is a revelation. Perhaps too much so. The front door closes behind them, and only then does Juvenal notice how much bigger the house is than where he lives, and he is filled with a rage beyond his years – a heat and a pain that immediately turn into tears, no matter how hard he tries to hold them back. ‘Hey, kid, you ok?’ the newspaper seller asks. But the kid is too distressed to answer, and he sets off at a run, in every direction and none, cursing himself for not having gone straight to school that morning. And as he runs, his face crumpled, tears flowing freely, he wonders who these other children could be. He doesn’t know that their names are Mincho and Rosario. He doesn’t know there are three more inside: Fernando, Moruno and María Jesús. All are his father’s children with Hermelinda Diez Canseco. He doesn’t know that he, Juvenal, is actually the first of the seven offspring born to a beautiful but impure relationship. But he does understand something, he makes a connection – and suddenly, as he runs, he thinks of Lima, of the room where he was born, in a yard beside the ghostly Matusita house, at the junction of Sol and España streets, a bedroom where his mother was always alone, and now, on the streets of Buenos Aires, this past solitude suddenly makes all the sense in the world. Juvenal keeps running aimlessly; there’s no way he’s going to school now, and he wonders how long his father has been going to that big house, the sight of which he wishes he could expel from his mind, but cannot.