It is much easier to write about pleasant and humorous memories. Unfortunately life has a little of everything. There are happy moments, funny moments, agitated moments, calm moments, grisly moments, and sad and tragic moments.
But I think one is lucky in life if it’s entertaining. I don’t say happy, nor tragic, simply entertaining. I think that in hell, instead of having those engulfing flames that are always pictured, it must be the total climax of boredom, something like the quintessence of absolute tediousness.
I ask myself if I actually had that in my life. The results tell me yes, I don’t know if it’s because of circumstances or because of my own initiative, probably a little of both. Hardly have I been bored and I prefer to think that with the years I have found harmony, and with harmony, peace.
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| Beatiful Bride |
I was the first-born son to my parents (at least according to the municipal records in Arequipa, a Peruvian southern city), and my first three years were what you would call abundant. Many toys, big house, a very comfortable life.
Only two incidents that were told to me, because I have no memory of them, are worthy of mention. I had meningitis and I fell down the stairs from the second story, splitting my forehead open. From that all is left is my excessive clumsiness, some problems with my coordination and a scar between my brows that I later made even more noticeable.
When I was three years old we had to move to Lima to Grandma’s house (Mamamita), my mom’s mom, because the family businesses managed by my father went bankrupt, for reason that aren’t relevant. First one business, then another, and just like that. There weren’t many but they allowed us to live very well.
At 28 years old my father had to start not from zero but from even lower, because he took on the pending debts. At that point, he found a job in the Department of Transportation to build highways in the mountain range of La Libertad, north of Lima. I remember being able to make it all the way to Huamachuco, a small town at the highlands of the Andes on the highway he built.
My mom, my brother Ed and I had to share a bedroom in Mamamita’s home, an old house in downtown Lima. I still remember the floorboards full of splinters, because back then there was no treatment for wooden floorboards yet. Since my brother and I always walked around the house without shoes, they would have to take the splinters out with a needle, and it wasn’t pleasant in any way.
In this house there was no yard, but a pen. We would receive, from my aunts up North, a turkey or two every once in a while. The window in our room faced the pen and I can vouch for the stupidity of these animals that in vain would try to peck at the turkey they saw reflected on the window as early as six in the morning.
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| Fernando and Jenny |
We were there for five years. Each year it was more difficult to control us and we were truly little pieces of work, Ed and I. Since I can remember, we would hit each other daily. I don’t remember a single reason to initiate these fights, but it was like a scripted scene that was always the same: Ed, younger than me by a year and a half, a constant pain in the ass, would start annoying me with something, I’d lose my patience and hit him, he would cry and hit me while I laughed, until he finally would throw a punch that hurt me, and we would start all over again. We could do this for hours.
Once they bought us roman swords, made out of hard plastic and we only got to play with them for one day. That night, my mom threw them in the trash when she saw the bodies of her two sons that looked like they had been painted with red stripes. We beat the crap out each other. This is such a good memory!
My father would come once a month or every two months, since traveling to Trujillo from Huamachuco took about two days back then, and one extra day to get to Lima. He stayed for a couple of days with us, then he returned to the mountains. The poor thing would do what he could in those times. took us to the movie matinees in the Tacna Theater where we would watch cartoon movies like “Woody Woodpecker” and “Lucky Rabbit”, and he tried to spend as much time as he could with us.
He also had to make time for my mom, and there was so little of it.
I just know he adored us, like he adored all of his children. We are four siblings total, two from his second marriage. By all means we are siblings, not half-siblings or any other stupid politically correct term. For us, you either are or aren’t, nothing in between.
In the meantime I turned into an avid and obsessive comic book reader. The only thing I wanted was more comic books, and I would make one of our maids read them to me over and over again. Every time my aunts came to visit, I asked for change to buy more comics. My aunt Maruja specially, always gave me enough for a couple of them. My mom, of course, would bring me one almost every day.
Even in the newspapers, I liked looking at the advertisements. One day I looked at an ad in the newspaper for a detergent called “Maravilla” and just like that, totally surprised I realized I could read everything it said! I was about 4 years old and I had never been to school since in those days we didn’t have preschool, or daycares.
Without fully understanding what was happening, I could grasp that this would change my life. No more maids, no more having to beg, ask, plead and even threaten them so they would read me a comic. My first step towards freedom had been taken.
I ran straight to my mom to tell her I knew how to read, and I showed her by reading a whole article in the newspaper. Against all expectations, my mom got mad and went straight to the maid to ask her for an explanation, thinking she had taught me how to read. Finally, and in a formal meeting, the whole family had to accept the fact that I had learned to read on my own.
It wasn’t until many years later that I found out the reason to her reaction; the doctor that treated me for meningitis told my mother that it was likely that I would have lasting effects and it was preferable I wasn’t pushed intellectually, and even recommended that I be held back from going to school for a year. In other words: “ma’am, don’t worry too much if your son turns out a little stupid.”
I was sent to kindergarten at the right age and two months later they transferred me to the next grade. My mom didn’t find out until half way through the year, when she went to the parent-teacher conference at the end of the first semester. It was too late. It turned out that not only were they not holding me back a year according to the doctor’s instructions, but I was placed a grade ahead!
I don’t think I had superior intelligence, but what I had was an obsessive, intense and impatient personality and a curiosity bordering with madness that have followed me my whole life. Now, I’m not stupid, not at all.
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| Two little pieces of work... |
My mom was also an avid reader and I remember her reading “Ben-Hur”, by Lewis Wallace, a little novel of about 600 pages in Victorian style. That was actually the first book I read (in secret, of course). I read it over and over again, and my imagination would transport me to the Galleys, the Roman Coliseum, Jerusalem and Africa; always with excitement, fear, happiness, and above all, passion. I hated Mesala with my whole being. I would cry, laugh, suffer, it was a flood of emotions and images that filled my life. Of course at this point my mom realized that there were parts of the book I knew by heart, and had no choice but to take me to watch the movie.
We went to the Metro, a very stylish and elegant theater downtown Lima and they cleaned me and dressed me up, they even had me wear a suit. I watched the movie practically without moving and almost not breathing. It was overpowering and impressive. A new obsession had been born in me: the movies. I must have watched as many as a few thousand movies. I have no idea how many books, but in both cases, I lost a lot of time for not knowing how to choose. I was a machine that processed text and images, wild and natural.
It was around that time that my mom started to instill other things in me; she would buy classical music albums, and I would sit to read in the living room with my record player (yes, mine at 6 years old) and I would play Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin specially. When I only wanted to listen to music I would play zarzuela (Spanish opera), another big passion my parents had. I listened to “Luisa Fernanda” until the grooves in the vinyl wore out and we had to buy another copy.
Undoubtedly I attended the zarzuela season that was presented by the Company of Don Faustino Garcia. I went with my mother for several years. The reaction of this alone would fill several more pages without a doubt.
We also had some great aunts, my grandfather’s sisters, which lived on top of the famous Cordano, a very old and traditional restaurant downtown Lima, at the front corner of the Government Palace. It was the house of our great grandfather whom had already passed away and in that house lived all of the single aunts. Actually I think they all stayed single. My Aunt Pepa, the oldest, was very loving but was also very ugly, the poor thing. Our great grandfather, faithful to tradition, decided that if the oldest one didn’t go out neither could the second, and so on, condemning all five of my aunts to a single life.
By the way, it was him who donated the paintings of the celebrated Pancho Fierro artist to the National Library of Lima, after a lot of strenuous work to top the watercolor paintings, and a “baptism” he did with Don Ricardo Palma, a famous Peruvian writer. I say “baptism” because Pancho Fierro was illiterate and the titles seen in the paintings were written by them. They had to figure out the date and more importantly the scenery and who was being portrayed in them.
My mom would take me to visit them once a month and she would pay us to kiss Aunt Pepa, because she had a mustache and a very deep voice. But this subject is for a different story.
For me it was a special day. My mom with one of my aunts (Emilia, I think) would take me to my great grandfather’s library. It was a room with very little light, even artificial light was scarce, and I estimate it had about 3,000 books. All four walls, almost from the ceiling to floor were filled with books, and additionally it had full bookshelves in the middle of the room.
They sat down and talked while I would get to pick whatever books I wanted. Of course I barely understood the titles or knew the authors, but they had all the books of the Molina Editorial, and the full Robin Hood collection, that were books for a younger demographic. And this is how I had the good fortune of being introduced to Jules Verne, Emilio Salgari, Louisa May Alcott, and Alexandre Dumas amongst others.
I could take 4 or 5 at a time depending on the price, because my aunt wasn’t dumb. She charged for each book. They haggled on the price back and forth with me putting my best “poor me” face and leaving happy, with a new dose of drug for the month.
What I really admired about my mom was her capability of making me see things in a way that weren’t imposed. But once something was defined in my interests, she wouldn’t stop stimulating it in various ways.
We got to share some books and talk about them, and sometimes when she would come home and I was listening to “Luisa Fernanda”, my favorite zarzuela, she would sit and enjoy it with me. Today I still remember those moments very clearly, and I realize now that the situation was very unusual, even for those times. Back then I don’t think I ever met anyone my age that even knew what zarzuelas were, let alone “Luisa Fernanda”.
When I turned eight, we moved to San Antonio, an upper class neighborhood and things were going much better for my father. We would get to see him more often; he worked in Chimbote, closer to Lima in a private construction company. My mom stopped working and we got to fully enjoy her for a few months.
Shortly after, she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer or lymphoma, fatal in those times. Of course we had no idea, we just knew she had surgery to have her lymph nodes removed.
After that everything became a little blurry. My mom would stay in bed for days with a lot of pain and we only got to spend time with her after dinner to watch “Mamá” a soap opera she really liked, and I remember it to this day. Even though I was young, I loved looking at Cuchita Salazar who played Fernando Larrañaga’s girlfriend in the soap opera, whom he was ferociously in love with until she was in an accident that disfigured her face. The love ran out.
In the summer of ’63 I turned 11 years old and I was in my last middle school year. Our father organized a trip from Lima to Tumbes that lasted almost a month. We had an extraordinary time. My mom’s illness didn’t seem to fog the horizon and everything was going great.
We had to come back a few days early because all of a sudden she wasn’t doing well. She had to spend some time in the Neoplastic Hospital and she came back home, but she was always on bed rest.
I was attending school at La Inmaculada, an excellent school ran by Jesuits, and it had an interesting method to make their schoolboys study. Every two months instead of our monthly exam, they would have “Contest-Exams”. The peculiar thing was that for a whole week, all we did was take exams that were worth twice the points, and before each exam we had several hours to study.
I was a good student, always of the top ones in my class, kind of. Nevertheless I didn’t study a whole lot. The truth is that thanks to this obsessive side of me, I was always paying attention in class and I would even read newspapers that were thrown in the trash. I would read my text books from cover to cover, not just once but several times, just for fun. I think my very first conscious effort at studying was when I was applying for college and honestly it took a lot of effort.
When I did my first “Contest-Exam”, to sit in front of the textbook going over the material for two or three hours was sensational. I couldn’t understand when I would see some of my classmates anxiously fidgeting in their desks, desperate for not being able to move or give shit to someone to pass the time. For me this was not a problem.
La Inmaculada also had another tradition: the reading of grades. The dean of the school, Monsignor Bambaren at the time, would sit on the stage of the school’s auditorium in front of a huge table covered with green flannel, with the results of the exams for the whole grade consisting of three sections; “A”, “B” and “C”. Never knew why I always was in section “C” but I am sure there was a reason.
He would call on each student, one at a time. He read out loud all the grades and then make a comment, rarely was it a positive one and most of them were so negative that it was borderline humiliation. I remember one comment specially, that I thought was cruel and insulting to the extreme:
- Perez, do you know what happens when you put a rotten apple in a barrel of freshly picked apples?
- No, father.
- Well I’m going to tell you, all of them rot. And you are that rotten apple. Starting this instant you are expelled from this school. Go to your classroom and pick up all of your things.
Obviously Perez was completely broken-down. To be classified as a rotten apple at eleven or twelve years old is a little premature. From what I learned later, Perez was able to come back to school despite Bambaren’s opposition and he is now a very decent person by today’s standards. The name has been changed to protect the innocents. Not Bambaren’s just in case. I mean the innocents only.
After more than two hours of agony, he finally made it the letter “S”, and then “Salmeron”. I’ve never really trusted myself so I expected the worst. In a fog I hear –Salmeron, do you know where are you placed in your class? –No, father – You are placed first for the whole grade, not only your class and not just that; you are twenty one points ahead from the second best. This is the first time there has been such a big difference between first and second place in this school ever. Congratulations!
Then he proceeded by reading all my grades and honestly they were pretty good. I sincerely was not expecting something like that and it took a long while for it to really sink in.
On the way to the flag pole, where we had to gather to get on the school buses that took us home, I was thinking how happy my mom was going to be with the news. She was particularly competitive in my regards. The whole way home I was thinking of how I would tell her and imagining her reaction!
The bus dropped me off and I ran home as quickly as I could; when I got there I found out that they had taken her to the emergency room of the Institute of Neoplastic Diseases that same morning. She would never come back home again and I never got to share my achievements with her.
And then the visits to the Institute started. There was a strict order not to let anyone under 14 years of age in due to the risk of carrying a virus or some sort of childhood illness that could decimate the patients if they caught it.
When we would arrive at the hospital they would sit us, my brother and I, in a bench at the entrance in front of the concierge. We had the practice of taking advantage of the most minor distraction to take off running and up the stairs, to my mom’s room.
My brother always took off first. Ed was special. He could never be calm. He had without a doubt a superior intelligence and much more balanced than mine. He reacted always quicker than anyone else, including uncles, aunts, father, mother and Mamamita. But especially much faster than his brother.
Always with the perfect phrase to discombobulate adults and trick kids.
We were completely different; fighting all the time, however I believe this tragedy united us so much that more than fifty years later we love each other down to the marrow.
We liked to go visit when uncle Pepe was there. Pepe was the Menendez’s dad, which in those times were only five. They would later become a few more.
Uncle Pepe was short, bald, wore glasses and he had a mustache. Intense and passionate, he loved to engage in debates, with or without sense, and he was more de la Rosa Toro (our mother’s maiden name) than any other person I ever met. When he was in the hospital, he would come down and engage the concierge in an argument, and man would he debate!
He would overwhelm the poor guy that was only trying to do his job, while with one hand behind his back he would signal for us to sneak off to the stairs, and that’s what we would do. It never failed.
Our mom was in very bad condition. She managed to stay alive for 5 months in the hospital, but in those times chemo and radiation were devastating. The last impression we had of her was terrible, but for us she was our mom, and we saw her as beautiful as ever and I’m not exaggerating. Her huge green eyes and the love they reflected was enough.
When they admitted my mom into the hospital for the last time, we went to live with a family that was very good friends with my dad. Wonderful people, that welcomed us like their sons with all the benefits and responsibilities. They were Aunt Concho and Uncle Ricardo, and Puchi, Ricardo and Eddie. To compare us to Ricardo and Eddie, a little bit younger than us, it was like trying to find similarities between heaven and hell.
Their room was impeccable. They even had a wall where their toys would hang from, intact! We didn’t have one single toy that had survived more than a week and the soccer ball we played with belonged to our cousin Rafo.
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| Jenny Number Two |
My books and comics were destroyed, and worn out. Their comics were matted! Ten copies per volume! The best.
They had lived in the same house their whole lives, and we had moved about five times in the most diverse environments, including long seasons in Chimbote, and in the mountain range of La Libertad.
Downtown Lima was extremely familiar to us, and I would take the bus from San Martin’s plaza to the Reducto Park, at age nine, when I would get out of La Inmaculada late, at 7 o’clock at night. They wouldn’t leave Miraflores, one of the best areas of Lima.
It was without a doubt a big cultural shock from both sides. While at Uncle Ricardo’s house dinner was eaten with a cloth napkin on your lap and seven different types of silverware on the table, we came from eating with one fork and one spoon for your soup that was placed on top of a plastic placemat. For the first course, main meal and dessert, we would wipe our fork clean with a napkin and it was good to go.
However we developed a friendship that still persists. I ask myself now if I would have the balls to do what Aunt Concho and Uncle Ricardo did for us. For both, my brother and I have an immense amount of respect and love. It’s a debt of gratitude we will never be able to pay.
One day my father put me in the car and while he drove, clearly explained to me the severity of the situation. Until this moment I was not fully conscious that my mother was going to die. Even after this conversation, I nursed the secret hope that she would recuperate.
I remember it was a Thursday, because Thursdays were the days I wore white socks, and I loved it; it looked really good with my school uniform. At seven in the morning Aunt Concho went up into our room and announced that our dad was downstairs. Running and ready for school we went downstairs to greet him.
He was wearing a suit and dark glasses, Aunt Maruja was with him, also wearing dark glasses. When I walked up to say hi to him, he grabbed my shoulder, got down and whispered: “Your mom has gone to heaven”. Before he even spoke, I knew what he was going to say and I felt a demolishing hit. I couldn’t think, speak or even less cry. However, it seems like even children have social norms we must comply with.
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| Jenny Number Three |
I could hear Ed, who was with Aunt Maruja, crying desperately and I understood I had to cry. But the tears wouldn’t come out or any noise from my throat. I was sitting on my dad’s lap and I only got the presence of mind of putting my eyes on his shoulder. Terrified, I felt like a bad person, I couldn’t cry.
I cried for the first time and uncontrollably, three months later, on the first Christmas without her.
Years later, Uncle Max’s daughter was born, my cousin Jennifer, and she is Jenny Number Two.
Jenny Number three is my youngest daughter.
Curiously, they have the same sweet gaze, sad and huge eyes both; they are also artists and dreamers down to their core like my mom.
And then they say that your name doesn’t influence your destiny…
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