From 'El chico que se declaraba con la mirada'

From El chico que se declaraba con la mirada (Lima: Asalto Al Cielo, 1988)

3 

Ipa. Your mini-pool. The Theater. At the Santa Isabel roundabout, my black-haired head. Rock and roll. Between your thighs. Aquamarine pants and good little girl moccasins. Dreamer. Flyer. A strange taste for letters. Writing poems. One for tonight at 8. And boom there I am on the old sidewalks and swings and willows. Destroyed. Ana María Iparraguirre. Song that left off like wind at the airport. In the nothing of the next pages.

I’m 16. I’m thinking about Toña. Thinking about your sex. Vallejo. México. I’m studying at Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola. Masturbation. I’m a loner. I’m a could-be killer. Stephen Hero. Death. I want to write a Song. Something real fun. Something Big. Municipal Cinema. Luis Bruno Seminary. Time-gaps. Fuiti Guzmán. Abimael Guzmán. Which is to say “Good.” Good man. Big beard. Supreme jefe. God. Demi-god. To kill. The story begins one sunny day in the orderly gardens of Santa Isabel, urbanization of evil. Why evil? Do you confess? What do you say to the priest? That you masturbate 7 times in a row like Larsen? Or a childhood skylight illuminated by the sun the site where I’m caressed by a young bitch. Summer sweetness. Refuge of the demented, the barefoot, the desperate, the blues, of the mortals and the forgers.

Hurí. Punkt.

I met her in a bar. Played the guitar left hand. On her gums yum yum the paste was extra tingly. More than a song sung at half volume to not wake the drunk old poets with their prominent paunches. Piura, fantastic stupidity. The loneliness of masturbation, Marijuana, Martha Wanda.

Pampería. A certain Elena. With Jimmy at the Tiburón. Death is a beautiful word. We go flying to the brothel in the Fiat 600. The devil’s fangs. Persecution. Out on the highway you feel good. The mind is liberated from sticks and stones brought in by the sea at San Pedro, so much loneliness, so much sand, so much ocean taking the sperm under. Beneath the water beneath Ena’s orange panties, beauty and my heart naked among the ruins. Amber. Another beer. The peeled Onassis. Ena plunges into forgetting. Her black and sleeping eyes sink into the sea. There is nothing but perfidious meanderings in the starry night. In the midst of the dark hollow. Immense grave. This man is governed by Death. One must liquidate him, get rid of him. He could be contagious. Ace him. Joy.

Hymns. Hallelujahs. Secret ceremony. Perfection of uncontrolled meaning. Inauguration of a body. New fruit. Jungle. Cement. Rust. Neurosis.

Accustomed to calling her on the phone after school. I liked her blue dress. A red get-up with flowers. Her laugh: her young mouth. Her lips. Her pointed teeth. The blonde in her. The joy of knowing that she existed. That I could call her and hear her adolescent voice, her 12-year-old voice, of Primero de Media. Traffic Sound’s song Toña. America. Chicama Way. Guitar your body. Platonic love.

At club Grau, Bingo night, you arrived at Knaup’s party and you came into the living room when Aroma was preparing a slow rock. That’s what you did and your hair flying on the waves of Chino Montenegro’s Chica Pagana. I play Campolo low at all costs. And the madman Alvarez, taking advantage of his Mick Jagger airs. A Cholo Jagger.

Your voice on the phone. The smoothness of afternoon. You came into the party. And I spotted you recently gotten off. Innocence. Wonder. Beautifully bound up embraced by the music, within the music, in the ancestral vertigo, magic and delirious from desire, the music. The only time you faltered between my heart and yours, beneath the petit-bourgeois fabric of our gilded youth.