A Fish in the Water: A Memoir by Mario Vargas Llosa

overcome with fear, because hating one’s own father was surely a mortal sin, for which God would punish me. At La Salle, there was confession every morning and I frequently made confession; my conscience was always sullied by that fault, hating my father and wanting him to die so that my mama and I could again have the life we’d had before. I approached the confessional with my face burning with shame for having to repeat the same sin every time.
    Neither in Bolivia nor in Piura had I been very pious, one of those sanctimonious little prigs that abounded among my schoolmates at La Salle and at the Salesian Brothers’ school, but in this first period in Lima I came close to being one, even though for bad reasons, since that was a discreet way of resisting my papa. He made fun of the religious hypocrites that the Llosas were, of that pantywaist habit they had inculcated in me of crossing myself when I passed in front of a church and of that custom of Catholics to kneel before those men in skirts: priests. He said that in order for him to be on good terms with God he didn’t need intermediaries, and needed even less lazy, parasitical ones in women’s skirts. But even though he ragged us a lot about how devout my mama and I were, he didn’t forbid us to go to Mass, perhaps because he suspected that, even though she obeyed his every order and prohibition, she would not have respected that one: her faith in God and in the Catholic Church was stronger than the passion she felt for him. Although who knows? My mother’s love for my father, as masochistic and tortured as it always seemed to me, had that excessive and transgressive nature of great love-passions that do not hesitate to defy heaven and even pay the price of going to hell in order to prevail. At any event, he allowed us to go to Mass and sometimes—I suppose it was because of his inordinate jealousy—he went with us himself. He remained standing throughout the entire Mass, without crossing himself or kneeling during the consecration. I, on the other hand, did so, and prayed with fervor, joining my hands and half-closing my eyes. And I took communion as often as I could. These demonstrations were a way of opposing his authority and, perhaps, of annoying him.
    But it was also a matter of something more indirect and barely conscious, because the fear that I had of him was too great for me to risk deliberately provoking those storming rages that turned into the nightmare of my childhood. My manifestations of rebellion, if they can be called that, were remote and cowardly; they were contrived in my imagination, safe from his gaze, when, in my bed, in the dark, I invented evil deeds against him, or acted them out with attitudes and gestures imperceptible to anyone but myself. For example, not kissing him ever again after the afternoon I first met him, in the Hotel de Turistas in Piura. In the little house in La Magdalena, I kissed my mama and merely said good night to him and ran upstairs to bed, frightened of my daring in the beginning, afraid he’d call me back, rivet his motionless gaze on me and with his knife-sharp voice ask me why I hadn’t kissed him as well. But he didn’t, doubtless because the block was as filled with stubborn pride as the chip that had come off it.
    We lived in constant tension. I had the presentiment that something dreadful was about to happen at any moment, a terrible catastrophe, that in one of his fits of rage he was going to kill my mama or me or both of us. It was the most abnormal house in the world. There was never a single visitor, we never ever went out to visit anybody. We didn’t even go to Uncle César and Aunt Orieli’s, because my father abhorred social life. When we were alone and I began to throw it up to my mama that the reason she had become reconciled with him was so that we’d die of fear, she tried to persuade me that my papa wasn’t so bad. He had his virtues. He never drank a drop of alcohol, he didn’t smoke,