Stars and Stripes

Carlitos loved the United States. He papered the walls of his room with American flags and tourist posters from odd places, like ‘Idaho, Home of the potato’. He said all the words he could in English, for example ‘Hershey’s’ or ‘Chuck Norris’, and when he did, he chewed on the syllables until they sounded the way they did in movies. I suppose he pronounced the language really well, because nobody understood anything. People had to ask him several times what exactly he had said.

It isn’t that Carlitos was trying to take anyone in. Just the opposite. I never knew anyone as authentic. He was incapable of pretending anything he didn’t really think, though he really didn’t think about too many things. If we became friends, it was because neither of us had more ideas than were strictly necessary. That brings people together.

Carlitos’s father, an extremely fat man, was an officer in the Peruvian navy. He had studied in panama, in the School of the Americas, and then somewhere in the United States in a place whose name I’ve forgotten, something like Naples. In the outside world, he moved around preceded by an escort car, dressed in a black uniform and a white visored hat, which helped to hide his bulk. But indoors he was always in his shorts and undershirt. Seeing his enormous belly about to burst through the undershirt, no one would have imagined he was so important.

Carlitos’s mother spent her days reminding him about the time they had spent in North America, recalling it with enthusiasm. Her way of indicating that she liked something a good deal was to say it was ‘like up there’. Carlitos’s older brother did the same thing, always talking about the clothes you could get ‘up there’. When he travelled, he would come back with gleaming sneakers, like the ones astronauts wore, or red jackets covered with zippers in the style of Michael Jackson. Carlitos was too young to have memories of ‘up there’. But he loved going to Disney. He had been there four times since he was very little.

Whenever Carlitos talked about Disney, I would go home to my father and say: ‘I want to go to Disney.’

‘Why? I’ve taken you to Ecuador.’

‘The only thing I remember about Ecuador is that there were banana trees and I got diarrhoea.’

‘You can get diarrhoea at Disney too.’

I’d stamp my feet and whine, but my father wouldn’t yield. In fact, he didn’t even bother to answer me. At the time Carlitos and I began to hang out together, his principal occupation was cheating on my mother. Mama taught at a secondary school outside Lima and would get home when it was almost dark. In the afternoons papa often came home with a woman when he thought I had gone out to play. Her name was Betsy and he’d take her into his room.

All those times – or nearly all of them, I suppose – I was in the house. I almost never went out to play. The neighbourhood kids played soccer, and I didn’t like soccer. I’d stay in the house with Carlitos, who didn’t play soccer either because they didn’t play it in the United States. We spent the afternoons looking at the baseball cards his father would bring back for him from his trips up north. We didn’t understand baseball, so Carlitos and I didn’t have anything to say to each other. We would look at the cards in silence, and who knows what we were thinking? This was why papa never heard us on those afternoons.

On several occasions though, maybe a dozen times, Carlitos did hear my father and his girlfriend. But he never said a word. Not to me and not to his family. Probably because he spoke English with his family and didn’t know how to say these things in that language. In any case, when papa came home with the woman and went to his room to the sound of giggles and whispers, Carlitos would only bend his head and silently pass me another card with the picture of some pitcher or catcher. I was very grateful to him for his silences, and I think this was when I began to value his companionship as I never had anyone else’s.