The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros

Author:Renato Cisneros
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: the distance between us;renato cisneros;fionn petch;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2018-08-01T14:32:47+00:00

Chapter 8

In the early years of writing this novel, when I still lacked a lot of information, the military side of my father’s identity gave rise to questions I became obsessed with answering. I wanted to know, above all, whether my father had ever killed anyone. I don’t mean killing blindly in combat, as he was never involved in an armed engagement; I mean selecting a victim for disappearance with a bullet to the head. There were days when it seemed so obvious, so true to the logic of his temperament and of his time. On other days, though, I preferred to be more sceptical. Everything became clearer when I asked the question of General Belisario Schwartz, one of his closest friends in the Army. Both had been second lieutenants in 1948, a year after my father arrived from Buenos Aires, and they worked together very closely during his Ministry of the Interior period, when the Gaucho was Minister and Schwartz the head of the intelligence service. I can imagine – no: I actually can’t – the things they talked about and plotted when they found themselves alone in the ministerial office of the San Borja high-rise building. In the Army, Schwartz was known as El Mocho, or ‘Stubby’, because when he was a cadet in Tumbes he once accidentally fired a bullet as he was field-stripping his Mauser pistol, shredding the finger he’d placed at the end of the barrel. His right index finger. He could have killed himself that day: the shot made him drop the weapon and, as it fell to the ground, it released another bullet that ricocheted off the ceiling and grazed him on the rebound. I still remember Schwartz’s mangled hand: his finger-stump provoked a mixture of fascination and repugnance in my childhood self. The left-wing journalists didn’t call him El Mocho; their nickname for him was El Malo, or the Evil One, because they claimed he was behind several of the kidnappings, bomb attacks and disappearances used by the military government to harass its opponents or simply to dispose of them.

The day I went to pick him up at his home on Porta St. in Miraflores, I was struck by how much he had aged. He no longer walked upright, but with the help of a stick, advancing more slowly than might be expected even for a man of eighty-six. A leather cap covered his hairless head. He was lucid, but he sometimes embarked on rambling detours, eventually finding his way back unaided. As I drove, I thought about how this vulnerable old man sitting beside me, gazing out the window at the street like a child travelling in a car for the first time, had once been a feared military leader. If my father were still alive, I thought, this is how he’d look, or worse, and I silently felt a kind of relief that he was dead. I spoiled old Schwartz that afternoon, taking him to an excellent restaurant in Barranco where I plied him with gourmet dishes.

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