A Fish in the Water by Mario Vargas Llosa — Read

The Lima-San Miguel streetcar went along the Avenida Salaverry, in front of the little house in La Magdalena where we came to live in those final days of 1946 or early 1947. The house still exists, faded and shabby, and even now, when I pass that way, I feel sharp pangs of anxiety. The year and a little more that I lived in it was the most agonizing one in my life. It was a two-story house. Downstairs there was a little living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and across a little patio, the maid's room. And upstairs, the bathroom and my bedroom and my parents', separated from mine by a short staircase landing.

From the moment we arrived, I felt excluded from the relationship between my mama and my papa, a man who, as the days went by, seemed to keep his distance from me. It infuriated me that they shut themselves up in their bedroom during the day, and on one pretext or another I kept going to knock on the door, until my father upbraided me, warning me not to do it again. His cold way of speaking and the steely look in his eyes is what I remember best of those first days in Lima, a city I detested from the very first moment. I was lonely, I missed my grandparents, Auntie Mamaé, Uncle Lucho, my friends from Piura. And I was bored, shut up in the house, not knowing what to do to occupy myself. Shortly after we arrived, my father and mother enrolled me in the sixth grade of the La Salle primary school, but classes didn't begin until April and it was only January. Was I going to spend the summer shut up inside the house, seeing the clanging San Miguel streetcar go by every so often?