Explore "A Fish in the Water" by Mario Vargas Llosa on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
At the end of May 1955, Julia, a younger sister of Aunt Olga's, arrived in Lima to spend a few weeks' vacation. She had been divorced not long before from her Bolivian husband, with whom she had lived for several years on a hacienda in the Altiplano; since their separation, she had been living in La Paz, with a woman friend from Santa Cruz.
I had known Julia in my childhood in Cochabamba. She was a friend of my mother's and often came to the house on Ladislao Cabrera; once, she lent me a romantic novel in two volumes-E. M. Hull's The Sheik and Son of the Sheik-which delighted me. I remember the tall and graceful figure of that friend whom my mother and my aunts and uncles called "the little Chilean" (because, although she lived in Bolivia, she had been born in Chile, as had Aunt Olga) dancing very vivaciously at Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby's wedding celebration, a dance that my cousins Nancy and Gladys and I spied on from a stairway until the wee hours of the night.