D.

espite the fact that he was a mulatto named Lopez, he longed to

resemble less and less a defensive back on the Alianza Lima Soccer Team
and increasingly to take on the look of a blond from Philadelphia. Life
had taught him that if he wanted to prosper in a colonial city it was better
to skip the intermediate stages and transform himself into a gringo from
the United States rather than into just a fair-skinned nobody from Lima.
During the years that I knew him, he devoted all of his attention to elimi-
nating every trace of the Lopez and zambo1 within him and Americaniz-
ing himself before the bottom fell out and he would turn into, say, a bank
guard or a taxi driver. He had to begin by killing the Peruvian in himself
and extracting something from every gringo he met. From all this plun-
dering a new person would emerge, a fragmented being who was neither
mulatto nor gringo, but rather the result of an unnatural commingling,
something that the force of destiny would eventually change, unfortu-
nately for him, from a rosy dream into a hellish nightmare.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We should establish the fact that
his name was Roberto, that years later he was known as Bobby, but that
the most recent official documents refer to him as Bob. At each stage in
his frantic ascent toward nothingness his name would lose one syllable.
Everything began the afternoon when a group of us fair-haired kids
were playing ball on Bolognesi Plaza. We were out of school on vacation
and some of us who lived in nearby chalets, both girls and boys, would
meet at the plaza during those endless summer afternoons. Roberto used
to go there too, even though he attended a public school and lived on one
of the last backstreets left in the district rather than in a chalet. He would
go there to watch the girls play and to be greeted by some fair-faced kid
who had seen him growing up on those streets and knew he was the
laundry woman's son.
In reality, he would go there like the rest of us, to see Queca. We were
all infatuated with Queca, who, during the past couple of years, had the
distinction of being chosen class queen, an honor bestowed upon her
during festivities at the end of the school year. Queca didn't study with
the German sisters of Saint Ursula, nor with the North Americans of Villa

i. Ribeyro uses the term zambo to refer to a person who is a blend of Indian
and Negro.

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