The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

home to live on their own, he knew very little about what Tiburcio and Miguel did when they weren’t working. They didn’t live together. The older one boarded in a house in the Miraflores district, a white neighborhood, of course, and Tiburcio rented an apartment with a friend in Castilla, near the new stadium. Did they have girlfriends, lovers? Were they carousers, gamblers? Did they get drunk with their friends on Saturday night? Did they go to bars and taverns or patronize whorehouses? What did they do in their spare time? On Sundays when they stopped by to have lunch in the house on Calle Arequipa, they didn’t talk much about their private lives, and he and Gertrudis didn’t ask questions. Maybe he should talk with them, find out a little more about the boys’ personal lives.
    The worst thing during this period were all the interviews, the result of the notice in El Tiempo , at several local radio stations, with reporters from the newspapers Correo and La República , and with the correspondent in Piura for RPP Noticias. The journalists’ questions made him very tense: His palms got sweaty and chills ran down his spine. His answers were punctuated by long pauses; he searched for words, denying vehemently that he was a civic hero or an example for anybody. Not at all, what an idea, he was simply following the philosophy of his father, who’d left him this piece of advice as an inheritance: “Son, never let anybody walk all over you.” They’d smile; some looked at him with an intimidating expression. He didn’t care. Screwing up his courage, he went on. He was a workingman, that’s all. He’d been born poor, very poor, near Chulucanas, in Yapatera, and everything he had he’d earned by working. He paid his taxes, obeyed the law. Why should he allow a few crooks to take what he had, sending him threats without even showing their faces? If nobody gave in to extortion, extortionists would disappear.
    He didn’t like to receive awards either; he broke into a cold sweat when he had to give speeches. Of course, deep down, he was proud and thought how happy his father, the sharecropper Aliño Yanaqué, would have been at the Exemplary Citizen medal pinned on his chest at a Rotary Club lunch in the Piuran Center, attended by the regional president and the mayor and the bishop of Piura. But when he had to approach the microphone to express his gratitude, he became tongue-tied and lost his voice. The same thing happened when the Enrique López Albújar Civic-Cultural-Athletic Society declared him Piuran of the Year.
    This was when a letter came to his house on Calle Arequipa from the Club Grau, signed by the president, the distinguished chemist-pharmacist Dr. Garabito León Seminario. It stated that the board of directors had unanimously accepted his application for membership in the institution. Felícito couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d sent in his application two or three years ago, and since they never responded, he thought they’d voted against him because he wasn’t white, which is what they believed they were, those gentlemen who went to the Club Grau to play tennis, Ping-Pong, Sapo, the card game cacho , swim in the pool, and dance on Saturday nights to the best orchestras in Piura. He’d found the courage to apply after he saw Cecilia Barraza, the Peruvian artist he admired most, sing at a party in the Club Grau. He’d gone with Mabel and sat at the table of Colorado Vignolo, who was a member. If he’d been asked to name the happiest day of his life, Felícito Yanaqué would have chosen that night.
    Cecilia Barraza had been his secret love even before he saw her in photographs or in person. He fell in love with her because of her voice. He didn’t tell anyone about it; it was private. He’d been in La Reina, a now-defunct restaurant on the corner of the Eguiguren Seawalk and Avenida Sánchez Cerro, where on the first Saturday of each month the board of directors of the Association of