Confesiones a un Árbol: The San Isidro Cinema of Chimbote

THE SAN ISIDRO CINEMA OF CHIMBOTE

Current view of the former San Isidro Cinema building.
(Eleventh block of Aviación Avenue)

“Huaylas,” “Patón,” Marcial, “Ruso,” “Chicago,” “Sandro,” “Andarita,” Hermógenes, and “Banchero Rossi” would swing open the theater doors, sweep the floors, and post the playbills to set the stage for every show. Leonor Obregón Herbias, Aguedita Varas, Esperanza Goicochea, Nilda, Patty Oré, and a succession of ticket sellers stood by the box office over the years. Standing against one of the lobby walls, a man directed everything with his gaze; his face wore a smile, and his belly a happy curve. It was Don Víctor, the owner of the cinema.

When Don Víctor finished building his cinema in 1963, he held a contest through the newspaper El Faro to choose a name. The winning entry was “Cine San Isidro.” The new cinema was located on the eleventh block of Aviación Avenue in the San Isidro Barrio, and it was born with the same humility as its community: a gabled cattail mat roof with eucalyptus trusses, straw chairs brought from the Ancash highlands, a wooden loft with a ladder for the projectionist, a screen of bleached muslin, and a water-cooled generator designed to run quietly during the films.

The cinema’s outdoor speakers brought music to our streets at a time when not every home had a transistor radio and television was a privilege for the few. Summoned by the call of the matinee, early evening, and night shows, street vendors and social life converged. Across the street, framed against the smoke of a charcoal grill, our neighbor Lucía Estrada Orbegozo made her delicious anticuchos and chunchulí. A few steps away, the jukebox blared at “La Balsa,” the bar which inherited the clientele and reputation of “El Frontón,” the famous bar shut down early in 1971. And nestled between the aroma of the grill and the noise of the tavern sat “Pacherres' Comics and Photo-novel Kiosk”—an endearing place that comes to my mind like the “Tardis” spacecraft from Doctor Who: on the outside, a simple wooden booth, but on the inside, an immense world of adventures through time, space, and the rainbow of life.

I must have been seven years old when I started visiting the cinema lugging my shoeshine box—which my mother used to say looked bigger than I was. In time, my father put me in charge of selling the comics he no longer needed in his grocery store at the cinema. And shortly after, my mother would also send me with a tray of sweets. Night after night, I worked and became familiar with the twilight world outside the theater. There was never a lack of spare change in my pockets, and I learned to read the code of the street early on.

During the sixties, my neighborhood had two public elementary schools. One for boys, on the corner of Aviación Avenue and Huáscar Street, led by Don Felipe González Olivera; and another for girls on Ramón Castilla Street, headed by Doña Ubínica Quiñones de Gayoso. For the local students, the cinema often showed the famous “matinales” (morning shows). We students would walk along the Aviación Avenue sidewalk in rows of two, holding hands. The girls from the other school did the same. Usually, we saw Spanish, Argentine, and Mexican movies featuring singers like Raphael, Marisol, Palito Ortega, and Angélica María, and comedians like Viruta and Capulina.

The cinema’s owner, Don Víctor Beltrán Leytón, was born in Chimbote on July 25, 1934. His parents were Don Zenobio Eusebio Beltrán Arroyo, also from Chimbote, and Doña Yldaura Margarita Leytón Beltrán, a native of Samanco. He attended elementary school at the Gloriosa 329 and high school at San Pedro. His father was a fisherman, owner of three boats, and a crane operator at the docks, but a different destiny awaited Don Víctor: to work hard until he became the owner of a chain of movie theaters.

Toward the early 1970s, Westerns (“cowboys”) and “sword-and-sandal” films were the most popular at our local cinema. Among the cowboys, we especially enjoyed the Spaghetti Western subgenre catapulted by Italian director Sergio Leone; our favorite characters were Django, Ringo, Sabata, Sartana, and Trinity. My brother Fernando and I admired actors Franco Nero and Giuliano Gemma, whom we considered the “true” Django and Ringo, respectively. As for the “sword-and-sandal” films, characters like Samson, Maciste, Hercules, Ulysses, and Ursus stood out, and we particularly liked actors Dan Vadis and Steve Reeves. And for Holy Week, year after year, with emotion and reverence, we stood in endless lines to see the same movie about the life, passion, and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The late-night show had already ended at the San Isidro Cinema that Saturday in 1971 when “El Guada” was killed. He was stabbed at dawn on October 30. He had been at “La Balsa” with some friends, and the drinks ended in a brawl. It’s possible the last song he heard on the bar’s jukebox was “Olvidarte Nunca,” perhaps “La Copa Rota,” or maybe “Pecado Mortal”—records that were played over and over, and I always heard them from the cinema’s sidewalk. Early in the morning, when I went to buy bread, I found his body lying on the ground next to the goalpost of a small soccer field. Segundo Guadalupe Quiroz Contreras, “El Guada,” had always lived on the razor’s edge.

After Don Víctor finished high school, he quickly showed an entrepreneurial spirit. He ran two grocery stalls at the Modelo market. Later, he worked as a middleman buying fish for the Samanco Fishing Company. In 1956, he finished his accounting studies by correspondence through the Latin American School of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Immediately after, he practiced his profession at an accounting firm. Then came the decisive years of 1961 and 1962, during which he worked in the administration office of the Chavín Cinema; it was there that he met Doña Teresa Jimmy Lavandera Barrera, whom he married on June 22, 1962. After his stint at the cinema, he felt ready to run his own cinema.

“The First Kiss” is not the title of any movie I saw at the San Isidro Cinema… it was a scene I witnessed in one of the seats. I was eight years old, and it is my earliest memory of seeing a couple kissing. It happened one day in 1969; I had bought my ticket for the early show (known as the vermuth) and was in the mezzanine watching the film The Silent One (El Silencioso). Midway through the movie, I headed to the restrooms, and as I was about to leave the hall, I noticed a couple locked in a passionate embrace near the door. When I returned, I pushed the door open and the glare of the light illuminated their faces: the couple was kissing. I recognized “Cholo” Espejo, a young man who lived on Aviación Avenue. From then on, for many years, our way of greeting each other was always: “Hey, Silencioso!”… “Hey, Quevedito!”

Shortly after the Westerns and the “sword-and-sandal” films, the San Isidro Cinema opened the doors to the world of Bollywood. Indian movies burst in with a torrent of music and the tenderness of My Elephant Family and Joker the Clown. At the same time, martial arts movies began to be shown and soon dominated the billboard. Initially, we were fans of Wang Yu and later Bruce Lee. In the neighborhood, we all wanted to be karatekas and break bricks with our hands… my brother Fernando would heat up sand in the backyard, and along with our friends, we would “harden” our hands in that hot sand!

In 1962, following his tenure at the Chavín Cinema, Don Víctor bought a 35mm Philips portable projector and set off through neighboring towns and hamlets with his traveling cinema. This was the seed of what would eventually become the San Isidro Cinema. Over the years, success smiled upon our cinema; it had started with cattail mats and became an established theater in Chimbote. Don Víctor then expanded his business horizons: in 1971, he set up the “Open Air Cinema” (popularly known as the “Pirate Cinema”) on the last block of Aviación Avenue. Then came the Dos de Mayo Cinema in the neighborhood of the same name. In 1974, he bought the Vinasisa Cinema in Villa María from the Méndez brothers—Víctor, Natividad, Simón, and Santos—whose initials formed the theater's name. And finally, he arranged to lease the Primavera Cinema on Pardo Avenue for two years.

The San Isidro Cinema, so linked to my upbringing, was also where I saw my first adult movie. I was still a teenager then. In those days, you had to be 21 to be of legal age, but we were a bit too impatient to wait that long. That first film was called The Embrace. Sometimes I got in through friends who worked there; if they wouldn't let me in, I’d wait for the R-rated ones to be screened at the ‘Pirate Cinema,’ where another friend would let me pass. In those scenes, I learned the theory from A to Z. As for the practice, that had to wait a few more years.

I was 23 when the San Isidro Cinema closed. It happened in 1983. It was also my last year in Chimbote. I moved to Trujillo, then to Europe, and later to the United States. The boom of Betamax and VHS tapes in the early eighties dealt a death blow to cinemas. The need to go out to the movies withered away. The audience dispersed, and the cinemas began to close their doors. Thus, the social heart of the community stopped beating, the smoke from the “Auntie who sold chunchulines” faded away, “Pacherres' Kiosk” was dismantled, the jukebox at “La Balsa” played no more, and the old cliques went off to find another corner.

Somewhere in the old San Isidro Cinema, there still linger the echoes of children's applause, the laughter of teenagers, the smacking of young people's kisses, the snoring of some adult, and the slamming of seats and shouts of 'Cheats… cheats!' that we hurled at the screen when the projectionist Augusto Medina “cut” parts of the movies to finish on time and send the reel to the next theater.

Every time I visit Chimbote, I go for a walk along Aviación Avenue. Passing through the eleventh block, a sound often reaches me—inaudible to distracted passersby but perceptible to me… like those ghosts that not everyone can see. It is the echo of the old song by Los Golpes whose lyrics repeat: “…but as for you, I’ll never forget you.”

Of all the movies I saw at San Isidro, which one is my favorite? I ask myself at the end of this story. I don’t think I know the answer; I only know there is a Spaghetti Western with images that have haunted me since childhood: Death Rides a Horse.

On a stormy night, hooded men pass by a ranch and kill an entire family except for little Bill. The boy notices a detail that identifies each bandit, and based on that, fifteen years later, he searches for them to take revenge. One by one he hunts them down with the help of Ryan, and in the ending, he discovers that Ryan was also one of the bandits. Both prepare to fight a final duel with only one bullet for each. Bill fires… but at an outlaw hidden on a roof, and Ryan opens his hand and shows his only bullet… he actually never put it in his revolver.
THE END.

New Hampshire, USA

October 2014