A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Thirteen. The Fierce Little Sartrean

I worked with Raúl Porras Barrenechea from February 1954 until a few days before I left for Europe, in 1958. The three hours a day I spent there, in those four years and a half, from Monday to Friday, between two and five in the afternoon, taught me more about Peru and contributed more to my education than the classes at San Marcos.

Porras Barrenechea was a master in the old style, who liked being surrounded by disciples, from whom he demanded complete loyalty. An elderly bachelor, he had lived in that old house with his mother until she died the year before, and he now shared it with an aged black servant who had perhaps been his nursemaid. She addressed him with the familiar tú and scolded him like a little boy, prepared the delicious cups of chocolate with which the historian received the intellectual luminaries who came by on a pilgrimage to the Calle Colina. Of those, I remember as the most delightful conversationalists the Spaniard Don Pedro Laín Entralgo; the Venezuelan Maríano Picón-Salas, a historian, essayist, and sharp-witted humorist; the Mexican Alfonso Junco, whose timidity disappeared when the conversation turned to the two subjects that impassioned him, Spain and the faith, for he was a militant crusader for Hispanism and Catholicism; and our compatriots the poet José Gálvez, who spoke a very pure Spanish and had a mania for genealogy, and Víctor Andrés Belaunde — in those days Peru’s ambassador to the United Nations — who often passed through Lima, and who, on one occasion I am thinking of, talked all night and didn’t allow either Porras or any of the guests at the gathering over chocolate given in his honor to get a word in edgewise.

Víctor Andrés Belaunde (1883–1966), who belonged to the generation before Porras’s, a philosopher and a Catholic essayist as well as a diplomat, had a celebrated controversy with José Carlos Mariátegui, whose theories on Peruvian society he refuted in his La realidad nacional,^* in which he defended a Christian corporatism that was as artificial and unreal as the schematic — although a most novel approach for the time and widely influential — Marxist interpretation of Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos. Porras esteemed Belaunde, although he did not share his ultramontane Catholicism, or that of José de la Riva Agüero (1885–1944), or the latter’s crepuscular enthusiasms for fascism, although he did appreciate his erudite and all-inclusive vision of the Peruvian past, which Riva Agüero interpreted as a synthesis of the indigenous and the Spanish. Porras professed an admiration without reservation for Riva Agüero, whom he regarded as his master and with whom he had in common meticulousness, exactitude regarding facts and quotations, a love of Spain and of history understood in Michelet’s romantic fashion, a certain ironic disdain for the new intellectual currents which held the individual and the anecdotal in contempt — anthropology and ethnohistory, for instance; while at the same time he stood apart from him by virtue of a much more flexible turn of mind with regard to religion and politics.

Diplomacy, to which Porras Barrenechea had devoted part of his life, had taken up a great deal of his time and energy, keeping him from crowning his career with what everyone expected of him, that masterwork on the history of the Discovery and the Conquest of Peru — or the biography of Pizarro — subjects on which he had been preparing to write the definitive work since his early years and on which he had managed to acquire so much information that it resembled omniscience. Up until then, Porras’s wisdom had taken the form of a series of learned monographs on chroniclers, travelers, or ideologists and defenders of emancipation, as well as of beautiful anthologies on Lima and Cuzco or of essays, that were to appear over those years, on Ricardo Palma, Riva Agüero’s Paisajes peruanos (Peruvian Landscapes), or his textbook on Fuentes históricas peruanas.^† But those of us who admired him, and he himself, knew that these were mere crumbs of the great overall work on that watershed era of Peruvian history, that of its establishing close relations with Europe and the West, which he knew more about than anyone else. A fellow scholar of his generation, Jorge Basadre, had fulfilled an equivalent undertaking in his monumental Historia de la República, which Porras had annotated from beginning to end and on which he had passed judgment, an opinion at once respectful and severely critical, in his microscopic handwriting, at the end of the last volume. Another fellow scholar of his generation, Luis Alberto Sánchez, exiled at the time in Chile, had also crowned his career with a voluminous history of Peruvian literature, under the title Literatura peruana. Although he had certain reservations and differences of opinion with Basadre, Porras had intellectual respect for him; for Sánchez, a disdainful commiseration.

Unlike Basadre or Porras, that third musketeer of the celebrated generation of 1919, Luis Alberto Sánchez (the fourth, Jorge Guillermo Leguía, died very young, leaving only the bare outline of an oeuvre), who, as the leader of the APRA, had lived for many years in exile, was the most international and the most fecund of the trio, but also the most devil-may-care and the least rigorous when it came time to publish. That he should write entire books in one go, trusting in his memory alone (even if it was the impressive memory of Luis Alberto Sánchez), without verifying the data, citing books he hadn’t read, making mistakes as to dates, titles, names, as frequently occurred in the flood of his publications, made Porras furious. Sánchez’s inaccuracies and carelessness — even more than his ill-will and his retaliations against his political adversaries and his personal enemies that can be found in abundance in his books — exasperated Porras for a reason that from a distance I think I now understand better, a loftier reason than what, at the time, appeared to me to be a mere rivalry between scholars of the same generation. Because those liberties that Sánchez took in the practice of his profession took for granted the underdevelopment of his readers, the inability of his audience to identify them and condemn them. And Porras — like Basadre and Jorge Guillermo Leguía and, before them, Riva Agüero — even though he wrote and published little, always did so as though the country to which he belonged were the most cultivated and best-informed one in the world, demanding of himself an extreme rigor and perfection, as would be only proper for a historian whose research is going to be subjected to the examination of the most responsible scholars.

Those years also brought the polemic between Luis Alberto Sánchez and the Chilean critic Ricardo A. Latcham, who, reviewing the former’s essay on the novel in Latin America—Proceso y contenido de la novela hispanoamericana (History and Content of the Hispano-American Novel)—pointed out a number of errors and omissions in the book. Sánchez answered with lively rejoinders and jokes. Latcham thereupon overwhelmed his adversary with an inexhaustible list of inaccuracies — dozens and dozens of them — which I remember seeing Porras read, in a Chilean publication, murmuring half to himself: “How shameful, how shameful.”

Since Sánchez survived Leguía, Porras, and Basadre by many years, his version of the generation of ’19—the intellectual quality of which would not be repeated again in Peru — has been enthroned in a manner little short of canonical. But, in all truth, it suffers from the same defects as the innumerable books of this good underdeveloped writer for underdeveloped readers that Sánchez represented. I am thinking, above all, of the prologue he wrote for Porras’s posthumous book on Pizarro, published in Lima in 1978 by a group of Porras’s disciples, and put together piecemeal, without giving the proper bibliographic information, jumbling together published and unpublished texts in a confused and uneven hodgepodge. I do not know to whom we owe the responsibility, or rather the irresponsibility, for this ugly edition — with commercial advertisements inserted in between the pages — which would have horrified that historian who was a perfectionist, but even today I understand still less the reason for entrusting the prologue to Luis Alberto Sánchez, who, faithful to his character and his habits, made of this introduction a subtle masterwork of malice, recalling amid saccharine manifestations of friendship for “Raúl” those episodes that had been especially embarrassing to Porras, such as his having supported General Ureta and not Bustamante y Rivero in the 1945 elections and not having resigned as ambassador to Spain, a post to which Bustamante had appointed him, at the time of Odría’s military coup in 1948.

Porras Barrenechea’s disciples and friends, of different generations and professions — among them were historians and professors and diplomats — all dropped by the Calle Colina, to visit him, to attend the chocolate gatherings as night fell, to pass on to him gossip about the university, politics, or the Ministry of Foreign Relations, which delighted him, or to ask him for advice and recommendations. The most frequent visitor of all was a close companion who belonged to his own generation, also a diplomat, a regional historian (of Piura) and a journalist, Ricardo Vegas García. Nearsighted, neat as a pin, impossibly ill-tempered, Don Ricardo had solitary fits of rage about which Porras told most amusing anecdotes, such as how he had seen him — or rather, heard him — smash to bits a toilet whose chain he’d had difficulty pulling, and pummeling to pieces with his fists a table on which he had begun by giving slaps of his hand to demand service. Don Ricardo Vegas García would enter the house on the Calle Colina like the waterspout of a tornado and invite everyone to have tea at the Tiendecita Blanca, where he always would order ladyfingers. And woe to anyone who resisted his invitations! Beneath his arrogance and his brusque remarks, Don Ricardo was a generous and likable man, whose friendship and loyalty Porras appreciated enormously and whom he later was to miss a great deal.

The university professors who dropped by most often were Jorge Puccinelli and Luis Jaime Cisneros, and César Vallejo’s widow came by too — the fearsome Georgette, whom Porras protected following the death of her husband in Paris — and many culturally lionized poets, writers, or journalists, whose presence gave the house on the Calle Colina a warm and stimulating atmosphere, in which the intellectual discussions and dialogues were larded with gossip and ill-will — the great Peruvian sport of raje—bad-mouthing — of which Porras, an old Lima hand (even though he’d been born in Pisco), was an outstanding practitioner. The gatherings used to last till far into the night and end up in some café in Miraflores — El Violín Gitano or La Pizzería on the Diagonal — or in El Triunfo, in Surquillo, an ill-reputed little bar that Porras had renamed Montmartre.

My first task, at the historian’s house, consisted of reading the chronicles of the Conquest, making note cards on the myths and legends of Peru. I have an exhilarating memory of those readings in search of data on the Seven Cities of Cíbola, the Kingdom of the Great Paititi, the marvels of El Dorado, the land of the Amazons, that of the Fountain of Youth and all the time-hallowed fantasies of utopian kingdoms, enchanted cities, continents that had disappeared, which the encounter with America brought back to life in the present among those migrating Europeans who ventured, dazzled by what they saw, into the lands of Tahuantinsuyo and resorted, in order to understand them, to the classical mythologies and the arsenal of medieval legends. Although very different in their composition and their aim, some of them written by rough, unlettered, uncultivated men induced by the sure sense that they were witnessing events of transcendent importance to leave behind testimony as to what they did, saw, and heard, these chronicles mark the appearance of a written literature in Spanish America, and already, through their most unusual mixture of fantasy and realism, of unbridled imagination and fierce verisimilitude, as well as through their abundance, their picturesqueness, their epic breadth, their descriptive itch, lay down the pattern for certain characteristics of the future literature of Latin America. Some accounts, above all those of monastic chroniclers, like Father Calancha, could be prolix and boring, but others, such as those of the Inca Garcilaso or Cieza de León, I read with genuine pleasure, as monuments of a new genre that combined the best of literature and history, for it had, like the latter, its feet immersed in lived experience and its head in fiction.

It was not only fun to spend those three hours consulting chronicles; in addition, if I had any sort of question of my own, there was the possibility of hearing a disquisition from Porras on persons and episodes having to do with the Conquest. I remember, one afternoon, because of some question or other that I don’t recall which Araníbar or I put to him, a master class that he gave us on “the heresy of the sun,” a deviation or heterodoxy from the point of view of the official religion of the Inca empire that he had reconstructed through the testimony of the chronicles, about which he was thinking of writing an article (a project which, like so many others, he never managed to get around to and actually finish). Porras had known the great figures of Peruvian literature, and many of Latin American and Spanish literature, and I listened to him, all ears, as he spoke of César Vallejo, with whom he had been on intimate terms before Vallejo died and the posthumous publication of whose Poemas humanos Porras was responsible for, or of José María Eguren, whose childish tender feelings and innocence he made fun of with the greatest irreverence, or of the apocalyptic end of Oquendo de Amat, a poet done in by tuberculosis and sheer rage, in a Spanish sanatorium to which he and the Marquesa de la Conquista — a descendant of Pizarro’s — had had him transferred on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.

Although only Carlos Araníbar and I worked in the house on the Calle Colina on a regular schedule and with a salary (which the bookseller-editor Mejía Baca paid us at the end of each month), all Porras’s old and new disciples — Félix Álvarez Brun, Raúl Rivera Serna, Pablo Macera, and, later on, Hugo Neyra and Waldemar Espinoza Soriano — often visited. Of all of them, the one in whom Porras had placed his greatest hopes, but also the one who managed to exasperate him and drive him almost out of his mind by the way he behaved, was Pablo Macera. Some five or six years older than I was, Pablo had already finished the courses for a degree in Letters but never presented his thesis, despite the exhortations and admonitions forthcoming from Porras, who could not foresee a time when Macera would subject his life to a little discipline and turn his talent toward doing solid, serious work. As for talent, Pablo had an abundance of it and it amused him to show it off and, above all, to waste it, in an oral exhibitionism that often was dazzling. He would drop into Porras’s library all of a sudden, and without giving Araníbar and me time enough even to say hello to him, he would propose to us that we found the “Herren Club” of Peru, inspired by the geopolitical doctrines of Karl Haushofer, so that, in league with a group of industrialists, in five years we could take over the country and turn it into an aristocratic and enlightened dictatorship whose first step would be to reestablish the Inquisition and burn heretics in the main square once again. The following morning, having forgotten all about his delirious despotic scheme, he would perorate on the need to legitimize and promote bigamy, or to revive human sacrifices, or to call for a national plebiscite to determine democratically whether the earth was square or round. The worst foolishness, the most grotesque paradoxes became suggestive realities in Macera’s mouth, since he had, as no one else did, that perverse faculty of the intellectual that Arthur Koestler speaks of: that of being able to demonstrate everything he believed in and of believing everything that he could demonstrate. Pablo believed in nothing, but he could demonstrate anything, eloquently and brilliantly, and he enjoyed noting the surprise that his maniacal theories, his paradoxes and puns, his sophisms and ukases aroused in us. His intellectual snobbery was blended with sparks of humor. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes he threw away after having taken just one puff, so as to provoke a comment from the disconcerted spectator that allowed him to reply, voluptuously savoring each syllable: “I smoke nervously.” That adverb, nerviosamente, which cost him many a sol, gave him shivers of pleasure.

Porras also succumbed at times to Macera’s intellectual spell, and listened to him, amused by his verbal fireworks, but he very soon reacted and became furious at Macera’s inner chaos, his snobbery and the complacency with which he gloried in his own neuroses, which Pablo cultivated the way others care for kittens or water their garden. During those years, Porras convinced Macera that he should enter a contest that International Petroleum was sponsoring for the best essay on history, and kept Pedro locked up in his library for several weeks until he finished the work. This book, which won the prize—Tres etapas en el desarrollo de la conciencia nacional (Three Stages in the Development of the National Consciousness)—was later to be disavowed by Macera himself, who has eliminated it from his bibliography and mentions it only to rail against it.

Although he later subjected himself to discipline and worked in a more or less orderly way at San Marcos, where, I believe, he is still teaching, and has published many works on travelers, historiography, and economic history, Macera still has not written that great comprehensive work that his teacher Porras was waiting for from him, and for which that intelligence with which he was endowed had, so to speak, predestined him. What Macera said — in the introduction to his conversaciones with Jorge Basadre — about Valcárcel, Porras, and Jorge Guillermo Leguía, now fits him like a ring on his own finger: “They have not completed their work and have done less than what their greatness asked of them.”^* Like Porras himself, his intellectual life appears to have been broken up into fragmentary efforts. Moreover, although it is many years since I have seen him or talked to him, judging by those interviews in which he allows himself to be exploited by a certain sort of publication, copies of which sometimes reach me, the old habit of the ukase and of tremendous absurdities has not disappeared with the passage of the years, although how moth-eaten and rusty it all sounds nowadays, what with everything that has happened in the world and, above all, in Peru.

In those years, in which we were quite close friends, it delighted me to get his goat and argue with him. Not so as to win the argument — a difficult task — but to enjoy his dialectical method, his feints and his traps, and the lighthearted nonchalance with which he could change his mind and refute himself with arguments as forceful as those that he had just used to defend precisely the opposite proposition.

My work at Porras’s, and what I continually learned there, turned out to be a great incentive. In those years of 1954 and 1955 I threw myself into writing and reading, morning and night, more convinced than ever that my true vocation was literature. My mind was made up: I would devote my life to writing and to teaching. My university career was the ideal complement to my vocation, since there was a great deal of time free between classes at San Marcos.

I had stopped writing poems and plays, because I now felt more fascinated by fiction. I did not dare to embark on a novel, but I trained myself by writing short stories, of all lengths and on all possible subjects, almost always ending up by tearing them to bits.

Carlos Araníbar, whom I told that I was writing short stories, proposed to me one day that I read one of them in a group headed by Jorge Puccinelli, a professor of literature and the editor of a review that, although it came out late, came out erratically, or never came out at all, contained writing of quality and was one of the outlets that young writers counted on: Letras Peruanas. Dreaming of the prospect of passing this test, I searched through my texts, chose the short story that seemed to me to be the best one — it was called “La parda” (“The Woman with Dusky Skin”), and dealt with a vaguely described woman who wandered from one café to another telling stories about her life. I corrected it and on the appointed night presented myself where the literary circle was meeting that time: El Patio, a café frequented by bullfight fans, artists, and bohemians, in the little square in front of the Teatro Segura. The experience of that first reading in public of a text of mine was a disaster. There were at least a dozen people there, sitting around the large table on the second floor of El Patio, among whom I remember, besides Puccinelli and Araníbar, Julio Macera, Pablo’s brother, Carlos Zavaleta, the poet and critic Alberto Escobar, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and perhaps Abelardo Oquendo, who was to become a close friend of mine a couple of years later. A bit intimidated, I read my story. An ominous silence followed the reading. No comments, no sign of approval or of disapproval: nothing but a depressing silence. After an interminable pause, various conversations started up again, on other subjects, as though nothing had happened. Much later in the evening, talking about something else, in order to emphasize his argument in favor of fiction that was realistic and national, Alberto referred disdainfully to what he called “abstract literature” and pointed to my story, which was still lying there in the middle of the table. When the gathering broke up and we’d all said goodbye to each other, once we were down on the street, Araníbar made amends by offering a few comments on my mistreated story. But once I arrived home, I tore it up and swore to myself never to go through an experience like that again.

The literary world in Lima in those days was rather mediocre, but I watched it enviously and tried to edge my way into it. There were two playwrights, Juan Ríos and Sebastián Salazar Bondy. The former lived the life of a recluse in his house in Miraflores, but the latter was often seen wandering about the courtyards of San Marcos, trailing after a good-looking classmate of mine, Rosita Zevallos, for whom he sometimes waited as classes let out, holding a romantic red rose in his hand. That courtyard of the Faculty of Letters at San Marcos was the general headquarters for the country’s potential and virtual poets and writers of fiction. The majority of them had published at most one or two very slender volumes of poems and hence Alejandro Romualdo, who in those days had returned to Peru after a long stay in Europe, would make fun of them and say: “¿Poetas? ¡No! ¡Plaquetas!” (“Poets? No! Pamphleteers!”). The most mysterious of them was Washington Delgado, whose stubborn silence some interpreted as a sign of buried genius. “When that mouth opens — they said — Peruvian poetry will be filled with memorable arpeggios and trills.” (The fact is that, when the mouth opened, years later, Peruvian poetry was filled with imitations of Bertolt Brecht.) Pablo Guevara, an intuitive poet, had just come out with a collection of verse entitled Retorno de la creatura (Return of the Human Being), whose exuberant poetry didn’t seem to have anything to do with him, nor he to have anything to do with books — which, a little later on, he would abandon to devote himself to filmmaking. And poets in exile began to come back to Peru, a number of whom — Manuel Scorza, Gustavo Valcárcel, Juan Gonzalo Rose — had quit the APRA and turned into militant Communists (Valcárcel, for instance) or fellow travelers. The most sensational abandonment of the APRA was Scorza’s, who from Mexico addressed a public letter to the leader of the Aprista party, accusing him of having sold out to imperialism—“Goodbye, Mr. Haya”—which circulated all over San Marcos.

Among the writers of fiction, the most respected, although he had not yet published a book, was Julio Ramón Ribeyro, who lived in Europe. Dominical, the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, and other publications occasionally printed his stories, ones like “Los gallinazos sin plumas” (“The Turkey Buzzards without Feathers”), which everyone commented on with respect. Of those in Peru, the most active was Carlos Zavaleta, who, in addition to publishing his first short stories in those years, had translated Joyce’s Chamber Music, and was a great promoter of Faulkner’s novels. It is to him, no doubt, that I owe my having discovered around this time the author of the saga of Yoknapatawpha County, which, from the first novel of his that I read—The Wild Palms—left me so bedazzled that I still haven’t recovered. He was the first writer whom I studied with paper and pencil in hand, taking notes so as not to get lost in his genealogical labyrinths and shifts of time and points of view, and also trying to unearth the secrets of the baroque construction that each one of his stories was based on, the serpentine language, the fracturing of chronological sequence, the mystery and the profundity and the disturbing ambiguities and psychological subtleties which that form gave to his stories. Although I read a great many American novelists in those years — Erskine Caldwell, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Waldo Frank — it was when I read Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom! Intruder in the Dust, These Thirteen, Knight’s Gambit, and other of Faulkner’s works that I discovered the adaptability and the creativity of the narrative form and the marvels that could be wrought in a work of fiction when used by a novelist with Faulkner’s skill. Along with Sartre, Faulkner was the author I most admired in my years at San Marcos; he made me feel that it was urgent for me to learn English so as to be able to read his books in their original language. Another writer, a somewhat elusive one, who appeared like a will-o’-the-wisp around San Marcos was Vargas Vicuña, whose subtle collection of stories, Nahuín, published in that period, aroused expectations of a body of work from him that, unfortunately, never was forthcoming.

But of all those poets and writers of fiction that I met every day in the courtyard of the Faculty of Letters at San Marcos, the flashiest figure was Alejandro Romualdo. A short little man, with mannerisms reminiscent of Tarzan and the legs of a flamenco dancer, he had been, before going off to Europe with a scholarship from Cultura Hispánica — the bridge to the outside world for penniless Peruvian writers — a sumptuous, musical poet, of the sort called a formalist (by contrast to socially oriented poets), who had written a beautiful book, La torre de los alucinados (The Tower of the Hallucinated), that won the National Poetry Prize. At the same time, he had become famous for his political caricatures — in particular, hybrids of different persons — in Pedro Beltrán’s La Prensa. Romualdo — Xano to his friends — came back from Europe converted to realism, to political commitment, to Marxism, and to revolution. But he had not lost his sense of humor or the wit and cleverness that came pouring out in the form of wordplay and jokes in the courtyard of San Marcos. “I didn’t hear that abstract painting well,” he would say, and also, puffing out his chest: “I believe in dialectical materialism and my wife supports me.” He brought with him the originals of what was to be a magnificent book—Poesía concreta (Concrete Poetry)—politically committed poems animated by a spirit of justice, written with fine craftsmanship and a good ear, wordplay, disconcerting run-on lines, and moral and political defiance, in somewhat the same direction in which Blas de Otero, who had become a good friend of Romualdo’s, had oriented his poetry in Spain. And in a reading that he gave at San Marcos, in which several poets participated, Romualdo was the star, milking his audience — above all with his flamboyant “Canto coral a Túpac Amaru, que es libertad” (“Choral Chant to Túpac Amaru, Who Is Freedom”) of ovations that turned the reception room at San Marcos into the stage for what was practically a political rally.

In all truth, that was what that reading was. It must have taken place at the end of 1954 or the beginning of 1955 and at it all the poets read or recited something that could be interpreted as an attack on the dictatorship. It was one of the first manifestations of a progressive mobilization of the country against that regime which, since October of 1948, had governed with an iron hand, crushing every attempt to criticize it.

San Marcos was the focal point and amplifier of the protests. These often took the form of lightning demonstrations. Not very numerous groups of us — a hundred, two hundred people — would agree to meet in some very crowded place, the Jirón de la Unión, the Plaza San Martín, La Colmena, or the Parque Universitario, and at the hour when there were the most people there, we would gather in the middle of the street and begin to shout in chorus: “Freedom! Freedom!” Sometimes we paraded for one or two blocks, inviting passersby to join us, and then broke up as soon as the mounted Civil Guards or the antiriot vehicles equipped with high-pressure hoses that shot foul-smelling water at us appeared on the scene.

I went to all the lightning demonstrations with Javier Silva, who, with all his fat, had to exert superhuman efforts so as not to be left behind as we ran from the police. His political vocation was becoming more widely known in those days, as well as his unrestrained personality, which made him want to be in on everything and be everywhere at once, playing a major role in all the conspiracies. One afternoon I went with him to visit Luciano Castillo, the head of the minuscule Socialist Party, and a Piuran, like Javier, in his little office on the Jirón Lampa. After a few minutes Javier came out of his office, beaming. He showed me a card: in addition to signing him up as a member of the party, Luciano Castillo had promoted him to the post of secretary general of the Socialist Youth Movement. As such, a while later, on the stage of the Teatro Segura one night, he read a violent revolutionary speech against Odría’s regime (which I wrote for him).

But, at the same time, he conspired with members of the APRA, which was springing up again, and with the new opposition groups that were organizing in Lima and in Arequipa. Of these groups, four would take definite shape in the following months, one of them with only an ephemeral existence — the National Coalition, guided by remote control by the daily La Prensa and Don Pedro Beltrán (who had gone over to the side in opposition to Odría), whose leader, Pedro Roselló, was also the organizer of an equally ephemeral group, the Owners’ Association — and three others that turned out to be political organizations with a more prolonged future: Democracia Cristiana (Christian Democracy), the Movimiento Social Progresista (the Social Progressivist Movement), and the Frente Nacional de Juventudes (National Youth Front), the seed of what was to become Popular Action, with Eduardo Orrego, at the time an architecture student, as one of the organizers.

By those years, 1954 and 1955, Odría’s dictatorship had grown weak. The repressive laws remained intact — above all, the Law of Domestic Security, a juridical aberration under cover of which hundreds of Apristas, Communists, and democrats had been sent to prison or into exile since 1948—but the regime had lost its basis of support in broad sectors of the middle class and the traditional right which (primarily because of its opposition to the APRA) had supported Odría since his defeat of Bustamante y Rivero. Among these sectors, the principal one, and the one that after its break with Odría was to turn into the most battle-hardened opposition to the regime, was La Prensa. Its owner and editor-in-chief, Pedro Beltrán Espantoso (1897–1979), as I have already said, was the bête noire of the left in Peru. His was a case very much like that of José de la Riva Agüero. Like the latter, he belonged to a tradition-conscious, very prosperous family, and had received an excellent education, at the London School of Economics. There he imbibed the principles of classic economic liberalism, a cause he had supported in Peru since his youth. And like Riva Agüero, Beltrán tried to organize and to lead a political movement — the former conservative, the latter liberal — in the face of the indifference, not to say the contempt, of his own social class, the so-called ruling elite, too selfish and ignorant to see beyond their very petty interests. The intentions of both, in the years of their youth, to organize political parties that would take an active part in public life, ended in resounding failures. And the furious rage of Riva Agüero in his mature years — documented in his Opúsculos por la verdad, la tradición y la Patria (Pamphlets in Favor of Truth, Tradition and the Fatherland)—which poisoned his intellectual work and impelled him to defend fascism and withdraw into a ridiculous caste pride, doubtless had a great deal to do with the disappointment he felt because of his powerlessness to mobilize that national elite which, as such, possessed in all truth nothing except money that almost always had been inherited or ill-gotten.

Unlike Riva Agüero, Pedro Beltrán continued to be active in politics, but in a more or less indirect way, through La Prensa, which, in the 1950s, became, thanks to him, a modern newspaper, each of its editorial pages written by a very well-integrated and brilliant group of journalists, perhaps the best that any modern Peruvian publication has had (I shall cite the names of the best ones: Juan Zegarra Russo, Enrique Chirinos Soto, Luis Rey de Castro, Arturo Salazar Larraín, Patricio Ricketts, José María de Romaña, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and Mario Miglio). With this team and perhaps thanks to it, Don Pedro Beltrán discovered in those years the virtues of political democracy, of which he had not previously been a convinced supporter. On the contrary, La Prensa—like the oldest Peruvian daily, El Comercio—had attacked Bustamante y Rivero’s administration with great severity, conspired against it, and supported General Odría’s barracks coup in 1948 and the electoral farce of 1950 in which the latter proclaimed himself president.

But beginning in the mid-1950s, Pedro Beltrán came to the defense not only of the market and private enterprise but also of political freedom and the democratization of Peru.^* And he attacked censorship, for which he had lost respect, allowing himself more and more harsh criticisms of the regime’s measures and its principal figures.

Esparza Zañartu, who was neither slow-witted nor dilatory, closed the paper, on which he mounted an assault with his informers and police, and Pedro Beltrán and his principal contributors ended up in the Frontón, the island prison just off Callao. He left it three weeks later — there had been strong international pressure for his release — as a hero of the freedom of the press (as he was proclaimed to be by the SIP (Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa: Inter-American Press Association) and with brand-new credentials as a democrat, which for the rest of his days would prove to be valid ones.

The climate changed as quickly as possible and Peruvians could once again engage in politics. Exiles from Chile, Argentina, Mexico returned, semiclandestine weeklies or biweeklies of just a few pages and of every ideological line began to appear, many of which disappeared after a few issues. One of the most picturesque of them was the mouthpiece of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (T), the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (T) — T for Trotskyite, whose leader and perhaps only affiliate, Ismael Frías, recently back from exile, glided his sinuous humanity every noon all through San Marcos, predicting the imminent establishment of soviets of workers and soldiers throughout the length and breadth of Peru. Another, more serious publication, whose title changed each year — calling itself 1956, 1957, 1958—was put out by Genaro Carnero Checa, who, although expelled from the Communist Party for having supported Odría’s coup d’état before being exiled by him, always maintained his ties with the U.S.S.R. and the socialist countries. In the Congress then in existence — a product of the fraudulent elections of 1950—a number of previously well-disciplined representatives and senators, sensing that the boat was shipping water, changed their old servility into independence and even, in the case of several of them, into open hostility toward the master. And in streets and public squares there circulated a hodgepodge of names and possibilities for the presidential election that, on paper at least, was scheduled to be held in 1956.

Of the new political groups that were emerging from the catacombs, the one that seemed to me to be the most interesting was the one that later coalesced into the movement that came to be known as Democracia Cristiana (the Christian Democrats). Many of its leaders in Arequipa, such as Mario Polar, Héctor Cornejo Chávez, Jaime Rey de Castro, and Roberto Ramírez del Villar — or their friends in Lima, Luis Bedoya Reyes, Ismael Bielich, and Ernesto Alayza Grundy — had worked with Bustamante y Rivero’s administration, and because of this a number of them had been the victims of persecution and exile. They were young professionals still, without ties to the great upper-class economic interests, uncontaminated by political filth, present or past, who appeared to be bringing to Peruvian politics a democratic conviction and an unequivocal decency, what Bustamante y Rivero had so pristinely embodied during the three years of his administration. Like many others, as soon as that movement made its appearance, I thought it was being organized in such a way that Bustamante y Rivero would be its leader and guiding light and, perhaps, its candidate in the coming elections. This made it even more attractive to me, since my admiration for Bustamante — because of his honesty and his well-nigh religious worship of the rule of law, on which Aprismo heaped such ridicule, calling him the “limping legalist”—had remained intact during my militancy in Cahuide. That admiration, as I now see more clearly, had to do with the precise fact that the general public had fallen into the habit of commenting sympathetically on his failure with the cliché: “He was a president for Switzerland, not for Peru.” In fact, during those “three years of struggle for democracy in Peru”—as the book of personal witness that he wrote in exile is entitled — Bustamante y Rivero governed as if the country that had elected him were not barbarous and violent, but a civilized nation of responsible citizens, respectful of the institutions and the norms that make social coexistence possible. From the fact that he had taken the trouble to write his speeches himself, in a clear and elegant prose with a turn-of-the-century cast, always addressing his compatriots without permitting himself the slightest demagoguery or shoddiness, as if taking as his point of departure the supposition that all of them formed an intellectually demanding audience, I saw in Bustamante y Rivero an exemplary man, a head of government that if Peru ever came to be that country which his governance aimed to make of it — a genuine democracy of free and cultivated individuals — Peruvians would remember with gratitude.

Javier Silva and I attended all the political gatherings at the Teatro Segura voicing opposition to Odría, meetings that the dictator gone soft now permitted: the one sponsored by the National Coalition, with Pedro Roselló as the main speaker, the one of the Socialist Party, with Luciano Castillo, and the one of the Christian Democrats, which was by far the best of all of them, by virtue of the quality of its backers and of its speakers. In a burst of enthusiasm, Javier and I signed the initial manifesto of the group, published in La Prensa.

And both of us were also present, of course, at the Córpac airport to receive Bustamante y Rivero, when he was able to return to Peru after seven years in exile. My friend Luis Loayza tells an anecdote about that arrival that I am not certain is true, but could well have been. A group of young people had organized to protect Bustamante when he got off the plane and escort him to the Hotel Bolívar, foreseeing that he might be attacked by thugs hired by the government or by Aprista “buffaloes” (who, with the liberalization of the dictatorship, had reappeared, launching attacks on Communist meetings). They had given us instructions to stand with our arms linked together, forming an unbreakable ring. But according to Loayza, who apparently was also part of that sui generis phalanx of bodyguards made up of two aspiring writers and a handful of good kids from Catholic Action, the moment Bustamante y Rivero appeared on the steps of the plane with his inevitable hat edged in ribbon — which he ceremoniously doffed to greet those who had come to welcome him — I broke the iron circle and ran to meet him, shouting feverishly: “Mr. President! Mr. President!” In short, the circle was broken, we were overrun, and Bustamante was pawed, pushed, and shoved by everyone — among them by my Uncle Lucho, a Bustamante fan whose suit coat and shirt were torn in the struggles of this encounter — before he reached the car that drove him to the Hotel Bolívar. Bustamante spoke, briefly, from one of the balconies of the hotel to express his gratitude for his reception, without giving the slightest hint of any intention of becoming active in politics again. And, in fact, in the months that followed, Bustamante was to refuse to enroll in the Christian Democratic Party or play any role whatsoever in active politics. Beginning at that time, he adopted the role that he kept up till his death: a wise patrician, above partisan squabbles, whose competence in international juridical questions would be frequently sought in the country and abroad (he was eventually named president of the International Court of Justice at The Hague), and who, in moments of crisis, was in the habit of sending a message to the country exhorting it to remain calm.

Although the climate in 1954 and 1955 was an improvement over the dense and oppressive atmosphere of preceding years, and the first public demonstrations tolerated, plus the new publications, created in the country a feeling of freedom in the air that stimulated political action, I nonetheless devoted quite a bit more time to intellectual work than to politics: attending classes at San Marcos, almost all of them in the morning, as well as those at the Alliance Française, and reading and writing nothing but short stories from that time on.

I believe that the bad time I had had with “La parda” in Jorge Puccinelli’s coterie had the effect of unconsciously keeping me away from dealing with timeless cosmopolitan subjects, on which most of the stories that I wrote in those years had been based, and attracting me toward other, more realistic, ones, in which I deliberately made use of my own memories. Around that time there was a short story contest announced by the Faculty of Letters of San Marcos, to which I submitted two stories, both of them set in Piura, one of which, “Los jefes,” was inspired by the abortive strike at the Colegio San Miguel, and the other, “La casa verde,” by the brothel on the outskirts of the city, the warm haven of my adolescence. My stories didn’t even receive honorable mention, and when I took the manuscript back, “La casa verde” struck me as a very bad piece of writing and I tore it up (I would return to the subject years later, in a novel), but the one of “Los jefes,” with its bare hint of an epic air about it, in which my readings of Malraux and Hemingway were obvious, struck me as being recoverable, and in the months that followed I wrote it over several times, until it seemed to me to be worth publishing. It was very long for Dominical, the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, whose first page always had a story with a color illustration, so I proposed it instead to the historian César Pacheco Vélez, the editor-in-chief of Mercurio Peruano. He accepted it, published it (in February 1957), and made me fifty tear-sheet copies that I distributed among my friends. It was my first story to see print and was to furnish the title for my first book. That short story prefigures much of my later practice as a novelist: using a personal experience as a point of departure for the imaginary; employing a form that pretends to be realistic by virtue of its precise geographical and urban details; an objectivity arrived at through dialogues and descriptions observed from an impersonal point of view, effacing the author’s tracks; and finally, a politically committed, critical attitude toward a certain set of problems that is the context or horizon of the story line.

In those years, an election was called for the rectorate of San Marcos. I don’t remember who launched Porras Barrenechea’s candidacy; he accepted with great hopes, and perhaps with a touch of self-congratulation — in those days being rector of San Marcos still meant something — but above all out of his enormous affection for his alma mater, to which he had devoted so many years and so much passionate enthusiasm. That candidacy was to be fatal for him and for his history of Peru. From the beginning, circumstances turned it into an antigovernment candidacy. His rival, Aurelio Miró Quesada, one of the owners of El Comercio, regarded as one of the symbols of the aristocracy, the oligarchy, and opposition to the APRA (the Miró Quesada family had never forgiven the APRA for having murdered the former editor-in-chief of El Comercio, Don Antonio Miró Quesada, and his wife), assumed the character of an official candidacy. Student organizations, controlled by the APRA and the left, backed Porras, as did the Aprista professors (many of whom, such as Sánchez, were still in exile). Porras and Aurelio Miró Quesada, who up until then had had cordial relations, had a falling out, in a vitriolic polemic in the form of open letters and editorials, and El Comercio (whose building was stoned by demonstrators from San Marcos who came out in force to run through the downtown streets shouting in chorus the slogans “Freedom” and “Porras for rector”) banished the name of Porras Barrenechea from its pages for some time (the famous “civil death” to which El Comercio condemned its adversaries was more feared, it was said, by those who belonged to Lima society than was political persecution).

Needless to say, those of us who worked with him and all his disciples engaged in brave efforts to ensure that Porras Barrenechea was elected. We divided up between us the professors who had the right to vote and the members of the University Council, and it fell to my lot and Pablo Macera’s to visit those from Sciences, Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine at their homes. Except for just one of them, they all promised us their vote. When, on the eve of the election, in the dining room of the house on the Calle Colina, we totted up the probable results, Porras had two-thirds of the votes. But in the University Council, when the time came for the secret ballot, Aurelio Miró Quesada won handily.

In his speech in the courtyard of the Faculty of Law, after the election, standing before a crowd of students who tried to make up for his losing with their cheers and applause, Porras was indiscreet enough to say that, even though he had lost, he was happy to know that some of the most eminent professors of San Marcos had voted for him and mentioned by name some of those who had assured us of their vote. A number of them immediately sent letters to El Comercio denying that they had voted for him.

His victory did not offer Aurelio Miró Quesada any satisfaction whatsoever. The fierce — and very unjust — political hostility of the students toward him after his election, turning him into little less than the symbol of the dictatorial regime, something he never was, resulted in his almost never being able to set foot in the most important locales of San Marcos and forced him to attend to matters concerning the rectorate from an office on the periphery, the object of permanent harassment and the enmity of university cloisters where, thanks to the regime’s increasing powerlessness, the heretofore clandestine forces of the APRA and the left were regaining the initiative and would soon be ready to take over the university. Shortly thereafter, this climate would lead the refined and elegant essayist that Aurelio Miró Quesada is to give up the rectorate and leave San Marcos.

Porras’s defeat deeply affected him. I have the impression that the rectorate was the post he coveted the most — more than any political distinction — because of his close and long-standing relationship with the university, and not having attained it left in him a frustration and a bitterness that induced him, in the 1956 elections, to agree to be a candidate for a senatorial seat on a list of the Democratic Front (a creation of the Aprista party) and, during Prado’s administration, to accept the post of minister of foreign relations, which he would occupy until a few days before his death, in 1960. It is true that he was a first-rate senator and minister, but that immersion in a political absorbent cut short his intellectual activities and kept him from writing that history of the Conquest which, when I began to work with him, he appeared to be determined to finish once and for all. He was occupied with it when the campaign for the rectorate intervened. I remember that, after keeping me busy making note cards on myths and legends for several months, Porras had me type out, in a single manuscript, all of his published monographs and articles and his unpublished chapters on Pizarro as well, to which he gradually added notes, corrected pages, and added more.

The fact that his candidacy for the rectorate of San Marcos had been supported by the APRA and the left — a curious paradox since Porras had never been an Aprista or a socialist, but rather a liberal inclined to be a conservative^*—earned him the revenge of the regime, in whose publications he began to be attacked, at times in the basest of terms. A weekly that backed Odría, Clarín, brought out several articles against him, full of abominations. It occurred to me to write a manifesto of solidarity with him as a person and to collect signatures among intellectuals, professors, and students. We secured several hundred signatures, but there was nowhere to publish the manifesto, so we had to content ourselves with presenting it to Porras.

Thanks to this manifesto I met someone who was to be one of my best friends in those years and help me a great deal in my first efforts as a professional writer. We had given printed copies of the manifesto to various people to circulate and gather signatures for, and I was informed that a student at the Catholic University wanted to lend a helping hand. His name was Luis Loayza. I gave him one of the copies and a few days later we met in the Crem Rica on the Avenida Larco so that he could hand the signatures over to me. He had secured only one: his own. He was tall, seemingly absent-minded and aloof, two or three years older than I was, and although he was studying law, the only thing he cared about was literature. He had read everything and spoke of authors that I hadn’t even known existed — men like Borges, whom he frequently quoted, and the Mexican writers Juan Rulfo and Juan José Arreola — and when I revealed my enthusiasm for Sartre and politically committed literature, his reaction was a crocodile-sized yawn.

We saw each other again soon thereafter, in his house on the Avenida Petit Thouars, where he read me some prose works that he was to publish, sometime later, in a private edition—El avaro (The Miser), which came out in Lima in 1955—and where we had long, uninterrupted conversations in his library crammed full of books. Loayza, along with Abelardo Oquendo, with whom I didn’t make friends until later, were to become my best pals of those years, and intellectually the most kindred spirits. We exchanged and discussed books and plans for our literary endeavors, and eventually constituted a warm and stimulating confraternity. Apart from our passion for literature, Lucho and I had great differences concerning many things, and for that reason we never got bored, for we always had something to have a heated argument about. Unlike me, always interested in politics and capable of becoming impassioned about almost any aspect of it and devoting myself entirely to it without thinking about it twice, politics bored Loayza stiff, and in general this and every other enthusiasm — except one for a good book — merited his subtle and sarcastic skepticism. He was against the dictatorship, of course, but more for aesthetic reasons than for political ones. Every once in a while I dragged him to lightning demonstrations and during one of them, in the Parque Universitario, he lost a shoe: I remember him running alongside me, never losing his composure, before a charge by the mounted Civil Guards, and asking me in a soft voice if doing such things was absolutely indispensable. My admiration for Sartre and his exhortations concerning social commitment sometimes bored him and sometimes irritated him — he preferred Camus, naturally, because he was more of an artist and wrote better prose than Sartre — and he dismissed both Sartre’s ideas and my admiration for them with a sibylline irony that made me howl with indignation. I avenged myself by attacking Borges, whom he idolized, calling him a formalist, an antipurist, and even the chien de garde of the bourgeoisie. Our Sartre-versus-Borges arguments lasted for hours and sometimes made us stop seeing or speaking to each other for several days. It was surely Loayza — or perhaps it was Abelardo: I never found out which — who gave me the nickname they used to pull my leg: the fierce little Sartrean, el sartrecillo valiante.

It was because of Loayza that I read Borges, in the beginning with a certain reluctance — what is purely or excessively intellectual, what seems dissociated from a very direct experience of life, always arouses in me a refusal to let myself become involved in it — but with an amazement and a curiosity that always made me come back to him. Until little by little, down through the months and the years, that distance turned into admiration. And, in addition to Borges, I turned to many other Latin American authors who, before my friendship with Loayza, I knew nothing of, or out of sheer ignorance held in contempt. The list would be a very long one, but among them are Alfonso Reyes, Bioy Casares, Juan José Arreola, Juan Rulfo, and Octavio Paz, a thin volume of whose poetry Loayza discovered one day—Piedra de sol (Sunstone)—which we read aloud and which led us to eagerly seek out other books of his.

My lack of interest in the literature of Latin America — with the sole exception of Pablo Neruda, whom I always read devotedly — had been total before I met Lucho Loayza. Rather than lack of interest, perhaps I should say hostility. This was because the only modern Latin American literature studied at San Marcos or discussed in literary reviews and supplements was of the indigenist or folkloric and regionalist sort, that of novelists like Alcides Arguedas, author of Raza de bronce (Race of Bronze); Jorge Icaza, author of Huasipungo; Eustasio Rivera, author of La vorágine (The Vortex); Rómulo Gallegos, author of Doña Bárbara; Ricardo Güiraldes, author of Don Segundo Sombra; or even Miguel Ángel Asturias.

I had been forced to read that sort of narrative and its Peruvian equivalent in classes at San Marcos, and I detested it, since it appeared to me to be a provincial and demagogic caricature of what a good novel should be. Because in those books the background was more important than the flesh-and-blood characters (in two of them, Don Segundo Sombra and La vorágine, nature finally swallowed up the heroes) and because their authors apparently didn’t know the first thing about how to put a story together, beginning with the ability to stay with the chosen point of view: in them the narrator was always butting in and offering his opinion, even when he was supposedly invisible, and furthermore, their ornate, bookish styles — especially in the dialogue — made stories that presumably took place among rude and primitive people so hard to believe that the illusion of reality never managed to break through the surface of them. All the so-called indigenist literature was a string of clichés about nature and of such great artistic poverty that one had the impression that for the authors writing good novels consisted in looking around for “good” subjects — weird and terrible events — and writing about them in unusual words taken straight out of dictionaries, as far removed as possible from everyday speech.

Lucho Loayza enabled me to discover another Latin American literature, more urbane and cosmopolitan, and more elegant as well, that had sprung up mainly in Mexico and in Argentina. And then, as he did, I began to read Victoria Ocampo’s review, Sur, every month, a window opened out onto the world of culture, whose arrival in Lima seemed to set the pitifully provincial city to shaking with a mighty cascade of ideas, debates, poems, short stories, essays, from every language and every culture, and place those of us who devoured it in the middle of the contemporary culture of the entire planet. What Victoria Ocampo did through her Sur—and along with her, of course, all those who collaborated in this editorial adventure, beginning with José Bianco — is something for which we Hispano-American readers and writers can never be grateful enough, in the lifetimes of at least three generations. (That is what I told Victoria Ocampo when I met her, in 1966, at a Pen Club congress in New York. I always remember the happiness it gave me, many years after the ones that I am here recalling, to see a text of mine published in that review which each month made us experience the illusion of being in the intellectual avant-garde of the time.) In one of the recent or past issues of Sur that Loayza collected, I read the famous debate between Sartre and Camus concerning the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union.

My association with Lucho, which soon became an intimate one, did not depend solely on books or on our shared vocation. It also had to do with his generous friendship and how pleasant it was to spend time with him listening to him talk about jazz, which delighted him, or about films — we never liked the same ones — or compete with him in the great national sport of raje, or watch him compose his prose pieces of a languid, refined aesthete, au-dessus de la mêlée, with which he liked at times to entertain his friends. At a certain period he began having an amusing — but most bothersome — ethical and aesthetic reaction: everything that struck him as ugly or earned his scorn made him sick to his stomach. It was a real risk to go with him to an exhibit, a lecture, a recital, a movie, or simply to stop in the middle of the street to exchange a few words with someone, for if the person or the performance didn’t meet his standards, he would begin retching right there on the spot.

Lucho had become acquainted with those Latin American authors thanks to a professor from the Catholic University, who had arrived not long before from Argentina: Luis Jaime Cisneros. He also taught a course in Spanish literature at San Marcos that I was enrolled in, but I became friends with him only later on, thanks to Loayza and Oquendo. Luis Jaime Cisneros also had a passion for teaching, and engaged in it outside the classroom, in a corner of his library — in a townhouse in Miraflores, on a street that crossed the Avenida Pardo — where he met with students who had a special liking for philology (his specialty) and literature, to whom he lent books (jotting the names of them down, with the date and the title, in a huge account book). Luis Jaime was thin, refined, polite, but he affected a slightly pedantic and bullying attitude toward his colleagues which earned him bitter enemies at the university. I myself had a mistaken impression of him until I began to visit him and form part of the little circle which was the recipient of Luis Jaime’s culture and friendship.

Luis Jaime had signed the first manifesto of the Christian Democrats, and the latter, who were taking the first steps to form a party, had asked him to be the editor of the periodical of the group. He asked me if I would like to give him a hand and I told him I’d be delighted to. And thus there came into being Democracia, in theory a weekly, but which came out only when we had scared up enough money for the issue, sometimes twice a month and sometimes monthly. For the first issue I wrote a long article on Bustamante y Rivero and the coup that overthrew him. We got the review together in Luis Jaime’s library, and had it printed in different shops each time, for they were all afraid that Esparza Zañartu — whom Odría had promoted to the post of minister of the interior, a political error that was providential for the reestablishment of democracy in Peru — would take reprisals against the printers. Since Luis Jaime, in order not to compromise his work at the university, did not want to appear as editor-in-chief on the masthead, I offered to let my name be used instead, and that was how Democracia appeared. On the first page there was an article, an unsigned one, as I remember, by Luis Bedoya Reyes, criticizing “Pradism,” which was reorganizing in order to launch a second candidacy for the presidency by Manuel Prado, a former holder of that office.

Democracia had only just come out when I was summoned by my father to his office. I found him livid, waving about the weekly on which my name appeared on the masthead as editor-in-chief. Had I forgotten that La Crónica belonged to the Prado family? That La Crónica had exclusive rights to material that came from the International News Service? That he was the director of the INS? Did I want La Crónica to cancel his contract and leave him without a job? He ordered me to take my name off the masthead. So as a result, after the second or third issue, my friend and comrade from San Marcos, Guillermo Carrillo Marchand, succeeded me as the supposed editor-in-chief — the real one was Luis Jaime. And since after a few issues Guillermo also had problems because of his being on the masthead in that capacity, Democracia then came out with a fictitious editor-in-chief, whose name we filched from one of Borges’s short stories.

The Christian Democrats played a major role in the downfall of Esparza Zañartu, which precipitated the death of the dictatorship. If he had continued to be in charge of the security forces of the dictatorship, the regime would perhaps have gone on beyond the elections of 1956, by faking the results, as it had done in 1950, in favor of Odría himself or of some figurehead (there were several individuals lining up to play that role). But the fall of the strongman of the regime weakened it and plunged it into a state of disorder in which the opposition seized the opportunity to take over the streets.

Throughout the dictatorship Esparza Zañartu had occupied a relatively unimportant post — administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior — which allowed him to remain in the background, for despite the fact that he made all the decisions with respect to security, the minister of the interior took public responsibility for them. The probable reason that led Odría to make Esparza Zañartu minister was that nobody wanted to occupy that puppet post. Legend has it that when General Odría summoned him to offer him the portfolio, Esparza answered that he would accept it, out of loyalty, but that this measure was the equivalent of suicide for the regime. And so it was. The moment that Esparza Zañartu became a visible target, all the weapons of the opposition were trained on him. The coup de grâce was the demonstration by Pedro Roselló’s National Coalition, in Arequipa, which Esparza tried to break up by sending hired gunmen and police in civvies as counterdemonstrators. The latter were routed by the Arequipans, and police began shooting at the dissidents, the result being a large number of casualties. The drama of 1950 seemed to be repeating itself, when, during the fraudulent elections, confronted with an attempted rebellion in the streets by the people of Arequipa, Odría had resorted to a wholesale slaughter. But this time the regime did not dare to bring tanks and soldiers out into the street to fire on the crowd, as rumor has it that Esparza Zañartu wanted to do. Arequipa declared a general strike, which the entire city took part in. At the same time, in accordance with the long-standing custom that had earned it the name of the caudillo city (since the majority of republican rebellions and revolutions began there), the Arequipans tore up the paving stones of the streets and set up barricades, where thousands upon thousands of men and women of every social sector waited on the alert for the regime’s response to their list of demands: Esparza Zañartu’s resignation, the abolition of the Law of Domestic Security, and a date set for free elections. After three days of tremendous tension, the regime sacrificed Esparza Zañartu, who, after resigning, hurriedly went abroad. And although the dictatorship named a military cabinet, it was evident to everyone, beginning with Odría himself, that the people of Arequipa — the home territory of Bustamante y Rivero — had dealt him a fatal blow.

In that Arequipan epic, which, in Lima, we students at San Marcos supported with lightning demonstrations at which Javier Silva and I were always in the first row, the leaders at various times were Mario Polar, Roberto Ramírez del Villar, Héctor Cornejo Chávez, Jaime Rey de Castro, and other Arequipans of the nascent Christian Democratic movement. They were attorneys who had great prestige, friends and even relatives of the Llosa family, and one of them, Mario Polar, had been a suitor, or as my Granny Carmen put it, a “beau” of my mother’s, to whom as a young man he had written some passionate poems that she kept hidden from my father, a man of retrospective fits of jealousy.

All these reasons finally aroused my wholehearted enthusiasm when the Christian Democratic movement organized itself as a party and I signed up as a member of it. I was immediately catapulted, I have no idea either how or by whom, to the departmental committee for Lima, of which Luis Jaime Cisneros, Guillermo Carrillo Marchand, and such respectable holders of academic chairs as the jurist Ismael Bielich and the psychiatrist Honorio Delgado were also members. The new party declared in its statutes that “it was not based on a creed,” so that it was not necessary to be a believer in order to be militant in it, but in all truth the headquarters of the party — an old house with walls made of cane reeds and clay, with balconies — on the Avenida Guzmán Blanco, very near the Plaza Bolognesi, seemed like a church, or at least a sacristy, since all the well-known ultrapious believers in Lima were there, from Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy to the leaders of Catholic Action and of UNEC (Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos: National Union of Catholic Students) and all the young people seemed to be students at the Catholic University. I wonder whether in those days there were any other students from San Marcos in the Christian Democratic Party except for myself and Guillermo Carrillo (Javier Silva was to sign up as a member sometime later).

What the devil was I doing there, among these people who were ultrarespectable, but light-years away from the Sartrean who ate priests alive, the leftist sympathizer not completely cured of the Marxist notions of the circle that I had belonged to, that I still felt myself to be? I wouldn’t be able to explain it. My political enthusiasm was quite a bit stronger than my ideological consistency. But I remember having experienced a certain uneasiness whenever I was obliged to explain intellectually my militancy in the Christian Democratic Party. And things got worse when, thanks to Antonino Espinoza, I was able to read material having to do with the social doctrine of the Church and Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum, which the Christian Democrats always cited as proof of their commitment to social justice and their will to work for economic reform to favor the poor. The famous encyclical fell from my hands as I read it, because of its paternalistic rhetoric, its gassy sentiments and vague criticisms of the excesses of capital. I recall having commented on the subject to Luis Loayza — who, if I remember correctly, had also signed some Christian Democratic text or other or had enrolled as a member of the party — and having told him how ill at ease I felt after reading that celebrated encyclical that struck me as being extremely conservative. He too had tried to read it, and after a few pages had started retching.

Nonetheless, I did not part company with the Christian Democratic Party (I would abandon it only years later, from Europe, because of the lukewarmness of its defense of the Cuban revolution, when for me the latter became an impassioned cause), because its fight against dictatorship and for the democratization of Peru was impeccable and because I continued to believe that Bustamante y Rivero would end up being the leader of the party and perhaps its presidential candidate. But, above all, because I, along with other more or less radical young people, discovered among the leaders of the Christian Democratic Party an attorney from Arequipa, who, although as devout a believer as the others, seemed to us from the start to be a man of more advanced and more progressive ideas than his colleagues, someone determined not only to moralize and democratize Peruvian politics, but also to bring about a profound reform so as to put an end to the iniquities of which the poor were victims: Héctor Cornejo Chávez.

The fact that I speak of him in those terms today, in view of his repulsive activities later as the adviser of Velasco’s military dictatorship, the author of the monstrous law confiscating all the communications media, and the first editor-in-chief of El Comercio after the state had taken it over, will make many people smile. But the fact is that, in the middle of the 1950s, when he came to Lima from his native Arequipa, this young attorney appeared to be a model of a politician with clean hands, a man driven by his burning democratic zeal and an indignation that flared up on the slightest provocation against any and every form of injustice. He had been Bustamante y Rivero’s secretary, and I was only too eager to see in him a rejuvenated and radicalized version of the former president, with the same moral integrity and the same unbreakable commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

Dr. Cornejo Chávez spoke of agrarian reform, of a reform of business enterprises based on profit sharing and a voice in their management by their workers, and he condemned oligarchy, large landowners, the “forty families,” with Jacobin rhetoric. He was admittedly not a likable man, but, rather, cold and distant, with that ceremonious and rather pompous manner of speaking so frequent in Arequipans (especially those who had had experience before the bar), but his modest and almost frugal way of life made many of us think that, with him at the head, the Christian Democratic Party could accomplish the transformation of Peru.

Things turned out very differently. Cornejo Chávez eventually became the leader of the party — he was not its head in 1955 or 1956, when I was a militant in it — and was its candidate for the presidency in the election of 1962, in which he won an insignificant percentage of the vote. His authoritarianism and his personality little by little created tensions and factional quarrels within his own party, which culminated, in 1965, in the breakup of the Christian Democrats: a majority of the leaders and militants were to leave, with Luis Bedoya Reyes at their head, to form the Christian Popular Party, whereas Cornejo Chávez’s party, reduced to its nadir, was barely to survive General Velasco’s military coup in 1968. He then saw that his hour had come. What he was unable to secure by way of the ballot box, Dr. Cornejo Chávez obtained through the dictatorship: reaching power by virtue of the fact that the military entrusted him with tasks as undemocratic as gagging the communications media and gutting the power of the judiciary (since he was also to be responsible for the creation of the National Council of Justice, an institution through which the dictatorship placed judges in its service).

When Velasco fell from power — when he was replaced, after a palace coup led by General Morales Bermúdez, in 1975—Cornejo Chávez, after taking part in the Constituent Assembly (1978–1979), retired from politics, in which, surely, he had left behind him nothing but bad memories.

The nonexistent Christian Democratic Party — a handful of social climbers — figured, nonetheless, in the political life of Peru, allied to Alan García, who, in order to maintain the fiction of a liberalizing regime, always had a Christian Democrat in his administration. After Alan García Christian Democracy died out, or rather, its governing board went into hibernation to wait until circumstances would allow it to recover a few crumbs of power once it had become the parasite of another of the revolving heads of state.

But we are in 1955 and all that is still far in the future. After that summer, as I began classes in my third year at the university and discussed literature with Luis Loayza, was a militant in the Christian Democratic movement, wrote short stories, and made index cards from history books at Porras Barrenechea’s, there arrived in Lima someone who would represent another earth tremor of my existence: “Aunt” Julia.