A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Seventeen. The Miter-Bird

Since my marriage, what with my classes at the university and the jobs to keep food on the table, I hadn’t had much time left over for politics, although, every so often, I attended the meetings of the Christian Democratic Party and contributed to the sporadic issues of Democracia. (After the third year, I gave up going to the Alliance Française, but by then I read French easily; besides, for the degree in literature at San Marcos, I chose French for the foreign language requirement.) But politics would enter my life again in the summer of 1956 in the most unexpected way: as paid employment.

The electoral process that put an end to Odría’s dictatorship was under way, and three candidates were coming to the fore as contenders for the presidency: Dr. Hernando de Lavalle, a wealthy man, an aristocrat, and a prestigious Lima attorney; the former president Manuel Prado, recently back from Paris, where he had lived since he left the presidency in 1945; and the one who appeared to be the minor candidate, because of a lack of financial resources and the air of youthful improvisation that marked his campaign: the architect and university professor Fernando Belaunde Terry.

The election finally took place in a very questionable way, in legal terms, under the unconstitutional Law of Domestic Security, approved by the Congress that was a fruit of the dictatorship, which placed the APRA and the Communist Party outside the law — and kept them from presenting candidates. The votes that the Communist Party would have garnered were few and far between; those of the APRA, the party of the masses and with a disciplined organization that it had maintained during the time that it was an outlawed party, would have been decisive. From the beginning Lavalle, Prado, and Belaunde sought, in secret negotiations and sometimes ones that were not so secret, an accord with the Apristas.

The APRA rejected Belaunde Terry from the start, with an instinctive certainty that in him Haya de la Torre, the founder of the APRA, would have not a cat’s paw but, in a short time, a competitor. (Such a serious one that he was to win out over the Apristas in the elections of 1963 and 1980.) And its support of Manuel Prado, who during his presidency from 1939 to 1945 had outlawed the APRA and imprisoned, exiled, and persecuted many Apristas, was presumed to be impossible to secure.

Hence Hernando de Lavalle appeared to be the favorite. The APRA demanded to be made a legal party again and Lavalle promised the Aprista leaders to back a law defining the status of political parties that would allow the APRA to reenter civic life. In order to negotiate these accords a number of Aprista leaders had returned to Peru from exile, among them Ramiro Prialé, the great architect of what was to become the regime of coexistence (1956–1961).

Porras Barrenechea collaborated in establishing this rapprochement between Hernando de Lavalle and the APRA. Although he had never been an Aprista, nor a party outsider favorably inclined toward it — a status that included a fair number of the middle and even the upper bourgeoisie — Porras, who, as a member of the same generation as Haya de la Torre and Luis Alberto Sánchez, kept up a friendship with them, on the surface at least, had many contacts with the APRA during the electoral campaign, and agreed to be a candidate for a seat in the Senate on the list of friends of the APRA, headed by the poet José Gálvez, whom this party supported in the 1956 elections.

A close friend of Lavalle’s, whose classmate he had also been at the university, Porras had actively supported the great alliance or civil coalition on which Lavalle wanted to base his candidacy. These forces included Luis A. Flores’s old and almost extinct Revolutionary Union and the Christian Democratic Party, with whom he held conversations looking toward the future.

One afternoon, Porras Barrenechea summoned Pablo Macera and me and offered us jobs with Dr. Lavalle, who was looking for two “intellectuals” to write speeches and political reports for him. The pay was quite good and there were no fixed working hours. That night Porras took us to Lavalle’s house — an elegant residence, surrounded by gardens and tall trees, on the Avenida 28 de Julio in Miraflores — to meet the candidate. Hernando de Lavalle was a kindly, elegant man, extremely circumspect, timid almost, who received Pablo and me most courteously and explained to us that a group of intellectuals, headed by a young and distinguished professor of philosophy, Carlos Cueto Fernandini, was preparing his program for governing, in which he would place great emphasis on cultural activities. Pablo and I would not be working with this group, however, but with the candidate alone.

Although I didn’t vote for him in the 1956 elections, but for Fernando Belaunde Terry — I will explain why later — in those months during which I worked alongside him I came to respect and esteem Hernando de Lavalle. Ever since he had been a young man it was said in Lima that someday he would be president of Peru. The descendant of an old family, Dr. Lavalle had been a brilliant student at the university and after that was a very successful attorney. Only now, when he was past sixty, had he decided — or rather, others had decided for him — that he should enter politics, an activity for which, as became clear during the electoral process, he was not well equipped.

He always believed what he told Pablo Macera and me on the night we first met him: that the aim of his candidacy was to reestablish democratic life and civil institutions in Peru after eight years under a military regime, and that in order to achieve that goal what was needed was a great coalition of Peruvians of all persuasions and a scrupulous respect for the law.

“The harebrained Lavalle wanted to win the election fair and square,” I heard a friend of Porras Barrenechea’s once say sarcastically, at one of the historian’s evening gatherings over cups of chocolate. “The elections of 1956 were rigged so that he’d win them; but this arrogantly proud, self-important candidate wanted to win fair and square. And that’s why he lost!” Something like that did in fact occur. But Dr. Lavalle did not want to win that election fair and square out of arrogant pride and self-importance, but because he was a decent person, and naïve enough to believe that he could win with clean hands an election which the existence of the dictatorship corrupted from the very beginning.

Pablo and I were installed in an office as empty as a tomb — there was never anybody in it except for the two of us — on the second floor of a building on La Colmena, right in the downtown section of Lima. Dr. Lavalle would drop in unexpectedly to ask us for drafts of speeches or proclamations. At our first meeting, Macera, in one of his typical outbursts, confronted Lavalle with this insolent remark: “The masses can be won over by contempt or by flattery. Which method should we use?”

I saw Dr. Lavalle’s face of a sad tortoise pale behind his glasses. And I listened to him for some time, embarrassed and disconcerted, as he explained to Macera that there was another way, outside of those two extremes, of winning over public opinion. He preferred a more moderate one, one more in harmony with his temperament. Macera’s brusque comments and wild remarks scared Lavalle — whom Macera wanted to have slip into his speeches every so often a quote from Freud or Georg Simmel or whoever else Pablo was reading at the time — but at the same time Lavalle was fascinated by him. He listened, enthralled, to his mad theories — Pablo expounded a great number of them every day, all of them contradictory, and then immediately forgot about them — and one day Lavalle said to me in confidence: “What an intelligent young man, but what an unpredictable one!”

An internal debate began within the Christian Democratic Party with regard to what its policy should be in the ’56 election. The wing consisting of supporters of Bustamante, the most conservative one, proposed supporting Lavalle, whereas many others, above all among the young members, favored Belaunde Terry. When the subject was discussed in the departmental committee, I let it be known that I was working with Dr. Lavalle, but that if the party agreed to support Belaunde I would respect its decision and resign. At first, the idea of supporting Lavalle prevailed.

As the period for the registration of candidates for the presidential election was about to close, the rumor circulated all through Lima that the national board of elections would refuse to register Belaunde, on the pretext that he did not have the number of signatures required. Belaunde immediately called for a street demonstration, on June 1, 1956, which — a tactic that, in a manner of speaking, was to transform his small and enthusiastic candidacy into a great movement destined to give birth eventually to Popular Action — he wanted to lead to the very gates of the Presidential Palace. On the Jirón de la Unión he and the few thousand people who followed him (among them was Javier Silva, who never failed to show up at every demonstration) were stopped by the police with high-pressure water hoses and tear gas. Belaunde faced the police charge waving the Peruvian flag on high, a gesture that would make him famous.

That same night, with elegant circumspection, Dr. Hernando de Lavalle sent word to General Odría that if the national board of elections did not register Belaunde, he would give up his own candidacy and denounce the electoral process. “This idiot doesn’t deserve to be president of Peru,” it is said that Odría sighed when he received the message. The dictator and his advisers thought that Lavalle, with his idea of a grand coalition, in which there was room even for Odría’s party — the name of which at the time was the Partido Restaurador (the Restoration Party) — was the one who would be their best rear guard if the future Congress was bent on investigating the crimes committed during the dictatorship. That gesture showed them that the timid conservative aristocrat was not the right person for that task. The fate of Hernando de Lavalle was sealed.

Odría ordered the national board of elections to allow the registration of Belaunde, who, in a large rally in the Plaza San Martín, thanked the “people of Lima” for entering his name on the list of candidates. After the famous incident of the flag and the police attack with water hoses, it began to appear that he could run for office on an equal footing with Prado and Lavalle, who, because of the costly publicity and the infrastructure on which they were counting, appeared to be the candidates with the greatest chances of winning.

Manuel Prado, meanwhile, negotiated behind the scenes to rally support for the APRA, to which he offered immediate legalization without going through the procedure of changing the status of political parties that Lavalle was proposing. Whether this was the decisive factor, or whether there were additional promises or gifts on Prado’s part, as was rumored, was never proved one way or the other. The fact is that agreement was arrived at, a few days before the elections. The orders given by the Aprista party to its militants that, instead of voting for Lavalle, they were to vote for the ex-president who had outlawed them, jailed and persecuted them, were obeyed, in another demonstration of the APRA’s iron discipline, and the votes of the Apristas won Manuel Prado the election.

In the end, Lavalle had been defeated by his public acceptance of the support of the Restoration Party, and by his statement, in the ceremony whereby the latter, through David Aguilar Cornejo, gave him its backing, that “he would continue the patriotic labors of General Odría.” The Christian Democratic Party immediately withdrew its support from him and allowed its members to vote as they pleased. And many independents who would have voted for him, won over by his image as a capable and decent man, felt put off by a declaration implying that he sanctioned the dictatorship. Like the majority of Christian Democrats, I voted for Belaunde, who, although he ended up in third place, won an important percentage of the vote, and the necessary support to found Popular Action some months later.

When I lost my job with Dr. Lavalle, my income was reduced, but not for very long, since, almost immediately, I found two other jobs, one real and the other theoretical. The real job was the one on the magazine Extra, whose owner, Don Jorge Checa, the ex-prefect of Piura, had known me since I was a little boy. He took me on when the magazine was already on the verge of bankruptcy. At the end of each month, those of us on the editorial staff lived through moments of anxiety, because only the ones who arrived first at the head office received their pay; the others received vouchers for payment sometime in the future. Every week while I was there I wrote film reviews and articles on cultural subjects. Sometimes I too was left without a paycheck. But I didn’t carry off Extra’s typewriters and even its office furniture, the way several of my colleagues did, because of my liking for Jorge Checa. I don’t know how much money the prodigal Don Jorge lost in this publishing venture; but he lost it with the nonchalance of a great lord and a Maecenas, without complaining and without getting rid of the horde of journalists he kept on the payroll, a number of whom stole him blind in the most cynical way. He apparently realized what was going on but it didn’t matter to him as long as he was having fun. And it was true that he was having a great time. He used to take the journalists from Extra to the house of his mistress, a good-looking woman whom he had set up in a house along Magdalena Vieja, where he organized lunches that ended up as orgies. The first jealous scene Julia ever made with me, after we’d been married a year and a half, must have been after one of those lunches, in what by now were the final weeks of existence of Extra, when I came back home in a rather unseemly state and with red stains on my handkerchief. The fight we had was a tooth-and-nail one and didn’t leave me with much enthusiasm for going back to Don Jorge’s hectic lunches. There wasn’t much chance of that, moreover, because a few weeks later the editor-in-chief of the magazine, the intelligent and refined Pedro Álvarez del Villar, skipped the country with Don Jorge’s mistress, and the staff of the weekly who hadn’t been paid their salaries carried off the last remaining pieces of furniture and typewriters, so that Extra died of consumption. (I will always remember Don Jorge Checa, when he was prefect of Piura and I a senior at San Miguel, ordering me, one night at the Grau club: “Marito, you who are halfway toward being an intellectual, go up onstage and introduce The Andalusian gypsies from Spain to the audience.” Don Jorge’s idea of an intellectual was based, doubtless, on the intellectuals whom he had happened to meet and hire.)

Porras Barrenechea was elected senator representing Lima on the list presented by friends of the APRA, and in the first election held by Congress was chosen first vice president of the Senate. In that capacity he had a right to have two hired assistants, posts to which he appointed Carlos Araníbar and me. The job was a theoretical one, because, as Porras’s aides, we went on working with him at his home, doing historical research, and dropped by Congress only at the end of each month to collect our modest salaries. After six months had gone by, Porras informed Carlos Araníbar and me that our posts had been done away with. That half year was my first and last experience as a civil servant.

Around that time, Julia and I moved from the minuscule little apartment in the townhouse on the Calle Porta to a roomier one, with two bedrooms — one of which I turned into a study — on Las Acacias, a few blocks away from Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s. It was in a modern building, very near the seawall and the ocean, in Miraflores, although it had only one window overlooking the street and so we had to keep the lights on all day long.

We lived there for more than two years, and I believe that, despite my exhausting daily routine, it was a time with many compensations, the best of which was, without a shadow of a doubt, my friendship with Luis Loayza and Abelardo Oquendo. I had met Luis sometime before, and Abelardo when I was a contributor to the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, whose literary section he was in charge of. From that period on, the three of us began seeing each other more and more often, until we constituted an inseparable triumvirate. We used to spend weekends together, at my place or at Abelardo and Pupi’s, on the Avenida Angamos, or we would go out to eat at a Chinese restaurant, outings on which we were sometimes joined by other friends, such as Sebastián Salazar Bondy, José Miguel Oviedo (who was beginning to take up arms as a literary critic for the first time), a Spanish friend of Loayza’s named José Manuel Muñoz, Pablo Macera, the actor Tachi Hilbck, or Baldomero Cáceres, the future psychologist, in those days more concerned with theology than with science and for that reason nicknamed Cristo Cáceres by Macera.

But Abelardo, Lucho, and I also saw each other during the week. We thought up all sorts of pretexts for meeting in downtown Lima to have coffee together and chat, between classes and our jobs, if only for a few minutes, because those meetings, in which we exchanged comments about one book or another, traded political, literary, or university gossip, stimulated us and compensated for the many boring and mechanical things involved in our daily routines.

Both Lucho and Abelardo had given up their literary studies at the university so as to devote all their time to their law studies. Abelardo had just received his law degree and was already a practicing attorney, in his father-in-law’s office. Lucho was just finishing his last courses in the Faculty of Law and practicing in the office of a bigwig of Pradism: Carlos Ledgard. But simply knowing them was enough to be certain that what really mattered to them was literature, and that it would enter their lives again every time they tried to get away from it. I believe that in those days Abelardo wanted to get away from it. He had finished all his courses for a degree in Letters and had spent a year in Spain on a scholarship meant to enable him to write a doctoral dissertation on proverbs in the works of Ricardo Palma. I don’t know whether it was this arid sort of research reminiscent of the dissection of cadavers — all the rage at the time in the field of stylistics, which exerted a dictatorship that had the effect of sterilizing university departments of literature — that made him sick and tired of the prospect of an academic career, or whether he left the field for practical reasons, telling himself that, having recently married and with a family in prospect, he had to think of more reliable ways of earning a living. The fact is that he had given up writing his dissertation and left the university. But not literature. He read a great deal and spoke with tremendous sensitivity about literary texts, poetry in particular, for which he had a surgeon’s eye and exquisite taste. He sometimes wrote book reviews, always very penetrating ones, models of the genre, but he almost never signed them and at times I wondered whether Abelardo hadn’t decided, because of his rigorous critical acumen, to give up writing so as to be the one person in whom he could attain that perfection he sought: a reader. He had studied the classics of the Golden Age intensively and I always provoked him into discussing them because hearing him express an opinion about El Romancero, Quevedo, or Góngora filled me with envy.

His genteel air and his repugnance for any sort of fakery, his maniacal concern for propriety — in his dress, his speech, his behavior toward his friends — called to mind an aristocrat of the spirit who, through an error of fate, was exiled in the body of a young man belonging to the middle class, in a hard practical world in which he was destined to have a difficult time surviving. When Lucho and I spoke of him, by ourselves, we called him the Dauphin.

In those days Lucho had, in addition to his passion for Borges, one for Henry James, which I failed to share. He was a cannibalistic reader of books in English, which he bought or ordered in a bookstore specializing in works in foreign languages, on the Calle Belén, and he continually surprised me with a new title or author he just discovered. I remember his great find, in an old bookstore downtown: a magnificent translation of Marcel Schwob’s fine book, Vies imaginaires, which he was so enthusiastic about that he bought every copy of it in the store to distribute to his friends. Often our literary tastes differed, which gave us an excuse for stupendous arguments. Thanks to Lucho, I discovered exciting books, such as Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, in Spanish translations. One of our violent literary arguments had a comical ending. The subject of it: Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres, which he admired and I detested. When I told him that the book seemed to me verbose, its prose affected and long-winded, he replied that the argument couldn’t go on without Baldomero Cáceres, a fanatical fan of Gide’s, taking part in it. We hunted Baldomero up, and Lucho asked me to repeat to his face what I thought of Les Nourritures terrestres. I did as he asked. Baldomero burst out laughing. He roared with laughter for a long time, doubled over, holding his sides, as though he were being tickled, as though he been told the funniest joke in the world. This line of argument shut me up.

We dreamed, naturally, of bringing out a literary review that would be our forum and the visible sign of our friendship. One fine day, Lucho announced to us that he would finance the first issue, with his salary from the Ledgard law office. There thus came into being Literatura, of which just three issues were to appear (the last of the three when Lucho and I were already in Europe). The first issue included a homage to César Moro — a teacher of mine at Leoncio Prado — whose poetry I had discovered a short time before and whose “inner exile” intrigued me and attracted me as much as his writings. On his return from France and Mexico, countries in which he lived for many years, Moro had lived in Peru a secret, marginal life, not mingling with writers, publishing practically nothing, writing texts, the majority of them in French, read by a small circle of friends. André Coyné gave us several of Moro’s unpublished poems for that issue, which also contained contributions by Sebastián Salazar Bondy, José Durand, and a young Peruvian poet, the author of a number of very beautiful poems that Lucho had discovered in a lost issue of Mercurio Peruano: Carlos Germán Belli. The issue also contained a manifesto against the death penalty, signed by the three of us, occasioned by the execution in Lima by a firing squad of a convicted criminal (the “monster of Armendáriz”) that had served as an excuse for a repellent public celebration: people had gathered at dawn on the Paseo de la República to listen, as day broke, to the fatal shots of the firing squad. The issue included as well Loayza’s wonderful portrait of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The publication of this little review, no more than a handful of pages, was an exciting adventure because this activity, like the conversations with Lucho and Abelardo, made me feel like a writer, an illusion that had little to do with the reality of how I spent my time, taken up as it was by all my jobs to earn our daily bread.

It seems to me that I was the one, with that inquisitiveness of mine that never left me — and still hasn’t — who got us started, in the summer of 1957, holding spiritualistic séances. We usually held them at my place. A cousin of Julia’s and Olguita’s, whose name was also Olga and who was a medium, had arrived from Bolivia. She frequented the other world with the greatest of ease. In the sessions she played her role so well that it was impossible not to believe that spirits spoke through her mouth; or more precisely, through her hand, since they dictated their messages to her and she wrote them down. The problem was that all the spirits that obeyed her summons made the same spelling mistakes. Despite this, moments of ebullient nervous tension were created, and afterward I would stay awake all night long, tossing and turning in bed out of guilt at that contact with the world beyond.

In one of these spiritualistic sessions, Pablo Macera began pounding on the table: “Keep quiet, it’s my grandmother.” He was deathly pale, and there was no doubt about it; he believed it. “Ask her if I killed her from the fit of rage I caused her,” he stammered. His grandmother’s spirit refused to relieve his doubts and he held it against us for some time, telling us that our fooling around had deprived him of the chance to free himself of a distressing uncertainty.

In the library of the Club Nacional I also came across some books on satanism, but my friends categorically refused to have us conjure up the devil following the obscene recipes of those manuals. They would consent only to our going every so often, at midnight, to the romantic cemetery in Surco, where Baldomero, in a state of lyrical rapture, suddenly began to ballet dance in the moonlight, leaping about amid the graves…

The Saturday night meetings, at my house in Las Acacias, lasted till dawn and were usually very amusing. We sometimes played a terrific, semihysterical game: the laughing game. The one who lost had to make the others laugh by clowning around. I had a very effective trick. Imitating a duck’s waddle, I rolled my eyes and cackled: “This is the miter-bird, the miter-bird, the miter-bird!” The self-important ones, such as Loayza and Macera, endured indescribable suffering when it was their turn to play the buffoon, and the only amusing gimmick that occurred to the latter was to pucker his mouth up like a baby and growl: brrrr, brrrr. A much more dangerous game was Truth or Consequences. In one of these sessions of collective exhibitionism, we listened, we heard, all of a sudden, from the timid Carlos Germán Belli — my admiration for his poems had led me to visit him in the very modest job as amanuensis that he had as a congressional clerk — a confession that amazed us: “I’ve slept with the ugliest women in Lima.” Carlos Germán was a rigidly moral surrealist, much like César Moro, stuffed into the skeleton of a well-educated and inconspicuous young man, and one day he had decided to put an end to his inhibitions about women, posting himself at the exit of the building where he worked, on a corner of the Jirón de la Unión, and making provocative remarks to the women passing by. But his timidity made him tongue-tied with the pretty ones; his tongue would loosen only to proposition the ugly ones…

Someone else who often came to those gatherings was Fernando Hilbck, a classmate of Lucho’s at the Faculty of Law and an actor. Loayza told how one day, in their last year, for the first time in seven years, Tachi became interested in a class: “How does it happen, Professor, that there are several codes? Aren’t all of the laws in just one book?” The professor called him aside: “Tell your father to let you become an actor and don’t waste any more time studying law.” Tachi’s father resigned himself and did just that, regretting that his son wouldn’t be the star of the tribunals that he’d dreamed he’d be. He sent him to Italy and gave him two years to make himself famous in the movies. I saw Tachi in Rome, shortly before the fateful date came round. All he had managed to accomplish was to play the part of a furtive Roman centurion in a film, but he was happy. Then he went to Spain, where he had a brief career in the movies and the theater, and finally — yet another Peruvian to number among those who chose invisibility — he disappeared altogether. In the spiritualist séances or in the game of clowning around, Tachi Hilbck was unbeatable: his histrionic gifts transformed the gathering into a hilarious performance.

Chance brought Raúl and Teresa Deustua, just back from the United States, where Raúl had worked for many years as a translator at the United Nations, to live in the apartment next to ours on Las Acacias. Belonging to the same generation as Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Javier Sologuren, and Eduardo Eielson, Raúl was, like them, a poet, and the author of a play, Judith, that remained unpublished. A refined man who was very well read, especially in English and in French, he was one of those elusive figures of Peruvian culture who, after a brief appearance on the scene, disappear and become ghosts, because they go abroad and break all their ties to Peru, or because, like César Moro, they opt for inner exile, keeping their distance from everybody and everything that might remind them of their swift journey along the path of art, thought, or literature. I have always been fascinated by the case of those Peruvians who, because of a sort of tragic loyalty to a vocation difficult to reconcile with their milieu, break with the latter, and to all appearances with the better part of themselves — their sensitivity, their intelligence, their culture — so as not to make debasing concessions or compromises.

Raúl had stopped publishing his work (he had published very little, in all truth), but he hadn’t stopped writing and his conversation was as literary as it could possibly be. We became friends, and he was very pleased to find a group of young men of letters that knew his writings, sought him out, and invited him to their gatherings. He had a fine collection of French books, which he generously lent us, and thanks to him I could read many Surrealist books and a number of wonderful issues of Minotaure. He had made a translation of Baudelaire’s Fusées and Mon Coeur mis à nu and I spent many hours with him and Loayza, revising it. Like the majority of his poems and a Chosica Diary, a record of days spent in the pleasant old resort town in the mountains above Lima, which he used to read aloud to us, I believe that the Baudelaire translation never saw print.

I don’t know why Raúl Deustua came back to Peru — out of nostalgia for the old country perhaps, and with the hope of finding a good job. He worked at different things, at Radio Panamericana and at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, to which Porras Barrenechea offered him entrée, but he never did find the comfortable position that he longed for. In a few months he gave up and left Peru once more, for Venezuela this time. Teresita, who had made friends with Julia, was pregnant and stayed behind in Lima to have the baby. She was very likable and being pregnant sometimes made her have sudden whims like this exquisite one: “I should like to nibble on the edges of wontons.” Lucho Loayza and I went out to a chifa—a Chinese restaurant — to buy her some. When the baby was born, the Deustuas asked me to be his godfather, so that I had to take him in my arms to the baptismal font.

When Raúl left for Caracas he asked me if I wanted his job at Radio Panamericana. It was paid by the hour, like all the other ones I had, and I accepted. He took me to the rise on the Calle Belén from which the radio station broadcast, and that was how I first met the brothers Genaro and Héctor Delgado. At the time they were beginning the career that would take them to the very top, as I’ve already said. Their father, the founder of Radio Central, had given Radio Panamericana over to them, a station which, unlike Radio Central — whose appeal was popular, its specialties being soap operas and comedies — was aimed in those days at an elite audience, with programs of American or European music, more refined and a touch snobbish. Thanks to Genaro’s drive and ambition, this little radio station for listeners of a certain cultural level was in a short time to become one of the most prestigious ones in the country, and he would be on the point of building what was to be a veritable audiovisual empire (on the Peruvian scale) over the years.

How did I manage, with the vast number of things that I was already doing, to add that job with the pompous title of news director of Radio Panamericana to the ones I already had? I don’t know how, but I did. I suppose that some of my old jobs — the cemetery one, the one on Extra, the Senate one, the book on Civic Education for the Catholic University — had ended. But the one in the afternoons, at Porras Barrenechea’s, and writing articles for El Comercio and Cultura Peruana went on. As did my studies in law and literature, although I attended few classes and confined myself to taking the exams. The work at Panamericana took up many hours of my time, so that in the next few months I dropped several of the jobs writing newspaper articles to concentrate on my programs at Radio Panamericana, which became more and more numerous while I was there, until they came to include “El Panamericano,” the nightly news roundup.

I have used many of my memories of Radio Panamericana in my novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, where they are jumbled together with other memories and flights of fancy. Today I have doubts about what separates one sort from another, and it is possible that certain invented ones have crept in among the true ones here, but I suppose that too may go by the name of autobiography.

My office was in a wooden shack, on the roof, which I shared with a person so emaciated he was very nearly invisible — Samuel Pérez Barreto — who wrote, with amazing productivity, all the commercials that went out over the station. I was left openmouthed at seeing how Samuel, typing with two fingers, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and talking to me nonstop about Hermann Hesse, was able, without pausing to think for one second, to spin out a whole series of witty comments on sausages or sanitary napkins, divinations about fruit juices or tailor shops, injunctions about cars, drinks, toys, or lotteries. Advertising was the very air he breathed, something he did unconsciously with his fingers. His passion in life in those years was Hermann Hesse. He kept reading or rereading him and talking about him with a contagious enthusiasm, to the point that, for Samuel’s sake, I dived into Steppenwolf, where I almost drowned. His great friend, José León Herrera, a student of Sanskrit, sometimes came to see him, and I listened to them get involved in esoteric conversations as Samuel’s tireless fingers filled one sheet of paper after another with advertising copy.

My work at Panamericana began very early in the morning, since the first news bulletin was at 7 a.m. Then a five-minute one each hour, until the noon one, which lasted fifteen minutes. The bulletins began again at 6 p.m., and went on until “El Panamericano,” the 10 p.m. news program, which was half an hour long. I spent the day going back and forth between the station and the library of the Club Nacional, or a class at San Marcos, or Porras’s house. In the afternoon and evening I stayed at the station for some four hours.

The truth is that I took a great liking to the work at Panamericana. It began by being just another job to keep us alive, but as Genaro kept pushing me to help him do new and different things and make the programs better, and as our audience and influence kept growing, the job turned into a commitment, something I tried to do creatively. I became friends with Genaro, who, despite being the big boss, spoke to everyone in an easygoing way and took an interest in everybody’s work, no matter how nondescript it was. He wanted Radio Panamericana to achieve a lasting prestige that went beyond mere entertainment and to that end he had sponsored programs on movies, with Pepe Ludmir, interviews and discussions of current events, on a program of Pablo de Madalengoitia’s, “Pablo y sus amigos”—and some excellent discussions of international politics by a Spanish Republican, Benjamín Núñez Bravo, on a program called “Día y Noche.”

I proposed to him that he put on the air a program on Congress, in which we would rebroadcast part of the sessions, with brief commentaries that I would write. He agreed. Porras got permission for us to record the sessions, and thus there came into being “El Parlamento en síntesis” (“What’s Going On in Congress”), a program that was quite successful but wasn’t on the air for long. Recording the sessions meant that the tapes often contained not only the speeches of the fathers of our country, but comments, exclamations, insults, whispers, and a thousand intimate interchanges which, when I edited the tapes, I was careful to cut out. But, one time, when I entrusted the task of editing them to Pascual Lucen, he allowed several salacious remarks by the Pradist senator from Puno, Torres Belón, the president of the Senate at the time, to go out over the air. The next day we were forbidden to record the sessions and the program died then and there.

By then, we had already launched “El Panamericano,” which was to have a long career on the radio and, later on, on television. And the news service, which I was in charge of, allowed itself the luxury of having three or four staff writers, a first-class editorial writer — Luis Rey de Castro — and the star radio announcer Humberto Martínez Morosini.

When I began to work at Panamericana my only collaborator was the likable and loyal but very chancy character Pascual Lucen. He might very well turn up pickled in alcohol at seven in the morning and sit down at his typewriter to summarize the news items from the daily papers that I had pointed out to him, without moving a muscle of his face, letting out blasts of hiccups and belches that shook the windows. In a few minutes, the air in the shack reeked pestilentially of alcohol. He went on, nothing daunted, typing news summaries that I often had to do over from beginning to end, by hand, as I took them downstairs to the announcers. The minute my attention flagged, Pascual Lucen slipped a catastrophe into the news bulletin. For he had an almost sexual passion for floods, earthquakes, derailments; they excited him and his eyes gleamed as he longingly showed me a cable from France Presse or a newspaper clipping about them. And if I acceded and said to him, “Okay, give it a quarter of a page,” he would thank me from the bottom of his heart.

Shortly thereafter, Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui arrived to give Pascual Lucen a helping hand. Demetrio was from Cuzco, a teacher of Quechua who had been a seminarian, and who for his part, whenever I let my guard down, filled the news bulletins with religious items. I never succeeded in getting the ceremonious Demetrio — whose photograph, in which he was dressed as an Inca on the heights of Machu Picchu and described as a direct descendant of the great Inca ruler Túpac Yupanqui, I had the surprise of seeing in a Spanish magazine not long ago — to call a bishop a bishop rather than a “purple-clad prelate.” The third writer was a ballet dancer and an aficionado of Roman helmets — since it was difficult to come by them in Peru, a tinsmith friend of his made them for him — with whom I had literary conversations between one bulletin and the next.

Later on, Carlos Paz Cafferata came to work with me, a man who, over the years, was to have a distinguished career under Genaro. Back then, he was already a journalist who didn’t seem to be a journalist (not a Peruvian one, at least) because of his frugality and his silences and a sort of metaphysical apathy toward the world and the afterworld. He was an excellent writer and editor, with a real instinct for differentiating between an important news item and a secondary one, for emphasizing and minimizing precisely the right aspects of an event, but I don’t remember ever having seen him wax enthusiastic about anything or anybody. He was a sort of Zen Buddhist monk, someone who has attained Nirvana and is beyond emotions and beyond good and evil. Carlos Paz’s silences and intellectual anorexia drove Samuel Pérez Barreto, a spirited and tireless conversationalist, out of his mind and he continually invented ruses to enliven, excite, and infuriate Paz. He never managed to.

Radio Panamericana reached the point of vying with Radio América for the title of best national radio station. The competition between the two was fierce and Genaro devoted his days and his nights to thinking up new programs and improvements to get the better of Panamericana’s rival. During this period he bought a series of radio relays, which, installed at different locations within the country, would place Panamericana within reach of a large part of Peru. Obtaining permission from the government to install the relays was a real feat, in the process of which I saw Genaro begin to display his first talents as a politico. It is true that, without them, neither he nor any other entrepreneur would have been able to have the slightest success in Peru. The procedure was endless. He was blocked at every step through the influence of his competitors or by bureaucrats eager for bribes. And Genaro was forced to seek influence against those influences and make deals and promises right and left, over many long months, in order to obtain a mere permit that, moreover, would benefit communications and establish links between various parts of the country.

In the last two years that I was in Peru, as I wrote news bulletins for Panamericana, I managed to get one more job: a teaching assistant in the course on Peruvian literature at the University of San Marcos. Augusto Tamayo Vargas, the professor in charge of the course, who had been extremely kind to me since my first year at San Marcos, secured it for me. He was an old friend of my aunts and uncles (and as a young man, one of my mother’s suitors, as I discovered one day by way of other love poems that she had also hidden at my grandparents’) and I had attended his course, that first year, with great dedication. So much so that, shortly after I began it, Augusto, who was preparing an enlarged edition of his book Literatura Peruana, took me on to work with him, several afternoons a week. I helped him with the bibliography and typed chapters of the manuscript. Once in a while I gave him short stories of mine to read and he handed them back to me with encouraging comments.

Tamayo Vargas was in charge of several courses for foreigners at San Marcos, and since I was in the third year he had entrusted me with a short course on Peruvian authors in connection with the program, which I taught once a week and for which I earned a few soles. In 1957, when I started my last year in the Faculty of Letters, he asked me about my plans for the future. I told him that I wanted to be a writer, but that, as it was impossible to earn a living by writing, once I’d finished my studies at the university I would devote myself to journalism or teaching, since even though I was also going on, in theory, with my studies in the Faculty of Law — I was in my third year of law school — I was certain I would never practice law. Augusto advised me to get a university job. Teaching literature was compatible with writing, since it left more time free than other occupations. I had best begin right away. He had proposed to the Faculty that a post as teaching assistant be created for his chair in Peruvian literature. Might he propose my name?

Of the three hours of teaching that the chair entailed, Tamayo Vargas entrusted one to me, which I prepared, nervously and excitedly, at the library of the Club Nacional or between one news bulletin and the next in my shack at Panamericana. That one little hour a week obliged me to read or to reread certain Peruvian authors and, above all, to sum up my reactions to these readings in rational and coherent language, making notes and filling up note cards. I liked doing this and impatiently awaited the day for that class which Tamayo Vargas himself sometimes attended, sitting among the students, to see how I was doing. (Alfredo Bryce Echenique was one of my students.)

Even though my class attendance had fallen off badly ever since I had married, I had always felt warm ties to San Marcos, above all to the Faculty of Letters. My dislike of the courses at the Faculty of Law, on the other hand, was wholehearted. I went on with them out of inertia, so as to end something that I had begun, and with the vague hope that the title of attorney-at-law might serve me, later on, to earn at least enough to live on.

But I took several courses leading to a degree in literature out of sheer pleasure: the ones in Latin, for instance, by Professor Fernando Tola, one of the most interesting persons on the Faculty. He had begun, very early in his life, to study modern languages such as French, English, and German, which he then abandoned in favor of Greek and Latin. But when I was his student he had conceived a passion for Sanskrit, which he had learned by himself, and gave a course in it whose sole pupil was, I believe, José León Herrera, Samuel Pérez Barreto’s friend. The irrepressible Porras Barrenechea joked: “They say that Doctor Tola knows Sanskrit. But who can tell?”

Tola, who belonged to what was known as high society, had caused what in those days was a tremendous scandal by abandoning his lawfully wedded wife and beginning to live with his secretary without trying to conceal the fact. He shared a little townhouse with her, on the Avenida Benavides, in Miraflores, crammed full of books, that he lent me without limit. He was a magnificent professor and his classes in Latin went on past the hour set for it on the official schedule. I greatly enjoyed them and remember having spent whole nights, wide awake and all excited, translating inscriptions on Roman funerary stelae for his course. I went to visit him at night sometimes in the little townhouse on Benavides, where I stayed for hours listening to him talk about the all-absorbing subject that obsessed him, Sanskrit. The three years that I studied Latin with him taught me quite a few more things than the language; and because of the many books on Roman civilization that Professor Tola had me read, I one day conceived the project of writing a novel about Heliogabalus, a project that, like so many others of those years, never came to anything more than a few short sketches.

In his Language Institute, Dr. Tola was publishing a little collection of bilingual texts, and I proposed to him that I translate Rimbaud’s story “Un Coeur sous une soutane,” which would not see print until thirty years later, right in the middle of the election campaign. I saw Dr. Tola years later, in Paris, where he stayed for some time perfecting his Sanskrit at the Sorbonne. Later on, he went to India, where he lived for many years and married for the third time — to an Indian woman, a professor of Sanskrit. I learned later that she chased after him all through Latin America, where this peripatetic and eternally young man had settled in Argentina (where he married for the fourth or perhaps the tenth time). By then he was an international authority on Vedic texts, the author of countless treatises and translations from Sanskrit and Hindi. I understand that for some years now he’s lost interest in India, having become interested in Chinese and Japanese…

Other seminars that I enthusiastically attended in the Faculty of Letters were those given by Luis Alberto Sánchez, on his return from exile in 1956, on Peruvian and Hispano-American literature. I remember him above all because it was thanks to him that I discovered Rubén Darío, whom Dr. Sánchez explained in such a lively way and with such intimate knowledge that when classes let out I rushed to the library to ask for the books that he had discussed. Like many readers of Darío, I had regarded him, before that seminar, as a verbose poet, like other modernists, beneath whose verbal pyrotechnics, beautiful music, and affectedly French images, there was nothing profound, merely conventional thought borrowed from the Parnassian poets. But in that seminar I came to know the essential and unconventional Darío, the founder of modern poetry in Spanish, without whose powerful verbal revolution figures as disparate as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado in Spain, and Vallejo and Neruda in Hispano-America, would have been inconceivable.

Unlike Porras, Sánchez rarely prepared a class beforehand. He trusted in his powerful memory and improvised, but he had read a great deal and loved books, and he knew the innermost depths of Darío, for example, and was able to reveal him in all his secret grandeur hidden under the modernist tinsel of a fair part of his works.

Thanks to that course, I decided that my thesis in literature would deal with Darío, and in 1957 I began, in my free moments, to take notes and make file cards. I was going to need that degree if I wanted to pursue the career as a university professor toward which, thanks to Augusto Tamayo Vargas, I had taken the first step. And furthermore, I couldn’t wait to finish my studies in Letters and present my thesis in order to become a candidate for the Javier Prado Fellowship, which would enable me to study for my doctorate in Spain.

The dream of that fellowship never left me. It was the only way I could make the trip to Europe, now that I was married. For the other literary fellowships, those in Hispanic Culture, hardly provided a living for just one person, let alone two. The Javier Prado, on the other hand, paid for a plane ticket to Madrid, which could be exchanged for two third-class boat tickets, and paid $120 a month for living expenses which, in the Spain of the 1950s, was a fortune.

The idea of going to Europe had stuck in my mind through all those years, even in those periods when, thanks to love or friendship, I lived intensely and felt happy. A worm kept gnawing at my conscience with the questions: “Weren’t you going to be a writer? When are you going to start being one?” Because, even though the articles and the short stories of mine that were published in the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, in Cultura Peruana, or Mercurio Peruano, gave me for a moment the sensation that I had already begun to be a writer, I soon opened my eyes. No, I wasn’t one. Those texts on the side, written by leaps and bounds, in the gaps of time that was devoted entirely to other work, were those of a simulacrum of a writer. I would be a writer only if I devoted myself to writing morning, noon, and night, putting into that undertaking all the energy that I was now wasting on so many things. And only if I felt myself surrounded by a stimulating milieu, an ambiance where writing did not seem to be such an odd, marginal activity, so lacking in harmony with the country in which I lived. To me, this ambiance had a name. Would I manage to live in Paris someday? Depression seeped down into my bones when I thought that if I didn’t win that Javier Prado Fellowship that would catapult me to Europe, I would never get to France, and hence I would be as frustrated as so many other Peruvians whose literary vocation never got beyond the rudimentary stage.

This was, needless to say, a constant subject of conversation with Lucho and Abelardo. They used to drop by my shack at Panamericana after the 6 p.m. news bulletin and, until the next one, we could spend a little while together, having coffee in one of the old places on the Plaza de Armas or La Colmena. I spurred them on to go to Europe with me. We would face up to the problem of survival better if we were together; we would write there the volumes we yearned to write. The objective would be Paris, but if there was no way of getting there, we would stop for a while in Monte Carlo, principality of Monaco. This place, phrased as a name and surname, turned into our trio’s password, and sometimes, when we were with other friends, one of the three of us would pronounce the emblematic formula — Monte Carlo, principality of Monaco — leaving all the others puzzled.

Lucho was determined to leave. His law practice had convinced him, I believe, that that profession repelled him as much as it did me, and the idea of spending some time in Europe cheered him up. His father had promised to help him financially, once he’d graduated. This encouraged him to begin work on the thesis he needed to write so as to get his degree.

Abelardo’s trip was more complicated, since Pupi had just had a little girl. And with a family, everything became risky and costly. But Abelardo allowed himself to be infected at times by my enthusiasm and also began to dream: he would try for the postgraduate fellowship in law that got the winner to Italy. With that and some money he’d saved he’d have enough for the trip. He too would get to the Europe des anciens parapets and would show up at the rendezvous of literary honor, in Monte Carlo, principality of Monaco.

In addition to our shared projects and fantasies, certain skirmishes of the guerrilla warfare on the local literary scene contributed to reinforcing our friendship. I remember one episode in particular, because I was the one who lit the fuse that set it off. From time to time I wrote book reviews. Abelardo gave me an assignment to review an anthology of Hispano-American poetry, compiled and translated into French by the Hispanist Mathilde Pomès. In my review, a rather fierce one, I wasn’t content to limit myself to criticizing the book, but also slipped in several very harsh sentences about Peruvian writers in general, the “tellurics,” the indigenists, regionalists, and local colorists in particular, and above all the modernist José Santos Chocano.

Several writers submitted a rebuttal — among them Alejandro Romualdo, with an article in the review 1957 entitled “No sólo los gigantes hacen la historia” (“Not Only Giants Make History”), and the poet Francisco Bendezú, a great exponent of bad taste in literature and in life, who accused me of having offended the nation’s honor by abusing the eminent bard Santos Chocano. I answered him in a long article and Lucho Loayza intervened with a lapidary volley. Augusto Tamayo Vargas himself wrote a text in defense of Peruvian literature, reminding me that “adolescence ought to be over soon.” At that point I recalled that I was an assistant to the holder of the chair in that literature that I had just attacked (I believe that in my articles the only ones who were spared in the genocide were the poets César Vallejo, José María Eguren, and César Moro) and I was afraid that Augusto, in the face of such an incongruity, would take my job away from me. But he was too decent to do a thing like that, and no doubt thought that with the passage of time I would become more considerate and charitable toward native writers (and that is what has happened).

Although these petty controversies and literary and artistic fracases — they happened often — had very limited repercussions, they suggest that, however minor it might be, there was a certain cultural life in the Lima of that day. It was possible because Prado’s administration brought an economic bonanza to the country, and for some time Peru opened up and had interchanges with the world. It happened, to be sure, despite the fact that the discriminatory mercantilist structure of institutions scarcely changed at all — the poor Peruvians of the C and D sectors continued to be hemmed in by poverty, with few opportunities to climb higher — but it brought the middle and upper classes a period of prosperity. It was owed, basically, to one of those bold and surprising initiatives of which that clever, cunning scoundrel of a politician (what in Peru they call a really foxy one!) whose name was Manuel Prado was capable. The severest critic his administration had was the owner of La Prensa, Pedro Beltrán, who in his newspaper mounted a daily attack on the economic policy of the regime. One fine day, Prado called Beltrán and offered him the Ministry of Finance and the premiership, with carte blanche to do what he thought best. Beltrán accepted and for two years applied the conservative monetarist policy that he had learned during his years as a student at the London School of Economics: fiscal austerity, balanced budgets, opening up the country to international competition, encouragement of private enterprise and investment. The economy responded admirably to this treatment: Peruvian currency became stronger — the country has never again had the solvency it did at that time — and domestic and foreign investment grew, employment increased, and the country lived for several years in a climate of optimism and security.

In the cultural domain, the effects were that books arrived in Peru from all over, and also musicians and theatrical companies and foreign art exhibitions — the Institute of Contemporary Art, founded by a private group and for a time directed by Sebastián Salazar Bondy, brought the most outstanding artists of Latin America to Peru, among them Matta and Wilfredo Lam, and many North American and European ones — and the publication of books and cultural periodicals (Literatura was one of them, but there were several others, and not only in Lima, but in cities such as Trujillo and Arequipa). The poet Manuel Scorza was to begin bringing out during those years popular editions of books that proved to be enormous successes and made him a small fortune. His bold socialist stance had lost its audaciousness and there were symptoms of the worst sort of capitalism in his conduct: he paid his authors — when he paid them at all — miserable royalties, with the argument that they ought to make sacrifices for the sake of culture, and he went around in a brand-new fire-engine-red Buick, with a biography of Onassis in his pocket. So as to irritate him, when we were together, I used to recite to him the least memorable of his verses: “Peru, I spit in vain on your name.”

Nobody, however, outside of the little group of journalists who worked with him at La Prensa, appreciated Beltrán’s work to orient economic policy in a different direction. Nor did anybody draw from what happened in those years conclusions favoring free market policies, private enterprise, and opening of the country to internationalism. Quite to the contrary. Beltrán’s image continued to be fiercely attacked by the left. And socialism began in those years to break out of the catacomb in which it had been imprisoned and to win a place for itself in public opinion. Populist philosophy, in favor of economic nationalism, the growth of the state, and government interventionism as indispensable for development and social justice, which up until then had been the monopoly of the APRA and of the small Marxist left, multiplied and reproduced itself in other versions, thanks to the guiding hand of Belaunde Terry, who had founded Popular Action and in those years took its message from town to town throughout the whole of Peru; thanks to the Christian Democratic Party, in which Cornejo Chávez’s radical bent was growing stronger by the day; and thanks to a pressure group — the Movimiento Social Progresista (the Progressivist Social Movement) — formed by leftist intellectuals, which, although sorely lacking in mass support, was to have an important impact on the political culture of the era.

(After a little over two years in office in Prado’s administration, believing that the success of his economic policy had made him politically popular, Pedro Beltrán resigned from the Ministry of Finance to try his hand at organizing a political movement, with his eye on the presidential election of 1962. His attempt was a resounding failure, the first time he took to the streets. A rally called for by Beltrán at the Colegio La Recoleta was broken up by the Aprista “buffaloes” and he wound up being laughed at. Beltrán would never again hold a single political post, until finally, with the advent of Velasco’s dictatorship, La Prensa was taken from him, as was his hacienda, Montalbán, and his fine old colonial house in the downtown area of Lima was torn down, on the pretext of opening up a new street. He left the country to go into exile, where I met him, thanks to the journalist Elsa Arana Freyre, in Barcelona in the 1970s. He was by then an old man who spoke with pathetic nostalgia of that old colonial house in Lima demolished because of the pettiness and the stupidity of his political enemies.)

And with the same boldness with which he had appointed Beltrán his minister of finance, one fine day President Prado appointed Porras Barrenechea minister of foreign relations. The latter, since his election as senator, had had a distinguished career in Congress. With other independents and with the members of Congress belonging to the Christian Democratic Party and to Popular Action, he led a campaign to get Congress to investigate the illegal political and economic acts committed by Odría’s dictatorship. The initiative did not get very far because the Pradist majority, along with its allies who were opposed to it (almost all of those on the list on which Porras had appeared as a candidate) and Odría’s own supporters, blocked his efforts. This converted Porras Barrenechea into a senator who opposed Prado’s administration, a role he played with great satisfaction and without thinking twice. Hence, his appointment as foreign minister came as a surprise to everyone, including Porras himself, who passed on the news, one afternoon, with stupefaction, to Carlos Araníbar and me: the president had just offered him the ministry, by telephone, in a two-minute conversation.

He accepted, out of a touch of vanity, I suppose, and also as another compensation for that rectorate that he had lost, a wound that went on bleeding as long as he lived. With his ministerial duties, his book on Pizarro came to a dead stop.

Shortly after this move, President Prado made another spectacular one, which brought Lima’s fondness of gossip to white-hot heat: he managed to have his Catholic marriage to his wife of more than forty years (and the mother of his children) annulled, on the grounds of a “formal defect” (he convinced the Vatican that he had been forced to marry without his consent). And immediately thereafter — he was a man capable of anything, and what was more, like all the brazen rascals of this world, utterly charming — was wedded, in the Presidential Palace, to his mistress of many years. On the night of that wedding, I saw with my own eyes, strolling about the main square of Lima, in front of the Presidential Palace, as though observing one of the traditions at the time of the viceroyalty, in a novel by Ricardo Palma, a group of ladies from families in Lima of noble lineage, with elegant mantillas and rosaries, and a huge placard that read: “Long live the indissolubility of Catholic marriage.”