A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Nine. Uncle Lucho

If, of the fifty-five years that I have lived, I were allowed to relive just one, I would choose the one I spent in Piura, at Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s, doing my final year of secondary studies at the Colegio San Miguel and working at La Industria. Everything that happened to me there, between April and December 1952, kept me in a state of intellectual enthusiasm and joie de vivre that I have always recalled with nostalgia. Of all those things, the main one was Uncle Lucho.

He was the oldest of my uncles, the one who, after Grandfather Pedro, had been the head of the Llosa tribe, the one to whom everybody went for help and the one whom I had secretly been fondest of, ever since I possessed the faculty of reason, there, in Cochabamba, when he made me the happiest creature in the world by taking me to swimming pools where I learned to swim.

The family was proud of Uncle Lucho. My grandparents and Auntie Mamaé told how, in Arequipa, he had won the prize for excellence, every year, at the Jesuit school, and Granny dug up his report cards to show us the outstanding grades he received when he graduated. But Uncle Lucho hadn’t been able to pursue the career in which, with his talent, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would have achieved all sorts of triumphs, because his being such a good-looking young man and being such a success with the ladies was his downfall. When he was still a youth, about to enter the university, he got one of his girl cousins pregnant, and the scandal, in serene and straitlaced Arequipa, forced him to go off to Lima until the family calmed down. The mere fact of his return caused another scandal, when, while still scarcely past adolescence, he married Mary, a woman from Arequipa twenty years older than he was. The couple had to leave the horror-stricken city and go off to Chile, where Uncle Lucho opened a bookstore and went on with his adventures as a Don Juan, which finally ruined his precocious marriage.

Once separated from his wife, he journeyed to Cochabamba, to his grandparents’. Among my early memories are those of his handsome presence — like a movie actor’s — and of the jokes and anecdotes that were told at the big family dinner table on Sundays concerning the conquests and gallantries of Uncle Lucho, who, from that time on, helped me to do my homework and gave me extra classes in math. Then he left to work in Santa Cruz, first with my grandfather on the Saipina hacienda and then on his own as the representative for various firms and products, among them Pommery, the champagne. Santa Cruz has the reputation of being the place in Bolivia with the prettiest women, and Uncle Lucho always said that he spent all the money he made in his business dealings there on Pommery champagne, which he sold to himself so as to court the beauties of Santa Cruz. He often came to Cochabamba and his arrivals brought a great tidal wave of energy into the house on Ladislao Cabrera. Of all the comings and goings in that family, I was most delighted by his visits, because even though I loved all my uncles dearly, Uncle Lucho was the one who seemed to me to be my real papa.

He finally settled down and married Aunt Olga. They went off to live in Santa Cruz, where legend has it that one of Uncle Lucho’s spiteful sweethearts from the town, a beautiful woman also named Olga, came on horseback one afternoon to shoot five bullets at Aunt Olga’s windows for having monopolized — in theory at least — such a choice catch. My predilection for Uncle Lucho was owed not only to how affectionate he was with me, but also to the aura of adventure, of life in perpetual renewal, that surrounded him. Ever since then I have felt a fascination for people who appear to have stepped out of novels, the ones who have made a reality of Chocano’s line of verse: “I want my life to be a torrential stream…”

Uncle Lucho spent his life changing jobs, trying his hand at all sorts of businesses, always unsatisfied with what he was doing, and although most of the time what he tried turned out badly, there is no doubt that he was never bored. The last year we were in Bolivia, he was smuggling rubber into Argentina. It was an undertaking that the Bolivian government, outwardly, tried to wipe out but secretly encouraged, since it was a good source of foreign currency for the country. Argentina, the victim of an international embargo because of its favorable stance toward the Axis during the war, paid a price equal to its weight in gold for this product from the Amazon jungles — whether India or gum rubber. I remember having gone with Uncle Lucho to some warehouses in Cochabamba where the rubber, before being hidden in the trucks that would take it to the border, had to be sprinkled with talcum powder to mask its odor, and having felt a sinful excitement when I too was allowed to throw a few handfuls of talcum onto the forbidden product. Shortly before the end of the war, one of Uncle Lucho’s convoys was confiscated at the border, and he and his partners lost their shirts. Just in time for him and Aunt Olga — and their two little daughters, Wanda and Patricia — to come settle in Piura with my grandparents.

Once arrived there, Uncle Lucho had worked for several years for the Romero Company, in a car distributorship, but in 1952, when I went to live with him, he was a farmer. He had rented the San José rural holding, on the banks of the Chira River, on which he grew cotton. San José was between Paita and Sullana, some two hours’ journey from Piura by car, and I often went out there with him, in the two or three trips a week that he made, in a rickety black truck, to oversee the irrigation, the spraying of pesticides, or the clearing of the land. As he spoke with the farmhands, I rode horseback, swam in the irrigation ditch, and invented stories about earth-shaking passions between young landowners and peasant girls who picked cotton. (I remember having written a long story of this sort to which I gave the elegantly euphuistic title “La zagala” [“The Shepherdess”].)

Uncle Lucho was very fond of reading and as a young man had written poetry. (Later on, at the university, I learned through professors who had been his friends in his youth, in Arequipa — Augusto Tamayo Vargas, Emilio Champion, and Miguel Ángel Ugarte Chamorro, for instance — that in those days all his intimate friends were convinced that his vocation was to be an intellectual.) I still remember some of his verses, in particular a sonnet, in which he compared a lady’s beautiful moral qualities to the beads of a necklace, and in our conversations during that year in Piura, when I spoke to him of my vocation and told him that I wanted to be a writer even if I starved to death, because literature was the best thing there was in the world, he used to recite that sonnet to me, as he encouraged me to follow my literary inclinations without giving a thought to the consequences, because — it is a lesson that I learned and have tried to transmit to my children — the worst misfortune that can befall a man is to spend his life doing things that he doesn’t like to do instead of those that he would have liked to do.

Uncle Lucho listened to me read aloud to him La huida del inca, and many poems and short stories, offering me certain criticisms at times — exuberance was my major defect — but tactfully, so as not to hurt my feelings as a novice writer.

Aunt Olga had fixed up a room for me at the back of the little patio of their tiny house on the Calle Tacna, just a little way away from its intersection with the Avenida Sánchez Cerro, opposite the Plaza Merino, where my brand-new school, San Miguel, was located. The house occupied the lower floors of an old building, and consisted of a small living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms, plus the bathrooms and bedrooms for the household help. My arrival wrecked the orderly household, which had grown — besides Wanda and Patricia, nine and seven years old, Lucho had been born and was two years old by then — and the three cousins had to be jammed together in one bedroom so that I could have my own, all to myself. In it, on a couple of shelves, were Uncle Lucho’s books, old volumes published by Espasa-Calpe, editions of classics put out by Ateneo, and, above all, the complete collection of the Biblioteca Contemporánea, published by Losada, some thirty or forty books of novels, essays, poetry, and theater that I am certain I read from beginning to end, in that year of voracious reading. Among Uncle Lucho’s books, I found an autobiography, published by Diana, a Mexico City publishing house, that kept me awake for many nights and gave me a violent political jolt: Out of the Night, by Jan Valtin. Its author had been a German Communist, in the Nazi era, and his autobiography, full of episodes of clandestine militancy, of sacrifices of fates and fortunes to the cause of revolution, and of hideous abuses was, to me, a detonating device, something that for the first time gave me pause and made me think about justice, political action, revolution. Although, at the end of the book, Valtin severely criticized the Communist Party, which sacrificed his wife and dealt with him in the most cynical way, I remember having finished the book feeling great admiration for those lay saints who, despite the risk of being tortured, decapitated, or condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the underground cells of the Nazis, dedicated their lives to fighting for socialism.

Since the school was just a few meters from the house — all I had to do was cross the Plaza Merino to get to it — I got up out of bed as late as possible, dressed in a mad rush, and raced off when they were already blowing the whistle for the beginning of classes. But Aunt Olga refused to let me skip breakfast and would send the maid to San Miguel with a cup of milk and a slice of buttered bread for me. I don’t know how many times I had to go through the embarrassing experience of seeing the head supervisor, “el Diablo”—“the Devil”—come into the classroom just after the first morning lesson had started, to summon me: “Vargas Llosa, Mario! To the door, to have his breakfast!” After my three months as a night-owl reporter on La Crónica and a steady customer of brothels, I had gone back to being a youngster with a family.

I didn’t regret it. I felt happy that Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho pampered me, and that at the same time they treated me like a grownup, giving me complete freedom to go out at night, or stay home reading until all hours, something that I often did. For that reason it took a superhuman effort on my part to get up in time for school. Aunt Olga signed blank cards for me, so that I could invent excuses myself for being late. But since I turned them in too often, Wanda and Patricia were given the responsibility for waking me up each morning. Wandita did so gently; her younger sister, Patricia, took advantage of this chance to give free rein to her wicked instincts and had no compunction about throwing a glass of water all over me. She was a little seven-year-old demon hidden behind a cute turned-up nose, flashing eyes, and curly hair. Those glasses of cold water she poured on top of me became a nightmare and I awaited them, still half asleep, with anticipated shivers. Stunned and startled by the sudden dash of cold water, I would throw the pillow at her in fury, but she would answer me with a great burst of laughter too big to have come out of her semi-skeletal little body. Her bad behavior beat all the records of family tradition, including my own. When something wasn’t to her liking, Cousin Patricia was capable of crying and stamping her feet for hours on end, until her tantrums infuriated Uncle Lucho, whom I once observed putting her under the shower fully dressed, to see if that would make her stop screaming. At a certain period when she slept in my room, I took it into my head to write her a poem, and she learned it by heart and used to fill me with embarrassment by reciting it in front of Aunt Olga’s friends, lingering over each word and giving it gelatinous accents so that it would sound even worse:

Duerme la niña

The little girl sleeps

cerquita de mí

right next to me

y su manecita

and her little hand

blanca y chiquitita

white and wee

apoyada tiene

she keeps folded tightly

muy junta de sí…

right next to her…

At times, I gave her a quick pinch or pulled her ears, whereupon she would kick up a fuss and begin howling as though she were being skinned alive, and in order that Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga wouldn’t believe I’d been mistreating her, I had to placate her by pleading with her or putting on a clown act. She used to exact a price for the deal: “Either you buy me a cup of chocolate or I’ll go on screaming…”

San Miguel de Piura was opposite the Salesian school, but unlike it, it didn’t have a roomy and comfortable building; it was in an old house made of reeds and clay with a corrugated zinc roof, not at all suited to its needs. But San Miguel, thanks to the efforts of its headmaster — Dr. Marroquín, to whom I gave so many headaches — was a splendid school. In it many youngsters from humble Piura families — from La Mangachería, from La Gallinacera and other districts on the outskirts of the city — attended classes with youngsters from the middle class and even from the top families of Piura, who were enrolled there either because the priests of the Salesian school wouldn’t put up with them any longer or because they were attracted by the good teachers at San Miguel. Dr. Marroquín had managed to persuade distinguished professionals of the city to come to the school to give classes — above all to pupils in my year, the last one before graduation — and thanks to this I had the good luck, for instance, to study political economy with Dr. Guillermo Gulman. It was this course, I believe, and also Uncle Lucho’s advice, that made me make up my mind to study, later on at the university, for degrees in Letters and in Law. But in those classes of Dr. Gulman’s, the law seemed much more profound and important than something that had to do merely with lawsuits: it was an open door to philosophy, to economics, to all the social sciences.

We also had an excellent history teacher, Néstor Martos, who wrote a daily column in El Tiempo entitled “Voto en Contra” (“A Vote Against”) on local issues. Professor Martos, an impenitent bohemian with a debauched face, who seemed to arrive in class, every so often, directly from some little bar where he had spent the whole night drinking chicha, his hair uncombed, his chin stubbled, and with a muffler covering half his face — a muffler, in torrid Piura! — was transformed in the classroom into an Apollonian expositor, a painter of frescoes of the pre-Inca and Inca eras of American history. I listened to him spellbound, and my face turned beet-red one morning in that class, in which, without mentioning my name, he devoted himself to enumerating all the reasons why no true Peruvian could be a “Hispanist” or praise Spain (which I had done, that same day, in my column in La Industria, on the occasion of the visit to Piura of the ambassador of that country). One of his arguments was this: In the three hundred years of colonialism, had any ruler ever deigned to visit the American possessions of the Spanish Empire?

The literature teacher was a little less lofty — we had to memorize the adjectives that described the classics: San Juan de la Cruz, “profound and essential” Góngora, “baroque and classicist” Quevedo, “ornate, festive, and imperishable” Garcilaso, “Italianizing, dead before his time, and a friend of Juan Boscáu’s”—but this blind teacher, José Robles Rázuri, was a very fine person. When he discovered my vocation, he held me in high esteem and used to lend me books — he had put pink paper covers on all of them and a little seal with his name — among which I remember the first two of Azorín’s that I read: Al margen de los clásicos (Marginal Notes to the Classics) and La ruta de Don Quijote (The Path of Don Quixote).

In the second or third week of classes, in a daring gesture, I told Professor Robles in secret about my little work for the theater. He read it and proposed something to me that gave me heart palpitations. The school habitually put on one of the ceremonies commemorating Piura Week, in July. Why didn’t we suggest to the head of San Miguel that the school put on my La huida del inca this year? Dr. Marroquín gave his approval of the project and, without further ado, I was put in charge of directing it, for its very first performance on July 17, in the Teatro Variedades. You can imagine how excited I was when I ran home to tell the news to Uncle Lucho: We were going to put on La huida del inca! And at the Teatro Variedades, no less!

If only because it allowed me to see, onstage, living with the fictitious life of the theater, something that I myself had invented, my debt to Piura can never be repaid. But I owe it other things. Good friends, some of whom I still have. Several of my old classmates of the Salesian school, such as Javier Silva and Manolo and Richard Artadi, had gone on to San Miguel, and among my new schoolmates there were others, the Temple twins, the León cousins, the Raygada brothers, who became my soulmates. This fifth year of secondary school turned out to be a pathbreaking one, since for the first time so-called mixed classes were tried out in a state school. In our class there were five girls; they sat in a row by themselves and our relations with them were formal and distant. One of them, Yolanda Vilela, was one of the three “vestals” in La huida del inca, according to the faded program of the performance that I’ve carried in my wallet, as a talisman, ever since.

Of all that group of friends, my closest pal was Javier Silva. He was already, at sixteen, what he would be later, many times over: fat, gluttonous, intelligent, tireless, unscrupulous, likable, loyal, always ready to embark on any and every adventure, and more generous than anybody else. He says that as long ago as that year I had convinced him that life far from Paris was impossible, that we had to go there as soon as we could, and that I dragged him with me to open a joint savings account, so as to be sure of having the money for the passage. (My memory tells me that that took place later in Lima, when we were university students.) He had a gigantic appetite and on the days when he was given pocket money — he lived around the corner from my house, in the Calle Arequipa — he would come by to invite me to El Reina, a restaurant on the Avenida Sánchez Cerro, where he ordered an appetizer and a beer for us to share. We used to go to the movies — to the Municipal, to the Variedades, or to the Castilla, the open-air movie theater with only one projector, so that at the end of each reel there was an intermission. We would go swimming at the Club Grau, and we would visit the Casa Verde, the Green House, on the road to Catacaos, to which I had to drag him the first time after getting him over the panic fear that his father, a much-loved doctor in Piura, had instilled in him, assuring him that if he went there he’d catch syphilis.

The Casa Verde was a big cabin, a building a bit more rustic than a house, a much happier and more sociable place than the brothels in Lima, which were usually sordid and frequently the scene of violent brawls. The bordello in Piura had retained the traditional function of a place to meet and hold get-togethers, and was not merely a house of prostitution. Piurans of all social classes went there. I remember being surprised one night to find the prefect, Don Jorge Checa, at one of the tables, moved by the tonderos and the cumananas of a trio from the Mangachería district. They went to listen to music, to eat the regional dishes — young goat, ceviche, or the stew of pork, corn, and bananas called chifles, and cream custards, along with light chicha and thick chicha—or to dance and to talk together, and not just for love-making. The atmosphere was easygoing, informal, cheery, and rarely spoiled by rows. Much later, when I discovered Maupassant, I couldn’t help associating that Casa Verde with his beautifully portrayed Maison Tellier, just as La Mangachería, the joyful, violent, and marginal neighborhood on the outskirts of Piura, was always identified in my memory with the Court of Miracles of Alexandre Dumas’s novels. Ever since I was a small boy, the real-life things and people that have moved me most have been the ones that most closely resembled literature.

My generation experienced the swan song of the brothel, buried that institution that was gradually to die out as sexual mores became more relaxed, the pill was discovered, the myth of virginity gradually became obsolete, and boys began to make love to their sweethearts. The banalization of sex that resulted is, according to psychologists and sexologists, a very salutary development for society, which, in this way, finds an outlet for its numerous neurotic repressions. Something very positive, doubtless. But it has also signified the trivialization of the sexual act and the disappearance of a privileged source of pleasure for contemporary humans. Stripped of mystery and of centuries-old religious and moral taboos, as well as of the elaborate rituals that surrounded the practice of it, physical love has come to be the most natural thing in the world for the younger generations, a gymnastic exercise, a temporary diversion, something very different from that central mystery of life, of the approach by way of it to the gates of heaven and hell that it still was for my generation. The brothel was the temple of that clandestine religion, where one went to celebrate an exciting and perilous rite, to live, for a few short hours, a life apart. A life founded on terrible social injustices, no doubt — from the next year on, I would be conscious of this and would be very much ashamed of having gone to brothels and having frequented whores like a contemptible bourgeois — but the truth is that it gave many of us a very intense, respectful, and almost mystical relationship to the world and the practices of sex, something inseparable from the intuition of the sacred and of ceremony, of the active unfolding of fantasy, of mystery and shame, of everything that Georges Bataille calls transgression. Perhaps it is a good thing that sex has come to seem something natural to most mortals. To me it never was, nor is it now. Seeing a naked woman in a bed has always been the most disquieting and most disturbing of experiences, something that never would have had for me that transcendental nature, deserving of so much tremulous respect and so much joyous expectation, if sex had not been, in my childhood and adolescence, surrounded by taboos, prohibitions, and prejudices, if in order to make love to a woman there had not been so many obstacles to overcome in those days.

Going to that house daubed with green paint, on the outskirts of Castilla, along the road to Catacaos, cost me my meager paycheck from La Industria, so I went only a few times a year. But each time I left there with my head full of impassioned images, and I am certain that from that time on I vaguely dreamed of one day making up a story, the scene of which would be that Casa Verde. It is possible for memory and nostalgia to embellish something that was wretched and sordid — what can one expect of a little bordello in a tiny city such as Piura? — but as I remember it, the atmosphere of the place was happy and poetic, and those who went there really had a good time, not only the johns but also the gay men who worked as waiters and bouncers, the whores, the musicians who played waltzes, tonderos, mambos, or huarachas, and the cook who prepared the food in sight of everyone, doing dance steps around the stove. There were only a few little rooms with rough beds for couples, so that often it was necessary to go out into the open among the sand dunes all about to make love, amid the mesquite and the goats. The lack of comfort was compensated for by the warm bluish atmosphere of Piuran nights, with the soft light of the moon when it was full and the sensual curves of dunes amid which one caught glimpses, on the other side of the river, of the twinkling lights of the city.

Just a few days after my arrival in Piura, I presented myself, with my letters of recommendation from Alfonso Delboy and Gastón Aguirre Morales, at the home of the owner of La Industria, Don Miguel F. Cerro Guerrero. He was a spindly little oldster, a little bit of a man with a weather-beaten face, covered with a thousand wrinkles, in which keen, restless eyes betrayed his indomitable energy. He had three daily provincial newspapers — issues of La Industria for Piura, Chiclayo, and Trujillo — which he ran from his little house in Piura with an energetic hand, and a cotton plantation, in the vicinity of Catacaos, which he rode out to on the back of a lazy mule as old as he was, so as to supervise things personally. He rode it matter-of-factly down the middle of the street, heading for the Old Bridge, paying no attention to pedestrians and to cars passing by. He made a stop at the main office of La Industria, in the Calle Lima, into whose patio surrounded by grillwork the mule would burst without warning, badly pitting the tiling with its hoofs, so that Don Miguel could have a look at the material in the editorial room. He was a man who never tired, who worked even when he was asleep, who was nobody’s fool, stern and even hardhearted but possessed of a rectitude that made those of us who worked under him feel secure. Legend had it that one night somebody had asked him, at a dinner accompanied by a great deal to drink, at the Centro Piurano, if he was still able to make love. And that Don Miguel had invited the other guests to accompany him to the Casa Verde, where he had, to all intents and purposes, laid that doubt to rest.

He read the letters through very carefully, asked me how old I was, speculated about how it would be possible for me to combine a newspaper job with my classes at school, and finally made his mind up and hired me. He pegged my monthly salary at three hundred soles and outlined in the course of that conversation what my work would entail. I was to go to the newspaper office as soon as my morning classes were over, in order to look through the Lima papers and extract and write a roundup of the news that might be of interest to Piurans, and I was to come back at night, for another two or three hours, to write articles, do reporting, and be on hand for emergencies.

La Industria was a historic relic. One compositor, Señor Nieves, set its four pages by hand — I don’t believe he ever progressed as far as using a Linotype. To watch him working, in the dark little room at the back, in that “print shop” where he was the sole printer, was a spectacle. Skinny, with thick-lensed glasses for his nearsightedness, always dressed in a short-sleeved undershirt and an apron that at one time had been white, Señor Nieves would place the original copy on a lectern, to his left. And with his right hand, at incredible speed, he would remove one by one the type characters from a bunch of little boxes laid out around him, and set the text in the form which he himself would then print, on a prehistoric press whose vibrations shook the walls and roof of the building. Señor Nieves seemed to me to have escaped from novels of the nineteenth century, those of Dickens especially; the craft, at which he was so skilled, an eccentric survival, was something already extinct in the rest of the world and something that would die out with him in Peru.

A new managing editor of La Industria had arrived in Piura at almost the same time that I did. Don Miguel F. Cerro Guerrero had brought from Lima Pedro del Pino Fajardo, a veteran journalist, to raise the circulation of the paper, in its cutthroat competition with El Tiempo, the other local paper (there was a third, Ecos y Noticias, that came out late, hardly ever, or never, on bright-colored paper, and was almost illegible because the print came off on the reader’s hands). We had two reporters. Owed Castillo, whose regular job was to attend to the depth gauges for the Piura River, was in charge of the sports news — later on, in Lima in the days of the military dictatorship, he would have a distinguished career as a filthmongering journalist. And I wrote up the local and international news. In addition, there were outside collaborators, such as Dr. Luis Ginocchio Feijó, a physician whom journalism came to interest as passionately as his profession.

We hit it off well with Pedro del Pino Fajardo, who, at the beginning, tried to give a rather flamboyant slant to La Industria, which shocked certain Piuran ladies, who went so far as to send a letter of protest against the scandalous tone of a feature article by the editor-in-chief. Don Miguel Cerro demanded of del Pino Fajardo that he restore to the daily its traditional serious respectability.

I had great fun working there, writing about anything and everything, and permitting myself the luxury, every so often, thanks to the kindliness with which Pedro del Pino welcomed my literary enthusiasms, of publishing poems that occupied one entire page of the four that made up each issue of the paper. On one of these occasions, in which a poem of mine gloomily entitled “La noche de los desesperados” (“The Night of the Desperate”) filled the page, Don Miguel, who had just dismounted from his mule, doffed his big sombrero of fine Catacaos straw and pronounced this sentence, which touched my heart: “Today’s edition is sinfully exuberant.”

Apart from the endless news items I wrote or the interviews I conducted, I put out two columns, “Buenos Días”—“Good Morning”—and “Campanario”—“The Bell Tower”—one under my own name and the other under a pseudonym, in which I made comments on current events and frequently spoke (ignorance is intrepid) of politics and of literature. I remember a couple of long articles on the revolution of 1952 waged by the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario: Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) in Bolivia, which won Víctor Paz Estenssoro the presidency, and whose reforms — the nationalization of mining companies, agrarian reform — I praised until Don Miguel Cerro reminded me that we were living under the military dictatorship of General Odría, and that I should moderate my revolutionary enthusiasms, since he didn’t want La Industria to be closed down.

The Bolivian revolution staged by the MNR greatly excited me. I learned certain details about it from a very direct source, since the family of my Aunt Olga, particularly her younger sister, Julia, who lived in La Paz, wrote her letters with many anecdotes and exact information about the events and the leaders of the uprising — such as the one who would become the vice president under Paz Estenssoro, Siles Suazo, and the leader of the miners, Juan Lechín — which I used for my articles in La Industria. And that revolution with strong leftist and socialist tendencies, so fiercely attacked in Peru by the daily papers, especially by Pedro Beltrán’s La Prensa, helped, as much as my reading of that book by Jan Valtin, to fill my head and my heart with ideas — perhaps it would be better to say images and emotions — that were socialist and revolutionary.

Pedro del Pino Fajardo had had a lung disease and had stayed for a time at the famous hospital for tuberculosis at Jauja (the one they used in order to scare me, at my grandparents’, when I was a little boy, so as to force me to eat), about which he wrote a novel that fell somewhere between being festive and being macabre, which he gave me shortly after we met. And he also showed me several of his works for the theater. He looked kindly on my vocation and encouraged it, but the real help he gave me was of a negative sort, causing me to have a presentiment from that time on of the mortal danger that bohemia represented for literature. Because in his case, as in that of so many writers, living and dead, in my country, his literary vocation had foundered on disorder, a lack of discipline, and above all alcohol, before the creative light dawned in him. Pedro was an incorrigible bohemian; he could spend entire days — entire nights — in a bar, telling extremely funny stories, and absorbing immeasurable quantities of beer, pisco brandy or any other alcoholic drink. He soon reached a scintillating, overexcited state, and remained in it, for hours and hours, days and days, burning up, in dazzlingly brilliant and ephemeral soliloquies, what were no doubt, by that time, the last vestiges of a talent that never managed to take definite shape because of his dissolute life. He was married to a granddaughter of Ricardo Palma, a heroic young blonde, who, with the responsibility for the care of a child who was only a few years old, used to come to rescue Pedro from the little bars.

I have never learned how to drink; in my short bohemian life, in the summer in Lima that I worked on La Crónica, more out of mimicry than out of a liking for it, I had drunk a great deal of beer — though I could never go on pisco binges, for instance, with my colleagues — but even beer had a bad effect on me, since I soon began to have a headache and feel nauseated. And now that I was in Piura, I had so many things to do, what with classes, my job on the newspaper, the books and other things I was trying to write, that the whole business of spending hours in a café or a bar, talking endlessly, as around me people began to get plastered, bored me and exasperated me. I would invent any sort of pretext to escape. That allergy began there in Piura, I believe, and had to do with a physical intolerance for alcohol that I no doubt inherited from my father — who was never able to drink — and with the distaste I felt at the spectacle of the way my friend Pedro del Pino Fajardo deteriorated, a distaste that gradually grew stronger until it had become a phobia. Neither in my years at the university nor afterward have I lived the bohemian life, not even in its most pleasant and benign forms, those back-room gatherings at table, those evenings in a coterie of like-minded friends, from which I have always fled like a cat from water.

Pedro del Pino stayed for no more than a year and a half or two years in Piura. He went back to Lima and there he became the editor-in-chief of a publication touting the policies of Odría’s dictatorship, La Nación, in which, without my permission, he reprinted several of my columns from La Industria. I sent him a furious letter of protest, which he didn’t publish, and I didn’t see him again. When the dictatorship ended, in 1956, he emigrated to Venezuela and died shortly afterward.

We began to rehearse La huida del inca at the end of April or the beginning of May, in the afternoons, three or four times a week, after classes let out, in the library of the school, a vast room on the top floor lent to us by San Miguel’s affable librarian, Carmela Garcés. In the cast, the selection of which took several days, there were students of the school, the Raygada brothers, Juan León and Yolanda Vilela from my class, and Walter Palacios, who was later to become a professional actor as well as a revolutionary leader. But the stars were the Rojas sisters, two girls from outside the school, very well known in Piura — one of them, Lira, for her magnificent voice, and the other, Ruth, for her dramatic talent (she had already played roles in several plays). The lovely voice of Lira Rojas caused General Odría, who had heard her sing while on an official visit to Piura, to offer her a scholarship and send her to Lima, to the National Music School.

I feel no need to remember the work (a soap opera with Incas, as I have said), but I am touched when I recall what slowly brought it to life, over a period of two months and a half, with the enthusiastic collaboration of the eight actors and the persons who helped us with the stage sets and the lighting. I had never directed, or ever seen anybody direct a play, and I spent entire nights without a wink of sleep, taking notes on the staging. The rehearsals, the atmosphere that was created, the camaraderie, and my dream of seeing the little play finally taking shape, convinced me that year that I would be not a poet but a playwright: drama was the prince of genres and I would inundate the world with works for the theater like those of Lorca or Lenormand. (I have not reread nor have I seen the plays of the latter performed on the stage, but two works of his, which had been published in the Biblioteca Contemporánea series and which I read that year, left a profound impression on me.)

From the first rehearsal I fell in love with my female lead, the slender Ruth Rojas. She had wavy hair that kissed her shoulders, a long neck like the stem of a flower, very pretty legs, and a walk like a queen’s. Hearing her speak was a pleasure fit for the gods, because as she did so she added to the warm, lingering, and musical cadence of Piuran speech a lilt of coquetry and gentle irony all her own that went straight to my heart. But the timidity that always came over me with the young women I fell in love with kept me from ever addressing a flirtatious remark to her or anything that might make her suspect what I felt for her. What was more, Ruth had a sweetheart, a young man who worked in a bank and who used to come to get her when rehearsals were over.

We could only run through a couple of rehearsals in the theater itself, in mid-July, just before the performance, when it seemed impossible that Maestro Aldana Ruiz would finish painting the stage sets in time; he didn’t finish them until the very morning of July 17. The advertising for the work was tremendous, in La Industria and in El Tiempo, over the radio, and, finally, over loudspeakers going up and down the streets — I remember having seen Javier Silva go past the door of the newspaper office, shouting into a megaphone, from atop a truck: “Don’t miss the event of the century, in an evening performance, at the Teatro Variedades…,” as a result of which all the seats were sold out. On the night of the performance, many people who hadn’t been able to get tickets broke through the barriers and poured into the theater, filling the aisles and the orchestra. What with all the disorder, the prefect himself, Don Jorge Checa, lost his seat and had to witness the entire performance standing up.

The work proceeded without mishap — or almost — and there was loud applause when I came out onto the stage, along with the actors and actresses, to acknowledge my authorship of it. The one semi-mishap occurred at the romantic moment of the work, when the Inca — Ricardo Raygada — kissed the heroine, who was supposed to be deeply in love with him. At just that point a look of disgust crossed Ruth’s face and she began to screw up her face. Later she explained to us that it was not the Inca who had repelled her, but a live cockroach that had attached itself to his mascaipacha—his symbolic imperial tassel. The success of La huida del inca was responsible for our giving, the following week, two performances more, to one of which I managed to sneak in Wanda and Patricia, since the censorship board’s classification of the work as one “suitable for minors over fifteen years of age” made it necessary to get them in on the sly.

In addition to La huida del inca, the show included some sung numbers, by Lira Rojas, and a performance by Joaquín Ramos Ríos, one of the most original characters in Piura. He was an outstanding exponent of an art that no longer exists today, or at any event, is considered obsolete and ridiculous, but at that time was a prestigious one: recitation. Joaquín had lived in Germany in his early years and had imported from there the German language, a monocle, a cape, a number of extravagant aristocratic mannerisms and an unbridled fondness for beer. He recited Lorca, Darío, Chocano marvelously well, and the Piuran bard Héctor Manrique — whose sonnet “Querellas del jardín” (“Quarrels in the Garden”), which began: “Era la agonía de una tarde rubia…” (“It was the death agony of a golden afternoon…”) Uncle Lucho and I used to declaim at the top of our lungs as we crossed the desert on the way to his farm — and he was the star of all the literary-musical evenings in Piura. Apart from reciting, all he did was wander about the streets of Piura, with his monocle and his cape, dragging along after him a kid goat that he introduced as his gazelle. He always went around half drunk, mimicking — in the grimy holes-in-the-wall of the chicherías, in the bars, and at the liquor stands in the market — the turn-of-the-century extravagances of Oscar Wilde or of his imitators in Lima, the poet and short-story writer Abraham Valdelomar and the colónidas, the Parnassian and Symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century, before a public of Piuran mestizos who didn’t pay the slightest attention to him and treated him with the contemptuous tolerance that one accords idiots. But Joaquín wasn’t one, because, amid the alcoholic haze in which he spent his life, he would suddenly start talking about poetry and poets in a very intense way, which revealed a profound familiarity with them. In addition to respect, I felt tenderness for Joaquín Ramos and I was deeply grieved, years later, to run into him in the center of Lima, a total wreck and so drunk he was unable to recognize me.

For the vacation during national holiday week, my class wanted to organize a trip to Cuzco, but the money we raised — with the performances of La huida del inca, raffles, lotteries, fairs — wasn’t enough and we got only as far as Lima, for a week. Although I slept at night with my classmates at a normal school on the Avenida Brasil, I spent the daytime hours with my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, in Miraflores. My parents were in the United States. It was the third trip my father had taken there, but my mother’s first. They had gone to Los Angeles and this was to be another attempt on my father’s part to set up a business or find a job that would allow him to leave Peru. Even though he never talked to me about his financial situation, I have the impression that it had begun to deteriorate, because of the money he had lost in his commercial experiment in New York, and because his income had dwindled. This time they stayed in the United States for several months and when they came back, instead of renting a house in Miraflores, they took a little apartment, with just one bedroom, in a very poor district, Rímac, an unmistakable sign of financial difficulties. And so, when, at the end of that year, I came back to Lima to enter the university, I didn’t go to live with my father, but with my grandparents, on the Calle Porta. I was never again to live with him.

Shortly after returning to Piura, I received an unexpected piece of news (everything went well for me during that year in Piura): La huida del inca had won second place in the theatrical competition. The news, published in the Lima daily papers, was reprinted by La Industria on the first page. The prize consisted of a small amount of money, and many months were to go by before Grandpa Pedro — who took the trouble to go to the Ministry of Education every week to ask for it — could collect it and send it to me in Piura. I doubtless spent it on books, and perhaps on visits to the Casa Verde.

Uncle Lucho encouraged me to be a writer. He wasn’t so naïve as to advise me to be only a writer, because what would I have lived on? He thought that practicing law would allow me to reconcile my literary vocation with keeping food on my table and urged me to put money aside from then on so as to get to Paris someday. From that time forward, the idea of traveling to Europe — to France — became a polestar. And until I managed to get there, six years later, I lived with the eagerness to be off and the conviction that if I stayed in Peru I wouldn’t ever attain my goal, because what Peruvian who had stayed here had ever managed to become a real writer?

I didn’t know any Peruvian writers, except dead ones or ones I knew only by name. One of these latter, who had published poems and written works for the theater, passed through Piura around that time: Sebastián Salazar Bondy. He was the literary adviser of Pedro López Lagar’s Argentine company, which had a brief run at the Teatro Variedades (it put on a work by Unamuno and another by Jacinto Grau, if memory serves me). At both performances I kept fighting against my shyness so as to approach Sebastián, whose tall, slender silhouette I saw strolling up and down the aisles of the theater. I wanted to talk to him about my vocation, to ask him for advice, or merely to have concrete verification that a Peruvian could manage to become a writer. But I couldn’t work up my nerve, and years later, when we had become friends and I told him about my hesitation, Sebastián couldn’t believe it.

I often went with my Uncle Lucho on trips to the interior of the departamento and one time to Tumbes, where he was exploring a business deal having to do with fish. We went to Sullana, Paita, Talara, Sechura, and also to the provinces in the highlands of Piura, such as Ayabaca and Huancabamba, but the landscape that lingered in my memory and conditioned, I feel, my relationship with nature was that Piuran desert that has nothing monotonous about it, that changes with the sun and with the wind, and in which, because of the vast horizon and the clear blue sky, one always has the sensation that, just on the other side of one sand dune or another, the sea will suddenly appear, with its silvery glints and its foamy waves.

Every time we went out of town in the creaking black station wagon and that nearly endless white or gray expanse stretched out before us, undulating, burning-hot, interrupted every so often by patches of mesquite, by little huts made of wild reeds and clay, and traversed by mysterious flocks of goats that seemed to be lost in the immensity that surrounded them, over which lizards suddenly zigzagged or iguanas toasted themselves in the sun, motionless and disquieting, I felt great excitement, a seething impulse. That vast space, that boundless horizon — every so often the lower ranges of the Andes appeared, like the shadows of giants — filled my head with adventurous ideas, with epic tales, and the number of stories and poems I planned to write using this setting, peopling it, was endless. When in 1958 I left for Europe, where I was to remain for many years, that landscape was one of the most frequently recurring images I preserved of Peru, and also the one that used to make me feel the most homesick.

When the semester was already well along, one fine day Dr. Marroquín announced to those of us in our last year that this time final exams would not be given in accordance with a preestablished schedule, but rather without prior notice. The reason for this experimental procedure was so as to be able to evaluate the student’s knowledge with greater accuracy. Examinations announced beforehand, for which the students prepared by memorizing the material of the course in question the night before, gave an imprecise idea of what they had assimilated.

The whole class panicked. The fact that a student prepared for a chemistry exam could go to school only to be tested in geometry or logic left us with our hair standing on end. We began to imagine a cataract of classes that we’d flunk. And in our last year at school!

Javier Silva and I incited our classmates to rebel against the experiment (long afterward I found out that that project had been the subject of Dr. Marroquín’s doctoral dissertation). We held meetings and an assembly in which a committee was named, with me as president, to speak with Dr. Marroquín. He received us in his office and politely listened to me ask him to post the examination schedules. But he told us that his decision was irrevocable.

We then planned a strike. We would refuse to go to classes until the measure was revoked. There were nights when, beside ourselves with overexcitement, we discussed the details of the operation with Javier and other classmates. On the morning agreed on, when the hour for classes to begin came round, we retreated to the Eguiguren embankment. But there, several boys, scared to death — in those days, a student strike was unheard of — began to murmur that they might expel us and that it would be better to go back and attend classes. The argument turned into a bitter one, and finally one group refused to go on with the strike. Demoralized by this desertion, the rest of us agreed to return for afternoon classes. When we went back inside the school, the head proctor took me to the principal’s office. Dr. Marroquín’s voice trembled as he told me that, as the one responsible for what had happened, I deserved, ipso facto, to be expelled from San Miguel. But instead, in order not to ruin my future, he would expel me only for seven days. And that I should tell Agricultural Engineer Llosa (he called Uncle Lucho that because he often saw him in the riding boots he wore when he went out to his farm) to come have a talk with him. Uncle Lucho had to listen to Dr. Marroquín’s complaints.

My temporary expulsion caused something of a stir and even Don Jorge Checa, the prefect, dropped by the house to offer to act as intermediary so that the principal would reverse his decision. I don’t remember if he shortened my expulsion or whether I was expelled for the entire week, but, once the punishment was over, I felt like Jan Valtin after he had survived the Nazis’ prisons.

I mention the episode of the abortive strike because it was to become the subject of my first published short story, “Los jefes” (“The Leaders”), and because in it the first glimpses of a burgeoning concern on my part could be discerned. I don’t believe I had thought much about politics before that year in Piura. I remember that when I was working as a messenger at International News Service, I was indignant when the editors received a warning that all information that arrived concerning Peru had to be discussed with the chief administrator of the Ministry of the Interior before being sent on to La Crónica. But even when I was working at the newspaper as a reporter, I didn’t think about the fact that we were living under a military dictatorship, which had forbidden political parties and exiled many Apristas, as well as the former president, Bustamante y Rivero, and a number of his collaborators.

In that year in Piura, politics entered my life at a gallop and with the idealism and confusion with which it usually bursts upon a young man. Since what I read, in utter disorder, left me with more questions than answers, I pestered Uncle Lucho, and he explained to me what socialism, Communism, Aprism, Urrism, fascism were, and patiently listened to my revolutionary pronouncements. What did they consist of? In my becoming aware that Peru was a country of contrasts, of millions of poor people and barely a handful of Peruvians who had a comfortable, decent standard of living, and that the poor — Indians, mestizos, and blacks — were, in addition to being exploited, looked down on by the rich, a large part of whom were whites. And in my very keen feeling that that injustice had to change and that this change would come about through what was known as the left, socialism, revolution. From those last months in Piura on, I began to think, in secret, that at the university I would try to contact those who were revolutionaries and be one of them. And I also decided that I would take the entrance exams for the University of San Marcos and not for Católica, a university for well-off kids, “whities,” and reactionaries. I would go to the national one, the one for mestizos, atheists, and Communists. Uncle Lucho wrote to a relative and a friend of his since childhood, a professor of literature at San Marcos — Augusto Tamayo Vargas — telling him about my plans. And Augusto wrote me a few encouraging lines, telling me that at San Marcos I would find fertile ground for my concerns.

I arrived at the final examinations with a certain anxiety, because of that strike, thinking that the school might take reprisals. But I passed all of them. The last two weeks were frantic ones. I stayed up all night, going over the year’s notes and outlines, with Javier Silva, the Artadis, the Temple twins, and often, with as much irresponsibility as ignorance, we took amphetamines so as to stay awake. Amphetamines were sold at the pharmacy without a prescription, and nobody in my circle of friends realized that they were a drug. The artificial lucidity and nervous tension left me feeling weak and depressed the next day.

After the final exam, I had one of those literary encounters that, I suspect, have had a prolonged effect on my life. I came back home around noon, happy at having now left the school behind me, physically exhausted by the many nights in a row that I had forced myself to stay awake, determined to sleep for many long hours. And, already in bed, I picked up one of the books that belonged to Uncle Lucho, a big fat one whose title by itself didn’t seem particularly striking: The Brothers Karamazov. I read it from cover to cover as fast as I could turn the pages, in a hypnotic state, getting up out of bed every so often like an automaton, not knowing who or where I was, until Aunt Olga came bustling in to remind me that I had to have lunch, and dinner, and breakfast. Between Dostoevsky’s magic and the paroxysmal power of his story, with its hallucinatory characters, and my overwrought nervous state brought on by the sleepless nights and the amphetamines of the two weeks of exams, that uninterrupted reading jag of almost twenty-four hours was a real trip, in the sense that that benign word would take on in the 1960s, with the drug culture and the hippie revolution. I have since reread The Brothers Karamazov, appreciating it better, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in its infinite complexities, but without living it as intensely as I did on that day and that night in December, when I ended my life as a schoolboy with this tremendous novelistic crowning touch.

I stayed in Piura for a few weeks more, after the exams. Uncle Jorge was to drive out to the San Jacinto hacienda, near Chimbote, where Uncle Pedro was the doctor, and Uncle Lucho agreed to go out there to join them, so that the brothers could see each other, and the plans were that I would go back to Lima in my Uncle Jorge’s car. To save me time in preparing for my enrollment at San Marcos, Grandpa had sent to me in Piura a guide for students preparing for the entrance examinations, the cuestionarios desarrollados—“models of ideal answers”—and I spent the mornings before my work began at La Industria going over the questions and the model answers.

I had high hopes at the prospect of entering the university and beginning adult life, but I felt sad at leaving Piura and Uncle Lucho. The help he gave me that year, during the stage that lies on the borderline between childhood and young adulthood, is one of the best things that ever happened to me. If the expression means anything, I was happy during that year, as I had never been in Lima in any of the previous years, although there had been splendid moments in the course of them. There in Piura, between April and December of 1952, with Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, I had enjoyed peace of mind, a way of life without chronic fear, without hiding what I thought, wanted, and dreamed, and this helped me organize my life in a way that harmonized my aptitudes and ineptitudes with my vocation. From Piura, during all of the following year, Uncle Lucho was to continue to help me with his advice and his encouragement, in long replies to the letters I wrote to him.

Perhaps for that reason, but not for that reason alone, Piura came to mean a great deal to me. Adding together the two times that I lived there, they amount to less than two years, and yet that place is more immediately real in what I have written than anywhere else in the world. Those novels, short stories and a play set in Piura do not exhaust these images of that region’s people and landscapes that still hover round about me, battling to be turned into works of fiction. The fact that it was in Piura that I had the joy of seeing a work I’d written presented on the stage of a theater and that I made such fast friends there doesn’t explain everything, because reason never can explain feelings, and the tie that one forms with a city is of the same sort as the one that suddenly binds one to a woman, a real love affair, with deep and mysterious roots. The fact is that, even if after those last days in 1952 I never lived in Piura again — though I visited it, very sporadically — in a manner of speaking I went on living there, taking the city with me wherever I went, all over the world, hearing Piurans speaking in that lilting, drawling way of theirs, with their typical guás and churres tacked on to the end of words and their supersuperlatives—lindisisíma, carisisíma, borrachisísimo—contemplating their languorous desert landscapes and sometimes feeling on their skin the searing language of its sun.

At the time of the battle against the nationalization of the banks, in 1987, one of the three protest demonstrations we staged was in Piura, and Piura was the first city I went to on campaign, after the launching of my candidacy in Arequipa, on June 4, 1989. Piura was the departamento where I visited the most provinces and districts and to which I returned most often during the campaign. I am certain that my subconscious predilection for Piurans and for what was Piuran played a part in that. And, doubtless, for that very reason I was to experience such disappointment, in June of 1990, on discovering that the voters in Piura were not attuned to my feelings, since they voted by a large majority for my opponent in the final round on June 10,^* despite the fact that Fujimori had made hardly more than a furtive visit to the city in the course of his campaign.

The trip to go meet Uncle Jorge was postponed several times, until finally we took to the road, at the end of December, very early in the morning. Our journey was marked by all sorts of mishaps — having to change a tire on the highway and confronting problems with the motor of the station wagon, which overheated. The meeting with the uncles coming from Lima took place in Chimbote, at that time still a quiet village of fishermen, with the very well-run Hotel de Turistas on the shores of a beach with crystal-clear water. We had a dinner with the whole family — Uncle Jorge’s wife, Aunt Gaby, and Uncle Pedro were there — and the next day, early in the morning, I said goodbye to Uncle Lucho, who was going back to Piura. When I gave him a hug, I burst into tears.