Nineteen
The Trip to Paris
One day in September or October 1957, Luis Loayza brought me a piece of unbelievable news: a short story contest, organized by a French magazine, the prize for which was—a two-week trip to Paris!
La Revue Française, a deluxe publication devoted to art and edited by Monsieur Prouverelle, was bringing out a series of issues, each of which was a monograph on a different country. The short story contest, with its coveted prize, was a feature of that series of monographs. An opportunity like that catapulted me to my typewriter, as was the case with every living Peruvian who knew how to write, and that was how I came to pen “El desafío” (“The Challenge”), a story about an old man who sees his son die in a knife duel, in the dry riverbed of the Piura, that is included in my first book, Los jefes, a collection of short stories published in 1959. (In English, the book’s title is The Cubs and Other Stories.) I entered the short story in the contest, the winner of which was to be decided by a jury headed by Jorge Basadre and on which there were critics and writers—Héctor Velarde, Luis Jaime Cisneros, André Coyné, and Sebastián Salazar Bondy—and tried to think of something else, so that the disappointment wouldn’t be as great if anyone else turned out to be the winner. Some weeks later, one afternoon when I was beginning to prepare the 6 p.m. news bulletin, Luis Loayza appeared in the doorway of my shack at Radio Panamericana, elated: “You’re going to France!” He was as overjoyed as though he’d won the prize himself.
I doubt whether, either before or since then, any piece of news has excited me as much as that one. I was going to set foot in the city I’d dreamed of, in the mythical country where the writers I most admired had been born. “I’m going to meet Sartre, I’m going to shake hands with Sartre,” I kept repeating that night to Julia and to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, with whom Julia and I went out to celebrate the occasion. I was so overexcited I must not have slept a wink all night, bouncing in the bed out of sheer joy.
The official announcement of the winner of the prize took place at the Alliance Française and my beloved French teacher, Madame del Solar, was also there, very pleased that her former pupil had won the contest sponsored by La Revue Française. I met Monsieur Prouverelle, and we came to an agreement whereby I would take the trip after the final examinations at the university and the year-end holidays. These last days of 1957 were hectic ones, in which there were interviews of me published in the newspapers and my friends came by to congratulate me. Dr. Porras organized a chocolate party to celebrate my winning the prize.
I went to thank the members of the jury one by one, and that was how I met Jorge Basadre, the last great nonprovincial intellectual figure that Peru has produced. I had never spoken with him before. He was less given to recounting anecdotes and less scintillating than Porras Barrenechea, but much more interested in ideas, doctrines, and philosophy than Porras was, with a vast literary culture and a broad view of Peru’s historical problems. The neatness and the discreet elegance of his home seemed to be a reflection of the organized intelligence of the historian, his mental clarity. He lacked vanity and did not make the slightest effort to show off his brilliance; he was earnest and formal, but very levelheaded. I spent two hours with him, listening to him talk about the great novels that had moved him deeply, and he spoke of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in such a way that, when I left his house in San Isidro, I hurried to a bookstore to buy it. Sebastián Salazar Bondy, who had been in France for a few months not long before, said to me, enviously: “The best thing that can happen to anyone in the world is happening to you: going to Paris!” He drew up a list for me of indispensable things to do and see in the capital of France.
André Coyné translated El desafío into French, but it was Georgette Vallejo who revised the translation and polished it, working with me. I knew César Vallejo’s widow because she often used to come to visit Porras, but it was only in those days when I was helping her with the translation, in her apartment in the Calle Dos de Mayo, that we became friends. She could be a fascinating person when she told anecdotes about famous writers she had known, although her stories were always weighted down by a secret passion. All Vallejo scholars habitually turned into her mortal enemies. She detested them, as though by coming to be on close terms with Vallejo they took something away from her. She was as thin and wiry as a fakir and had an awesome temper. At a famous lecture at San Marcos, in which the subtle poet Gerardo Diego recounted as a mild joke how Vallejo had died owing him a few pesetas, the shadow of the illustrious widow rose to her feet in the auditorium and coins sailed over the audience’s heads toward the lecturer, as the air was deafened by the exclamation: “Vallejo always paid his debts, you wretch!” Neruda, who detested her as much as she detested him, swore that Vallejo was so afraid of Georgette that he used to make his escape over the rooftops or through the windows of their Paris apartment so as to be alone with his friends. Georgette lived in near penury in the days when I first knew her, giving private French classes, and cultivated her neuroses without the least embarrassment. She put out little spoonfuls of sugar for the ants in her apartment, she never took off the black turban she was invariably wearing every time I saw her, in dramatic accents she lamented the fate of the ducks doomed to decapitation at a Chinese restaurant next to the building where she lived, and she fought tooth and nail—by means of devastatingly cruel open letters—with all the publishers who had brought out or tried to bring out Vallejo’s poetry. She lived extremely frugally, and I remember how one time, when Julia and I invited her to have lunch with us at La Pizzería on the Diagonal, she scolded us, with tears in her eyes, for having left food on our plates when there were so many hungry people in the world. Though her behavior was outrageous, she was generous: she was eager to help Communist poets who had financial or political problems, and on occasion, in times of repression, she hid them in her apartment. Being friends with her was arduous, like walking across burning coals, since the most trivial and unexpected thing might offend her and unleash one of her fits of fury. Despite this, she became a very good friend of ours and we used to go fetch her, bring her to our place, and sometimes take her out on Saturdays. Then, when I went off to live in Europe, she made me run errands for her—collect royalties owed her, mail her certain homeopathic medicines from a pharmacy at the Carrefour de l’Odéon, of which she had been a customer ever since the days of her youth—until, because of one of these errands, we too had a quarrel by letter. And even though we made up later on, we no longer saw each other very often. The last time I spoke with her, in Mejía Baca’s bookstore, shortly before the beginning of that terrible last stage of her life that was to keep her in a clinic for years, turned into a vegetable, I asked her how things were going with her: “How do you expect they’re going for a woman in this country where every day people are more evil, uglier, and crueler?” she answered, rasping her r’s with obvious delight.
At Radio Panamericana they gave me a month’s vacation, and Uncle Lucho secured me a loan of a thousand dollars from his bank, so as to enable me to stay in Paris, at my own expense, for two additional weeks. Uncle Jorge dug up an old gray overcoat which he’d kept around since the days of his youth and which the moths in Lima hadn’t done too much damage to, and one morning in January 1958 I started out on the great adventure. Besides Julia, Uncle Lucho, Abelardo and Pupi, and Luis Loayza came to the airport to say goodbye to me. With great self-importance, I took along in my suitcase several copies of the very first issue of Literatura, just off the presses, so as to acquaint French writers with our review.
I have made many journeys in my life and have forgotten almost all of them, but I remember that two-day Avianca flight with a wealth of details, such as the magical thought that never left me: “I’m going to get to know Paris.” There was a Peruvian medical student who was going back to Madrid on the plane, and two young Colombian girls, who had come aboard at the stop in Barranquilla, whom the two of us photographed each other with in the Azores. (A year later, in a bar in Madrid, the Peruvian Lucho Garrido Lecca showed that photo to Julia, sparking a monumental jealous scene.) The plane remained for hours at each stopover—Bogotá, Barranquilla, the Azores, Lisbon—and finally, early in the morning on a rainy winter day, it arrived at Orly, in those days a smaller and more modest airport than the one in Lima. And waiting there was Monsieur Prouverelle, yawning.
As his Dauphine went up the Champs-Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe, it all seemed like a miracle to me. A cold dawn was breaking and there were no cars or pedestrians on the great broad avenue, but how imposing everything looked, how harmonious the façades and the show windows were, how majestic and magnificent the Arc de Triomphe. Monsieur Prouverelle drove around the Étoile so that I could enjoy the view before taking me to the Hôtel Napoléon on the Avenue de Friedland, where I would spend the two weeks of my prize. It was a luxurious hotel and Lucho Loayza was later to say that I described my entrance into the Napoléon the way the “savages” whom Columbus brought to Spain described their entrance into the court of Castile and Aragon.
During that month in Paris I lived a life that was to have nothing to do with the one I would lead during my stay of almost seven years in France later on, when I was almost always confined to the world of the rive gauche. In those four weeks at the beginning of 1958, on the other hand, I was a resident of the eighth arrondissement, on the rive droite, and to all appearances, anyone would have taken me for a South American dandy come to Paris to have myself a fling. In the Hôtel Napoléon I was given a room with a little balcony overlooking the street, from which I could glimpse the Arc de Triomphe. Across from my room someone who had also won a prize was staying: Miss France 1958, part of whose prize also consisted of a stay at the Napoléon. Her name was Annie Simplon and she was a girl with golden tresses and a wasp waist, to whom the manager of the hotel, Monsieur Makovsky, introduced me and with whom he invited me to dine and dance one night in a fashionable nightclub, L’Éléphant Blanc. Nice Annie Simplon took me on a tour of Paris in the Dauphine that she’d won along with her kingdom and my ears still ache from the bursts of laughter I sent her into, on the afternoon of that outing, with the French that I thought I’d learned not only to read but to speak.
The Hôtel Napoléon had a restaurant, Chez Pescadou, whose elegance intimidated me so much that I crossed it on tiptoe. My French did not allow me to decipher all the exquisite names of the dishes on the menu, and perturbed by the presence of that maître d’hôtel, who looked like a royal chamberlain in ceremonial dress standing alongside me, I chose them at random, pointing with my finger. And so I was surprised at lunch one day to find that I had been brought a little fishing net. I had ordered a trout and had to go get it myself, out of a tank in one corner of the restaurant. “This is Proust’s world,” I thought, bowled over, despite the fact that at the time I hadn’t yet read even one line of Remembrance of Things Past.
On the morning after my arrival, almost the minute I woke up, around noon, I went out for a stroll along the Champs-Élysées. It was now crowded with people and vehicles and, behind the glass partitions, the terraces of the bistros were jam-packed with men and women, smoking, talking together. Everything looked beautiful, incomparable, dazzling to me. I was nothing but a métèque, a cheeky spic. I felt that this was my city: I would live here, write here, put down roots here and stay forever. In those days, Syrians and Lebanese prowled the streets of the center of the city, buying and selling dollars—the inevitable result of currency controls—and I didn’t understand what those characters who approached me every so often, with furtive gestures, were offering me, until finally one of them, who spoke a sort of Spanuguese, explained to me what he was after. He changed some dollars for me, at a better rate than the one I got at the bank, and I made the mistake of telling him what hotel I was staying at. Later on, he phoned me several times, offering me diversions of all sorts, with “mushashas muito bonitas”—his Spanuguese for “very pretty girls.”
Monsieur Prouverelle had prepared a program for me, which included a visit to the Hôtel de Ville, where they gave me a citation. We were accompanied by the Peruvian cultural attaché, an elderly gentleman who a while later would attain a moment of fame at a general conference of UNESCO during which he gave a speech attacking Picasso—making it clear that his criticisms were “of a painter by a painter,” since he himself turned out landscape paintings in his time off from his diplomatic duties. He had become so refined (or was so absent-minded) that he kissed the hands of all the women doorkeepers at the Hôtel de Ville, to the astonishment of Monsieur Prouverelle, who asked me if this was a Peruvian custom. Our cultural attaché had lived in Europe for an eternity and the Peru of his memories was already long dead and gone, or had perhaps never existed. I remember how surprised I was, on the afternoon I met him—we had gone to have coffee together, after the visit to the Hôtel de Ville, at a bistro near the Châtelet—when I heard him say: “People in Lima are so frivolous, strolling up and down the Paseo Colón every Sunday.” When were Limeños in the habit of going for Sunday strolls along that run-down Paseo in the downtown area of the city? Thirty or forty years before, no doubt. But, in all truth, that gentleman could have been a thousand years old.
Monsieur Prouverelle got Le Figaro to interview me and gave a cocktail party in my honor at the Hôtel Napoléon, at which he presented the issue of La Revue Française in which my short story appeared. He was, as he put it, “un chauvin raisonné”—a reasonable chauvinist—and he was amused and delighted by my unbridled enthusiasm for everything I saw round about me and my fascination for French books and authors. He was amazed that I went all about Paris continually associating its monuments, streets, and various sites with novels and poems that I knew by heart.
He made valiant efforts to arrange for me to meet Sartre, but he couldn’t manage it. We got as far as Sartre’s secretary at the time, Jean Cau, who, doing his job conscientiously, kept putting us off until we got tired of insisting. But I did manage to see Albert Camus, shake his hand, and exchange a few words with him. Monsieur Prouverelle found out that he was directing the revival of one of his plays, in a theater on the grands boulevards, and I posted myself there one morning, with my cheekiness of a twenty-one-year-old. After I’d waited for just a short time, Camus appeared, accompanied by the actress Maria Casares. (I recognized her at once, from a film I’d seen twice and liked as much as Lucho Loayza disliked it: Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis.) I went over to him, stammering, in my bad French, that I admired him very much and that I wanted to give him a copy of a literary review, and to my surprise, he answered me in a few kindly sentences in good Spanish (his mother was a Spaniard from Oran). He was wearing the same raincoat as in all the photographs of him, and holding the usual cigarette between his fingers. He and she said something, immediately after that, about “le Pérou,” a word that in those days was still associated in France with ideas of prosperity (“Ce n’est pas le Pérou!”—“This isn’t Peru!”).
The day after my arrival Monsieur Prouverelle invited me to have an aperitif with him at the Rhumerie Martiniquaise, in St.-Germain-des-Prés, and have dinner at Le Fiacre, warning me that he was taking me there because it was an excellent restaurant, but that the bar on the ground floor might shock me. I thought I had freed myself of any sort of prejudice, but it is true that as I went through that bar, where lustful elderly gentlemen were making out with boys, lavishing kisses on them and joyously fondling them in full view of everyone, I was disconcerted. It was one thing to read that such things existed and another to see them.
The restaurant Le Fiacre, on the other hand, was most proper, and I learned there that Monsieur Prouverelle, before being editor of La Revue Française, had been in the military. He had hung up his uniform because of a great disappointment; I don’t know whether it was a political or a personal one, but he spoke to me about it in a tone that impressed me, for it appeared to be a drama that had turned his life upside down. Dumbfounded, I heard him speak well of Salazar’s regime, which, according to him, had put an end to the anarchy that had previously held sway in Portugal, a thesis I hastened to refute, shocked that anyone could believe that dictators such as Salazar or Franco had done anything good for their countries. He didn’t insist, and instead changed the subject, telling me that he would introduce me the next day to a young lady, the daughter of friends of his, who could accompany me to visit museums and tour Paris.
And that was how I met Bernadette, whom I saw, from that time on, for many hours every day, until the eve of my return to Lima. And thanks to her I knew that something even better could happen to me than all the good things that had already come my way: being twenty-one years old and knowing a pretty, likable young French girl with whom to discover the marvels of Paris.
Bernadette had chestnut-colored bobbed hair, bright blue eyes with a penetrating gaze, and a pale complexion that, when her face grew flushed with laughter or embarrassment, set her person aglow with radiant charm. She must have been about eighteen and was a perfect demoiselle du seizième, a girl comme il faut, thanks to her invariably neat and tidy appearance, her excellent manners, and her very proper behavior. But she was also intelligent, amusing, possessed of an elegant and worldly-wise flirtatiousness, and seeing her and hearing her and being aware of her graceful silhouette at my side made shivers run up and down my spine. She was studying at an art school, and knew the Louvre, Versailles, L’Orangerie, Le Jeu de Paume like the palm of her hand, so that visiting museums with her doubled my pleasure.
We met each other very early each morning and began our tour of churches, art galleries, and bookstores, following a carefully thought-out plan. Early in the evening we would go to the theater or the movies, and on some nights, after dinner, to some cave on the rive gauche to listen to music and to dance. She lived on a street that crossed the Avenue Victor Hugo, in an apartment with her parents and an older sister, and she took me to her place a number of times to have lunch or dinner, something that was not to happen to me again in the many years I lived in France, even with my best French friends.
On going back to Paris again, to live there for some time a couple of years later, especially in the beginning, when I was having financial difficulties, I always remember as something fabulous that month in which, with pretty Bernadette, I went to all sorts of performances and to restaurants every night, and my days were spent visiting art galleries and out-of-the-way places in Paris and buying books. Monsieur Prouverelle got us complimentary tickets to the Comédie Française and the Théâtre National de Paris, directed by Jean Vilar, on the stage of which I saw Gérard Philippe, in Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg. Another memorable theatrical performance was the staging of a play of Shakespeare’s in which one of the roles was played by Pierre Brasseur, whose films I was continually trying to find a showing of. We also saw, I’m certain, Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) and La Leçon (The Lesson), in the little theater on the Rue de la Huchette (where performances of both are still given today, after a run of nearly forty years), and that night, after the theater, we took a very long walk along the quays, on the banks of the Seine, during which I tried out a few flirtatious remarks in my imperfect French, making grammatical mistakes that Bernadette corrected. I also became acquainted with the Cinémathèque on the Rue d’Ulm, where we immured ourselves for an entire day, seeing four of Max Ophuls’s films, among them The Earrings of Madame de…, with that great beauty Danielle Darrieux.
Since my prize paid me for only fifteen days at the Napoléon, for the last two weeks of my stay I had reserved a room in the Hôtel de Seine, in the Latin Quarter, recommended to me by Salazar Bondy. But when I went to say goodbye to the manager of the Hôtel Napoléon, Monsieur Makovsky told me that I should stay on, paying what I would be paying at the Hôtel de Seine. So I continued to enjoy the Arc de Triomphe until the end of my stay.
To me, another of the marvels of Paris was the bookstalls along the Seine and the little bargain bookstores in the Latin Quarter, where I laid in a good supply of books that later on I had no idea how to fit into my suitcase. I managed, in this way, to complete my collection of Les Temps Modernes, from the first issue on, with that initial manifesto of Sartre’s in favor of political commitment which I knew almost by heart.
Years later, settled now in France, I had a long conversation about Paris one night with Julio Cortázar, who also loved the city and who once declared that he had chosen it “because being nobody in a city that was everything was a thousand times preferable to having things the other way around.” I told him of that precocious passion in my life for a mythical city, which I knew only through literary fantasies and gossip, and how, by comparing it to the real version, in that month straight out of the Thousand and One Nights, instead of my being disappointed by it, the spell had grown even greater. (It lasted until 1966.)
He too felt that Paris had given something profound to his life that could never be repaid: a perception of what was best in human experience; a certain tangible sense of beauty. A mysterious association of history, literary invention, technical skill, scientific knowledge, architectonic and plastic wisdom, and also, in large doses, sheer chance had created that city where going out for a stroll along the bridges and the quays of the Seine, or observing at certain hours the volutes of the gargoyles of Notre Dame or venturing into certain little squares or the labyrinth of dark, narrow streets in the Marais, was a moving spiritual and aesthetic experience, like burying oneself in a great book. “Just as one chooses a woman and is or is not chosen by her, the same thing happens with cities,” Cortázar said. “We chose Paris and Paris chose us.”
At that time Cortázar had already settled in France, but in that month of January 1958 I hadn’t yet met him, nor do I believe I knew of any of the many Latin American painters or writers there (Pobre gente de Paris—“Poor wretches in Paris”—Sebastián Salazar Bondy was to call them in a book of short stories inspired by them), with the exception of the Peruvian poet Leopoldo Chariarse, about whom I had heard Abelardo Oquendo tell very amusing anecdotes (such as having declared, in public, that his vocation as a poet was born “the day that, as a child, a black woman raped me”). Chariarse, who was later to become a flute player, an Orientalist, a guru and the spiritual father of a sect and the director of an ashram in Germany, at that time was a Surrealist, and he had great prestige within the little sect to which André Breton’s movement had been reduced. The French Surrealists presumed that he was a revolutionary persecuted by the dictatorial regime in Peru (governed at the time by a most peace-loving Manuel Prado), and didn’t suspect in the least that he was the sole poet in the history of Peru to be given a scholarship to Europe through an Act of Congress.
I learned all this through the poet Benjamin Péret, whom I went to visit in the very modest apartment where he lived, with the hope that he would give me certain information about César Moro, since one of my projects at the time was to write an essay on him. In France, Moro belonged to the Surrealist group for a number of years—he contributed to Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution and the Hommage à Violette Nozière, and then organized, with Péret and Breton, an International Exposition of Surrealism in Mexico. However, in the official history of the group, he was rarely referred to. Péret proved to be very evasive, either because he scarcely remembered Moro or for some other reason, and told me almost nothing about the most authentic Surrealist born in Peru, and perhaps in all of Latin America. The person who gave me a clue to the reasons for this ostracism to which Moro had been condemned by Breton and his friends was Maurice Nadeau, whom I went to see, on an errand for Georgette Vallejo, to receive royalties from him for several of Vallejo’s poems that had appeared in Les Lettres Nouvelles. Nadeau, whose Histoire du Surréalisme I was acquainted with, introduced me to a young French novelist who was with him—Michel Butor—and when I asked him why the Surrealists appeared to have “purged” Moro, told me that probably it was because of his homosexuality. Breton tolerated and encouraged every “vice” except for that one, ever since, in the 1920s, the Surrealists had been accused of being fairies. This was the incredible reason why Moro had come to be an inner exile too, even within the very movement whose morality and philosophy he himself embodied—someone whose integrity and talent alike were more genuine than that of the majority of those recognized and hallowed by Papa Breton.
In this month in Paris, I began for the first time, very secretly, to wonder whether I hadn’t been overly hasty and made a mistake by getting married. Not because Julia and I didn’t get along together, for we had no more quarrels than the usual married couple, and I am the first to admit that Julia helped me in my work, and instead of putting obstacles in the way of my literary vocation encouraged it. But, rather, because that initial passion for her had died out and been replaced by a domestic routine and an obligation that, at times, I began to feel as an enslavement. Could this marriage last? Time, rather than lessening our difference in age, would little by little make it more dramatic, until it turned our relationship into something artificial. The family’s predictions would come true, sooner or later, and that romantic marriage would perhaps end up foundering.
These gloomy thoughts arose indirectly, during those days, as my tours of Paris and my flirtation with Bernadette went on. She devoured me with questions about Julia—her feminine curiosity was stronger than her polite upbringing—and she kept after me to show her a photograph of my wife. With this young girl I felt young myself, and in a certain way I relived, in those weeks, my early years in Miraflores and my amorous skirmishes in Diego Ferré. For not since I was thirteen or fourteen had I had a “sweetheart” or whiled away my time in such a marvelous way, wandering about and having fun, as I did during those four weeks in Paris. In the last few days, when my return to Peru was imminent, I was overcome by a tremendous anxiety attack and the temptation to stay in France, to break with Peru, break with my family, and immediately begin a new life, in that city, in that country, where being a writer appeared to be possible, where everything gave me the impression of having conspired to favor it.
The night I bade Bernadette goodbye was very tender. It was late, it was drizzling, and we kept endlessly saying goodbye to each other in the doorway of the building where she lived. I kept kissing her hands and tears glistened in her pretty eyes. The next morning, as I was about to leave for the airport, we had one last conversation over the phone. Then after that, we wrote to each other several times, but I never saw her again. (Thirty years later, at the most crucial moment of the election campaign, someone whom I was never able to identify slipped a letter from her under the door of my house.)
The trip to Lima, which was scheduled to take a couple of days, lasted all that week. We flew the first leg, from Paris to Lisbon, without problems, and took off from there exactly on time. But almost as soon as we started flying over the Atlantic, the pilot of the Avianca Super Constellation announced to us that one of the engines wasn’t working properly. We went back to Lisbon. We stayed two days in that city, at Avianca’s expense, waiting for the plane that was coming to our rescue, a delay that enabled me to have a glimpse of that pretty, melancholy capital. My money was all gone and I was dependent on the coupons that the airline gave us for lunches and dinners, but on one of those days a fellow passenger from Colombia invited me to a picturesque Lisbon restaurant to sample the cod à la Gomes de Sá. He was a young man who was a member of the Conservative Party. I looked on him as a strange creature—he wore a big broad-brimmed sombrero wherever he went and pronounced his words with the pretentiously and perversely precise accent of people from Bogotá—and I irritated him by asking him a number of times: “How can anyone be young and conservative?”
Finally, after two days, we boarded the replacement plane. We reached the Azores, but there bad weather kept it from landing. We were diverted to an island whose name I’ve forgotten, where, in the course of the terrifying landing, the pilot managed to damage one of the plane’s wheels and put us through several moments of panic. When I arrived in Bogotá, my flight to Lima had left three days before, and hapless Avianca had to lodge me and feed me in Bogotá for several more days. The moment I was installed in the Hotel Tequendama, I went out for a stroll down one of the main downtown streets. I was looking into the show windows of a bookstore when I saw people running toward me, in the midst of a skirmish of some sort. Before I understood what was going on, I heard shots and saw policemen and soldiers dealing out blows right and left with their truncheons, so I too started to run, knowing neither where to nor why, and wondering what sort of city this was, where I had just landed and already they were trying to kill me.
I finally arrived in Lima, full of energy, determined to finish my thesis as soon as possible and perform miracles to win the Javier Prado Fellowship. I told Julia, Lucho and Abelardo, my aunts and uncles about my trip to Paris with unbridled enthusiasm, and my memory relived with vast delight everything I had seen and done there. But I didn’t have much time for nostalgia, since, in fact, I set to work on my thesis on Rubén Darío’s short stories, in all my free moments, at the library of the Club Nacional, between news bulletins at Panamericana, and at night, at home, until sometimes I fell asleep over my typewriter.
A mishap occurred that interrupted that work pace. One morning my groin began to hurt—what I thought was my groin, that is, and turned out to be my appendix. I went to San Marcos to have a doctor see me. He prescribed several medicines for me to take, which didn’t have the slightest effect on me, and shortly thereafter, Genaro Delgado Parker, who saw me limping, put me in his car and drove me to the Clínica International, with which Panamericana had some sort of a deal. I had to have an emergency operation, since my appendix was now badly inflamed. According to Lucho Loayza, when I came out from under the anesthesia, I was shouting swear words, my mother was shocked and covered my mouth with her hand and Julia was protesting: “You’re smothering him, Dorita.” Although Radio Panamericana paid for half the expenses of my operation, the part I had to pay for plus paying back the thousand-dollar loan I owed to the bank left me nearly broke. I compensated for those expenditures by churning out extra articles in the supplement of El Comercio, in the form of book reviews, and writing for the magazine Cultura Peruana, whose kindly editor-in-chief, José Flórez Aráoz, let me have two signed columns in each issue and publish notes or articles without a byline.
I finished my thesis before half a year had gone by, giving it a title that sounded scholarly—“Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío”—and began to harass my professors who were evaluating it—Augusto Tamayo Vargas and Jorge Puccinelli—to get them to write their reports as soon as possible so I could get my degree. One morning in June or July 1958, I was summoned by the historian Luis E. Valcárcel, at that time the dean of the Faculty of Letters, to defend my thesis in the auditorium at San Marcos, where degrees are awarded. My whole family attended this academic ceremony and the observations and questions put to me by the professors who constituted the jury were kindly. My thesis was approved cum laude, and it was suggested that it be published in the review of the Faculty of Letters. But I kept putting off having it published, having in mind the idea of making improvements on it first, something I never got around to. Written in fits and starts, in the gaps of a life taken up almost entirely by jobs to keep food on the table, it was worthless, and the grade I received is better explained by the good will of the professors on the jury and the declining academic standards of San Marcos than by its merits. But my work on that thesis gave me the opportunity to read a great deal of the writings of a poet gifted with a fabulous verbal richness, to whose inspiration and skill the Castilian language owes one of the seminal revolutions in its history. For with Rubén Darío—the starting point of all the avant-garde movements of the future—poetry in Spain and Latin America began to be modern.
In my application for the Javier Prado scholarship, to earn a doctorate from the Complutense University in Madrid, I expressed my intention of continuing the same studies in Spain, taking advantage of the Rubén Darío archives that a professor from the University of Madrid, Antonio Oliver Belmas, had discovered not long before—something that, had circumstances permitted, I would have been more than happy to do. But there were insuperable obstacles standing in the way of my consulting those archives, and once my thesis was approved at San Marcos my involvement as a Darío scholar was interrupted. But not my devotion as a reader of his, for ever since then, after long parentheses sometimes, I reread him and I always experience the same amazement and admiration that his poetry occasioned in me on first reading it. (Unlike what happens to me in the case of the novel, a genre in which I have an invincible weakness for so-called realism, in poetry I have always preferred a luxuriant unreality, above all if a spark of flashiness and fine music accompanies it.)
Loayza graduated a little before or a little after I did, he too being determined to take off for Europe. In order to make concrete plans for the journey, we were both waiting for the decision of the jury for the Javier Prado scholarship. On the morning of the day that the winner was to be announced, my heart was in my throat when I arrived at San Marcos. But Rosita Corpancho, who enjoyed passing on good news, got up from her desk the moment she saw me appear: “They gave it to you!” I staggered out of her office to tell Julia that we were going to Madrid. My happiness, as we walked along La Colmena to the Plaza San Martín to take the minibus to Miraflores, was so great that I felt like giving out with a yell like Tarzan’s.
We immediately began making preparations for the journey. We sold the furniture we had, so as to take a bit of money with us, and packed all my books in boxes and cartons, tossing inside them little balls of naphthalene and spreading packages of black tobacco around in them, since we had been assured that that was a good preventative against bookworms. It wasn’t. In 1974, when I came back to Peru to live, after sixteen years abroad—during which time I returned only for short stays, with one exception, in 1972, a stay that lasted six months—and reopened those boxes and cartons that up until then had been stored at my grandparents’ and at the houses of various aunts and uncles, a number of them offered a frightful spectacle: a green layer of mold covered the books, in which there could be glimpsed, as though it were a colander, the little holes through which the bookworms had bored their way inside to wreak their damage. Many of those boxes were now nothing but dust, bits and scraps, and vermin and had to be thrown into the trash. Less than a third of that first library of mine survived Lima’s uncultured bad weather.
At the same time, I went on working at all my jobs and Lucho and Abelardo and I prepared the second issue of Literatura, in which an article of mine on César Moro appeared, and in which we rendered a brief homage to the Cubans of the 26th of July, who, with a romantic guerrilla fighter as their leader—that was what Fidel Castro seemed to us to be—fought against Batista’s tyranny. There were a few Cubans in exile in Lima and one of them, active in the resistance, worked at Radio Panamericana. He kept me informed about the barbudos with whom, needless to say, I sentimentally identified myself. But in that last year in Lima, except for that emotional loyalty to the resistance movement against Batista, I did not engage in the slightest political activity and I had drawn apart from the Christian Democratic Party, in which, however, I remained enrolled as a member for several months more until, following Fidel’s victory and in view of the lukewarm support that the Peruvian Christian Democrats gave him, I formally resigned from the party, in a letter that I wrote them from Europe.
All my energy and time, in those last months in Lima, were devoted to working so as to get a little money together, and to preparing for my stay abroad. Although the latter, in theory, was to last a year—the time limit of the scholarship—I had resolved that it would be forever. After Spain, I would find a way to get to France and would stay there for good. In Paris I would become a writer and if I returned to Peru, it would be for a visit, since in Lima I would never get past being that protowriter that I had become and the Peruvian writers whom I knew seemed to me to be. I had talked it over very seriously with Julia and she agreed to our uprooting ourselves. She too had high hopes for our European adventure and was completely confident that I would succeed in becoming a novelist and promised to help me reach that goal by making whatever sacrifices were necessary. When I heard her talk to me like that, I was assailed by bitter remorse for having allowed myself to be overcome, in Paris, by the bad thoughts I had had. (I have never been good at the widespread sport of cheating on one’s wife, which I have seen being engaged in all around me, by the majority of my friends, with self-confident offhandedness; I fall passionately in love and my infidelities have always brought me moral and emotional traumas.)
The one person to whom I confided my intention of never returning to Peru was Uncle Lucho, who, as always, encouraged me to do what I thought best for my vocation. To the others, this represented a postgraduate stay abroad, and at San Marcos, Augusto Tamayo Vargas managed to get me a leave of absence, which assured me of having classes to teach in the Faculty of Letters on my return. Porras Barrenechea helped me secure two free passages on the Brazilian mail plane, from Lima to Rio de Janeiro (the flight took three days, since the plane made overnight stops in Santa Cruz and in Campo Grande), so that all Julia and I had to pay for was our passage by boat, in third class, from Rio to Barcelona. Lucho Loayza would travel to Brazil on his own and from there we would go on together. The only trouble was that Abelardo wouldn’t be going along with us, but he assured Lucho and me that he would pull all the strings he could to get the scholarship from the Faculty of Law to go to Italy. Within a few months he was to surprise us by suddenly turning up in Europe.
When our preparations were already well under way, at the Faculty of Letters one day, Rosita Corpancho asked me if I wouldn’t be tempted by the prospect of taking a trip to Amazonia. A Mexican anthropologist born in Spain, Juan Comas, was about to arrive in Peru, and for this reason the Summer Institute of Linguistics and San Marcos had organized an expedition to the Alto Marañon region, the homeland of the Aguaruna and Huambisa tribes, in which he was interested. I accepted, and thanks to this brief journey I became acquainted with the Peruvian jungle area and saw landscapes and people and heard stories that, later on, would be the raw material for at least three of my novels: The Green House, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, and The Storyteller.
Never in my life, and I can assure my reader that I’ve been to quite a few places in the world, have I taken a more fruitful journey, one that afterward would arouse such stimulating memories and images for inventing stories. Thirty-five years later, every so often I still remember certain anecdotes and moments of that expedition by way of territories nearly virgin at that time and remote villages, where existence was very different from the other regions of Peru that I was acquainted with, and where, in the little settlements of Huambisas, Shapras, and Aguarunas that we reached, prehistory was still alive, they still shrank heads and still practiced animism. But, precisely because of how important it turned out to be for my work as a writer and how greatly I have profited from it, I feel more diffident about referring to that experience than I do about any other, since in no other has imagination, which jumbles everything together, become so intermingled with the experience itself. Moreover, I have written and spoken so much about that first journey I made to the jungle that I am certain that if someone were to take the trouble to verify all those eyewitness accounts and personal interviews that I have told about, he or she would notice the subtle changes, which are doubtless abrupt ones as well, that my unconscious and my imagination have continually incorporated into the memory of that expedition.*
What I am sure of is this: discovering the awesome power of the still untamed landscape of Amazonia, and its adventure-filled, primitive, fierce world, with a freedom unknown in urban Peru, left me filled with amazement. It also enlightened me in an unforgettable way with regard to the extremes of savagery and total impunity to which injustice might lead for certain Peruvians. But at the same time, it unfolded before my eyes a world in which, as in great novels, life could be an adventure with no frontiers, where there was room for the most inconceivable feats of daring, where living almost always meant risk, boldness, permanent change—all within the framework of forests, rivers, and lakes that seemed like those of Paradise on Earth. It would come back to my mind a thousand and one times in years to come and would be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for my writing.
We went first to Yarinacocha, near Pucallpa, where the base of the Summer Institute of Linguistics was located, and there met its founder, Dr. Townsend, who had created it for a purpose that was at once scientific and religious: so that his linguists—who at the same time were also Protestant missionaries—could learn languages and primitive dialects in order to translate the Bible into them. We then took off to visit the Alto Marañon tribes and were in Urakusa, Chicais, Santa María de Nieva, and many villages and settlements where we slept in hammocks or on makeshift cots; in order to reach some of them, after disembarking from the seaplane, we had to be taken to them in the frail canoes of native ferrymen. In one of the Shapra villages, the tribal chief, Tariri, explained to us the technique used to shrink heads, which his people still practiced; they had a prisoner there from a neighboring tribe with which they were at war; the man roamed about freely among his captors, but they kept his dog in a cage. In Urakusa, I met the tribal chief Jum, recently tortured by some soldiers and “bosses” from Santa María de Nieva, whom we also met, and whom I was later to try to bring to life in The Green House. In all the places we visited I learned of unbelievable things and met extraordinary people.
Besides Juan Comas, there traveled with us in the little seaplane the anthropologist Matos Mar, with whom I have been friends ever since, the editor-in-chief of Cultura Peruana, José Flórez Aráoz, and Efraín Morote Best, an anthropologist and folklorist from Ayacucho, whom we had to lift off the ground, literally, so that the seaplane could take off. Morote Best had visited bilingual schools and traveled among the tribes, under heroic conditions, bombarding Lima with denunciations of the abuses and iniquities suffered by the indigenous peoples. These latter received him in their villages with great affection and passed their complaints on to him and told him about their problems. The idea I formed of him was that of a very honest and generous man, who had profoundly identified himself with the victims of that country of victims known as Peru. I never imagined that the gentle, timid Dr. Morote Best would, as the years went by, be won over by Maoism, during his rectorate at Ayacucho University, and open the doors of that institution to the fundamentalist Maoism of Sendero Luminoso—whose mentor, Abimael Guzmán, he brought there as a professor—and be regarded as something like the spiritual father of the most bloody extremist movement in the history of Peru.
When I returned to Lima, I didn’t even have time left to write the account of the expedition that I had promised Flórez Aráoz (I sent it to him from Rio de Janeiro, on my way to Europe). I spent my last days in Peru saying goodbye to friends and relatives and selecting the papers and notebooks that I would take with me. I felt very sad in the early morning of the day on which I bade my grandparents and Auntie Mamaé farewell, since I didn’t know if I would ever see those three elderly people again. Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga arrived at the Córpac airport to say goodbye to us after Julia and I were already aboard the Brazilian military plane, which, instead of seats, had parachutists’ benches. We spied the two of them from the little window and waved goodbye to them, knowing that they couldn’t see us. I was sure that I would see the two of them again, and that by that time I would at last be a writer.