When I learned that I had been awarded a grant to study for my doctorate in Madrid, I felt an indescribable joy. Ever since, as a child, I had read Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Dickens and Victor Hugo, to go to Europe, to live in Europe, was a long cherished dream which became almost a physical need when I was a student at university. The ‘journey to Europe’ seemed to me, as to many young people at the time in Latin America, an essential prerequisite for a good intellectual training. Europe held cultural sway over us, but I think that this is no longer so much the case for the new generations in Latin America.
My greatest ambition was to go to Paris – almost all my readings were in North American or French literature – but Madrid, as viewed from Lima, was not to be sneered at. Franco was there, of course (it was 1958), but I thought that it would be wonderful to see on stage those Golden Age plays that, in Peru, we only knew through books. And, furthermore, the University of Madrid, compared to the University of Lima, would be a centre of high culture in which I could fill the extraordinary cultural gaps in the education that I had received at the old San Marcos University (where, for example, the classes in medieval literature consisted of the lecturer reading us out pages from the Espasa Encyclopedia).
It turned out that the University of Madrid was not much better, at least in the field of literature. The lecturer in Spanish American literature only taught up to Romanticism since he was suspicious of everything from modernismo onwards. The books and authors put on the Index by the Vatican were removed from the faculty library; that year, the purged titles included work by Unamuno and the Revista de Occidente, edited by Ortega y Gasset, that I had begun to read between classes. The mood of sanctimoniousness and prejudice among the student body could also be surprisingly intense. One fellow student on the doctoral programme stopped saying hello to me when he found out that I had not been married in church. ‘Stylistics’ was the reigning critical orthodoxy and no other form of literary analysis apart from this linguistic approach was permitted or even known. Professor Leo
Spitzer, the author of laborious grammatical studies in search of (in the words of another critic, Dámaso Alonso) ‘the ultimate moistness of the poem’, was considered to be the canonical model of a literary intellectual, a scholar who had managed to master the ‘science’ of literature. But, surprisingly, almost none of my teachers or colleagues seemed to have heard of Sartre or Camus – whose books were banned by the censors – and on the subject of existentialism, which was then so fashionable in the rest of Europe, there was only a very cautious mention of the Catholic Gabriel Marcel.
Because of the mediocrity of the faculty, I spent a great deal of time reading romances of chivalry in the National Library, a big and gloomy building with very high ceilings where readers would freeze in winter. For some strange reason, many romances of chivalry, like Lancelot du Lac, were in the section called ‘Hell’ and could only be consulted with permission from the Curia. In order to obtain this permission, one had to present statements from teachers or academic institutions vouching for the ‘scientific intentions’ of the aspirant reader. Anyone who has made his way through the intricate forest of adventures of chivalric narrative in which, with very rare exceptions (the most famous of these is, of course, Tirant lo Blanc), the erotic scenes are normally very chaste, can imagine the really grotesque extremes that the control of thought in 1950s Spain could reach.
The newspapers and magazines were simply unreadable because they were old-fashioned and because the censorship not only banned articles that the regime thought dangerous or sinful, but also forced the press to present the news and other items that it let through in such a twisted and distorted way that any sense was lost. Only the most conservative foreign publications were allowed into the country, while, for example, Le Monde or the Herald Tribune were often banned, along with L’Express or Le Nouvel Observateur. To find out what was happening in the world and in Spain itself, the Spaniards listened to foreign radio stations. In the boarding house where I lived, in the Salamanca district, there was a fixed ritual every evening at dinner to tune into the Spanish language broadcasting service of French Radio-Television, where, by chance, I would end up working as an editor once my Madrid studies were over and I went to live in France.
I was not able to satisfy my desire to see, at long last, classic Spanish theatre on the stage. Or rather, the only Golden Age play that I saw in Madrid at that time was Lope de Vega’s La dama boba (The Foolish
Lady), put on by a university company whose main actor was Ricardo Blume, a Peruvian! The poverty of the theatre being performed was terrifying: the listings were full of sainetes or pseudo-farcical, sickly nonsense – Alfonso Paso was the most successful dramatist – while the great modern playwrights of Spain, from Valle Inclán to Garcia Lorca, were simply not staged. Censorship had removed one of the richest and most creative aspects of twentieth-century Spanish culture and had frustrated any attempt to bring the inhabitants of Madrid up to date with what was happening in theatre in the rest of Europe (the theatre of the absurd, the new English theatre, etc.). The anachronism of Spanish theatre in the 1950s was not just limited to the plays that were performed; the acting, the direction, the stage design and all the theatrical techniques and resources seemed to have remained petrified since the Civil War.
Cinema was worse. The films that the censors did not ban reached the screen horribly mutilated, to such an extent that they sometimes seemed like shorts. Apart from wielding their scissors, the censors also tampered with the dubbing, softening or altering the original dialogues to suit the dominant morality in such a radical way that the results were sometimes a source of great amusement (the most famous case of dubbing adulteration was when the lovers in Mogambo were turned into brother and sister). Visitors to Madrid today, who are impressed by its prosperity, its big city appearance, its cosmopolitanism and its intense cultural life, where every form of experimentation, every vanguard movement and even the wildest extravagances have a place, would find it difficult to imagine that provincial, quiet, asphyxiating city with its caricaturesque cultural life that I knew in 1958.
And yet, although I felt cheated in many respects, I came to have a deep affection for that village Madrid, and the year or more that I spent in its quiet little streets was one of the best times of my life. Because, despite Franco, censorship and all the other retrograde aspects, Madrid had innumerable attractions. With the $120 a month of my scholarship, I could live like a king in a good boarding house in the Salamanca district. I bought books, went to the bullfights, made trips throughout Castille and frequented the bars with their smell of fried food and shellfish. Old Madrid was very well preserved and, strolling in the mild autumn evenings, we could follow the itineraries of the novels of Pio Baroja dealing with turn of the century anarchists or compare with the original the descriptions that Pérez Galdós made
of nineteenth-century Madrid in Fortunata y Jacinta (Fortunata and Jacinta), a novel that I read that year with passion. Apart from the Gijón, there were still many old cafés where poets as old as the cafés themselves still met, as in the days of those famous ‘parties’ or ‘gatherings’, which fill so many pages of Spanish literature, and where one could look at the illustrious writers. Furthermore, the warmth that everyone – high or low, from the country or the city – showed to a foreigner knew no bounds. Since then, I have lived in many cities in the old world and the new: I have never witnessed anything that even remotely resembles the overwhelming hospitality and generosity of the Spanish people towards foreigners. This virtue would go on increasing retrospectively in my memory in the following six years that I spent in Paris, a city which, curiously, can be characterized in two very different ways: it is the most bewitching and irresistible city for the rest of the planet and the most inhospitable towards the métèque (which I was at the time).
Lima, 1985