A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (35 page)

By the time I dropped out of Cahuide, in the middle of the following year, 1954, I hardly ever saw Lea and Félix, and from then on I practically never saw them. We didn’t talk together or seek each other out in the remaining years at San Marcos, exchanging at most a brief hello when we ran into each other as classes were beginning or ending. When I lived in Europe, I had scarcely any news of them, except that they had gotten married and had children, and that both of them, or Félix at least, had followed the jagged trajectory of so many militants of his generation, leaving the Party and going back to it, being a leader of it or suffering from the divisions, ruptures, reconciliations, and new divisions of the Peruvian Communists in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1972, on the occasion of President Salvador Allende’s visit to Lima, I ran into both of them, at a reception at the Chilean embassy. There among the crowd of guests, we were barely able to exchange even a few words. But I still haven’t forgotten Lea’s joke about
Conversation in The Cathedral—
“Those demons of yours…” It is a novel in which several episodes of our years at San Marcos appear, transfigured.

Eighteen or twenty years went by without my hearing any more about them. And then one fine day, during the election campaign, on the eve of the launching of my candidacy in Arequipa, in May of 1989, my secretaries handed me the list of journalists who were requesting interviews with me, on which Félix’s name appeared. I immediately granted him an interview, wondering whether it was the same person. It was. Almost four decades older, but still identical to the Félix I remembered: suave and conspiratorial, with the same modesty and the same carelessness in his dress and the same conscientiousness when it came time to ask questions, the ever-exclusive political perspective on the tip of his tongue, and writing for a little periodical as marginal and precarious as the one that we had put out together at San Marcos. I was moved, seeing him, and I imagine that he was too. But neither of us allowed the other to glimpse those embers of sentimentality.

Of my passage through Cahuide the one episode that gave me the feeling that I was working for the revolution was the strike at San Marcos to show our solidarity with the streetcar employees. Their union was controlled by militants from Cahuide. The student section threw itself wholeheartedly into seeing to it that the Federation of San Marcos joined the strike, and we succeeded. Those were exciting days because, for the first time, the members of my cell had the chance to take action outside the university—and with workers! We attended the meetings of the union and put out, with the strikers, in a little print shop in La Victoria, a daily bulletin that we handed out in the places where people who had been left without any means of transportation gathered. And in those days, too, in the meetings of the strike committee, I had the chance to discover several members of Cahuide I’d never known.

How many of us were there? I never found out, but I suspect that there were no more than a few dozen. Just as I never knew, either, who our secretary general was nor who the members of the central committee were. The harsh repression of those years—only after 1955 would the state security system be relaxed, after the fall of Esparza Zañartu—required secrecy with regard to our activities. But it also had to do with the nature of the Party, its conspiratorial predisposition, that vocation for the clandestine that had never permitted it—despite the fact that we talked so much about the prospect—to become a party of the masses.

It was this, in part, that made me fed up with Cahuide. When I stopped going to the meetings of my cell, around June or July of 1954, I had felt bored for some time by the inanity of what we were doing. And I no longer believed a word of our class analyses and our materialist interpretations which, although I wouldn’t have said so straight out to my comrades, seemed puerile to me, a catechism of stereotypes and abstractions, of formulas—“petty bourgeois opportunism,” “revisionism,” “class interest,” “class struggle”—which were used as all-purpose clichés, to explain and defend the most contradictory things. And, above all, because there was in my nature, in my individualism, in my growing vocation as a writer, and in my intractable temperament a visceral inability to embody that patient, tireless, docile revolutionary, a slave to the organization, who accepts and practices democratic centralism once a decision has been arrived at by the organization and all the militants adopt it as their own and apply it with fanatical discipline. Against this, even though I paid lip service to the fact that it was the price of being effective, my whole being rebelled. Ideological differences, which came to me, above all, from Sartre and
Les Temps Modernes
, of which I was a devoted reader, also played a role in my withdrawing from Cahuide. But I believe that this was a secondary factor. For, despite all that I read in the study circles, what I managed to learn about Marxism at the time was fragmentary and superficial. Only in the 1960s, in Europe, would I make a serious effort to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, and heterodox Marxists such as Lukács, Gramsci, and Goldmann or the superorthodox Althusser, spurred on by the enthusiasm awakened in me by the Cuban revolution, which, from 1960 on, revived that interest in Marxism-Leninism which, ever since I had parted company with Cahuide, I had thought no longer existed.

Although San Marcos, Cahuide, Lea, and Félix had been, for all that time, my all-absorbing preoccupation, I continued to see my aunts and uncles—I dropped by one or another of their houses in turn for lunch or dinner throughout the week—and wrote to Uncle Lucho, to whom I gave a detailed account of everything I was doing or dreaming of doing and from whom I always received letters full of encouraging words. I also saw a great deal of friends from Piura who had come to Lima to prepare for careers at the university, especially Javier Silva. Several of them lived with Javier in a boardinghouse on the Calle Schell, in Miraflores, a place they called Slow Death because of the terrible food they were served. Javier had decided to study architecture and went about disguised as an architect, with a little intellectual’s beard and black turtlenecks, St.-Germain-des-Prés style. I had already convinced him that we had to go off to Paris, and I even encouraged him to write a short story, which I published for him in
Turismo
. His mysterious text began as follows: “My footsteps took on a larger surface area…” But the following year, he suddenly decided to be an economist and entered San Marcos, so that, from 1954 on, we were also fellow university students.

Thanks to Javier, who had joined it, I resumed contact with my Diego Ferré
barrio
. I did so a little furtively, because those boys and girls were bourgeois and I had ceased to be one. What would Lea, Félix, or the comrades from Cahuide have said if they saw me, on the corner of the Calle Colón, talking about those “terrific babes” who had just moved to the Calle Ocharán, or planning the Saturday night surprise party? And what would the boys and girls of the
barrio
have said of Cahuide, an organization which, in addition to being Communist, had Indians, mestizos, and blacks in it like the ones who were servants in their houses? They were two worlds, separated by an abyss. When I went from one to the other I felt I was changing countries.

The ones I saw least in all that time were my parents. They had spent several months in the United States—and then, soon after returning home, my father went back. These visits were yet other attempts to find some sort of job or set up a business that would allow him to move there permanently. My mother stayed with my grandparents, where there was barely room for us. My father’s absence greatly distressed her and I suspected that she was afraid that, in a fit of rage, he would disappear, as he had the first time. But he came back, just as the year 1953 was coming to an end, and one day he summoned me to his office.

I went, feeling very apprehensive, because I never expected anything good to come of his summonses. He told me that my job at
Turismo
didn’t involve real responsibility, that it was just one I did on the side, and that I should work at something that would allow me to go on building a career for myself at the same time that I was studying at the university, the way so many young people did in the United States. He had already spoken to a friend of his, from the Banco Popular, and a job was waiting for me there, beginning on January 1.

So I began 1954 as a bank clerk, at the Banco Popular branch in La Victoria. On the first day the manager asked me if I had any experience. I told him I had none at all. He gave a whistle, intrigued. “In other words, you got the job through pull?” Yes, I had. “You’re in trouble,” he announced. “Because what I need is a receiving teller. We’ll see how you make out.” It was a rough experience that went on after the eight hours I spent in the office, from Monday to Friday, and it was repeated in nightmares I had about it. I had to receive money from people for their savings passbooks or their current accounts. A great many of the customers were whores from the Jirón Huatica, which was around the corner from the bank branch, and who became impatient because it took me such a long time to count their money and give them a receipt. I dropped the banknotes or messed them all up as I fingered them, and sometimes, when I became completely flustered, I pretended to have finished counting them and gave them the receipt without carefully checking how much they had given me. On many afternoons, the balance didn’t tally and I had to count the cash all over again in a state of real panic. One day I found I was a hundred soles short. Thoroughly downcast, I went to the manager and told him I’d make up the missing sum out of my salary. But with a mere glance at the balance, he found the error and laughed at my inexperience. He was a likable young man, determined that my colleagues appoint me as the branch’s delegate to the union of bank employees, since I was a university student. But I refused to become a union delegate, and I didn’t tell Cahuide about it, since I was certain that they would have asked me to accept. If I took on that responsibility I would have to remain a bank employee, and that was a most unpleasant prospect. I detested the work, the strict working hours, and looked forward to Saturdays the way I had when I was a boarding student at Leoncio Prado.

And then, in my second month at the bank, a chance to escape from making figures balance came my way unexpectedly. I had gone to San Marcos to get my grades and the secretary of the Faculty, Rosita Corpancho, told me that Dr. Porras Barrenechea, for whose course I had received an excellent grade, wanted to see me. I telephoned him, intrigued—I had never spoken alone with him before—and he asked me to come by his house, on the Calle Colina, in Miraflores.

I went there, filled with curiosity, delighted to be able to enter this redoubt whose library and collection of paintings and statues of
Don Quixote
was spoken of as something mythical. He ushered me into the little study where he usually worked and there, surrounded by a host of books of all sizes and shelves where little statues and portraits of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were lined up, congratulated me on my final exam and the work that I had handed in to him—in which he had seen, with approval, that I had pointed out a historical error on the part of the archaeologist Tschudi—and proposed to me that I work with him. Juan Mejía Baca had commissioned the principal Peruvian historians to put together a collection on the history of Peru. Porras would be responsible for the volumes on the Conquest and the Emancipation. The publisher and chief editor of the series would pay him for two assistants to help him with the bibliography and the documentation. He already had one working with him: Carlos Araníbar, a student who was studying for his degree in history at San Marcos. Did I want to be the other one? My pay would be five hundred soles a month and I would work at his house, from two to five in the afternoon, from Monday to Friday.

I left his house in an indescribable state of euphoria, to write my letter of resignation to the Banco Popular, which I handed to the manager the following morning, without hiding from him the happiness I felt. He couldn’t understand it. Did I realize that I was leaving a steady job for one that would be short-lived? My co-workers at the branch offered me a farewell dinner in a Chinese restaurant in La Victoria, during which they kept teasing me about my customers from the Jirón Huatica, who definitely weren’t going to miss me.

Filled with apprehension, I told my father the news. Despite the fact that I was going on eighteen, my fear of him reappeared on such occasions—a paralyzing sensation that minimized and nullified my arguments even in my own eyes, even on subjects concerning which I was certain that I was right—as well as the malaise I felt whenever he was near at hand, even in the most harmless situations.

He heard me out, turning slightly pale and scrutinizing me with that glacial gaze that I have never seen in anyone else, and once I had finished he demanded that I prove to him that I was going to earn five hundred soles a month. I had to go back to Dr. Porras’s to seek supporting evidence. He gave me the signed document, somewhat surprised, and my father confined himself to heaping scorn on me for a time, telling me that I hadn’t left the bank because the other job was going to be more interesting, but because of my lack of ambition.

And at the same time that I obtained the job with Porras Barrenechea, another fine thing happened to me: Uncle Lucho moved to Lima. Not for the right reasons. A sudden flood of the Chira River, owing to diluvial rains in the Piura mountains, had caused the waters to break through the barriers of the San José farm and destroy all the cotton fields, in a year in which the cleared land had produced plants with very heavy bolls and an exceptional harvest was expected. The investment and efforts of many years were wiped out in a matter of minutes. Uncle Lucho turned the plantation back to its owners, sold his furniture, loaded Aunt Olga and my cousins Wanda, Patricia, and Lucho in his station wagon, and got ready to fight for survival yet again, this time in Lima.