A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (39 page)

Porras also succumbed at times to Macera’s intellectual spell, and listened to him, amused by his verbal fireworks, but he very soon reacted and became furious at Macera’s inner chaos, his snobbery and the complacency with which he gloried in his own neuroses, which Pablo cultivated the way others care for kittens or water their garden. During those years, Porras convinced Macera that he should enter a contest that International Petroleum was sponsoring for the best essay on history, and kept Pedro locked up in his library for several weeks until he finished the work. This book, which won the prize
—Tres etapas en el desarrollo de la conciencia nacional (Three Stages in the Development of the National Consciousness)—
was later to be disavowed by Macera himself, who has eliminated it from his bibliography and mentions it only to rail against it.

Although he later subjected himself to discipline and worked in a more or less orderly way at San Marcos, where, I believe, he is still teaching, and has published many works on travelers, historiography, and economic history, Macera still has not written that great comprehensive work that his teacher Porras was waiting for from him, and for which that intelligence with which he was endowed had, so to speak, predestined him. What Macera said—in the introduction to his
conversaciones
with Jorge Basadre—about Valcárcel, Porras, and Jorge Guillermo Leguía, now fits him like a ring on his own finger: “They have not completed their work and have done less than what their greatness asked of them.”
^*
Like Porras himself, his intellectual life appears to have been broken up into fragmentary efforts. Moreover, although it is many years since I have seen him or talked to him, judging by those interviews in which he allows himself to be exploited by a certain sort of publication, copies of which sometimes reach me, the old habit of the ukase and of tremendous absurdities has not disappeared with the passage of the years, although how moth-eaten and rusty it all sounds nowadays, what with everything that has happened in the world and, above all, in Peru.

In those years, in which we were quite close friends, it delighted me to get his goat and argue with him. Not so as to win the argument—a difficult task—but to enjoy his dialectical method, his feints and his traps, and the lighthearted nonchalance with which he could change his mind and refute himself with arguments as forceful as those that he had just used to defend precisely the opposite proposition.

My work at Porras’s, and what I continually learned there, turned out to be a great incentive. In those years of 1954 and 1955 I threw myself into writing and reading, morning and night, more convinced than ever that my true vocation was literature. My mind was made up: I would devote my life to writing and to teaching. My university career was the ideal complement to my vocation, since there was a great deal of time free between classes at San Marcos.

I had stopped writing poems and plays, because I now felt more fascinated by fiction. I did not dare to embark on a novel, but I trained myself by writing short stories, of all lengths and on all possible subjects, almost always ending up by tearing them to bits.

Carlos Araníbar, whom I told that I was writing short stories, proposed to me one day that I read one of them in a group headed by Jorge Puccinelli, a professor of literature and the editor of a review that, although it came out late, came out erratically, or never came out at all, contained writing of quality and was one of the outlets that young writers counted on:
Letras Peruanas
. Dreaming of the prospect of passing this test, I searched through my texts, chose the short story that seemed to me to be the best one—it was called “La parda” (“The Woman with Dusky Skin”), and dealt with a vaguely described woman who wandered from one café to another telling stories about her life. I corrected it and on the appointed night presented myself where the literary circle was meeting that time: El Patio, a café frequented by bullfight fans, artists, and bohemians, in the little square in front of the Teatro Segura. The experience of that first reading in public of a text of mine was a disaster. There were at least a dozen people there, sitting around the large table on the second floor of El Patio, among whom I remember, besides Puccinelli and Araníbar, Julio Macera, Pablo’s brother, Carlos Zavaleta, the poet and critic Alberto Escobar, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and perhaps Abelardo Oquendo, who was to become a close friend of mine a couple of years later. A bit intimidated, I read my story. An ominous silence followed the reading. No comments, no sign of approval or of disapproval: nothing but a depressing silence. After an interminable pause, various conversations started up again, on other subjects, as though nothing had happened. Much later in the evening, talking about something else, in order to emphasize his argument in favor of fiction that was realistic and national, Alberto referred disdainfully to what he called “abstract literature” and pointed to my story, which was still lying there in the middle of the table. When the gathering broke up and we’d all said goodbye to each other, once we were down on the street, Araníbar made amends by offering a few comments on my mistreated story. But once I arrived home, I tore it up and swore to myself never to go through an experience like that again.

The literary world in Lima in those days was rather mediocre, but I watched it enviously and tried to edge my way into it. There were two playwrights, Juan Ríos and Sebastián Salazar Bondy. The former lived the life of a recluse in his house in Miraflores, but the latter was often seen wandering about the courtyards of San Marcos, trailing after a good-looking classmate of mine, Rosita Zevallos, for whom he sometimes waited as classes let out, holding a romantic red rose in his hand. That courtyard of the Faculty of Letters at San Marcos was the general headquarters for the country’s potential and virtual poets and writers of fiction. The majority of them had published at most one or two very slender volumes of poems and hence Alejandro Romualdo, who in those days had returned to Peru after a long stay in Europe, would make fun of them and say: “¿Poetas? ¡No! ¡Plaquetas!” (“Poets? No! Pamphleteers!”). The most mysterious of them was Washington Delgado, whose stubborn silence some interpreted as a sign of buried genius. “When that mouth opens—they said—Peruvian poetry will be filled with memorable arpeggios and trills.” (The fact is that, when the mouth opened, years later, Peruvian poetry was filled with imitations of Bertolt Brecht.) Pablo Guevara, an intuitive poet, had just come out with a collection of verse entitled
Retorno de la creatura (Return of the Human Being)
, whose exuberant poetry didn’t seem to have anything to do with him, nor he to have anything to do with books—which, a little later on, he would abandon to devote himself to filmmaking. And poets in exile began to come back to Peru, a number of whom—Manuel Scorza, Gustavo Valcárcel, Juan Gonzalo Rose—had quit the APRA and turned into militant Communists (Valcárcel, for instance) or fellow travelers. The most sensational abandonment of the APRA was Scorza’s, who from Mexico addressed a public letter to the leader of the Aprista party, accusing him of having sold out to imperialism—“Goodbye, Mr. Haya”—which circulated all over San Marcos.

Among the writers of fiction, the most respected, although he had not yet published a book, was Julio Ramón Ribeyro, who lived in Europe.
Dominical
, the Sunday supplement of
El Comercio
, and other publications occasionally printed his stories, ones like “Los gallinazos sin plumas” (“The Turkey Buzzards without Feathers”), which everyone commented on with respect. Of those in Peru, the most active was Carlos Zavaleta, who, in addition to publishing his first short stories in those years, had translated Joyce’s
Chamber Music
, and was a great promoter of Faulkner’s novels. It is to him, no doubt, that I owe my having discovered around this time the author of the saga of Yoknapatawpha County, which, from the first novel of his that I read
—The Wild Palms—
left me so bedazzled that I still haven’t recovered. He was the first writer whom I studied with paper and pencil in hand, taking notes so as not to get lost in his genealogical labyrinths and shifts of time and points of view, and also trying to unearth the secrets of the baroque construction that each one of his stories was based on, the serpentine language, the fracturing of chronological sequence, the mystery and the profundity and the disturbing ambiguities and psychological subtleties which that form gave to his stories. Although I read a great many American novelists in those years—Erskine Caldwell, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Waldo Frank—it was when I read
Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust, These Thirteen, Knight’s Gambit
, and other of Faulkner’s works that I discovered the adaptability and the creativity of the narrative form and the marvels that could be wrought in a work of fiction when used by a novelist with Faulkner’s skill. Along with Sartre, Faulkner was the author I most admired in my years at San Marcos; he made me feel that it was urgent for me to learn English so as to be able to read his books in their original language. Another writer, a somewhat elusive one, who appeared like a will-o’-the-wisp around San Marcos was Vargas Vicuña, whose subtle collection of stories,
Nahuín
, published in that period, aroused expectations of a body of work from him that, unfortunately, never was forthcoming.

But of all those poets and writers of fiction that I met every day in the courtyard of the Faculty of Letters at San Marcos, the flashiest figure was Alejandro Romualdo. A short little man, with mannerisms reminiscent of Tarzan and the legs of a flamenco dancer, he had been, before going off to Europe with a scholarship from Cultura Hispánica—the bridge to the outside world for penniless Peruvian writers—a sumptuous, musical poet, of the sort called a formalist (by contrast to socially oriented poets), who had written a beautiful book,
La torre de los alucinados (The Tower of the Hallucinated
), that won the National Poetry Prize. At the same time, he had become famous for his political caricatures—in particular, hybrids of different persons—in Pedro Beltrán’s
La Prensa
. Romualdo—Xano to his friends—came back from Europe converted to realism, to political commitment, to Marxism, and to revolution. But he had not lost his sense of humor or the wit and cleverness that came pouring out in the form of wordplay and jokes in the courtyard of San Marcos. “I
didn’t hear
that abstract painting well,” he would say, and also, puffing out his chest: “I believe in dialectical materialism and my wife supports me.” He brought with him the originals of what was to be a magnificent book
—Poesía concreta (Concrete Poetry)—
politically committed poems animated by a spirit of justice, written with fine craftsmanship and a good ear, wordplay, disconcerting run-on lines, and moral and political defiance, in somewhat the same direction in which Blas de Otero, who had become a good friend of Romualdo’s, had oriented his poetry in Spain. And in a reading that he gave at San Marcos, in which several poets participated, Romualdo was the star, milking his audience—above all with his flamboyant “Canto coral a Túpac Amaru, que es libertad” (“Choral Chant to Túpac Amaru, Who Is Freedom”) of ovations that turned the reception room at San Marcos into the stage for what was practically a political rally.

In all truth, that was what that reading was. It must have taken place at the end of 1954 or the beginning of 1955 and at it all the poets read or recited something that could be interpreted as an attack on the dictatorship. It was one of the first manifestations of a progressive mobilization of the country against that regime which, since October of 1948, had governed with an iron hand, crushing every attempt to criticize it.

San Marcos was the focal point and amplifier of the protests. These often took the form of lightning demonstrations. Not very numerous groups of us—a hundred, two hundred people—would agree to meet in some very crowded place, the Jirón de la Unión, the Plaza San Martín, La Colmena, or the Parque Universitario, and at the hour when there were the most people there, we would gather in the middle of the street and begin to shout in chorus: “Freedom! Freedom!” Sometimes we paraded for one or two blocks, inviting passersby to join us, and then broke up as soon as the mounted Civil Guards or the antiriot vehicles equipped with high-pressure hoses that shot foul-smelling water at us appeared on the scene.

I went to all the lightning demonstrations with Javier Silva, who, with all his fat, had to exert superhuman efforts so as not to be left behind as we ran from the police. His political vocation was becoming more widely known in those days, as well as his unrestrained personality, which made him want to be in on everything and be everywhere at once, playing a major role in all the conspiracies. One afternoon I went with him to visit Luciano Castillo, the head of the minuscule Socialist Party, and a Piuran, like Javier, in his little office on the Jirón Lampa. After a few minutes Javier came out of his office, beaming. He showed me a card: in addition to signing him up as a member of the party, Luciano Castillo had promoted him to the post of secretary general of the Socialist Youth Movement. As such, a while later, on the stage of the Teatro Segura one night, he read a violent revolutionary speech against Odría’s regime (which I wrote for him).

But, at the same time, he conspired with members of the APRA, which was springing up again, and with the new opposition groups that were organizing in Lima and in Arequipa. Of these groups, four would take definite shape in the following months, one of them with only an ephemeral existence—the National Coalition, guided by remote control by the daily
La Prensa
and Don Pedro Beltrán (who had gone over to the side in opposition to Odría), whose leader, Pedro Roselló, was also the organizer of an equally ephemeral group, the Owners’ Association—and three others that turned out to be political organizations with a more prolonged future: Democracia Cristiana (Christian Democracy), the Movimiento Social Progresista (the Social Progressivist Movement), and the Frente Nacional de Juventudes (National Youth Front), the seed of what was to become Popular Action, with Eduardo Orrego, at the time an architecture student, as one of the organizers.