A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (47 page)

I left my father’s office in great excitement to send Julia a telegram telling her that her exile was over and that I’d be sending her money for her plane ticket back to Peru very soon. Then I rushed over to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s to pass on the good news to them. Although I was very busy now, what with all the jobs I’d taken on, every time I had a free moment I would hurry over to their house on the Avenida Armendáriz to have lunch or dinner, because with them I could talk about my exiled wife, the only subject that interested me. Aunt Olga too had finally become accustomed to the idea that her sister’s marriage was irreversible, and she was happy that my father had agreed to Julia’s return.

I immediately began to think up ways I could buy her plane ticket. Even though I was earning more money now, renting the apartment and redeeming my typewriter and my watch, indispensable for fulfilling all my work assignments, had left me without a cent. I was looking into how I could buy the plane ticket in installments or get a loan from the bank, when a telegram from Julia arrived for me, announcing her arrival on the following day. She had stolen a march on me by selling her jewelry.

I went to the airport to meet her, along with Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, and when Aunt Olga spied her among the passengers on the plane from Santiago, she made a remark that delighted me, because it showed that the family situation was back to normal: “Look how pretty your wife has made herself for the reunion.”

That was a very happy day, to be sure, for Julia and me. The little apartment in the townhouse on the Calle Porta was as tidy as could be and in it were fragrant flowers to welcome the bride. I had brought all my books and clothes there the evening before, with great expectations, moreover, at the prospect of finally beginning to live an independent life, in a house of my own (in a manner of speaking).

I had planned to finish my college courses and then my studies in the two Faculties—Letters and Law—that came after that, and not only because I had promised my family that I would, but also because I was certain that only those degrees would allow me to have the minimum financial security needed to devote myself to writing, and because I thought that without them I’d never get to Europe, to France, something that continued to be the main goal of my life. I was more determined than ever to try to be a writer and was convinced that I would never manage to be one if I didn’t leave Peru, if I didn’t live in Paris. I talked this over a thousand times with Julia and she, who was adventurous and fond of new things, egged me on: yes, yes, I should finish my studies and apply for the scholarship that the Banco Popular and San Marcos were awarding for postgraduate studies in Spain. Then we would go to Paris, where I would write all the novels I had in my head. She would help me.

She helped me a great deal, from the very first day. Without her aid, I would not have been able to hold down my seven jobs, to find the time to attend classes at San Marcos, to compose the essays the professors assigned and, as if all that weren’t enough, to write a fair number of short stories.

When, today, I try to reconstruct my schedule during those three years—1955 to 1958—I’m amazed: how was I able to do so many things and, on top of everything else, read piles of books, and cultivate the friendship of several wonderful friends such as Lucho and Abelardo, and also go to the movies every so often and eat and sleep? On paper, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all that. But I found room to fit it all in, and despite the hectic rushing around and the need to stretch every penny, they were exciting years of hopes renewed and enhanced, years in which, to be sure, I did not regret my sudden marriage.

I believe Julia didn’t either. We loved each other, enjoyed each other’s company, and although we had the inevitable fights that married life brings with it, during those three years in Lima, before the trip to Europe, our relationship was productive and mutually stimulating. One source of our quarrels was my fits of retrospective jealousy, the absurd, anguished fury I felt when I discovered that Julia had had a love life, and most important of all, following her divorce and up until the eve of her coming to Lima, she had had an impassioned love affair with an Argentine singer, who came to La Paz and caused havoc among the women in the city. For some mysterious reason—the subject makes me laugh today, but at the time it made me suffer a great deal and I made Julia suffer too on account of it—my wife’s affair with the Argentine singer, which she naïvely mentioned in passing shortly after we were married, kept me awake nights and made me feel that, even though it was over and done with, it represented a threat, a danger to our marriage, for it stole a part of Julia’s life from me, a part that would always be out of my reach, and that therefore we would never be able to be completely happy. I demanded that she recount to me a plethora of details about this adventure, and for that reason we sometimes had violent arguments, which would end in tender reconciliations.

But we also had fine times together. When one almost never has time, or money, for diversions, these, however rare and modest they may be, take on a wondrous quality, produce a pleasure unknown to those who can enjoy them when and as they please. I remember the childlike excitement it caused us, at the end of the month sometimes, to go out to lunch in a German restaurant on the Calle La Esperanza, the Gambrinus, where they served a delicious Wiener schnitzel, for which we joyfully prepared ourselves, looking forward to it for days. Or on certain nights, going to eat a pizza with a little pitcher of wine at La Pizzería, which a nice Swiss couple had just opened up on the Diagonal, and which, from the modest garage where it first set up in business, would become over the years one of the best-known restaurants in Miraflores.

Where we went at least once a week was to the movies. They delighted both of us. Unlike what happens to me with books, which, when they’re bad, not only bore me but irritate me as well, since they make me feel that I’m wasting my time, I can put up with bad films very easily, and as long as they aren’t pretentious, they amuse me. So we used to go see whatever was playing, and above all Mexican melodramas, full of moaning and groaning, with María Félix, Arturo de Córdoba, Agustín Lara, Emilio Tuero, Mirta Aguirre, and all the others, for which Julia and I had a perverse predilection.

Julia was a very good typist, so that I could give her the list of dead in the Presbítero Maestro scribbled in my notebooks and she would turn them into luminously clear index cards. She also typed my feature stories and articles for
El Comercio, Turismo
, and the magazine
Cultura Peruana
, for which I began to write, soon after, a monthly column devoted to the most important Peruvian political thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the title of “Hombres, libros y ideas” (“Men, Books and Ideas”). Preparing that column, for a little over two years, was very enjoyable, since, thanks to Porras Barrenechea’s library and the one at the Club Nacional, I could read almost all of them, from Sánchez Carrión y Vigil to José Carlos Mariátegui and Riva Agüero, passing by way of González Prada, whose virulent anarchical diatribes against institutions and political leaders of all stripes, in an exquisitely sculptured prose with the bright polish of the Parnassian poets, naturally made a tremendous impression on me.

The weekly interviews that Abelardo assigned me for
El Comercio
were very instructive with regard to the situation of Peruvian literature, although frequently they were disappointing. The first writer I interviewed was José María Arguedas. He had not yet published
Los ríos profundos
(
Deep Rivers
), but the author of
Yawar Fiesta
and
Diamantes y pedernales
(
Diamonds and Flints
), published not long before by Mejía Baca, was already surrounded by a certain cult that thought highly of him as a delicately lyrical narrator possessed of intimate knowledge of the world of the Indian. I was surprised by how timid and modest he was, how little he knew about modern literature, and his fears and hesitations. He made me show him the interview once I had written it up, corrected a number of things, and then sent a letter to Abelardo, requesting that it not be published, since he didn’t want anyone’s feelings to be hurt by it (because in it he had mentioned the stepbrother who had tormented him in his childhood). The letter arrived after the interview had already been printed. Arguedas was not disturbed by this and immediately sent me an affectionate little note, thanking me for how well I had dealt with him and his work.

I think that for that column I interviewed every living Peruvian who had ever published a novel in Peru: from the very elderly Enrique López Albújar, a living relic, who, in his little house in San Miguel, mixed up names, dates, and titles and spoke of men now seventy years old as “boys,” to the brand-new arrival on the literary scene, Vargas Vicuña, who was in the habit of interrupting his public readings by letting out a shout that was his motto (“Long live life, goddamn it!”) and who, after the beautiful prose passages of
Nahuín
, mysteriously vanished, at least from the world of literature. And passing, of course, by way of the likable Piuran Vegas Seminario, or Arturo Hernández, the author of
Sangama
, and dozens of writers, both men and women, on any number of subjects, the authors of novels about Creoles, about aborigines, about mestizos, about local customs, about blacks, which always fell from my hands and seemed very old (not ancient, just very old) because of the way in which they were written and, above all, structured as narratives.

At that time, largely because of my bedazzlement by Faulkner’s works, I was continually fascinated by novelistic technique, and all the novels that came my way I read with a clinical eye, observing the way in which point of view was handled, how the chronology was organized, whether the function of the narrator was consistent or whether the inconsistencies and technical infelicities—the use of adjectives, for example—destroyed (got in the way of) the work’s verisimilitude. I questioned all the novelists and short story writers whom I interviewed about narrative form, about their technical preoccupations, and their answers, disdainful of such “formalisms,” always dismayed me. Some of them added “formalisms borrowed from abroad, imitations of European trends,” and others went so far as to use the loaded word “telluric”: “To me, the important thing is not form, but life itself,” “My literature receives its sustenance from Peruvian essences.”

Ever since those days I have abhorred the word “telluric,” flaunted by many writers and critics of the time as the greatest literary virtue and the obligatory theme of every Peruvian writer. To be telluric meant to write a literature with roots in the bowels of the earth, in local landscape and local customs, preferably Andean ones, and to denounce the bossism and feudalism of the highlands, the jungle, or the coast, with cruel episodes involving
mistis
(whites in positions of power) who raped peasant girls, drunken authorities who stole, and fanatical, corrupt priests who preached resignation to the Indians. Those who wrote and promoted telluric literature failed to realize that, despite their intentions, it was the most conformist and conventional literature in the world, the repetition of a series of clichés, put together mechanically, in which a folkloristic language, affected and caricatural, and the carelessness with which the narratives were constructed completely corrupted the historico-critical testimony meant to justify them. Unreadable as literature, they were also false social documents, in truth a picturesque, banal, and complaisant adulteration of a complex reality.

For me, the word
telluric
came to stand for provincialism and underdevelopment in the field of literature, the elementary and superficial version of the writer’s vocation held by the ingenuous pen pusher who believes that good novels can be written by inventing good “subjects” and has yet to learn that a successful novel is a valiant intellectual effort, a struggle with language and the invention of a narrative order, of an organization of time, of movements, of an imparting of information alternating with silences on which it depends entirely whether a piece of fiction is true or false, moving or ridiculous, serious or stupid. I didn’t know whether I would manage to become a writer someday, but I did know after those years that I would never be a
telluric
writer.

To be sure, not all the Peruvian writers whom I interviewed had that folkloristic scorn for form nor did they shield their laziness behind an adjective. One of the exceptions was Sebastián Salazar Bondy. He had not written novels, but he had written short stories—in addition to essays, works for the theater, and poetry—and thus had a place in the series. That was the first time I conversed at length with him. I sought him out in his little office at the daily
La Prensa
, and we went downstairs to have coffee together, at the Crem Rica on the Jirón de la Unión. He was tall and slender and sharp as a knife, tremendously likable and intelligent and, unlike the others, well acquainted with modern literature, about which he spoke with an assurance and a keenness of judgment that filled me with respect. Like every young person who aspired to be a writer, I was a parricide, and Salazar Bondy, because of how active and many-sided he was—he seemed at times to represent the entire cultural life of Peru—turned out to be the “father” whom my generation had to bury in order to take on a personality of our own, and it was very “in” to attack him. I had done so too, severely criticizing, in
Turismo
, his play
No hay isla feliz (There Is No Happy Island)
, which I didn’t like. Although we came to be intimate friends only much later, I keep remembering that interview, because of the good impression it made on me. Talking with him was a healthy contrast to other authors whom I had interviewed: he was living proof that a Peruvian writer didn’t have to be telluric, that one could have a firm footing in Peruvian life and at the same time a mind open to the good literature of the whole world.