A Fish in the Water

  When I lost my job with Dr. Lavalle, my income was reduced, but not for very long, since, almost immediately, I found two other jobs, one real and the other theoretical. The real job was the one on the magazine Extra, whose owner, Don Jorge Checa, the ex-prefect of Piura, had known me since I was a little boy. He took me on when the magazine was already on the verge of bankruptcy. At the end of each month, those of us on the editorial staff lived through moments of anxiety, because only the ones who arrived first at the head office received their pay; the others received vouchers for payment sometime in the future. Every week while I was there I wrote film reviews and articles on cultural subjects. Sometimes I too was left without a paycheck. But I didn’t carry off Extra’s typewriters and even its office furniture, the way several of my colleagues did, because of my liking for Jorge Checa. I don’t know how much money the prodigal Don Jorge lost in this publishing venture; but he lost it with the nonchalance of a great lord and a Maecenas, without complaining and without getting rid of the horde of journalists he kept on the payroll, a number of whom stole him blind in the most cynical way. He apparently realized what was going on but it didn’t matter to him as long as he was having fun. And it was true that he was having a great time. He used to take the journalists from Extra to the house of his mistress, a good-looking woman whom he had set up in a house along Magdalena Vieja, where he organized lunches that ended up as orgies. The first jealous scene Julia ever made with me, after we’d been married a year and a half, must have been after one of those lunches, in what by now were the final weeks of existence of Extra, when I came back home in a rather unseemly state and with red stains on my handkerchief. The fight we had was a tooth-and-nail one and didn’t leave me with much enthusiasm for going back to Don Jorge’s hectic lunches. There wasn’t much chance of that, moreover, because a few weeks later the editor-in-chief of the magazine, the intelligent and refined Pedro Álvarez del Villar, skipped the country with Don Jorge’s mistress, and the staff of the weekly who hadn’t been paid their salaries carried off the last remaining pieces of furniture and typewriters, so that Extra died of consumption. (I will always remember Don Jorge Checa, when he was prefect of Piura and I a senior at San Miguel, ordering me, one night at the Grau club: “Marito, you who are halfway toward being an intellectual, go up onstage and introduce The Andalusian gypsies from Spain to the audience.” Don Jorge’s idea of an intellectual was based, doubtless, on the intellectuals whom he had happened to meet and hire.)

  Porras Barrenechea was elected senator representing Lima on the list presented by friends of the APRA, and in the first election held by Congress was chosen first vice president of the Senate. In that capacity he had a right to have two hired assistants, posts to which he appointed Carlos Araníbar and me. The job was a theoretical one, because, as Porras’s aides, we went on working with him at his home, doing historical research, and dropped by Congress only at the end of each month to collect our modest salaries. After six months had gone by, Porras informed Carlos Araníbar and me that our posts had been done away with. That half year was my first and last experience as a civil servant.

  Around that time, Julia and I moved from the minuscule little apartment in the townhouse on the Calle Porta to a roomier one, with two bedrooms—one of which I turned into a study—on Las Acacias, a few blocks away from Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s. It was in a modern building, very near the seawall and the ocean, in Miraflores, although it had only one window overlooking the street and so we had to keep the lights on all day long.

  We lived there for more than two years, and I believe that, despite my exhausting daily routine, it was a time with many compensations, the best of which was, without a shadow of a doubt, my friendship with Luis Loayza and Abelardo Oquendo. I had met Luis sometime before, and Abelardo when I was a contributor to the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, whose literary section he was in charge of. From that period on, the three of us began seeing each other more and more often, until we constituted an inseparable triumvirate. We used to spend weekends together, at my place or at Abelardo and Pupi’s, on the Avenida Angamos, or we would go out to eat at a Chinese restaurant, outings on which we were sometimes joined by other friends, such as Sebastián Salazar Bondy, José Miguel Oviedo (who was beginning to take up arms as a literary critic for the first time), a Spanish friend of Loayza’s named José Manuel Muñoz, Pablo Macera, the actor Tachi Hilbck, or Baldomero Cáceres, the future psychologist, in those days more concerned with theology than with science and for that reason nicknamed Cristo Cáceres by Macera.

  But Abelardo, Lucho, and I also saw each other during the week. We thought up all sorts of pretexts for meeting in downtown Lima to have coffee together and chat, between classes and our jobs, if only for a few minutes, because those meetings, in which we exchanged comments about one book or another, traded political, literary, or university gossip, stimulated us and compensated for the many boring and mechanical things involved in our daily routines.

  Both Lucho and Abelardo had given up their literary studies at the university so as to devote all their time to their law studies. Abelardo had just received his law degree and was already a practicing attorney, in his father-in-law’s office. Lucho was just finishing his last courses in the Faculty of Law and practicing in the office of a bigwig of Pradism: Carlos Ledgard. But simply knowing them was enough to be certain that what really mattered to them was literature, and that it would enter their lives again every time they tried to get away from it. I believe that in those days Abelardo wanted to get away from it. He had finished all his courses for a degree in Letters and had spent a year in Spain on a scholarship meant to enable him to write a doctoral dissertation on proverbs in the works of Ricardo Palma. I don’t know whether it was this arid sort of research reminiscent of the dissection of cadavers—all the rage at the time in the field of stylistics, which exerted a dictatorship that had the effect of sterilizing university departments of literature—that made him sick and tired of the prospect of an academic career, or whether he left the field for practical reasons, telling himself that, having recently married and with a family in prospect, he had to think of more reliable ways of earning a living. The fact is that he had given up writing his dissertation and left the university. But not literature. He read a great deal and spoke with tremendous sensitivity about literary texts, poetry in particular, for which he had a surgeon’s eye and exquisite taste. He sometimes wrote book reviews, always very penetrating ones, models of the genre, but he almost never signed them and at times I wondered whether Abelardo hadn’t decided, because of his rigorous critical acumen, to give up writing so as to be the one person in whom he could attain that perfection he sought: a reader. He had studied the classics of the Golden Age intensively and I always provoked him into discussing them because hearing him express an opinion about El Romancero, Quevedo, or Góngora filled me with envy.

  His genteel air and his repugnance for any sort of fakery, his maniacal concern for propriety—in his dress, his speech, his behavior toward his friends—called to mind an aristocrat of the spirit who, through an error of fate, was exiled in the body of a young man belonging to the middle class, in a hard practical world in which he was destined to have a difficult time surviving. When Lucho and I spoke of him, by ourselves, we called him the Dauphin.

  In those days Lucho had, in addition to his passion for Borges, one for Henry James, which I failed to share. He was a cannibalistic reader of books in English, which he bought or ordered in a bookstore specializing in works in foreign languages, on the Calle Belén, and he continually surprised me with a new title or author he just discovered. I remember his great find, in an old bookstore downtown: a magnificent translation of Marcel Schwob’s fine book, Vies imaginaires, which he was so enthusiastic about that he bought every copy of it in the store to distribute to his friends. Often our literary tastes differed, which gave us an excuse for stupendous arguments. Thanks to Lucho, I discovered exciting books, such as Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering
Sky and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, in Spanish translations. One of our violent literary arguments had a comical ending. The subject of it: Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres, which he admired and I detested. When I told him that the book seemed to me verbose, its prose affected and long-winded, he replied that the argument couldn’t go on without Baldomero Cáceres, a fanatical fan of Gide’s, taking part in it. We hunted Baldomero up, and Lucho asked me to repeat to his face what I thought of Les Nourritures terrestres. I did as he asked. Baldomero burst out laughing. He roared with laughter for a long time, doubled over, holding his sides, as though he were being tickled, as though he been told the funniest joke in the world. This line of argument shut me up.

  We dreamed, naturally, of bringing out a literary review that would be our forum and the visible sign of our friendship. One fine day, Lucho announced to us that he would finance the first issue, with his salary from the Ledgard law office. There thus came into being Literatura, of which just three issues were to appear (the last of the three when Lucho and I were already in Europe). The first issue included a homage to César Moro—a teacher of mine at Leoncio Prado—whose poetry I had discovered a short time before and whose “inner exile” intrigued me and attracted me as much as his writings. On his return from France and Mexico, countries in which he lived for many years, Moro had lived in Peru a secret, marginal life, not mingling with writers, publishing practically nothing, writing texts, the majority of them in French, read by a small circle of friends. André Coyné gave us several of Moro’s unpublished poems for that issue, which also contained contributions by Sebastián Salazar Bondy, José Durand, and a young Peruvian poet, the author of a number of very beautiful poems that Lucho had discovered in a lost issue of Mercurio Peruano: Carlos Germán Belli. The issue also contained a manifesto against the death penalty, signed by the three of us, occasioned by the execution in Lima by a firing squad of a convicted criminal (the “monster of Armendáriz”) that had served as an excuse for a repellent public celebration: people had gathered at dawn on the Paseo de la República to listen, as day broke, to the fatal shots of the firing squad. The issue included as well Loayza’s wonderful portrait of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The publication of this little review, no more than a handful of pages, was an exciting adventure because this activity, like the conversations with Lucho and Abelardo, made me feel like a writer, an illusion that had little to do with the reality of how I spent my time, taken up as it was by all my jobs to earn our daily bread.

  It seems to me that I was the one, with that inquisitiveness of mine that never left me—and still hasn’t—who got us started, in the summer of 1957, holding spiritualistic séances. We usually held them at my place. A cousin of Julia’s and Olguita’s, whose name was also Olga and who was a medium, had arrived from Bolivia. She frequented the other world with the greatest of ease. In the sessions she played her role so well that it was impossible not to believe that spirits spoke through her mouth; or more precisely, through her hand, since they dictated their messages to her and she wrote them down. The problem was that all the spirits that obeyed her summons made the same spelling mistakes. Despite this, moments of ebullient nervous tension were created, and afterward I would stay awake all night long, tossing and turning in bed out of guilt at that contact with the world beyond.

  In one of these spiritualistic sessions, Pablo Macera began pounding on the table: “Keep quiet, it’s my grandmother.” He was deathly pale, and there was no doubt about it; he believed it. “Ask her if I killed her from the fit of rage I caused her,” he stammered. His grandmother’s spirit refused to relieve his doubts and he held it against us for some time, telling us that our fooling around had deprived him of the chance to free himself of a distressing uncertainty.

  In the library of the Club Nacional I also came across some books on satanism, but my friends categorically refused to have us conjure up the devil following the obscene recipes of those manuals. They would consent only to our going every so often, at midnight, to the romantic cemetery in Surco, where Baldomero, in a state of lyrical rapture, suddenly began to ballet dance in the moonlight, leaping about amid the graves…

  The Saturday night meetings, at my house in Las Acacias, lasted till dawn and were usually very amusing. We sometimes played a terrific, semihysterical game: the laughing game. The one who lost had to make the others laugh by clowning around. I had a very effective trick. Imitating a duck’s waddle, I rolled my eyes and cackled: “This is the miter-bird, the miter-bird, the miter-bird!” The self-important ones, such as Loayza and Macera, endured indescribable suffering when it was their turn to play the buffoon, and the only amusing gimmick that occurred to the latter was to pucker his mouth up like a baby and growl: brrrr, brrrr. A much more dangerous game was Truth or Consequences. In one of these sessions of collective exhibitionism, we listened, we heard, all of a sudden, from the timid Carlos Germán Belli—my admiration for his poems had led me to visit him in the very modest job as amanuensis that he had as a congressional clerk—a confession that amazed us: “I’ve slept with the ugliest women in Lima.” Carlos Germán was a rigidly moral surrealist, much like César Moro, stuffed into the skeleton of a well-educated and inconspicuous young man, and one day he had decided to put an end to his inhibitions about women, posting himself at the exit of the building where he worked, on a corner of the Jirón de la Unión, and making provocative remarks to the women passing by. But his timidity made him tongue-tied with the pretty ones; his tongue would loosen only to proposition the ugly ones…

  Someone else who often came to those gatherings was Fernando Hilbck, a classmate of Lucho’s at the Faculty of Law and an actor. Loayza told how one day, in their last year, for the first time in seven years, Tachi became interested in a class: “How does it happen, Professor, that there are several codes? Aren’t all of the laws in just one book?” The professor called him aside: “Tell your father to let you become an actor and don’t waste any more time studying law.” Tachi’s father resigned himself and did just that, regretting that his son wouldn’t be the star of the tribunals that he’d dreamed he’d be. He sent him to Italy and gave him two years to make himself famous in the movies. I saw Tachi in Rome, shortly before the fateful date came round. All he had managed to accomplish was to play the part of a furtive Roman centurion in a film, but he was happy. Then he went to Spain, where he had a brief career in the movies and the theater, and finally—yet another Peruvian to number among those who chose invisibility—he disappeared altogether. In the spiritualist séances or in the game of clowning around, Tachi Hilbck was unbeatable: his histrionic gifts transformed the gathering into a hilarious performance.

  Chance brought Raúl and Teresa Deustua, just back from the United States, where Raúl had worked for many years as a translator at the United Nations, to live in the apartment next to ours on Las Acacias. Belonging to the same generation as Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Javier Sologuren, and Eduardo Eielson, Raúl was, like them, a poet, and the author of a play, Judith, that remained unpublished. A refined man who was very well read, especially in English and in French, he was one of those elusive figures of Peruvian culture who, after a brief appearance on the scene, disappear and become ghosts, because they go abroad and break all their ties to Peru, or because, like César Moro, they opt for inner exile, keeping their distance from everybody and everything that might remind them of their swift journey along the path of art, thought, or literature. I have always been fascinated by the case of those Peruvians who, because of a sort of tragic loyalty to a vocation difficult to reconcile with their milieu, break with the latter, and to all appearances with the better part of themselves—their sensitivity, their intelligence, their culture—so as not to make debasing concessions or compromises.

  Raúl had stopped publishing his work (he had published very little, in all truth), but he hadn’t stopped writing and his conversation was as literary as it could possibly be. We became friends, and he was very pleased to find a group of y
oung men of letters that knew his writings, sought him out, and invited him to their gatherings. He had a fine collection of French books, which he generously lent us, and thanks to him I could read many Surrealist books and a number of wonderful issues of Minotaure. He had made a translation of Baudelaire’s Fusées and Mon Coeur mis à nu and I spent many hours with him and Loayza, revising it. Like the majority of his poems and a Chosica Diary, a record of days spent in the pleasant old resort town in the mountains above Lima, which he used to read aloud to us, I believe that the Baudelaire translation never saw print.

  I don’t know why Raúl Deustua came back to Peru—out of nostalgia for the old country perhaps, and with the hope of finding a good job. He worked at different things, at Radio Panamericana and at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, to which Porras Barrenechea offered him entrée, but he never did find the comfortable position that he longed for. In a few months he gave up and left Peru once more, for Venezuela this time. Teresita, who had made friends with Julia, was pregnant and stayed behind in Lima to have the baby. She was very likable and being pregnant sometimes made her have sudden whims like this exquisite one: “I should like to nibble on the edges of wontons.” Lucho Loayza and I went out to a chifa—a Chinese restaurant—to buy her some. When the baby was born, the Deustuas asked me to be his godfather, so that I had to take him in my arms to the baptismal font.