A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  My tour of police headquarters began at around seven at night, but it was later, from ten or eleven o’clock on, that the patrol cars arrived back at the stations with their loads of thieves, bloodthirsty lovers, those badly injured from fights in bars and bordellos, or transvestites, who were cruelly hounded and who always merited the honors of the police-blotter page. Between PIPs (police detectives) and Civil Guards, Becerrita had a fine-meshed network of informers, whom he had done favors for—hiding facts or giving on his page the information that put them in the best light—and thanks to those sources we often scooped our rival, Última Hora. Becerrita’s page had been the sovereign queen of violent death and scandal for many years. But this new daily, Última Hora, the evening edition of La Prensa, which had introduced slang and cant—local idioms and vulgar expressions—into their headlines and their news items, fought Becerrita for the scepter and on certain days snatched it away from him: that left him beside himself. Scooping Última Hora, outdoing it with bigger doses of death and pandering, on the other hand, made him growl with pleasure and let out those outlandish guffaws that seemed to come from the innermost depths of a tunnel or a stone quarry, and not from a human throat.

  Despite the fierce competition that brought our two daily papers face to face in their fight for the sensationalist kingdom, I came to be a very good friend of the chief editor of the crime page of Última Hora, Norwin Sánchez Geny. He was a Nicaraguan and had come to study law at the Catholic University in Lima. He began to work as a journalist in his free time and thereby discovered his vocation. And his talent as well, if talent is the right name for what he and Becerrita had created (something that other journalists would later develop to criminal extremes). Norwin was young, skinny, an inveterate bohemian, generous, a tireless, lecherous whoremaster and beer drinker. After the third or fourth glass he would begin to recite the first chapter of the Quijote, which he knew by heart. His eyes would fill with tears: “What great prose, damn it all!” Very often, Carlos, Milton, and I would go by to get him at the Última Hora editorial room, upstairs at La Prensa, on the Jirón de La Unión, or he would pick us up on the Calle Pando, and we would go have a few beers, or on payday take off for a brothel. (Norwin, that likable fellow, returned some years later to Nicaragua, where he became a serious, upright man, according to what he wrote me in a letter that I unexpectedly received in 1969, while I was giving a series of lectures at the University of Puerto Rico. He gave up journalism, studied economics, graduated, and became a bureaucrat. But shortly thereafter he met the sort of end that Última Hora capitalized on: he was murdered, in a cheap bar in Managua, during a fight.) The places we went to most often were some little Chinese bars, on La Colmena and its environs, very old, smoke-filled, stinking, crowded places which stayed open all night, in some of which the tables were separated from each other by screens or thin wooden partitions—as in Chinese restaurants—covered with graffiti in pencil or carved with a knife and cigar burns. All of them had soot-stained, grimy ceilings, red-tiled floors on which the waiters, young mountain boys who could barely get out a few words in Spanish, threw bucketfuls of sawdust so as to sweep up the puke and gobs of spit of drunks more easily. In the dim light the night owls of downtown Lima, the dregs of humanity, could be seen: inveterate souses, bourgeois gays cruising for pickups, hookers, no-account pimps, office clerks winding up a bachelor dinner. Those of us from La Crónica would talk and smoke together, the others would recount their adventures as journalists, and I would listen to them, feeling very much older than my sixteen years—a birthday I had not yet reached—and yet I was a real bohemian, a real journalist. And I secretly thought that I was living the same life that had been lived, right here, when he came to the capital from his provincial Trujillo, by the great César Vallejo, whom I began to read for the first time—surely following the advice of Carlos Ney—during that summer. Hadn’t he spent his nights in the bars and brothels of bohemian Lima? Didn’t his poems, his short stories testify to it? This was the path, then, to literature and to genius.

  Carlos Ney Barrionuevo was my literary mentor during those months. He was five or six years older than I and had read a great deal, modern literature in particular, and published poems in the cultural supplement of La Crónica. Sometimes, late at night, when beers took away his timidity—his nose already red and his greenish eyes gleaming feverishly—he took out of his pocket a poem scribbled in a page of his reporter’s notebook and read it to us. He wrote poems that were hard to understand, full of strange words, that intrigued me as I listened to them, for they revealed to me a completely unknown world, that of modern poetry. It was from him that I learned of the existence of Martín Adán, many of whose sonnets from Poesía de extramares (Poetry from Beyond the Sea) he could recite from memory, and whose bohemian figure—shuttling back and forth between the madhouse and the tavern—Carlos would go religiously to spy on at the Cordano bar next to the Presidential Palace, headquarters of the poet Martín Adán on the days when he left the psychiatric clinic in which he had decided to live.

  I am more in debt for my literary education to Carlitos Ney than to all my teachers at secondary school and most of the ones I had at the university. Thanks to him, I became acquainted with some of the books and authors that would brand my adolescence with fire—the Malraux of Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope, the American novelists of the Lost Generation, and above all Sartre, whose short stories, collected in The Wall, Ney gave me one afternoon, in the Losada edition with a prologue by Guillermo de Torre. Through this book there began a relationship with Sartre’s work and thought that was to have a decisive effect on my vocation. And I am certain that it was also Carlitos Ney who first spoke to me of Eguren’s poetry, of Surrealism and of Joyce, whose Ulysses he must have bought me, in the dreadful translation published by Santiago Rueda, which, let me say in passing, I was hardly able to get through, skipping whole pages and not understanding very much of what I read.

  But, even more than what he had me read, I owe to my friend Carlos Ney his having taught me, on those bohemian nights, everything I didn’t know about books and authors that were making the rounds in the vast outside world, without my even having heard that they existed, and having given me an intuition of the complexity and richness that went to make up that literature, which for me, up until then, had meant little more than adventure stories and a handful of classic or modernist poets.

  Talking about books, about authors, about poetry with Carlitos Ney, in the filthy little rooms of downtown Lima, or in boisterous and promiscuous brothels, was exciting. Because Carlos was sensitive and intelligent and had an inordinate love of literature, which, I am convinced, must have represented for him something more profound and basic than the journalism to which he was to devote his whole life. I always believed that, at one time or another, Carlitos Ney would publish a book of poems which would reveal to the world that enormous talent he seemed to be hiding and which, in the wee hours, when alcohol and staying up all night had made all his timidity and sense of self-criticism disappear, he let us catch a glimpse or two of. That he didn’t bring out such a book, and that his life was spent instead, I suspect, between the frustrating editorial rooms of Lima daily papers and his “nights of bohemian investigations,” is not something that surprises me today. For the truth is that, as happened to Carlitos Ney, I have seen other friends of my youth who appeared to have been called to be the princes of our republic of letters gradually become inhibited and fade away, because of that lack of conviction, that premature and profound pessimism that is the sickness par excellence, in Peru, of the best and the brightest—a curious means, it would seem, adopted by those who are worth the most, to defend themselves from the mediocrity, the frauds, and the frustrations that intellectual and artistic life offers in such an unfavorable milieu.

  When we had a bit of money, instead of going to the Chinese bars on La Colmena, we used to go to a chic bohemian place: the Negro-Negro. In that basement underneath the arcades of the Plaza San Martín I f
elt as though I were in the Paris I dreamed of, in one of the caves where Juliette Greco sang, with the existentialist writers listening. The Negro-Negro was a boîte with intellectual pretensions; in it theatrical performances and recitals were given and French music was played. In the wee hours, at its tiny tables and between its walls papered with covers from The New Yorker, an exquisite and eccentric fauna got together: painters such as Sérvulo Gutiérrez, who had been a boxer and who one night recounted there how he had challenged a member of the armed forces to a fistfight in a taxi; actors, actresses, or musicians who’d just finished their performances, or, simply, bohemians and night owls in suits and ties. It was there, one night after many beers, that a sophisticate from Arequipa named Velando had me try a “snort,” assuring me that, if I breathed in those grains of white powder, they would make my dizziness from the alcohol disappear in one fell swoop and leave me fresh and ready to go on for the rest of the night. In fact, the “snort,” because it was too big a dose or because I was constitutionally allergic to it, left me in a state of nervous overexcitement, an anxiety and a malaise worse that any “downer” from drinking too much, and took away all desire to repeat that experience with drugs. (That “sniff” of cocaine, the only one I ever took in my life, was to have a melodramatic resurrection, forty years later, during the 1990 electoral campaign.)

  During that summer, and because of my job at La Crónica, I saw a corpse for the first time in my life. The image has lingered in my memory, which brings it back to me every so often to grieve me or depress me. One afternoon, when I arrived at the paper, Becerrita sent me off to El Porvenir in search of a scoop that a “data gatherer” had just phoned in to him. The San Pablo was a miserable cheap hotel, with rooms to take hookers to, on a street that crossed the Avenida 28 de Julio, in those days a neighborhood with a bad reputation for prostitution, robbery, and mayhem. The police let me past after I’d shown them my press card with my photograph, and at the end of several dark hallways, lined on each side with symmetrical little rooms, I suddenly came upon the naked corpse of a very young mestiza who had been stabbed to death with a knife. As he photographed her from different angles, the great Ego Aguirre joked with the PIPs. The atmosphere exuded squalor and grotesque depravity, in addition to the cruelty of the underground. For several days I filled whole pages of La Crónica with news stories on the mysterious murder of the “night moth” of the Hotel San Pablo, investigating her life, tracking down friends and relatives of hers, going and coming amid bars, bordellos, and miserable back streets, trying to dredge up facts about her, and then writing the sort of hair-raising pieces that were the specialty of La Crónica.

  When I went back to the local news section, I had a certain nostalgia for those lower depths that work under Becerrita had given me a glimpse of. But I didn’t have time to get bored. The editor-in-chief assigned me the job of chasing down the winners of the polla and the pollón and interviewing them. The first or the second week of this hunt, we were informed that the winner of several millions was in Trujillo. They put me into a station wagon belonging to the paper, along with a photographer, and the two of us started out to track him down. At Kilometer 70 or 71 along the highway, a truck coming in the opposite direction forced our driver off the road. The car turned over once or twice on the sandy ground and I was thrown out, breaking the windshield as my body went through it. When I came to, a red station wagon, with a compassionate driver, was taking me back to Lima. They put the photographer, who also had several slight injuries, and me in a private clinic and La Crónica published a little box with the news of the accident, picturing us as war heroes.

  A moment of grave danger came about on one of those days when I was in the clinic, when there suddenly appeared, in the room I shared with the photographer, a night moth of the Avenida Colonial, who went by the name of Magda, with whom I had been having a romance for a time. She was young, with a pretty little face, dark chestnut hair and bangs, and one night, in that brothel, I had agreed to let her offer me her services on credit (I barely had enough money for the room). We saw each other later, in the daytime, in a Crem Rica that was next to La Cabaña in the Parque de la Exposición, and we went to the movies, holding hands and kissing each other in the dark. I had seen her two or three times after that, where she worked or on the street, before her sudden appearance in my hospital room. She was sitting on my bed, alongside me, when through the window I spied my father approaching, and such fear must have showed on my face that she immediately realized that something serious might happen, and quickly got to her feet and left the room, meeting my father on the threshold. He must have thought that the young lady with all the makeup was a visitor of the photographer’s, because he didn’t ask me anything about her. Despite the work and the great time I was having that summer as a grownup, when confronted with the figure of my father I was still a little boy.

  I mention Magda—I don’t know if that was her real name—because of this anecdote, and because I believe I fell in love with her, although at the time, doubtless, I wouldn’t have confessed it to any of my bohemian friends, since what man in his right mind fell in love with a hooker? That day at the clinic was the last time I saw her. A number of events followed each other in rapid succession. A few days after being let out of the hospital I had to go to Piura, and the night I went looking for her, at that house on the Avenida Colonial, she hadn’t come to work. And a year later, when I came back to Lima and went nosing around to see if I could find her, the house was no longer a bordello and (as had more or less happened to me) she had become respectable.

  After a month or a month and a half of working at La Crónica, I had a conversation with my father about my future. Just for a change, we had moved yet again, from the apartment on the Calle Porta to a little house on Juan Fanning, also in Miraflores. Since I got home very late from work—just as dawn was breaking, as a matter of fact—my father had given me the key to the house. We talked together in the dining room for about an hour, with the melodramatic solemnity that he was so fond of. As always in his presence, I felt uncomfortable and mistrustful, and, with a slight stammer, I told him that journalism was my real vocation. I would devote myself to it after finishing school. But, now that I was working on La Crónica, why didn’t I keep my job while I went through the final grade of secondary school? Instead of going through it at Leoncio Prado, I could enroll at some state school, such as Guadalupe or Melitón Carbajal, and work and study at the same time. After that, I would enter the University of San Marcos and continue my studies without giving up my job at La Crónica. That way, I would be practicing my profession at the same time that I was studying.

  He heard me out and then agreed: it was a good idea. The one who wasn’t at all pleased by this plan was my mother. That job that kept me out of the house all night worried her terribly and made her suspect the worst (that is to say, the truth). I knew that on many a night she stayed awake, waiting for me to come home, and sometimes, half asleep, I would hear her, early in the morning, tiptoeing into my room to fold and hang up the suit that I had thrown down on the bed any which way. (After her passion for my father, my mother’s other ones were for cleanliness and order. I have inherited from her the first of these: dirt, in particular the literal sort, is intolerable to me; as for order, it has never been my strong point, except where writing is concerned.) But, even though the idea that I would go on working at night at La Crónica while I finished the last year of secondary school frightened her, she did not dare oppose my father’s decision, something that, moreover, would have been of little avail.

  And so, when the accident on the highway going north happened while I was on the job—in mid-March—I had already received the reports of my grades from Leoncio Prado, announced to the military academy that I wouldn’t be back, and made vague inquiries at two or three state schools about enrolling for my final year. At all of them they put me on the waiting list, and trusting that one or another of them would accept me, I forgot all about the matter. I thoug
ht that at the last moment a recommendation would open for me the doors of Guadalupe, of Melitón Carbajal, or of some other state school. (It had to be a public high school because they were free and because I imagined that they would be more lenient about my working at the same time as a journalist.)

  But all these plans fell through, without my knowing it, as the doctors at the private hospital were treating me for the contusions I had received when the car turned over. Besides my mother, my aunts and uncles too were alarmed about my nightly forays. They had heard gossip here and there about my having been seen in bars or boîtes and one night, to top it all off, I ran into the most happy-go-lucky and party-loving of my uncles, Jorge, in the Negro-Negro. I was sitting at a table with Carlitos Ney, Norwin Sánchez, and the sketch artist Paco Cisneros, and there were also two or three other individuals at the table whom I hardly knew. But Uncle Jorge knew them very well, and taking me aside to have a few words with me, he told me that they were shady characters, drunks and cocaine addicts, and what was I, a mere snotnosed kid, doing in such company? My explanations, instead of reassuring him, worried him even more.

  There was a family council and the aunts and uncles decided that I was well on the road to perdition and that something had to be done. What they decided to do was bold: to talk to my father. They never saw him and knew that he detested them. They were of the opinion that my mother’s marriage had been a great misfortune, but for her sake, they had made an effort to receive my father as a guest in their homes and behave cordially toward him when they happened to run into him. He, however, stuck to his guns and did not try to hide his feelings. He never visited them. He would come by to drop my mother off at Aunt Lala’s, or Aunt Gaby’s, or at my grandparents’, but he didn’t get out of the car to say hello to them, nor did he do so at night, when he came by to take her back home. The decision to have a talk with him was a bitter pill they swallowed for the sake of what they believed to be a major consideration.