A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  He read the letters through very carefully, asked me how old I was, speculated about how it would be possible for me to combine a newspaper job with my classes at school, and finally made his mind up and hired me. He pegged my monthly salary at three hundred soles and outlined in the course of that conversation what my work would entail. I was to go to the newspaper office as soon as my morning classes were over, in order to look through the Lima papers and extract and write a roundup of the news that might be of interest to Piurans, and I was to come back at night, for another two or three hours, to write articles, do reporting, and be on hand for emergencies.

  La Industria was a historic relic. One compositor, Señor Nieves, set its four pages by hand—I don’t believe he ever progressed as far as using a Linotype. To watch him working, in the dark little room at the back, in that “print shop” where he was the sole printer, was a spectacle. Skinny, with thick-lensed glasses for his nearsightedness, always dressed in a short-sleeved undershirt and an apron that at one time had been white, Señor Nieves would place the original copy on a lectern, to his left. And with his right hand, at incredible speed, he would remove one by one the type characters from a bunch of little boxes laid out around him, and set the text in the form which he himself would then print, on a prehistoric press whose vibrations shook the walls and roof of the building. Señor Nieves seemed to me to have escaped from novels of the nineteenth century, those of Dickens especially; the craft, at which he was so skilled, an eccentric survival, was something already extinct in the rest of the world and something that would die out with him in Peru.

  A new managing editor of La Industria had arrived in Piura at almost the same time that I did. Don Miguel F. Cerro Guerrero had brought from Lima Pedro del Pino Fajardo, a veteran journalist, to raise the circulation of the paper, in its cutthroat competition with El Tiempo, the other local paper (there was a third, Ecos y Noticias, that came out late, hardly ever, or never, on bright-colored paper, and was almost illegible because the print came off on the reader’s hands). We had two reporters. Owed Castillo, whose regular job was to attend to the depth gauges for the Piura River, was in charge of the sports news—later on, in Lima in the days of the military dictatorship, he would have a distinguished career as a filthmongering journalist. And I wrote up the local and international news. In addition, there were outside collaborators, such as Dr. Luis Ginocchio Feijó, a physician whom journalism came to interest as passionately as his profession.

  We hit it off well with Pedro del Pino Fajardo, who, at the beginning, tried to give a rather flamboyant slant to La Industria, which shocked certain Piuran ladies, who went so far as to send a letter of protest against the scandalous tone of a feature article by the editor-in-chief. Don Miguel Cerro demanded of del Pino Fajardo that he restore to the daily its traditional serious respectability.

  I had great fun working there, writing about anything and everything, and permitting myself the luxury, every so often, thanks to the kindliness with which Pedro del Pino welcomed my literary enthusiasms, of publishing poems that occupied one entire page of the four that made up each issue of the paper. On one of these occasions, in which a poem of mine gloomily entitled “La noche de los desesperados” (“The Night of the Desperate”) filled the page, Don Miguel, who had just dismounted from his mule, doffed his big sombrero of fine Catacaos straw and pronounced this sentence, which touched my heart: “Today’s edition is sinfully exuberant.”

  Apart from the endless news items I wrote or the interviews I conducted, I put out two columns, “Buenos Días”—“Good Morning”—and “Campanario”—“The Bell Tower”—one under my own name and the other under a pseudonym, in which I made comments on current events and frequently spoke (ignorance is intrepid) of politics and of literature. I remember a couple of long articles on the revolution of 1952 waged by the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario: Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) in Bolivia, which won Víctor Paz Estenssoro the presidency, and whose reforms—the nationalization of mining companies, agrarian reform—I praised until Don Miguel Cerro reminded me that we were living under the military dictatorship of General Odría, and that I should moderate my revolutionary enthusiasms, since he didn’t want La Industria to be closed down.

  The Bolivian revolution staged by the MNR greatly excited me. I learned certain details about it from a very direct source, since the family of my Aunt Olga, particularly her younger sister, Julia, who lived in La Paz, wrote her letters with many anecdotes and exact information about the events and the leaders of the uprising—such as the one who would become the vice president under Paz Estenssoro, Siles Suazo, and the leader of the miners, Juan Lechín—which I used for my articles in La Industria. And that revolution with strong leftist and socialist tendencies, so fiercely attacked in Peru by the daily papers, especially by Pedro Beltrán’s La Prensa, helped, as much as my reading of that book by Jan Valtin, to fill my head and my heart with ideas—perhaps it would be better to say images and emotions—that were socialist and revolutionary.

  Pedro del Pino Fajardo had had a lung disease and had stayed for a time at the famous hospital for tuberculosis at Jauja (the one they used in order to scare me, at my grandparents’, when I was a little boy, so as to force me to eat), about which he wrote a novel that fell somewhere between being festive and being macabre, which he gave me shortly after we met. And he also showed me several of his works for the theater. He looked kindly on my vocation and encouraged it, but the real help he gave me was of a negative sort, causing me to have a presentiment from that time on of the mortal danger that bohemia represented for literature. Because in his case, as in that of so many writers, living and dead, in my country, his literary vocation had foundered on disorder, a lack of discipline, and above all alcohol, before the creative light dawned in him. Pedro was an incorrigible bohemian; he could spend entire days—entire nights—in a bar, telling extremely funny stories, and absorbing immeasurable quantities of beer, pisco brandy or any other alcoholic drink. He soon reached a scintillating, overexcited state, and remained in it, for hours and hours, days and days, burning up, in dazzlingly brilliant and ephemeral soliloquies, what were no doubt, by that time, the last vestiges of a talent that never managed to take definite shape because of his dissolute life. He was married to a granddaughter of Ricardo Palma, a heroic young blonde, who, with the responsibility for the care of a child who was only a few years old, used to come to rescue Pedro from the little bars.

  I have never learned how to drink; in my short bohemian life, in the summer in Lima that I worked on La Crónica, more out of mimicry than out of a liking for it, I had drunk a great deal of beer—though I could never go on pisco binges, for instance, with my colleagues—but even beer had a bad effect on me, since I soon began to have a headache and feel nauseated. And now that I was in Piura, I had so many things to do, what with classes, my job on the newspaper, the books and other things I was trying to write, that the whole business of spending hours in a café or a bar, talking endlessly, as around me people began to get plastered, bored me and exasperated me. I would invent any sort of pretext to escape. That allergy began there in Piura, I believe, and had to do with a physical intolerance for alcohol that I no doubt inherited from my father—who was never able to drink—and with the distaste I felt at the spectacle of the way my friend Pedro del Pino Fajardo deteriorated, a distaste that gradually grew stronger until it had become a phobia. Neither in my years at the university nor afterward have I lived the bohemian life, not even in its most pleasant and benign forms, those back-room gatherings at table, those evenings in a coterie of like-minded friends, from which I have always fled like a cat from water.

  Pedro del Pino stayed for no more than a year and a half or two years in Piura. He went back to Lima and there he became the editor-in-chief of a publication touting the policies of Odría’s dictatorship, La Nación, in which, without my permission, he reprinted several of my columns from La Industria. I sent him a furious letter of protest, whi
ch he didn’t publish, and I didn’t see him again. When the dictatorship ended, in 1956, he emigrated to Venezuela and died shortly afterward.

  We began to rehearse La huida del inca at the end of April or the beginning of May, in the afternoons, three or four times a week, after classes let out, in the library of the school, a vast room on the top floor lent to us by San Miguel’s affable librarian, Carmela Garcés. In the cast, the selection of which took several days, there were students of the school, the Raygada brothers, Juan León and Yolanda Vilela from my class, and Walter Palacios, who was later to become a professional actor as well as a revolutionary leader. But the stars were the Rojas sisters, two girls from outside the school, very well known in Piura—one of them, Lira, for her magnificent voice, and the other, Ruth, for her dramatic talent (she had already played roles in several plays). The lovely voice of Lira Rojas caused General Odría, who had heard her sing while on an official visit to Piura, to offer her a scholarship and send her to Lima, to the National Music School.

  I feel no need to remember the work (a soap opera with Incas, as I have said), but I am touched when I recall what slowly brought it to life, over a period of two months and a half, with the enthusiastic collaboration of the eight actors and the persons who helped us with the stage sets and the lighting. I had never directed, or ever seen anybody direct a play, and I spent entire nights without a wink of sleep, taking notes on the staging. The rehearsals, the atmosphere that was created, the camaraderie, and my dream of seeing the little play finally taking shape, convinced me that year that I would be not a poet but a playwright: drama was the prince of genres and I would inundate the world with works for the theater like those of Lorca or Lenormand. (I have not reread nor have I seen the plays of the latter performed on the stage, but two works of his, which had been published in the Biblioteca Contemporánea series and which I read that year, left a profound impression on me.)

  From the first rehearsal I fell in love with my female lead, the slender Ruth Rojas. She had wavy hair that kissed her shoulders, a long neck like the stem of a flower, very pretty legs, and a walk like a queen’s. Hearing her speak was a pleasure fit for the gods, because as she did so she added to the warm, lingering, and musical cadence of Piuran speech a lilt of coquetry and gentle irony all her own that went straight to my heart. But the timidity that always came over me with the young women I fell in love with kept me from ever addressing a flirtatious remark to her or anything that might make her suspect what I felt for her. What was more, Ruth had a sweetheart, a young man who worked in a bank and who used to come to get her when rehearsals were over.

  We could only run through a couple of rehearsals in the theater itself, in mid-July, just before the performance, when it seemed impossible that Maestro Aldana Ruiz would finish painting the stage sets in time; he didn’t finish them until the very morning of July 17. The advertising for the work was tremendous, in La Industria and in El Tiempo, over the radio, and, finally, over loudspeakers going up and down the streets—I remember having seen Javier Silva go past the door of the newspaper office, shouting into a megaphone, from atop a truck: “Don’t miss the event of the century, in an evening performance, at the Teatro Variedades…,” as a result of which all the seats were sold out. On the night of the performance, many people who hadn’t been able to get tickets broke through the barriers and poured into the theater, filling the aisles and the orchestra. What with all the disorder, the prefect himself, Don Jorge Checa, lost his seat and had to witness the entire performance standing up.

  The work proceeded without mishap—or almost—and there was loud applause when I came out onto the stage, along with the actors and actresses, to acknowledge my authorship of it. The one semi-mishap occurred at the romantic moment of the work, when the Inca—Ricardo Raygada—kissed the heroine, who was supposed to be deeply in love with him. At just that point a look of disgust crossed Ruth’s face and she began to screw up her face. Later she explained to us that it was not the Inca who had repelled her, but a live cockroach that had attached itself to his mascaipacha—his symbolic imperial tassel. The success of La huida del inca was responsible for our giving, the following week, two performances more, to one of which I managed to sneak in Wanda and Patricia, since the censorship board’s classification of the work as one “suitable for minors over fifteen years of age” made it necessary to get them in on the sly.

  In addition to La huida del inca, the show included some sung numbers, by Lira Rojas, and a performance by Joaquín Ramos Ríos, one of the most original characters in Piura. He was an outstanding exponent of an art that no longer exists today, or at any event, is considered obsolete and ridiculous, but at that time was a prestigious one: recitation. Joaquín had lived in Germany in his early years and had imported from there the German language, a monocle, a cape, a number of extravagant aristocratic mannerisms and an unbridled fondness for beer. He recited Lorca, Darío, Chocano marvelously well, and the Piuran bard Héctor Manrique—whose sonnet “Querellas del jardín” (“Quarrels in the Garden”), which began: “Era la agonía de una tarde rubia…” (“It was the death agony of a golden afternoon…”) Uncle Lucho and I used to declaim at the top of our lungs as we crossed the desert on the way to his farm—and he was the star of all the literary-musical evenings in Piura. Apart from reciting, all he did was wander about the streets of Piura, with his monocle and his cape, dragging along after him a kid goat that he introduced as his gazelle. He always went around half drunk, mimicking—in the grimy holes-in-the-wall of the chicherías, in the bars, and at the liquor stands in the market—the turn-of-the-century extravagances of Oscar Wilde or of his imitators in Lima, the poet and short-story writer Abraham Valdelomar and the colónidas, the Parnassian and Symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century, before a public of Piuran mestizos who didn’t pay the slightest attention to him and treated him with the contemptuous tolerance that one accords idiots. But Joaquín wasn’t one, because, amid the alcoholic haze in which he spent his life, he would suddenly start talking about poetry and poets in a very intense way, which revealed a profound familiarity with them. In addition to respect, I felt tenderness for Joaquín Ramos and I was deeply grieved, years later, to run into him in the center of Lima, a total wreck and so drunk he was unable to recognize me.

  For the vacation during national holiday week, my class wanted to organize a trip to Cuzco, but the money we raised—with the performances of La huida del inca, raffles, lotteries, fairs—wasn’t enough and we got only as far as Lima, for a week. Although I slept at night with my classmates at a normal school on the Avenida Brasil, I spent the daytime hours with my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, in Miraflores. My parents were in the United States. It was the third trip my father had taken there, but my mother’s first. They had gone to Los Angeles and this was to be another attempt on my father’s part to set up a business or find a job that would allow him to leave Peru. Even though he never talked to me about his financial situation, I have the impression that it had begun to deteriorate, because of the money he had lost in his commercial experiment in New York, and because his income had dwindled. This time they stayed in the United States for several months and when they came back, instead of renting a house in Miraflores, they took a little apartment, with just one bedroom, in a very poor district, Rímac, an unmistakable sign of financial difficulties. And so, when, at the end of that year, I came back to Lima to enter the university, I didn’t go to live with my father, but with my grandparents, on the Calle Porta. I was never again to live with him.

  Shortly after returning to Piura, I received an unexpected piece of news (everything went well for me during that year in Piura): La huida del inca had won second place in the theatrical competition. The news, published in the Lima daily papers, was reprinted by La Industria on the first page. The prize consisted of a small amount of money, and many months were to go by before Grandpa Pedro—who took the trouble to go to the Ministry of Education every week to ask for it—could collect it and
send it to me in Piura. I doubtless spent it on books, and perhaps on visits to the Casa Verde.

  Uncle Lucho encouraged me to be a writer. He wasn’t so naïve as to advise me to be only a writer, because what would I have lived on? He thought that practicing law would allow me to reconcile my literary vocation with keeping food on my table and urged me to put money aside from then on so as to get to Paris someday. From that time forward, the idea of traveling to Europe—to France—became a polestar. And until I managed to get there, six years later, I lived with the eagerness to be off and the conviction that if I stayed in Peru I wouldn’t ever attain my goal, because what Peruvian who had stayed here had ever managed to become a real writer?