A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Porras Barrenechea’s disciples and friends, of different generations and professions—among them were historians and professors and diplomats—all dropped by the Calle Colina, to visit him, to attend the chocolate gatherings as night fell, to pass on to him gossip about the university, politics, or the Ministry of Foreign Relations, which delighted him, or to ask him for advice and recommendations. The most frequent visitor of all was a close companion who belonged to his own generation, also a diplomat, a regional historian (of Piura) and a journalist, Ricardo Vegas García. Nearsighted, neat as a pin, impossibly ill-tempered, Don Ricardo had solitary fits of rage about which Porras told most amusing anecdotes, such as how he had seen him—or rather, heard him—smash to bits a toilet whose chain he’d had difficulty pulling, and pummeling to pieces with his fists a table on which he had begun by giving slaps of his hand to demand service. Don Ricardo Vegas García would enter the house on the Calle Colina like the waterspout of a tornado and invite everyone to have tea at the Tiendecita Blanca, where he always would order ladyfingers. And woe to anyone who resisted his invitations! Beneath his arrogance and his brusque remarks, Don Ricardo was a generous and likable man, whose friendship and loyalty Porras appreciated enormously and whom he later was to miss a great deal.

  The university professors who dropped by most often were Jorge Puccinelli and Luis Jaime Cisneros, and César Vallejo’s widow came by too—the fearsome Georgette, whom Porras protected following the death of her husband in Paris—and many culturally lionized poets, writers, or journalists, whose presence gave the house on the Calle Colina a warm and stimulating atmosphere, in which the intellectual discussions and dialogues were larded with gossip and ill-will—the great Peruvian sport of raje—bad-mouthing—of which Porras, an old Lima hand (even though he’d been born in Pisco), was an outstanding practitioner. The gatherings used to last till far into the night and end up in some café in Miraflores—El Violín Gitano or La Pizzería on the Diagonal—or in El Triunfo, in Surquillo, an ill-reputed little bar that Porras had renamed Montmartre.

  My first task, at the historian’s house, consisted of reading the chronicles of the Conquest, making note cards on the myths and legends of Peru. I have an exhilarating memory of those readings in search of data on the Seven Cities of Cíbola, the Kingdom of the Great Paititi, the marvels of El Dorado, the land of the Amazons, that of the Fountain of Youth and all the time-hallowed fantasies of utopian kingdoms, enchanted cities, continents that had disappeared, which the encounter with America brought back to life in the present among those migrating Europeans who ventured, dazzled by what they saw, into the lands of Tahuantinsuyo and resorted, in order to understand them, to the classical mythologies and the arsenal of medieval legends. Although very different in their composition and their aim, some of them written by rough, unlettered, uncultivated men induced by the sure sense that they were witnessing events of transcendent importance to leave behind testimony as to what they did, saw, and heard, these chronicles mark the appearance of a written literature in Spanish America, and already, through their most unusual mixture of fantasy and realism, of unbridled imagination and fierce verisimilitude, as well as through their abundance, their picturesqueness, their epic breadth, their descriptive itch, lay down the pattern for certain characteristics of the future literature of Latin America. Some accounts, above all those of monastic chroniclers, like Father Calancha, could be prolix and boring, but others, such as those of the Inca Garcilaso or Cieza de León, I read with genuine pleasure, as monuments of a new genre that combined the best of literature and history, for it had, like the latter, its feet immersed in lived experience and its head in fiction.

  It was not only fun to spend those three hours consulting chronicles; in addition, if I had any sort of question of my own, there was the possibility of hearing a disquisition from Porras on persons and episodes having to do with the Conquest. I remember, one afternoon, because of some question or other that I don’t recall which Araníbar or I put to him, a master class that he gave us on “the heresy of the sun,” a deviation or heterodoxy from the point of view of the official religion of the Inca empire that he had reconstructed through the testimony of the chronicles, about which he was thinking of writing an article (a project which, like so many others, he never managed to get around to and actually finish). Porras had known the great figures of Peruvian literature, and many of Latin American and Spanish literature, and I listened to him, all ears, as he spoke of César Vallejo, with whom he had been on intimate terms before Vallejo died and the posthumous publication of whose Poemas humanos Porras was responsible for, or of José María Eguren, whose childish tender feelings and innocence he made fun of with the greatest irreverence, or of the apocalyptic end of Oquendo de Amat, a poet done in by tuberculosis and sheer rage, in a Spanish sanatorium to which he and the Marquesa de la Conquista—a descendant of Pizarro’s—had had him transferred on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.

  Although only Carlos Araníbar and I worked in the house on the Calle Colina on a regular schedule and with a salary (which the bookseller-editor Mejía Baca paid us at the end of each month), all Porras’s old and new disciples—Félix Álvarez Brun, Raúl Rivera Serna, Pablo Macera, and, later on, Hugo Neyra and Waldemar Espinoza Soriano—often visited. Of all of them, the one in whom Porras had placed his greatest hopes, but also the one who managed to exasperate him and drive him almost out of his mind by the way he behaved, was Pablo Macera. Some five or six years older than I was, Pablo had already finished the courses for a degree in Letters but never presented his thesis, despite the exhortations and admonitions forthcoming from Porras, who could not foresee a time when Macera would subject his life to a little discipline and turn his talent toward doing solid, serious work. As for talent, Pablo had an abundance of it and it amused him to show it off and, above all, to waste it, in an oral exhibitionism that often was dazzling. He would drop into Porras’s library all of a sudden, and without giving Araníbar and me time enough even to say hello to him, he would propose to us that we found the “Herren Club” of Peru, inspired by the geopolitical doctrines of Karl Haushofer, so that, in league with a group of industrialists, in five years we could take over the country and turn it into an aristocratic and enlightened dictatorship whose first step would be to reestablish the Inquisition and burn heretics in the main square once again. The following morning, having forgotten all about his delirious despotic scheme, he would perorate on the need to legitimize and promote bigamy, or to revive human sacrifices, or to call for a national plebiscite to determine democratically whether the earth was square or round. The worst foolishness, the most grotesque paradoxes became suggestive realities in Macera’s mouth, since he had, as no one else did, that perverse faculty of the intellectual that Arthur Koestler speaks of: that of being able to demonstrate everything he believed in and of believing everything that he could demonstrate. Pablo believed in nothing, but he could demonstrate anything, eloquently and brilliantly, and he enjoyed noting the surprise that his maniacal theories, his paradoxes and puns, his sophisms and ukases aroused in us. His intellectual snobbery was blended with sparks of humor. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes he threw away after having taken just one puff, so as to provoke a comment from the disconcerted spectator that allowed him to reply, voluptuously savoring each syllable: “I smoke nervously.” That adverb, nerviosamente, which cost him many a sol, gave him shivers of pleasure.

  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 desarrol
lo 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 urge
nt 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.