During that month in Paris I lived a life that was to have nothing to do with the one I would lead during my stay of almost seven years in France later on, when I was almost always confined to the world of the rive gauche. In those four weeks at the beginning of 1958, on the other hand, I was a resident of the eighth arrondissement, on the rive droite, and to all appearances, anyone would have taken me for a South American dandy come to Paris to have myself a fling. In the Hôtel Napoléon I was given a room with a little balcony overlooking the street, from which I could glimpse the Arc de Triomphe. Across from my room someone who had also won a prize was staying: Miss France 1958, part of whose prize also consisted of a stay at the Napoléon. Her name was Annie Simplon and she was a girl with golden tresses and a wasp waist, to whom the manager of the hotel, Monsieur Makovsky, introduced me and with whom he invited me to dine and dance one night in a fashionable nightclub, L’Éléphant Blanc. Nice Annie Simplon took me on a tour of Paris in the Dauphine that she’d won along with her kingdom and my ears still ache from the bursts of laughter I sent her into, on the afternoon of that outing, with the French that I thought I’d learned not only to read but to speak.
The Hôtel Napoléon had a restaurant, Chez Pescadou, whose elegance intimidated me so much that I crossed it on tiptoe. My French did not allow me to decipher all the exquisite names of the dishes on the menu, and perturbed by the presence of that maître d’hôtel, who looked like a royal chamberlain in ceremonial dress standing alongside me, I chose them at random, pointing with my finger. And so I was surprised at lunch one day to find that I had been brought a little fishing net. I had ordered a trout and had to go get it myself, out of a tank in one corner of the restaurant. “This is Proust’s world,” I thought, bowled over, despite the fact that at the time I hadn’t yet read even one line of Remembrance of Things Past.
On the morning after my arrival, almost the minute I woke up, around noon, I went out for a stroll along the Champs-Élysées. It was now crowded with people and vehicles and, behind the glass partitions, the terraces of the bistros were jam-packed with men and women, smoking, talking together. Everything looked beautiful, incomparable, dazzling to me. I was nothing but a métèque, a cheeky spic. I felt that this was my city: I would live here, write here, put down roots here and stay forever. In those days, Syrians and Lebanese prowled the streets of the center of the city, buying and selling dollars—the inevitable result of currency controls—and I didn’t understand what those characters who approached me every so often, with furtive gestures, were offering me, until finally one of them, who spoke a sort of Spanuguese, explained to me what he was after. He changed some dollars for me, at a better rate than the one I got at the bank, and I made the mistake of telling him what hotel I was staying at. Later on, he phoned me several times, offering me diversions of all sorts, with “mushashas muito bonitas”—his Spanuguese for “very pretty girls.”
Monsieur Prouverelle had prepared a program for me, which included a visit to the Hôtel de Ville, where they gave me a citation. We were accompanied by the Peruvian cultural attaché, an elderly gentleman who a while later would attain a moment of fame at a general conference of UNESCO during which he gave a speech attacking Picasso—making it clear that his criticisms were “of a painter by a painter,” since he himself turned out landscape paintings in his time off from his diplomatic duties. He had become so refined (or was so absent-minded) that he kissed the hands of all the women doorkeepers at the Hôtel de Ville, to the astonishment of Monsieur Prouverelle, who asked me if this was a Peruvian custom. Our cultural attaché had lived in Europe for an eternity and the Peru of his memories was already long dead and gone, or had perhaps never existed. I remember how surprised I was, on the afternoon I met him—we had gone to have coffee together, after the visit to the Hôtel de Ville, at a bistro near the Châtelet—when I heard him say: “People in Lima are so frivolous, strolling up and down the Paseo Colón every Sunday.” When were Limeños in the habit of going for Sunday strolls along that run-down Paseo in the downtown area of the city? Thirty or forty years before, no doubt. But, in all truth, that gentleman could have been a thousand years old.
Monsieur Prouverelle got Le Figaro to interview me and gave a cocktail party in my honor at the Hôtel Napoléon, at which he presented the issue of La Revue Française in which my short story appeared. He was, as he put it, “un chauvin raisonné”—a reasonable chauvinist—and he was amused and delighted by my unbridled enthusiasm for everything I saw round about me and my fascination for French books and authors. He was amazed that I went all about Paris continually associating its monuments, streets, and various sites with novels and poems that I knew by heart.
He made valiant efforts to arrange for me to meet Sartre, but he couldn’t manage it. We got as far as Sartre’s secretary at the time, Jean Cau, who, doing his job conscientiously, kept putting us off until we got tired of insisting. But I did manage to see Albert Camus, shake his hand, and exchange a few words with him. Monsieur Prouverelle found out that he was directing the revival of one of his plays, in a theater on the grands boulevards, and I posted myself there one morning, with my cheekiness of a twenty-one-year-old. After I’d waited for just a short time, Camus appeared, accompanied by the actress Maria Casares. (I recognized her at once, from a film I’d seen twice and liked as much as Lucho Loayza disliked it: Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis.) I went over to him, stammering, in my bad French, that I admired him very much and that I wanted to give him a copy of a literary review, and to my surprise, he answered me in a few kindly sentences in good Spanish (his mother was a Spaniard from Oran). He was wearing the same raincoat as in all the photographs of him, and holding the usual cigarette between his fingers. He and she said something, immediately after that, about “le Pérou,” a word that in those days was still associated in France with ideas of prosperity (“Ce n’est pas le Pérou!”—“This isn’t Peru!”).
The day after my arrival Monsieur Prouverelle invited me to have an aperitif with him at the Rhumerie Martiniquaise, in St.-Germain-des-Prés, and have dinner at Le Fiacre, warning me that he was taking me there because it was an excellent restaurant, but that the bar on the ground floor might shock me. I thought I had freed myself of any sort of prejudice, but it is true that as I went through that bar, where lustful elderly gentlemen were making out with boys, lavishing kisses on them and joyously fondling them in full view of everyone, I was disconcerted. It was one thing to read that such things existed and another to see them.
The restaurant Le Fiacre, on the other hand, was most proper, and I learned there that Monsieur Prouverelle, before being editor of La Revue Française, had been in the military. He had hung up his uniform because of a great disappointment; I don’t know whether it was a political or a personal one, but he spoke to me about it in a tone that impressed me, for it appeared to be a drama that had turned his life upside down. Dumbfounded, I heard him speak well of Salazar’s regime, which, according to him, had put an end to the anarchy that had previously held sway in Portugal, a thesis I hastened to refute, shocked that anyone could believe that dictators such as Salazar or Franco had done anything good for their countries. He didn’t insist, and instead changed the subject, telling me that he would introduce me the next day to a young lady, the daughter of friends of his, who could accompany me to visit museums and tour Paris.
And that was how I met Bernadette, whom I saw, from that time on, for many hours every day, until the eve of my return to Lima. And thanks to her I knew that something even better could happen to me than all the good things that had already come my way: being twenty-one years old and knowing a pretty, likable young French girl with whom to discover the marvels of Paris.
Bernadette had chestnut-colored bobbed hair, bright blue eyes with a penetrating gaze, and a pale complexion that, when her face grew flushed with laughter or embarrassment, set her person aglow with radiant charm. She must have been about eighteen and was a perfect demoiselle du seizième, a girl comm
e il faut, thanks to her invariably neat and tidy appearance, her excellent manners, and her very proper behavior. But she was also intelligent, amusing, possessed of an elegant and worldly-wise flirtatiousness, and seeing her and hearing her and being aware of her graceful silhouette at my side made shivers run up and down my spine. She was studying at an art school, and knew the Louvre, Versailles, L’Orangerie, Le Jeu de Paume like the palm of her hand, so that visiting museums with her doubled my pleasure.
We met each other very early each morning and began our tour of churches, art galleries, and bookstores, following a carefully thought-out plan. Early in the evening we would go to the theater or the movies, and on some nights, after dinner, to some cave on the rive gauche to listen to music and to dance. She lived on a street that crossed the Avenue Victor Hugo, in an apartment with her parents and an older sister, and she took me to her place a number of times to have lunch or dinner, something that was not to happen to me again in the many years I lived in France, even with my best French friends.
On going back to Paris again, to live there for some time a couple of years later, especially in the beginning, when I was having financial difficulties, I always remember as something fabulous that month in which, with pretty Bernadette, I went to all sorts of performances and to restaurants every night, and my days were spent visiting art galleries and out-of-the-way places in Paris and buying books. Monsieur Prouverelle got us complimentary tickets to the Comédie Française and the Théâtre National de Paris, directed by Jean Vilar, on the stage of which I saw Gérard Philippe, in Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg. Another memorable theatrical performance was the staging of a play of Shakespeare’s in which one of the roles was played by Pierre Brasseur, whose films I was continually trying to find a showing of. We also saw, I’m certain, Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) and La Leçon (The Lesson), in the little theater on the Rue de la Huchette (where performances of both are still given today, after a run of nearly forty years), and that night, after the theater, we took a very long walk along the quays, on the banks of the Seine, during which I tried out a few flirtatious remarks in my imperfect French, making grammatical mistakes that Bernadette corrected. I also became acquainted with the Cinémathèque on the Rue d’Ulm, where we immured ourselves for an entire day, seeing four of Max Ophuls’s films, among them The Earrings of Madame de…, with that great beauty Danielle Darrieux.
Since my prize paid me for only fifteen days at the Napoléon, for the last two weeks of my stay I had reserved a room in the Hôtel de Seine, in the Latin Quarter, recommended to me by Salazar Bondy. But when I went to say goodbye to the manager of the Hôtel Napoléon, Monsieur Makovsky told me that I should stay on, paying what I would be paying at the Hôtel de Seine. So I continued to enjoy the Arc de Triomphe until the end of my stay.
To me, another of the marvels of Paris was the bookstalls along the Seine and the little bargain bookstores in the Latin Quarter, where I laid in a good supply of books that later on I had no idea how to fit into my suitcase. I managed, in this way, to complete my collection of Les Temps Modernes, from the first issue on, with that initial manifesto of Sartre’s in favor of political commitment which I knew almost by heart.
Years later, settled now in France, I had a long conversation about Paris one night with Julio Cortázar, who also loved the city and who once declared that he had chosen it “because being nobody in a city that was everything was a thousand times preferable to having things the other way around.” I told him of that precocious passion in my life for a mythical city, which I knew only through literary fantasies and gossip, and how, by comparing it to the real version, in that month straight out of the Thousand and One Nights, instead of my being disappointed by it, the spell had grown even greater. (It lasted until 1966.)
He too felt that Paris had given something profound to his life that could never be repaid: a perception of what was best in human experience; a certain tangible sense of beauty. A mysterious association of history, literary invention, technical skill, scientific knowledge, architectonic and plastic wisdom, and also, in large doses, sheer chance had created that city where going out for a stroll along the bridges and the quays of the Seine, or observing at certain hours the volutes of the gargoyles of Notre Dame or venturing into certain little squares or the labyrinth of dark, narrow streets in the Marais, was a moving spiritual and aesthetic experience, like burying oneself in a great book. “Just as one chooses a woman and is or is not chosen by her, the same thing happens with cities,” Cortázar said. “We chose Paris and Paris chose us.”
At that time Cortázar had already settled in France, but in that month of January 1958 I hadn’t yet met him, nor do I believe I knew of any of the many Latin American painters or writers there (Pobre gente de Paris—“Poor wretches in Paris”—Sebastián Salazar Bondy was to call them in a book of short stories inspired by them), with the exception of the Peruvian poet Leopoldo Chariarse, about whom I had heard Abelardo Oquendo tell very amusing anecdotes (such as having declared, in public, that his vocation as a poet was born “the day that, as a child, a black woman raped me”). Chariarse, who was later to become a flute player, an Orientalist, a guru and the spiritual father of a sect and the director of an ashram in Germany, at that time was a Surrealist, and he had great prestige within the little sect to which André Breton’s movement had been reduced. The French Surrealists presumed that he was a revolutionary persecuted by the dictatorial regime in Peru (governed at the time by a most peace-loving Manuel Prado), and didn’t suspect in the least that he was the sole poet in the history of Peru to be given a scholarship to Europe through an Act of Congress.
I learned all this through the poet Benjamin Péret, whom I went to visit in the very modest apartment where he lived, with the hope that he would give me certain information about César Moro, since one of my projects at the time was to write an essay on him. In France, Moro belonged to the Surrealist group for a number of years—he contributed to Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution and the Hommage à Violette Nozière, and then organized, with Péret and Breton, an International Exposition of Surrealism in Mexico. However, in the official history of the group, he was rarely referred to. Péret proved to be very evasive, either because he scarcely remembered Moro or for some other reason, and told me almost nothing about the most authentic Surrealist born in Peru, and perhaps in all of Latin America. The person who gave me a clue to the reasons for this ostracism to which Moro had been condemned by Breton and his friends was Maurice Nadeau, whom I went to see, on an errand for Georgette Vallejo, to receive royalties from him for several of Vallejo’s poems that had appeared in Les Lettres Nouvelles. Nadeau, whose Histoire du Surréalisme I was acquainted with, introduced me to a young French novelist who was with him—Michel Butor—and when I asked him why the Surrealists appeared to have “purged” Moro, told me that probably it was because of his homosexuality. Breton tolerated and encouraged every “vice” except for that one, ever since, in the 1920s, the Surrealists had been accused of being fairies. This was the incredible reason why Moro had come to be an inner exile too, even within the very movement whose morality and philosophy he himself embodied—someone whose integrity and talent alike were more genuine than that of the majority of those recognized and hallowed by Papa Breton.
In this month in Paris, I began for the first time, very secretly, to wonder whether I hadn’t been overly hasty and made a mistake by getting married. Not because Julia and I didn’t get along together, for we had no more quarrels than the usual married couple, and I am the first to admit that Julia helped me in my work, and instead of putting obstacles in the way of my literary vocation encouraged it. But, rather, because that initial passion for her had died out and been replaced by a domestic routine and an obligation that, at times, I began to feel as an enslavement. Could this marriage last? Time, rather than lessening our difference in age, would little by little make it more dramatic, until it turned our relationship into something artificia
l. The family’s predictions would come true, sooner or later, and that romantic marriage would perhaps end up foundering.
These gloomy thoughts arose indirectly, during those days, as my tours of Paris and my flirtation with Bernadette went on. She devoured me with questions about Julia—her feminine curiosity was stronger than her polite upbringing—and she kept after me to show her a photograph of my wife. With this young girl I felt young myself, and in a certain way I relived, in those weeks, my early years in Miraflores and my amorous skirmishes in Diego Ferré. For not since I was thirteen or fourteen had I had a “sweetheart” or whiled away my time in such a marvelous way, wandering about and having fun, as I did during those four weeks in Paris. In the last few days, when my return to Peru was imminent, I was overcome by a tremendous anxiety attack and the temptation to stay in France, to break with Peru, break with my family, and immediately begin a new life, in that city, in that country, where being a writer appeared to be possible, where everything gave me the impression of having conspired to favor it.
The night I bade Bernadette goodbye was very tender. It was late, it was drizzling, and we kept endlessly saying goodbye to each other in the doorway of the building where she lived. I kept kissing her hands and tears glistened in her pretty eyes. The next morning, as I was about to leave for the airport, we had one last conversation over the phone. Then after that, we wrote to each other several times, but I never saw her again. (Thirty years later, at the most crucial moment of the election campaign, someone whom I was never able to identify slipped a letter from her under the door of my house.)
A Fish in the Water: A Memoir Page 56