A Fish in the Water: A Memoir Read online

  It was only later that I discovered that one of my teachers from Leoncio Prado was a great Peruvian poet and an intellectual figure whom, in my years at the university, I would admire: César Moro. He was short and very thin, with sparse, fair hair and blue eyes that looked upon the world, on people, with an ironic little gleam deep down inside the pupils. He taught French, and gossip around the school had it that he was a poet and a fairy. His exaggeratedly polite manners and something affected about him and the rumors that circulated aroused our animosity against someone who appeared to be the negation incarnate of the morals and the philosophy of Leoncio Prado. In class we used to rag him, the way we ragged the huevones. We threw spitballs at him or subjected him to those concerts of razor blades stuck in the groove where the desktop opened and twanged with our fingers; the more daring among us asked him questions—transparent gibes and taunts—that the rest of the class guffawed at. I can still see Loco Bolognesi, walking after him one afternoon, wiggling his arm behind Moro’s backside as though it were a gigantic cock. It was very easy to rag Professor César Moro because, unlike his colleagues, he never summoned the officer on guard to restore order, cursing us out or filling out forms to deprive us of weekend passes. Professor Moro put up with our deviltry and rudeness with stoicism, and, it might even be said, with a secret pleasure, as though it amused him that these little savages insulted him. For him, it must have been one of those risky games that the Surrealists were so inclined toward, a way of testing oneself and exploring the limits of one’s own fortitude and those of human stupidity on a juvenile scale.

  At any event, César Moro didn’t teach classes in French at Leoncio Prado so as to get rich. Years later, on the occasion of his death, I discovered, from an impassioned text that André Coyné published about him,* that Moro had participated in the Surrealist movement in France, and I began to read that body of work of his that (as if to cut himself off even more from that country of which he said, in one of his marvelous aphorisms, that “in Peru they only cook broad beans”† he had written for the most part in French. When I looked into the details of his life, I saw that his salary, at the school, had been pitifully meager. Anywhere else, he would have been less exposed and could have earned more. What must have attracted him about Leoncio Prado was no doubt the cruelty and irritation aroused among the cadets by his delicate appearance, his inquisitive and ironic attitude, and the fact that there had been rumors that he was a poet and made love like a woman.

  To write, at school, was possible—tolerated and even applauded—if one wrote the way I did: professionally. I don’t know how I began writing love letters for the cadets who had sweethearts and didn’t know how to tell them that they loved them and missed them. In the beginning it must have been a game, a bet, with Víctor, or Quique or Alberto or another of my friends in the dormitories. Then they probably passed the word on. The fact is that, at some time during my first year at the academy, they came to search me out and to ask me, invariably with prudence and a touch of embarrassment, to write love letters for them, and among my clients there were cadets from other sections and perhaps from other years. They paid me with cigarettes but I wrote them free of charge for my friends. I liked playing Cyrano, because, on the pretext of saying what was appropriate, I learned of the details of the love relations—complicated, guileless, transparent, ill-intentioned, chaste, sinful—of the cadets, and prying into that intimacy was as entertaining as reading novels.

  I remember very well, on the other hand, how I wrote my first erotic novelette, a couple of pages scribbled in a rush so as to read them aloud to a group of cadets of the second section, in the dorm, before lights-out. The text was received with an outburst of approving obscenities (I have described a similar episode in La ciudad y los perros). Later on, as we were getting into our bunks, my neighbor, Vallejo the black, came to ask me how much I would sell him my novelette for. I wrote many others, afterward, for fun and on assignment, because I had fun doing it and because with them I paid for my vice of smoking (smoking was forbidden, of course, and a cadet who was caught smoking had his weekend pass taken away). And also, surely, because writing love letters and erotic novelettes was not looked down on or considered a shameful activity or something that only pansies did. Literature with the characteristics that mine possessed was quite acceptable in that temple of machismo and earned me a certain reputation as an oddball.

  Even so, Loco wasn’t among the nicknames I had. They called me Bugs Bunny, Rabbit’s Foot, or Skinny (which I was), and, now and then, Poet, because I wrote and, above all, because I spent all day, and sometimes all night, reading. I believe I’ve never read as much and as passionately as in those years at Leoncio Prado. I read at recess and at hours when I was supposed to be studying, hiding the book during classes underneath my notebooks, and sneaked out of the classroom to go read in the arbor next to the swimming pool, and read, at night, when it was my turn to be on guard duty, sitting on the floor of chipped white tiles, in the dim light in the dormitory bathroom. And I read every Saturday and Sunday that I was consigned to quarters, which added up to a goodly number. Immersing myself in fiction, escaping from the moldy, whitish dampness of the confines of the college and toiling in the depths of the underseas abyss in the Nautilus with Captain Nemo, or being Nostradamus, or the son of Nostradamus, or the Arab Ahmed Ben Hasan, who kidnaps the proud Diana Mayo and takes her to live with him in the Sahara, or sharing with d’Artagnan, Portos, Athos, and Aramis the adventures of the Queen’s necklace, or those of the Man in the Iron Mask, or confronting the elements with Han d’Islande, or the rigors of Jack London’s Alaska teeming with wolves, or, in Scottish castles, the knights errant of Sir Walter Scott, or spying on the gypsy girl from the twists and turns and the gargoyles of Notre Dame with Quasimodo, or, with Gavroche, being an amusing and daring street urchin in Paris in the middle of the insurrection, was more than entertainment: it was to live real life, exciting and magnificent life, so superior to that other one of routine, dirty tricks, and the tedium of being a boarding student. The books ended, but their intensely vivid worlds full of marvelous presences continued to whirl around in my brain, and I translated myself to them again and again in my imagination and spent hours there, even though to all appearances I was very quietly and seriously listening to the math lesson or our instructor’s lecture on cleaning a Mauser rifle or the technique of a bayonet attack. From an early age, I had had that ability to take leave of everything around me to live in a world of fantasy, to re-create through imagination the make-believe stories that held me spellbound, and in those years of 1950 and 1951 it was converted into my defensive strategy against the bitterness of being shut in, far from my family, from Miraflores, from girls, from the barrio, from those beautiful things I enjoyed when I was free.

  When I was allowed out on weekends, I bought books and my uncles always had a new supply ready for me to take back to school. When darkness began to fall on Sunday night and the time came to change out of civvies into my uniform to go back to the boarding school, everything began to turn bad: the movie became ugly, the soccer match dull, the houses, the parks, and the sky grew gloomy. I suffered a vague malaise all over. In those years I must have hated the late afternoon and evening on Sundays. I remember many books that I read in those years—Les Misérables, for instance, with its imperishable effect on me—but the author to whom I am most grateful is Alexandre Dumas. Almost all of his books were in the yellow paperback editions put out by Tor or the Sopena edition in dark-colored hard covers with a paper jacket: The Count of Monte Cristo, Memoirs of a Doctor, The Queen’s Necklace, The Taking of the Bastille, and the very long series that ended with the three volumes of The Viscount of Bragelonne. The great thing was that his novels had sequels; on finishing the book the reader knew that there was another, others, that continued the story. The saga of d’Artagnan, which begins with the young Gascon arriving in Paris as a forsaken provincial and ends many years later, at the siege of La Rochelle, when he dies, without having
received the marshal’s baton that the king is sending him via a postboy, is one of the most important things to have happened to me in my life. I have rarely identified more closely with works of fiction, or transubstantiated myself to a greater degree into the characters and milieus of a story, or found such intense pleasure and intense pain in what I read. One day Loco Cox, a pal of mine in the same year as I was, clowning around, snatched out of my hands one of the volumes of The Viscount of Bragelonne, which I was sitting out of doors reading in front of the dormitories. He started running and passing the book to others as though it were a basketball. That was one of the few times that I got into a fight at school, flinging myself on him in a blind rage, as though it was my life that was at stake. To Dumas, to the books of his that I read, I owe many things that I did and that I was afterward, that I still do and still am. From those days on, it was from the images that sprung from such reading that there stemmed my eagerness to learn French and to go off to live someday in France, a country that was, during the whole of my adolescence, my fondest dream, a country that was associated in my fantasies and desires with everything that (having been well taught by Dumas and other novelists) I would have liked life to offer: beauty, adventure, boldness, generosity, elegance, ardent passions, undisguised sentiment, extravagant gestures.

  (I have never again reread any of the novels of Dumas that dazzled me when I was a youngster, books like The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo. In my library I have the volumes of the Pléiade edition that contain them; but each time that I have begun to leaf through them, a reverential fear that they will no longer be what they once were, that they will not be able to give me what they gave me when I was fourteen and fifteen, stops me. A similar taboo kept me from rereading Les Misérables for many years. But when I did so, I discovered that it was also a masterpiece for an adult of today.)

  In addition to the reading that changed my life, in addition to its opening my eyes to my own country and making me go through experiences that I used in writing my first novel, my two years at Leoncio Prado allowed me to practice the sport that I liked best: swimming. I was made a member of the school team and trained and participated in intramural competitions, although not in the inter-school championship, in which I was going to compete in the freestyle race, because, just as we were on our way to the National Stadium, the headmaster of Leoncio Prado decided for some reason to withdraw the school from competition. Belonging to the swimming team had its advantages: the members of it were given extra food (a fried egg at breakfast and a glass of milk in the middle of the afternoon) and, sometimes, instead of Saturday field maneuvers, we went to the pool to train.

  Saturday was the happiest day of the week for those who had permission to leave for the weekend. Or, rather, the happiness began on Friday night, after the evening meal, with the movie in the improvised auditorium with wooden benches and a roof of corrugated iron. That movie was a foretaste of freedom. On Saturday the bugle blew reveille almost before it was light, since that was the day for field maneuvers. We went out into the wide-open spaces of La Perla and it was fun playing war games—setting up ambushes, taking a hill by assault, breaking a siege—especially if the lieutenant who was heading the company was Lieutenant Bringas, a model officer, who took maneuvers very seriously and sweated as much as we did. Other officers took things easier and confined themselves to intellectual leadership. The likable Lieutenant Anzieta, for instance, one of the most indulgent ones it fell to my lot to serve under. He had a grocery store; we could order packages of caramels and cookies from him, which he sold to us more cheaply than the price we paid for them on the street. I invented a little poem for him, which we sang to him while in formation:

  Si quiere el cadete

  If the cadet

  ser un buen atleta

  Wants to be a good athlete

  que coma galleta

  Let him buy cookies

  del teniente Anzieta.

  From Lieutenant Anzieta.

  On finishing my first year at Leoncio Prado, I told my father I wanted to apply for admission to the Naval Academy. I don’t know why I did that, since by that time I knew only too well that my temperament was incompatible with military life; perhaps so as to stick to my guns—a character trait that has got me into a lot of hot water—or because being a cadet at the Naval Academy would have meant my emancipation from my father’s tutelage, something I dreamed of day and night. To my surprise, he replied that he did not approve of that decision and that, therefore, he would not give me the money that had to be put up as a fee in order to take the entrance examination. With the bitterness I felt toward him, I attributed this refusal to his stinginess—a defect, moreover, that he was not free of—for one of the reasons he put forward, also, was that, according to the regulations, if a cadet, after three or four years at the Naval Academy, asked for a discharge, he was obliged to reimburse the navy for everything that his education had cost. And my father was sure that I would not last at the Academy.

  Despite his refusal, however, I went to La Punta to get the list of requirements for entering the Academy (I had thought that I would ask my uncles for the money to enroll), but at the Academy I discovered that in any case I would not have been able to request admission that year, since candidates had to be past fifteen before doing so and I wouldn’t be fifteen until March 1951. I had to wait another year, then.

  In that summer of 1951 my father took me to work with him in his office. The International News Service was in the first block of the Jirón Carabaya, in the Calle Pando, a few meters from the Plaza San Martín, on the first floor of an old building. The office, at the end of a long corridor with a floor covered in yellow tiles, consisted of two large rooms, the first of which was divided by partitions into two areas: in one, the radio operator received the news dispatches, and in the other, the editors translated them into Spanish and adapted them so as to send them on to La Crónica, which had exclusive rights to all the services of the International News Service. The room in the back was my father’s office.

  From January to March, I worked at the INS as a messenger, taking to La Crónica the cables and articles from the news service. I began at five o’clock in the afternoon and finished work at midnight on the dot, which left me a good part of the day free to go to the beach with my friends from the barrio. Most of the time we went to Miraflores-Los Baños, as people still called it—which, despite being a stony beach, had the best waves for bodysurfing. Bodysurfing was a marvelous sport. The waves at Miraflores broke far from shore and the experienced surfer could get carried along for fifty meters or more by tensing his body and giving the necessary arm strokes at just the right moment. On the beach at Miraflores was the Club Waikiki, the symbol of snobbery; its members rode waves on Hawaiian surfboards, at the time a very expensive sport, since the boards, made of balsa wood, were imported from the United States, and only a handful of Peruvians had the financial means to practice it. When fiberglass surfboards began to be manufactured, the sport became a more democratic one, and today it is practiced by Peruvians of all social classes. But in those days, middle-class people from Miraflores, such as I was, looked on those surfboards of the members of the Waikiki as something unattainable, cutting through the waves at Miraflores while we had to be content to bodysurf. We also went to La Herradura, with a fine sandy beach and fierce waves where the pleasure was not in letting oneself be carried along by them but in daring to ride down with them as they broke, and always placing one’s body very far ahead of the crest so as not to be trapped by the underside and slammed against the bottom.

  That summer was also the one of a frustrated romance with a girl from Miraflores, whose appearance in the mornings, atop the terrace of Los Baños, in her black bathing suit and little white slippers, her short hair and her honey-colored eyes, left me speechless. Her name was Flora Flores and I fell in love with her at first sight. But she never formally acknowledged my suit, although she allowed me to accompany her, after the beach, to her
house, near the Colina movie theater, and sometimes came out for long walks with me, under the ficus trees of the Avenue Pardo. She was pretty and graceful, quick-witted too, and when I was with her I turned into a boy who was slow-witted and stammered. My timid advances to make her my sweetheart were rejected in such a subtly flirtatious way that I was always left with what seemed to be a lingering hope. Until, on one of our walks along the promenade lined with poplars, I introduced her to a handsome friend of mine, who, to top it all off, was a swimming champion: Rubén Mayer. Under my very nose he began to butter her up and shortly thereafter she fell for him, head over heels. To make a girl fall for you and formally declare that she is your sweetheart is a custom that was to decline little by little, until today it is something that to the younger generations, speedy and pragmatic when it comes to love, seems like prehistoric idiocy. I still have a tender memory of those rituals that love consisted of when I was an adolescent and it is to them that I owe the fact that that stage of my life has remained in my memory not only as violent and repressive but also as made up of delicate and intense moments that compensated me for all the rest.