A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Needless to say, those of us who worked with him and all his disciples engaged in brave efforts to ensure that Porras Barrenechea was elected. We divided up between us the professors who had the right to vote and the members of the University Council, and it fell to my lot and Pablo Macera’s to visit those from Sciences, Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine at their homes. Except for just one of them, they all promised us their vote. When, on the eve of the election, in the dining room of the house on the Calle Colina, we totted up the probable results, Porras had two-thirds of the votes. But in the University Council, when the time came for the secret ballot, Aurelio Miró Quesada won handily.

  In his speech in the courtyard of the Faculty of Law, after the election, standing before a crowd of students who tried to make up for his losing with their cheers and applause, Porras was indiscreet enough to say that, even though he had lost, he was happy to know that some of the most eminent professors of San Marcos had voted for him and mentioned by name some of those who had assured us of their vote. A number of them immediately sent letters to El Comercio denying that they had voted for him.

  His victory did not offer Aurelio Miró Quesada any satisfaction whatsoever. The fierce—and very unjust—political hostility of the students toward him after his election, turning him into little less than the symbol of the dictatorial regime, something he never was, resulted in his almost never being able to set foot in the most important locales of San Marcos and forced him to attend to matters concerning the rectorate from an office on the periphery, the object of permanent harassment and the enmity of university cloisters where, thanks to the regime’s increasing powerlessness, the heretofore clandestine forces of the APRA and the left were regaining the initiative and would soon be ready to take over the university. Shortly thereafter, this climate would lead the refined and elegant essayist that Aurelio Miró Quesada is to give up the rectorate and leave San Marcos.

  Porras’s defeat deeply affected him. I have the impression that the rectorate was the post he coveted the most—more than any political distinction—because of his close and long-standing relationship with the university, and not having attained it left in him a frustration and a bitterness that induced him, in the 1956 elections, to agree to be a candidate for a senatorial seat on a list of the Democratic Front (a creation of the Aprista party) and, during Prado’s administration, to accept the post of minister of foreign relations, which he would occupy until a few days before his death, in 1960. It is true that he was a first-rate senator and minister, but that immersion in a political absorbent cut short his intellectual activities and kept him from writing that history of the Conquest which, when I began to work with him, he appeared to be determined to finish once and for all. He was occupied with it when the campaign for the rectorate intervened. I remember that, after keeping me busy making note cards on myths and legends for several months, Porras had me type out, in a single manuscript, all of his published monographs and articles and his unpublished chapters on Pizarro as well, to which he gradually added notes, corrected pages, and added more.

  The fact that his candidacy for the rectorate of San Marcos had been supported by the APRA and the left—a curious paradox since Porras had never been an Aprista or a socialist, but rather a liberal inclined to be a conservative*—earned him the revenge of the regime, in whose publications he began to be attacked, at times in the basest of terms. A weekly that backed Odría, Clarín, brought out several articles against him, full of abominations. It occurred to me to write a manifesto of solidarity with him as a person and to collect signatures among intellectuals, professors, and students. We secured several hundred signatures, but there was nowhere to publish the manifesto, so we had to content ourselves with presenting it to Porras.

  Thanks to this manifesto I met someone who was to be one of my best friends in those years and help me a great deal in my first efforts as a professional writer. We had given printed copies of the manifesto to various people to circulate and gather signatures for, and I was informed that a student at the Catholic University wanted to lend a helping hand. His name was Luis Loayza. I gave him one of the copies and a few days later we met in the Crem Rica on the Avenida Larco so that he could hand the signatures over to me. He had secured only one: his own. He was tall, seemingly absent-minded and aloof, two or three years older than I was, and although he was studying law, the only thing he cared about was literature. He had read everything and spoke of authors that I hadn’t even known existed—men like Borges, whom he frequently quoted, and the Mexican writers Juan Rulfo and Juan José Arreola—and when I revealed my enthusiasm for Sartre and politically committed literature, his reaction was a crocodile-sized yawn.

  We saw each other again soon thereafter, in his house on the Avenida Petit Thouars, where he read me some prose works that he was to publish, sometime later, in a private edition—El avaro (The Miser), which came out in Lima in 1955—and where we had long, uninterrupted conversations in his library crammed full of books. Loayza, along with Abelardo Oquendo, with whom I didn’t make friends until later, were to become my best pals of those years, and intellectually the most kindred spirits. We exchanged and discussed books and plans for our literary endeavors, and eventually constituted a warm and stimulating confraternity. Apart from our passion for literature, Lucho and I had great differences concerning many things, and for that reason we never got bored, for we always had something to have a heated argument about. Unlike me, always interested in politics and capable of becoming impassioned about almost any aspect of it and devoting myself entirely to it without thinking about it twice, politics bored Loayza stiff, and in general this and every other enthusiasm—except one for a good book—merited his subtle and sarcastic skepticism. He was against the dictatorship, of course, but more for aesthetic reasons than for political ones. Every once in a while I dragged him to lightning demonstrations and during one of them, in the Parque Universitario, he lost a shoe: I remember him running alongside me, never losing his composure, before a charge by the mounted Civil Guards, and asking me in a soft voice if doing such things was absolutely indispensable. My admiration for Sartre and his exhortations concerning social commitment sometimes bored him and sometimes irritated him—he preferred Camus, naturally, because he was more of an artist and wrote better prose than Sartre—and he dismissed both Sartre’s ideas and my admiration for them with a sibylline irony that made me howl with indignation. I avenged myself by attacking Borges, whom he idolized, calling him a formalist, an antipurist, and even the chien de garde of the bourgeoisie. Our Sartre-versus-Borges arguments lasted for hours and sometimes made us stop seeing or speaking to each other for several days. It was surely Loayza—or perhaps it was Abelardo: I never found out which—who gave me the nickname they used to pull my leg: the fierce little Sartrean, el sartrecillo valiante.

  It was because of Loayza that I read Borges, in the beginning with a certain reluctance—what is purely or excessively intellectual, what seems dissociated from a very direct experience of life, always arouses in me a refusal to let myself become involved in it—but with an amazement and a curiosity that always made me come back to him. Until little by little, down through the months and the years, that distance turned into admiration. And, in addition to Borges, I turned to many other Latin American authors who, before my friendship with Loayza, I knew nothing of, or out of sheer ignorance held in contempt. The list would be a very long one, but among them are Alfonso Reyes, Bioy Casares, Juan José Arreola, Juan Rulfo, and Octavio Paz, a thin volume of whose poetry Loayza discovered one day—Piedra de sol (Sunstone)—which we read aloud and which led us to eagerly seek out other books of his.

  My lack of interest in the literature of Latin America—with the sole exception of Pablo Neruda, whom I always read devotedly—had been total before I met Lucho Loayza. Rather than lack of interest, perhaps I should say hostility. This was because the only modern Latin American literature studied at San Marcos or discussed in literary reviews and supplements was o
f the indigenist or folkloric and regionalist sort, that of novelists like Alcides Arguedas, author of Raza de bronce (Race of Bronze); Jorge Icaza, author of Huasipungo; Eustasio Rivera, author of La vorágine (The Vortex); Rómulo Gallegos, author of Doña Bárbara; Ricardo Güiraldes, author of Don Segundo Sombra; or even Miguel Ángel Asturias.

  I had been forced to read that sort of narrative and its Peruvian equivalent in classes at San Marcos, and I detested it, since it appeared to me to be a provincial and demagogic caricature of what a good novel should be. Because in those books the background was more important than the flesh-and-blood characters (in two of them, Don Segundo Sombra and La vorágine, nature finally swallowed up the heroes) and because their authors apparently didn’t know the first thing about how to put a story together, beginning with the ability to stay with the chosen point of view: in them the narrator was always butting in and offering his opinion, even when he was supposedly invisible, and furthermore, their ornate, bookish styles—especially in the dialogue—made stories that presumably took place among rude and primitive people so hard to believe that the illusion of reality never managed to break through the surface of them. All the so-called indigenist literature was a string of clichés about nature and of such great artistic poverty that one had the impression that for the authors writing good novels consisted in looking around for “good” subjects—weird and terrible events—and writing about them in unusual words taken straight out of dictionaries, as far removed as possible from everyday speech.

  Lucho Loayza enabled me to discover another Latin American literature, more urbane and cosmopolitan, and more elegant as well, that had sprung up mainly in Mexico and in Argentina. And then, as he did, I began to read Victoria Ocampo’s review, Sur, every month, a window opened out onto the world of culture, whose arrival in Lima seemed to set the pitifully provincial city to shaking with a mighty cascade of ideas, debates, poems, short stories, essays, from every language and every culture, and place those of us who devoured it in the middle of the contemporary culture of the entire planet. What Victoria Ocampo did through her Sur—and along with her, of course, all those who collaborated in this editorial adventure, beginning with José Bianco—is something for which we Hispano-American readers and writers can never be grateful enough, in the lifetimes of at least three generations. (That is what I told Victoria Ocampo when I met her, in 1966, at a Pen Club congress in New York. I always remember the happiness it gave me, many years after the ones that I am here recalling, to see a text of mine published in that review which each month made us experience the illusion of being in the intellectual avant-garde of the time.) In one of the recent or past issues of Sur that Loayza collected, I read the famous debate between Sartre and Camus concerning the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union.

  My association with Lucho, which soon became an intimate one, did not depend solely on books or on our shared vocation. It also had to do with his generous friendship and how pleasant it was to spend time with him listening to him talk about jazz, which delighted him, or about films—we never liked the same ones—or compete with him in the great national sport of raje, or watch him compose his prose pieces of a languid, refined aesthete, au-dessus de la mêlée, with which he liked at times to entertain his friends. At a certain period he began having an amusing—but most bothersome—ethical and aesthetic reaction: everything that struck him as ugly or earned his scorn made him sick to his stomach. It was a real risk to go with him to an exhibit, a lecture, a recital, a movie, or simply to stop in the middle of the street to exchange a few words with someone, for if the person or the performance didn’t meet his standards, he would begin retching right there on the spot.

  Lucho had become acquainted with those Latin American authors thanks to a professor from the Catholic University, who had arrived not long before from Argentina: Luis Jaime Cisneros. He also taught a course in Spanish literature at San Marcos that I was enrolled in, but I became friends with him only later on, thanks to Loayza and Oquendo. Luis Jaime Cisneros also had a passion for teaching, and engaged in it outside the classroom, in a corner of his library—in a townhouse in Miraflores, on a street that crossed the Avenida Pardo—where he met with students who had a special liking for philology (his specialty) and literature, to whom he lent books (jotting the names of them down, with the date and the title, in a huge account book). Luis Jaime was thin, refined, polite, but he affected a slightly pedantic and bullying attitude toward his colleagues which earned him bitter enemies at the university. I myself had a mistaken impression of him until I began to visit him and form part of the little circle which was the recipient of Luis Jaime’s culture and friendship.

  Luis Jaime had signed the first manifesto of the Christian Democrats, and the latter, who were taking the first steps to form a party, had asked him to be the editor of the periodical of the group. He asked me if I would like to give him a hand and I told him I’d be delighted to. And thus there came into being Democracia, in theory a weekly, but which came out only when we had scared up enough money for the issue, sometimes twice a month and sometimes monthly. For the first issue I wrote a long article on Bustamante y Rivero and the coup that overthrew him. We got the review together in Luis Jaime’s library, and had it printed in different shops each time, for they were all afraid that Esparza Zañartu—whom Odría had promoted to the post of minister of the interior, a political error that was providential for the reestablishment of democracy in Peru—would take reprisals against the printers. Since Luis Jaime, in order not to compromise his work at the university, did not want to appear as editor-in-chief on the masthead, I offered to let my name be used instead, and that was how Democracia appeared. On the first page there was an article, an unsigned one, as I remember, by Luis Bedoya Reyes, criticizing “Pradism,” which was reorganizing in order to launch a second candidacy for the presidency by Manuel Prado, a former holder of that office.

  Democracia had only just come out when I was summoned by my father to his office. I found him livid, waving about the weekly on which my name appeared on the masthead as editor-in-chief. Had I forgotten that La Crónica belonged to the Prado family? That La Crónica had exclusive rights to material that came from the International News Service? That he was the director of the INS? Did I want La Crónica to cancel his contract and leave him without a job? He ordered me to take my name off the masthead. So as a result, after the second or third issue, my friend and comrade from San Marcos, Guillermo Carrillo Marchand, succeeded me as the supposed editor-in-chief—the real one was Luis Jaime. And since after a few issues Guillermo also had problems because of his being on the masthead in that capacity, Democracia then came out with a fictitious editor-in-chief, whose name we filched from one of Borges’s short stories.

  The Christian Democrats played a major role in the downfall of Esparza Zañartu, which precipitated the death of the dictatorship. If he had continued to be in charge of the security forces of the dictatorship, the regime would perhaps have gone on beyond the elections of 1956, by faking the results, as it had done in 1950, in favor of Odría himself or of some figurehead (there were several individuals lining up to play that role). But the fall of the strongman of the regime weakened it and plunged it into a state of disorder in which the opposition seized the opportunity to take over the streets.

  Throughout the dictatorship Esparza Zañartu had occupied a relatively unimportant post—administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior—which allowed him to remain in the background, for despite the fact that he made all the decisions with respect to security, the minister of the interior took public responsibility for them. The probable reason that led Odría to make Esparza Zañartu minister was that nobody wanted to occupy that puppet post. Legend has it that when General Odría summoned him to offer him the portfolio, Esparza answered that he would accept it, out of loyalty, but that this measure was the equivalent of suicide for the regime. And so it was. The moment that Esparza Zañartu became a visible target, all the weapons o
f the opposition were trained on him. The coup de grâce was the demonstration by Pedro Roselló’s National Coalition, in Arequipa, which Esparza tried to break up by sending hired gunmen and police in civvies as counterdemonstrators. The latter were routed by the Arequipans, and police began shooting at the dissidents, the result being a large number of casualties. The drama of 1950 seemed to be repeating itself, when, during the fraudulent elections, confronted with an attempted rebellion in the streets by the people of Arequipa, Odría had resorted to a wholesale slaughter. But this time the regime did not dare to bring tanks and soldiers out into the street to fire on the crowd, as rumor has it that Esparza Zañartu wanted to do. Arequipa declared a general strike, which the entire city took part in. At the same time, in accordance with the long-standing custom that had earned it the name of the caudillo city (since the majority of republican rebellions and revolutions began there), the Arequipans tore up the paving stones of the streets and set up barricades, where thousands upon thousands of men and women of every social sector waited on the alert for the regime’s response to their list of demands: Esparza Zañartu’s resignation, the abolition of the Law of Domestic Security, and a date set for free elections. After three days of tremendous tension, the regime sacrificed Esparza Zañartu, who, after resigning, hurriedly went abroad. And although the dictatorship named a military cabinet, it was evident to everyone, beginning with Odría himself, that the people of Arequipa—the home territory of Bustamante y Rivero—had dealt him a fatal blow.