Ever since those days I have abhorred the word “telluric,” flaunted by many writers and critics of the time as the greatest literary virtue and the obligatory theme of every Peruvian writer. To be telluric meant to write a literature with roots in the bowels of the earth, in local landscape and local customs, preferably Andean ones, and to denounce the bossism and feudalism of the highlands, the jungle, or the coast, with cruel episodes involving mistis (whites in positions of power) who raped peasant girls, drunken authorities who stole, and fanatical, corrupt priests who preached resignation to the Indians. Those who wrote and promoted telluric literature failed to realize that, despite their intentions, it was the most conformist and conventional literature in the world, the repetition of a series of clichés, put together mechanically, in which a folkloristic language, affected and caricatural, and the carelessness with which the narratives were constructed completely corrupted the historico-critical testimony meant to justify them. Unreadable as literature, they were also false social documents, in truth a picturesque, banal, and complaisant adulteration of a complex reality.
For me, the word telluric came to stand for provincialism and underdevelopment in the field of literature, the elementary and superficial version of the writer’s vocation held by the ingenuous pen pusher who believes that good novels can be written by inventing good “subjects” and has yet to learn that a successful novel is a valiant intellectual effort, a struggle with language and the invention of a narrative order, of an organization of time, of movements, of an imparting of information alternating with silences on which it depends entirely whether a piece of fiction is true or false, moving or ridiculous, serious or stupid. I didn’t know whether I would manage to become a writer someday, but I did know after those years that I would never be a telluric writer.
To be sure, not all the Peruvian writers whom I interviewed had that folkloristic scorn for form nor did they shield their laziness behind an adjective. One of the exceptions was Sebastián Salazar Bondy. He had not written novels, but he had written short stories — in addition to essays, works for the theater, and poetry — and thus had a place in the series. That was the first time I conversed at length with him. I sought him out in his little office at the daily La Prensa, and we went downstairs to have coffee together, at the Crem Rica on the Jirón de la Unión. He was tall and slender and sharp as a knife, tremendously likable and intelligent and, unlike the others, well acquainted with modern literature, about which he spoke with an assurance and a keenness of judgment that filled me with respect. Like every young person who aspired to be a writer, I was a parricide, and Salazar Bondy, because of how active and many-sided he was — he seemed at times to represent the entire cultural life of Peru — turned out to be the “father” whom my generation had to bury in order to take on a personality of our own, and it was very “in” to attack him. I had done so too, severely criticizing, in Turismo, his play No hay isla feliz (There Is No Happy Island), which I didn’t like. Although we came to be intimate friends only much later, I keep remembering that interview, because of the good impression it made on me. Talking with him was a healthy contrast to other authors whom I had interviewed: he was living proof that a Peruvian writer didn’t have to be telluric, that one could have a firm footing in Peruvian life and at the same time a mind open to the good literature of the whole world.
But of all my interviewees, the most picturesque and original one was, by far, Enrique Congrains Martin, who at the time was at the height of his popularity. He was a few years older than I was, blond and fond of sports, but very serious, to the point, I believe, of being impermeable to humor. He had a somewhat disconcerting fixed stare and his whole person exuded energy and action. He had come to literature for purely practical reasons, although that seemed scarcely believable. From an early age he had been a salesman of various products, and rumor had it that he was also the inventor of a special soap to wash saucepans, and that one of the fantastic projects he’d thought up had been to organize a union of domestic cooks who worked in Lima, so as to require, through this entity (he would be pulling the strings), all the housewives of the city to have their kitchenware scrubbed with the soap that he’d invented. Everyone thinks up mad undertakings; Enrique Congrains Martin had the ability — unheard of in Peru — to invariably put into practice the crazy projects that he came up with. From being a soap salesman he went on to be a book salesman, and so one day he decided to write and publish the books he sold himself, convinced that no one would resist this argument: “Buy this book, of which I am the author, from me. Have a good time reading it and help the cause of Peruvian literature.”
That was how he had come to write the collection of short stories Lima, hora cero (Lima, Zero Hour), Kikuyo, and most recently the novel No una, sino muchas muertes (Not One, but Many Dead), with which he brought his career as a writer to an end. He published his books and sold them from office to office, from house to house. And nobody could say no to him, because to anyone who told him he didn’t have any money, his reply would be that payment could be made in weekly installments of a few centavos. When I interviewed him, Enrique had dazzled all the Peruvian intellectuals who couldn’t see how he could be, at one and the same time, all the things he was.
And this was only the beginning. As soon as he got to literature he left it behind and went on to become a designer and salesman of peculiar pieces of furniture with three legs, a grower and seller of miniature Japanese trees, and, finally, a clandestine Trotskyite and a conspirator, and therefore thrown in prison. He got out and fathered twins. One day he disappeared and I had no news of him for a long time. Years later I discovered that he was living in Venezuela, where he was the prosperous owner of a speed-reading school, where a method was used that he himself, naturally, had invented.
A couple of months after her return from Chile, Julia became pregnant. The news came as an indescribable shock to me, because I was convinced at the time (was this too an obvious proof of Sartre’s influence on me?) that my vocation might possibly be compatible with marriage, but that it would irremediably founder if children who had to be fed, dressed, and educated entered the picture. Goodbye dreams of going off to France! Goodbye plans to write extra-long novels! How to devote oneself to an activity that didn’t put food on the table and work at things that brought in money to support a family? But Julia was looking forward to having a baby with such high hopes that I was obliged to hide my deep distress, and even to simulate an enthusiasm I didn’t feel at all at the prospect of being a father.
Julia hadn’t had any children during her previous marriage and the doctors had told her that she couldn’t have any, which was a great frustration in her life. This pregnancy was a surprise that overjoyed her. The German woman doctor who saw her gave her a very strict regimen to follow in the first months of her pregnancy, in which she was to move about as little as possible. She obeyed the doctor’s orders with great self-discipline, but after several warning signs, she lost the baby. It was very soon after the beginning of her pregnancy and it did not take long for her to recover from her disappointment.
I believe it was around that time that someone gave us a puppy. He was a lovable mutt, although a bit neurotic, and we named him Batuque — Rumpus. Little and wiggly, he would leap all about to welcome me home and used to jump up onto my lap as I read. But at times he would suddenly be overcome by unexpected fits of bad temper and make a lunge at one of our neighbors in the townhouse on the Calle Porta, the poet and writer María Teresa Llona, who lived by herself, and whose calves, for some reason, attracted and infuriated Batuque. She put up with it graciously, but we often found ourselves very embarrassed.