Around that time, Julia and I moved from the minuscule little apartment in the townhouse on the Calle Porta to a roomier one, with two bedrooms — one of which I turned into a study — on Las Acacias, a few blocks away from Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s. It was in a modern building, very near the seawall and the ocean, in Miraflores, although it had only one window overlooking the street and so we had to keep the lights on all day long.
We lived there for more than two years, and I believe that, despite my exhausting daily routine, it was a time with many compensations, the best of which was, without a shadow of a doubt, my friendship with Luis Loayza and Abelardo Oquendo. I had met Luis sometime before, and Abelardo when I was a contributor to the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, whose literary section he was in charge of. From that period on, the three of us began seeing each other more and more often, until we constituted an inseparable triumvirate. We used to spend weekends together, at my place or at Abelardo and Pupi’s, on the Avenida Angamos, or we would go out to eat at a Chinese restaurant, outings on which we were sometimes joined by other friends, such as Sebastián Salazar Bondy, José Miguel Oviedo (who was beginning to take up arms as a literary critic for the first time), a Spanish friend of Loayza’s named José Manuel Muñoz, Pablo Macera, the actor Tachi Hilbck, or Baldomero Cáceres, the future psychologist, in those days more concerned with theology than with science and for that reason nicknamed Cristo Cáceres by Macera.
But Abelardo, Lucho, and I also saw each other during the week. We thought up all sorts of pretexts for meeting in downtown Lima to have coffee together and chat, between classes and our jobs, if only for a few minutes, because those meetings, in which we exchanged comments about one book or another, traded political, literary, or university gossip, stimulated us and compensated for the many boring and mechanical things involved in our daily routines.
Both Lucho and Abelardo had given up their literary studies at the university so as to devote all their time to their law studies. Abelardo had just received his law degree and was already a practicing attorney, in his father-in-law’s office. Lucho was just finishing his last courses in the Faculty of Law and practicing in the office of a bigwig of Pradism: Carlos Ledgard. But simply knowing them was enough to be certain that what really mattered to them was literature, and that it would enter their lives again every time they tried to get away from it. I believe that in those days Abelardo wanted to get away from it. He had finished all his courses for a degree in Letters and had spent a year in Spain on a scholarship meant to enable him to write a doctoral dissertation on proverbs in the works of Ricardo Palma. I don’t know whether it was this arid sort of research reminiscent of the dissection of cadavers — all the rage at the time in the field of stylistics, which exerted a dictatorship that had the effect of sterilizing university departments of literature — that made him sick and tired of the prospect of an academic career, or whether he left the field for practical reasons, telling himself that, having recently married and with a family in prospect, he had to think of more reliable ways of earning a living. The fact is that he had given up writing his dissertation and left the university. But not literature. He read a great deal and spoke with tremendous sensitivity about literary texts, poetry in particular, for which he had a surgeon’s eye and exquisite taste. He sometimes wrote book reviews, always very penetrating ones, models of the genre, but he almost never signed them and at times I wondered whether Abelardo hadn’t decided, because of his rigorous critical acumen, to give up writing so as to be the one person in whom he could attain that perfection he sought: a reader. He had studied the classics of the Golden Age intensively and I always provoked him into discussing them because hearing him express an opinion about El Romancero, Quevedo, or Góngora filled me with envy.
His genteel air and his repugnance for any sort of fakery, his maniacal concern for propriety — in his dress, his speech, his behavior toward his friends — called to mind an aristocrat of the spirit who, through an error of fate, was exiled in the body of a young man belonging to the middle class, in a hard practical world in which he was destined to have a difficult time surviving. When Lucho and I spoke of him, by ourselves, we called him the Dauphin.
In those days Lucho had, in addition to his passion for Borges, one for Henry James, which I failed to share. He was a cannibalistic reader of books in English, which he bought or ordered in a bookstore specializing in works in foreign languages, on the Calle Belén, and he continually surprised me with a new title or author he just discovered. I remember his great find, in an old bookstore downtown: a magnificent translation of Marcel Schwob’s fine book, Vies imaginaires, which he was so enthusiastic about that he bought every copy of it in the store to distribute to his friends. Often our literary tastes differed, which gave us an excuse for stupendous arguments. Thanks to Lucho, I discovered exciting books, such as Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, in Spanish translations. One of our violent literary arguments had a comical ending. The subject of it: Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres, which he admired and I detested. When I told him that the book seemed to me verbose, its prose affected and long-winded, he replied that the argument couldn’t go on without Baldomero Cáceres, a fanatical fan of Gide’s, taking part in it. We hunted Baldomero up, and Lucho asked me to repeat to his face what I thought of Les Nourritures terrestres. I did as he asked. Baldomero burst out laughing. He roared with laughter for a long time, doubled over, holding his sides, as though he were being tickled, as though he been told the funniest joke in the world. This line of argument shut me up.
We dreamed, naturally, of bringing out a literary review that would be our forum and the visible sign of our friendship. One fine day, Lucho announced to us that he would finance the first issue, with his salary from the Ledgard law office. There thus came into being Literatura, of which just three issues were to appear (the last of the three when Lucho and I were already in Europe). The first issue included a homage to César Moro — a teacher of mine at Leoncio Prado — whose poetry I had discovered a short time before and whose “inner exile” intrigued me and attracted me as much as his writings. On his return from France and Mexico, countries in which he lived for many years, Moro had lived in Peru a secret, marginal life, not mingling with writers, publishing practically nothing, writing texts, the majority of them in French, read by a small circle of friends. André Coyné gave us several of Moro’s unpublished poems for that issue, which also contained contributions by Sebastián Salazar Bondy, José Durand, and a young Peruvian poet, the author of a number of very beautiful poems that Lucho had discovered in a lost issue of Mercurio Peruano: Carlos Germán Belli. The issue also contained a manifesto against the death penalty, signed by the three of us, occasioned by the execution in Lima by a firing squad of a convicted criminal (the “monster of Armendáriz”) that had served as an excuse for a repellent public celebration: people had gathered at dawn on the Paseo de la República to listen, as day broke, to the fatal shots of the firing squad. The issue included as well Loayza’s wonderful portrait of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The publication of this little review, no more than a handful of pages, was an exciting adventure because this activity, like the conversations with Lucho and Abelardo, made me feel like a writer, an illusion that had little to do with the reality of how I spent my time, taken up as it was by all my jobs to earn our daily bread.