It seems to me that I was the one, with that inquisitiveness of mine that never left me — and still hasn’t — who got us started, in the summer of 1957, holding spiritualistic séances. We usually held them at my place. A cousin of Julia’s and Olguita’s, whose name was also Olga and who was a medium, had arrived from Bolivia. She frequented the other world with the greatest of ease. In the sessions she played her role so well that it was impossible not to believe that spirits spoke through her mouth; or more precisely, through her hand, since they dictated their messages to her and she wrote them down. The problem was that all the spirits that obeyed her summons made the same spelling mistakes. Despite this, moments of ebullient nervous tension were created, and afterward I would stay awake all night long, tossing and turning in bed out of guilt at that contact with the world beyond.
In one of these spiritualistic sessions, Pablo Macera began pounding on the table: “Keep quiet, it’s my grandmother.” He was deathly pale, and there was no doubt about it; he believed it. “Ask her if I killed her from the fit of rage I caused her,” he stammered. His grandmother’s spirit refused to relieve his doubts and he held it against us for some time, telling us that our fooling around had deprived him of the chance to free himself of a distressing uncertainty.
In the library of the Club Nacional I also came across some books on satanism, but my friends categorically refused to have us conjure up the devil following the obscene recipes of those manuals. They would consent only to our going every so often, at midnight, to the romantic cemetery in Surco, where Baldomero, in a state of lyrical rapture, suddenly began to ballet dance in the moonlight, leaping about amid the graves…
The Saturday night meetings, at my house in Las Acacias, lasted till dawn and were usually very amusing. We sometimes played a terrific, semihysterical game: the laughing game. The one who lost had to make the others laugh by clowning around. I had a very effective trick. Imitating a duck’s waddle, I rolled my eyes and cackled: “This is the miter-bird, the miter-bird, the miter-bird!” The self-important ones, such as Loayza and Macera, endured indescribable suffering when it was their turn to play the buffoon, and the only amusing gimmick that occurred to the latter was to pucker his mouth up like a baby and growclass="underline" brrrr, brrrr. A much more dangerous game was Truth or Consequences. In one of these sessions of collective exhibitionism, we listened, we heard, all of a sudden, from the timid Carlos Germán Belli — my admiration for his poems had led me to visit him in the very modest job as amanuensis that he had as a congressional clerk — a confession that amazed us: “I’ve slept with the ugliest women in Lima.” Carlos Germán was a rigidly moral surrealist, much like César Moro, stuffed into the skeleton of a well-educated and inconspicuous young man, and one day he had decided to put an end to his inhibitions about women, posting himself at the exit of the building where he worked, on a corner of the Jirón de la Unión, and making provocative remarks to the women passing by. But his timidity made him tongue-tied with the pretty ones; his tongue would loosen only to proposition the ugly ones…
Someone else who often came to those gatherings was Fernando Hilbck, a classmate of Lucho’s at the Faculty of Law and an actor. Loayza told how one day, in their last year, for the first time in seven years, Tachi became interested in a class: “How does it happen, Professor, that there are several codes? Aren’t all of the laws in just one book?” The professor called him aside: “Tell your father to let you become an actor and don’t waste any more time studying law.” Tachi’s father resigned himself and did just that, regretting that his son wouldn’t be the star of the tribunals that he’d dreamed he’d be. He sent him to Italy and gave him two years to make himself famous in the movies. I saw Tachi in Rome, shortly before the fateful date came round. All he had managed to accomplish was to play the part of a furtive Roman centurion in a film, but he was happy. Then he went to Spain, where he had a brief career in the movies and the theater, and finally — yet another Peruvian to number among those who chose invisibility — he disappeared altogether. In the spiritualist séances or in the game of clowning around, Tachi Hilbck was unbeatable: his histrionic gifts transformed the gathering into a hilarious performance.
Chance brought Raúl and Teresa Deustua, just back from the United States, where Raúl had worked for many years as a translator at the United Nations, to live in the apartment next to ours on Las Acacias. Belonging to the same generation as Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Javier Sologuren, and Eduardo Eielson, Raúl was, like them, a poet, and the author of a play, Judith, that remained unpublished. A refined man who was very well read, especially in English and in French, he was one of those elusive figures of Peruvian culture who, after a brief appearance on the scene, disappear and become ghosts, because they go abroad and break all their ties to Peru, or because, like César Moro, they opt for inner exile, keeping their distance from everybody and everything that might remind them of their swift journey along the path of art, thought, or literature. I have always been fascinated by the case of those Peruvians who, because of a sort of tragic loyalty to a vocation difficult to reconcile with their milieu, break with the latter, and to all appearances with the better part of themselves — their sensitivity, their intelligence, their culture — so as not to make debasing concessions or compromises.
Raúl had stopped publishing his work (he had published very little, in all truth), but he hadn’t stopped writing and his conversation was as literary as it could possibly be. We became friends, and he was very pleased to find a group of young men of letters that knew his writings, sought him out, and invited him to their gatherings. He had a fine collection of French books, which he generously lent us, and thanks to him I could read many Surrealist books and a number of wonderful issues of Minotaure. He had made a translation of Baudelaire’s Fusées and Mon Coeur mis à nu and I spent many hours with him and Loayza, revising it. Like the majority of his poems and a Chosica Diary, a record of days spent in the pleasant old resort town in the mountains above Lima, which he used to read aloud to us, I believe that the Baudelaire translation never saw print.
I don’t know why Raúl Deustua came back to Peru — out of nostalgia for the old country perhaps, and with the hope of finding a good job. He worked at different things, at Radio Panamericana and at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, to which Porras Barrenechea offered him entrée, but he never did find the comfortable position that he longed for. In a few months he gave up and left Peru once more, for Venezuela this time. Teresita, who had made friends with Julia, was pregnant and stayed behind in Lima to have the baby. She was very likable and being pregnant sometimes made her have sudden whims like this exquisite one: “I should like to nibble on the edges of wontons.” Lucho Loayza and I went out to a chifa—a Chinese restaurant — to buy her some. When the baby was born, the Deustuas asked me to be his godfather, so that I had to take him in my arms to the baptismal font.
When Raúl left for Caracas he asked me if I wanted his job at Radio Panamericana. It was paid by the hour, like all the other ones I had, and I accepted. He took me to the rise on the Calle Belén from which the radio station broadcast, and that was how I first met the brothers Genaro and Héctor Delgado. At the time they were beginning the career that would take them to the very top, as I’ve already said. Their father, the founder of Radio Central, had given Radio Panamericana over to them, a station which, unlike Radio Central — whose appeal was popular, its specialties being soap operas and comedies — was aimed in those days at an elite audience, with programs of American or European music, more refined and a touch snobbish. Thanks to Genaro’s drive and ambition, this little radio station for listeners of a certain cultural level was in a short time to become one of the most prestigious ones in the country, and he would be on the point of building what was to be a veritable audiovisual empire (on the Peruvian scale) over the years.