How did I manage, with the vast number of things that I was already doing, to add that job with the pompous title of news director of Radio Panamericana to the ones I already had? I don’t know how, but I did. I suppose that some of my old jobs — the cemetery one, the one on Extra, the Senate one, the book on Civic Education for the Catholic University — had ended. But the one in the afternoons, at Porras Barrenechea’s, and writing articles for El Comercio and Cultura Peruana went on. As did my studies in law and literature, although I attended few classes and confined myself to taking the exams. The work at Panamericana took up many hours of my time, so that in the next few months I dropped several of the jobs writing newspaper articles to concentrate on my programs at Radio Panamericana, which became more and more numerous while I was there, until they came to include “El Panamericano,” the nightly news roundup.
I have used many of my memories of Radio Panamericana in my novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, where they are jumbled together with other memories and flights of fancy. Today I have doubts about what separates one sort from another, and it is possible that certain invented ones have crept in among the true ones here, but I suppose that too may go by the name of autobiography.
My office was in a wooden shack, on the roof, which I shared with a person so emaciated he was very nearly invisible — Samuel Pérez Barreto — who wrote, with amazing productivity, all the commercials that went out over the station. I was left openmouthed at seeing how Samuel, typing with two fingers, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and talking to me nonstop about Hermann Hesse, was able, without pausing to think for one second, to spin out a whole series of witty comments on sausages or sanitary napkins, divinations about fruit juices or tailor shops, injunctions about cars, drinks, toys, or lotteries. Advertising was the very air he breathed, something he did unconsciously with his fingers. His passion in life in those years was Hermann Hesse. He kept reading or rereading him and talking about him with a contagious enthusiasm, to the point that, for Samuel’s sake, I dived into Steppenwolf, where I almost drowned. His great friend, José León Herrera, a student of Sanskrit, sometimes came to see him, and I listened to them get involved in esoteric conversations as Samuel’s tireless fingers filled one sheet of paper after another with advertising copy.
My work at Panamericana began very early in the morning, since the first news bulletin was at 7 a.m. Then a five-minute one each hour, until the noon one, which lasted fifteen minutes. The bulletins began again at 6 p.m., and went on until “El Panamericano,” the 10 p.m. news program, which was half an hour long. I spent the day going back and forth between the station and the library of the Club Nacional, or a class at San Marcos, or Porras’s house. In the afternoon and evening I stayed at the station for some four hours.
The truth is that I took a great liking to the work at Panamericana. It began by being just another job to keep us alive, but as Genaro kept pushing me to help him do new and different things and make the programs better, and as our audience and influence kept growing, the job turned into a commitment, something I tried to do creatively. I became friends with Genaro, who, despite being the big boss, spoke to everyone in an easygoing way and took an interest in everybody’s work, no matter how nondescript it was. He wanted Radio Panamericana to achieve a lasting prestige that went beyond mere entertainment and to that end he had sponsored programs on movies, with Pepe Ludmir, interviews and discussions of current events, on a program of Pablo de Madalengoitia’s, “Pablo y sus amigos”—and some excellent discussions of international politics by a Spanish Republican, Benjamín Núñez Bravo, on a program called “Día y Noche.”
I proposed to him that he put on the air a program on Congress, in which we would rebroadcast part of the sessions, with brief commentaries that I would write. He agreed. Porras got permission for us to record the sessions, and thus there came into being “El Parlamento en síntesis” (“What’s Going On in Congress”), a program that was quite successful but wasn’t on the air for long. Recording the sessions meant that the tapes often contained not only the speeches of the fathers of our country, but comments, exclamations, insults, whispers, and a thousand intimate interchanges which, when I edited the tapes, I was careful to cut out. But, one time, when I entrusted the task of editing them to Pascual Lucen, he allowed several salacious remarks by the Pradist senator from Puno, Torres Belón, the president of the Senate at the time, to go out over the air. The next day we were forbidden to record the sessions and the program died then and there.
By then, we had already launched “El Panamericano,” which was to have a long career on the radio and, later on, on television. And the news service, which I was in charge of, allowed itself the luxury of having three or four staff writers, a first-class editorial writer — Luis Rey de Castro — and the star radio announcer Humberto Martínez Morosini.
When I began to work at Panamericana my only collaborator was the likable and loyal but very chancy character Pascual Lucen. He might very well turn up pickled in alcohol at seven in the morning and sit down at his typewriter to summarize the news items from the daily papers that I had pointed out to him, without moving a muscle of his face, letting out blasts of hiccups and belches that shook the windows. In a few minutes, the air in the shack reeked pestilentially of alcohol. He went on, nothing daunted, typing news summaries that I often had to do over from beginning to end, by hand, as I took them downstairs to the announcers. The minute my attention flagged, Pascual Lucen slipped a catastrophe into the news bulletin. For he had an almost sexual passion for floods, earthquakes, derailments; they excited him and his eyes gleamed as he longingly showed me a cable from France Presse or a newspaper clipping about them. And if I acceded and said to him, “Okay, give it a quarter of a page,” he would thank me from the bottom of his heart.
Shortly thereafter, Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui arrived to give Pascual Lucen a helping hand. Demetrio was from Cuzco, a teacher of Quechua who had been a seminarian, and who for his part, whenever I let my guard down, filled the news bulletins with religious items. I never succeeded in getting the ceremonious Demetrio — whose photograph, in which he was dressed as an Inca on the heights of Machu Picchu and described as a direct descendant of the great Inca ruler Túpac Yupanqui, I had the surprise of seeing in a Spanish magazine not long ago — to call a bishop a bishop rather than a “purple-clad prelate.” The third writer was a ballet dancer and an aficionado of Roman helmets — since it was difficult to come by them in Peru, a tinsmith friend of his made them for him — with whom I had literary conversations between one bulletin and the next.
Later on, Carlos Paz Cafferata came to work with me, a man who, over the years, was to have a distinguished career under Genaro. Back then, he was already a journalist who didn’t seem to be a journalist (not a Peruvian one, at least) because of his frugality and his silences and a sort of metaphysical apathy toward the world and the afterworld. He was an excellent writer and editor, with a real instinct for differentiating between an important news item and a secondary one, for emphasizing and minimizing precisely the right aspects of an event, but I don’t remember ever having seen him wax enthusiastic about anything or anybody. He was a sort of Zen Buddhist monk, someone who has attained Nirvana and is beyond emotions and beyond good and evil. Carlos Paz’s silences and intellectual anorexia drove Samuel Pérez Barreto, a spirited and tireless conversationalist, out of his mind and he continually invented ruses to enliven, excite, and infuriate Paz. He never managed to.