Radio Panamericana reached the point of vying with Radio América for the title of best national radio station. The competition between the two was fierce and Genaro devoted his days and his nights to thinking up new programs and improvements to get the better of Panamericana’s rival. During this period he bought a series of radio relays, which, installed at different locations within the country, would place Panamericana within reach of a large part of Peru. Obtaining permission from the government to install the relays was a real feat, in the process of which I saw Genaro begin to display his first talents as a politico. It is true that, without them, neither he nor any other entrepreneur would have been able to have the slightest success in Peru. The procedure was endless. He was blocked at every step through the influence of his competitors or by bureaucrats eager for bribes. And Genaro was forced to seek influence against those influences and make deals and promises right and left, over many long months, in order to obtain a mere permit that, moreover, would benefit communications and establish links between various parts of the country.
In the last two years that I was in Peru, as I wrote news bulletins for Panamericana, I managed to get one more job: a teaching assistant in the course on Peruvian literature at the University of San Marcos. Augusto Tamayo Vargas, the professor in charge of the course, who had been extremely kind to me since my first year at San Marcos, secured it for me. He was an old friend of my aunts and uncles (and as a young man, one of my mother’s suitors, as I discovered one day by way of other love poems that she had also hidden at my grandparents’) and I had attended his course, that first year, with great dedication. So much so that, shortly after I began it, Augusto, who was preparing an enlarged edition of his book Literatura Peruana, took me on to work with him, several afternoons a week. I helped him with the bibliography and typed chapters of the manuscript. Once in a while I gave him short stories of mine to read and he handed them back to me with encouraging comments.
Tamayo Vargas was in charge of several courses for foreigners at San Marcos, and since I was in the third year he had entrusted me with a short course on Peruvian authors in connection with the program, which I taught once a week and for which I earned a few soles. In 1957, when I started my last year in the Faculty of Letters, he asked me about my plans for the future. I told him that I wanted to be a writer, but that, as it was impossible to earn a living by writing, once I’d finished my studies at the university I would devote myself to journalism or teaching, since even though I was also going on, in theory, with my studies in the Faculty of Law — I was in my third year of law school — I was certain I would never practice law. Augusto advised me to get a university job. Teaching literature was compatible with writing, since it left more time free than other occupations. I had best begin right away. He had proposed to the Faculty that a post as teaching assistant be created for his chair in Peruvian literature. Might he propose my name?
Of the three hours of teaching that the chair entailed, Tamayo Vargas entrusted one to me, which I prepared, nervously and excitedly, at the library of the Club Nacional or between one news bulletin and the next in my shack at Panamericana. That one little hour a week obliged me to read or to reread certain Peruvian authors and, above all, to sum up my reactions to these readings in rational and coherent language, making notes and filling up note cards. I liked doing this and impatiently awaited the day for that class which Tamayo Vargas himself sometimes attended, sitting among the students, to see how I was doing. (Alfredo Bryce Echenique was one of my students.)
Even though my class attendance had fallen off badly ever since I had married, I had always felt warm ties to San Marcos, above all to the Faculty of Letters. My dislike of the courses at the Faculty of Law, on the other hand, was wholehearted. I went on with them out of inertia, so as to end something that I had begun, and with the vague hope that the title of attorney-at-law might serve me, later on, to earn at least enough to live on.
But I took several courses leading to a degree in literature out of sheer pleasure: the ones in Latin, for instance, by Professor Fernando Tola, one of the most interesting persons on the Faculty. He had begun, very early in his life, to study modern languages such as French, English, and German, which he then abandoned in favor of Greek and Latin. But when I was his student he had conceived a passion for Sanskrit, which he had learned by himself, and gave a course in it whose sole pupil was, I believe, José León Herrera, Samuel Pérez Barreto’s friend. The irrepressible Porras Barrenechea joked: “They say that Doctor Tola knows Sanskrit. But who can tell?”
Tola, who belonged to what was known as high society, had caused what in those days was a tremendous scandal by abandoning his lawfully wedded wife and beginning to live with his secretary without trying to conceal the fact. He shared a little townhouse with her, on the Avenida Benavides, in Miraflores, crammed full of books, that he lent me without limit. He was a magnificent professor and his classes in Latin went on past the hour set for it on the official schedule. I greatly enjoyed them and remember having spent whole nights, wide awake and all excited, translating inscriptions on Roman funerary stelae for his course. I went to visit him at night sometimes in the little townhouse on Benavides, where I stayed for hours listening to him talk about the all-absorbing subject that obsessed him, Sanskrit. The three years that I studied Latin with him taught me quite a few more things than the language; and because of the many books on Roman civilization that Professor Tola had me read, I one day conceived the project of writing a novel about Heliogabalus, a project that, like so many others of those years, never came to anything more than a few short sketches.
In his Language Institute, Dr. Tola was publishing a little collection of bilingual texts, and I proposed to him that I translate Rimbaud’s story “Un Coeur sous une soutane,” which would not see print until thirty years later, right in the middle of the election campaign. I saw Dr. Tola years later, in Paris, where he stayed for some time perfecting his Sanskrit at the Sorbonne. Later on, he went to India, where he lived for many years and married for the third time — to an Indian woman, a professor of Sanskrit. I learned later that she chased after him all through Latin America, where this peripatetic and eternally young man had settled in Argentina (where he married for the fourth or perhaps the tenth time). By then he was an international authority on Vedic texts, the author of countless treatises and translations from Sanskrit and Hindi. I understand that for some years now he’s lost interest in India, having become interested in Chinese and Japanese…
Other seminars that I enthusiastically attended in the Faculty of Letters were those given by Luis Alberto Sánchez, on his return from exile in 1956, on Peruvian and Hispano-American literature. I remember him above all because it was thanks to him that I discovered Rubén Darío, whom Dr. Sánchez explained in such a lively way and with such intimate knowledge that when classes let out I rushed to the library to ask for the books that he had discussed. Like many readers of Darío, I had regarded him, before that seminar, as a verbose poet, like other modernists, beneath whose verbal pyrotechnics, beautiful music, and affectedly French images, there was nothing profound, merely conventional thought borrowed from the Parnassian poets. But in that seminar I came to know the essential and unconventional Darío, the founder of modern poetry in Spanish, without whose powerful verbal revolution figures as disparate as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado in Spain, and Vallejo and Neruda in Hispano-America, would have been inconceivable.