I doubt whether, either before or since then, any piece of news has excited me as much as that one. I was going to set foot in the city I’d dreamed of, in the mythical country where the writers I most admired had been born. “I’m going to meet Sartre, I’m going to shake hands with Sartre,” I kept repeating that night to Julia and to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, with whom Julia and I went out to celebrate the occasion. I was so overexcited I must not have slept a wink all night, bouncing in the bed out of sheer joy.
The official announcement of the winner of the prize took place at the Alliance Française and my beloved French teacher, Madame del Solar, was also there, very pleased that her former pupil had won the contest sponsored by La Revue Française. I met Monsieur Prouverelle, and we came to an agreement whereby I would take the trip after the final examinations at the university and the year-end holidays. These last days of 1957 were hectic ones, in which there were interviews of me published in the newspapers and my friends came by to congratulate me. Dr. Porras organized a chocolate party to celebrate my winning the prize.
I went to thank the members of the jury one by one, and that was how I met Jorge Basadre, the last great nonprovincial intellectual figure that Peru has produced. I had never spoken with him before. He was less given to recounting anecdotes and less scintillating than Porras Barrenechea, but much more interested in ideas, doctrines, and philosophy than Porras was, with a vast literary culture and a broad view of Peru’s historical problems. The neatness and the discreet elegance of his home seemed to be a reflection of the organized intelligence of the historian, his mental clarity. He lacked vanity and did not make the slightest effort to show off his brilliance; he was earnest and formal, but very levelheaded. I spent two hours with him, listening to him talk about the great novels that had moved him deeply, and he spoke of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in such a way that, when I left his house in San Isidro, I hurried to a bookstore to buy it. Sebastián Salazar Bondy, who had been in France for a few months not long before, said to me, enviously: “The best thing that can happen to anyone in the world is happening to you: going to Paris!” He drew up a list for me of indispensable things to do and see in the capital of France.
André Coyné translated El desafío into French, but it was Georgette Vallejo who revised the translation and polished it, working with me. I knew César Vallejo’s widow because she often used to come to visit Porras, but it was only in those days when I was helping her with the translation, in her apartment in the Calle Dos de Mayo, that we became friends. She could be a fascinating person when she told anecdotes about famous writers she had known, although her stories were always weighted down by a secret passion. All Vallejo scholars habitually turned into her mortal enemies. She detested them, as though by coming to be on close terms with Vallejo they took something away from her. She was as thin and wiry as a fakir and had an awesome temper. At a famous lecture at San Marcos, in which the subtle poet Gerardo Diego recounted as a mild joke how Vallejo had died owing him a few pesetas, the shadow of the illustrious widow rose to her feet in the auditorium and coins sailed over the audience’s heads toward the lecturer, as the air was deafened by the exclamation: “Vallejo always paid his debts, you wretch!” Neruda, who detested her as much as she detested him, swore that Vallejo was so afraid of Georgette that he used to make his escape over the rooftops or through the windows of their Paris apartment so as to be alone with his friends. Georgette lived in near penury in the days when I first knew her, giving private French classes, and cultivated her neuroses without the least embarrassment. She put out little spoonfuls of sugar for the ants in her apartment, she never took off the black turban she was invariably wearing every time I saw her, in dramatic accents she lamented the fate of the ducks doomed to decapitation at a Chinese restaurant next to the building where she lived, and she fought tooth and nail — by means of devastatingly cruel open letters — with all the publishers who had brought out or tried to bring out Vallejo’s poetry. She lived extremely frugally, and I remember how one time, when Julia and I invited her to have lunch with us at La Pizzería on the Diagonal, she scolded us, with tears in her eyes, for having left food on our plates when there were so many hungry people in the world. Though her behavior was outrageous, she was generous: she was eager to help Communist poets who had financial or political problems, and on occasion, in times of repression, she hid them in her apartment. Being friends with her was arduous, like walking across burning coals, since the most trivial and unexpected thing might offend her and unleash one of her fits of fury. Despite this, she became a very good friend of ours and we used to go fetch her, bring her to our place, and sometimes take her out on Saturdays. Then, when I went off to live in Europe, she made me run errands for her — collect royalties owed her, mail her certain homeopathic medicines from a pharmacy at the Carrefour de l’Odéon, of which she had been a customer ever since the days of her youth — until, because of one of these errands, we too had a quarrel by letter. And even though we made up later on, we no longer saw each other very often. The last time I spoke with her, in Mejía Baca’s bookstore, shortly before the beginning of that terrible last stage of her life that was to keep her in a clinic for years, turned into a vegetable, I asked her how things were going with her: “How do you expect they’re going for a woman in this country where every day people are more evil, uglier, and crueler?” she answered, rasping her r’s with obvious delight.
At Radio Panamericana they gave me a month’s vacation, and Uncle Lucho secured me a loan of a thousand dollars from his bank, so as to enable me to stay in Paris, at my own expense, for two additional weeks. Uncle Jorge dug up an old gray overcoat which he’d kept around since the days of his youth and which the moths in Lima hadn’t done too much damage to, and one morning in January 1958 I started out on the great adventure. Besides Julia, Uncle Lucho, Abelardo and Pupi, and Luis Loayza came to the airport to say goodbye to me. With great self-importance, I took along in my suitcase several copies of the very first issue of Literatura, just off the presses, so as to acquaint French writers with our review.
I have made many journeys in my life and have forgotten almost all of them, but I remember that two-day Avianca flight with a wealth of details, such as the magical thought that never left me: “I’m going to get to know Paris.” There was a Peruvian medical student who was going back to Madrid on the plane, and two young Colombian girls, who had come aboard at the stop in Barranquilla, whom the two of us photographed each other with in the Azores. (A year later, in a bar in Madrid, the Peruvian Lucho Garrido Lecca showed that photo to Julia, sparking a monumental jealous scene.) The plane remained for hours at each stopover — Bogotá, Barranquilla, the Azores, Lisbon — and finally, early in the morning on a rainy winter day, it arrived at Orly, in those days a smaller and more modest airport than the one in Lima. And waiting there was Monsieur Prouverelle, yawning.