As his Dauphine went up the Champs-Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe, it all seemed like a miracle to me. A cold dawn was breaking and there were no cars or pedestrians on the great broad avenue, but how imposing everything looked, how harmonious the façades and the show windows were, how majestic and magnificent the Arc de Triomphe. Monsieur Prouverelle drove around the Étoile so that I could enjoy the view before taking me to the Hôtel Napoléon on the Avenue de Friedland, where I would spend the two weeks of my prize. It was a luxurious hotel and Lucho Loayza was later to say that I described my entrance into the Napoléon the way the “savages” whom Columbus brought to Spain described their entrance into the court of Castile and Aragon.
During that month in Paris I lived a life that was to have nothing to do with the one I would lead during my stay of almost seven years in France later on, when I was almost always confined to the world of the rive gauche. In those four weeks at the beginning of 1958, on the other hand, I was a resident of the eighth arrondissement, on the rive droite, and to all appearances, anyone would have taken me for a South American dandy come to Paris to have myself a fling. In the Hôtel Napoléon I was given a room with a little balcony overlooking the street, from which I could glimpse the Arc de Triomphe. Across from my room someone who had also won a prize was staying: Miss France 1958, part of whose prize also consisted of a stay at the Napoléon. Her name was Annie Simplon and she was a girl with golden tresses and a wasp waist, to whom the manager of the hotel, Monsieur Makovsky, introduced me and with whom he invited me to dine and dance one night in a fashionable nightclub, L’Éléphant Blanc. Nice Annie Simplon took me on a tour of Paris in the Dauphine that she’d won along with her kingdom and my ears still ache from the bursts of laughter I sent her into, on the afternoon of that outing, with the French that I thought I’d learned not only to read but to speak.
The Hôtel Napoléon had a restaurant, Chez Pescadou, whose elegance intimidated me so much that I crossed it on tiptoe. My French did not allow me to decipher all the exquisite names of the dishes on the menu, and perturbed by the presence of that maître d’hôtel, who looked like a royal chamberlain in ceremonial dress standing alongside me, I chose them at random, pointing with my finger. And so I was surprised at lunch one day to find that I had been brought a little fishing net. I had ordered a trout and had to go get it myself, out of a tank in one corner of the restaurant. “This is Proust’s world,” I thought, bowled over, despite the fact that at the time I hadn’t yet read even one line of Remembrance of Things Past.
On the morning after my arrival, almost the minute I woke up, around noon, I went out for a stroll along the Champs-Élysées. It was now crowded with people and vehicles and, behind the glass partitions, the terraces of the bistros were jam-packed with men and women, smoking, talking together. Everything looked beautiful, incomparable, dazzling to me. I was nothing but a métèque, a cheeky spic. I felt that this was my city: I would live here, write here, put down roots here and stay forever. In those days, Syrians and Lebanese prowled the streets of the center of the city, buying and selling dollars — the inevitable result of currency controls — and I didn’t understand what those characters who approached me every so often, with furtive gestures, were offering me, until finally one of them, who spoke a sort of Spanuguese, explained to me what he was after. He changed some dollars for me, at a better rate than the one I got at the bank, and I made the mistake of telling him what hotel I was staying at. Later on, he phoned me several times, offering me diversions of all sorts, with “mushashas muito bonitas”—his Spanuguese for “very pretty girls.”
Monsieur Prouverelle had prepared a program for me, which included a visit to the Hôtel de Ville, where they gave me a citation. We were accompanied by the Peruvian cultural attaché, an elderly gentleman who a while later would attain a moment of fame at a general conference of UNESCO during which he gave a speech attacking Picasso — making it clear that his criticisms were “of a painter by a painter,” since he himself turned out landscape paintings in his time off from his diplomatic duties. He had become so refined (or was so absent-minded) that he kissed the hands of all the women doorkeepers at the Hôtel de Ville, to the astonishment of Monsieur Prouverelle, who asked me if this was a Peruvian custom. Our cultural attaché had lived in Europe for an eternity and the Peru of his memories was already long dead and gone, or had perhaps never existed. I remember how surprised I was, on the afternoon I met him — we had gone to have coffee together, after the visit to the Hôtel de Ville, at a bistro near the Châtelet — when I heard him say: “People in Lima are so frivolous, strolling up and down the Paseo Colón every Sunday.” When were Limeños in the habit of going for Sunday strolls along that run-down Paseo in the downtown area of the city? Thirty or forty years before, no doubt. But, in all truth, that gentleman could have been a thousand years old.
Monsieur Prouverelle got Le Figaro to interview me and gave a cocktail party in my honor at the Hôtel Napoléon, at which he presented the issue of La Revue Française in which my short story appeared. He was, as he put it, “un chauvin raisonné”—a reasonable chauvinist — and he was amused and delighted by my unbridled enthusiasm for everything I saw round about me and my fascination for French books and authors. He was amazed that I went all about Paris continually associating its monuments, streets, and various sites with novels and poems that I knew by heart.
He made valiant efforts to arrange for me to meet Sartre, but he couldn’t manage it. We got as far as Sartre’s secretary at the time, Jean Cau, who, doing his job conscientiously, kept putting us off until we got tired of insisting. But I did manage to see Albert Camus, shake his hand, and exchange a few words with him. Monsieur Prouverelle found out that he was directing the revival of one of his plays, in a theater on the grands boulevards, and I posted myself there one morning, with my cheekiness of a twenty-one-year-old. After I’d waited for just a short time, Camus appeared, accompanied by the actress Maria Casares. (I recognized her at once, from a film I’d seen twice and liked as much as Lucho Loayza disliked it: Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis.) I went over to him, stammering, in my bad French, that I admired him very much and that I wanted to give him a copy of a literary review, and to my surprise, he answered me in a few kindly sentences in good Spanish (his mother was a Spaniard from Oran). He was wearing the same raincoat as in all the photographs of him, and holding the usual cigarette between his fingers. He and she said something, immediately after that, about “le Pérou,” a word that in those days was still associated in France with ideas of prosperity (“Ce n’est pas le Pérou!”—“This isn’t Peru!”).
The day after my arrival Monsieur Prouverelle invited me to have an aperitif with him at the Rhumerie Martiniquaise, in St.-Germain-des-Prés, and have dinner at Le Fiacre, warning me that he was taking me there because it was an excellent restaurant, but that the bar on the ground floor might shock me. I thought I had freed myself of any sort of prejudice, but it is true that as I went through that bar, where lustful elderly gentlemen were making out with boys, lavishing kisses on them and joyously fondling them in full view of everyone, I was disconcerted. It was one thing to read that such things existed and another to see them.