In this month in Paris, I began for the first time, very secretly, to wonder whether I hadn’t been overly hasty and made a mistake by getting married. Not because Julia and I didn’t get along together, for we had no more quarrels than the usual married couple, and I am the first to admit that Julia helped me in my work, and instead of putting obstacles in the way of my literary vocation encouraged it. But, rather, because that initial passion for her had died out and been replaced by a domestic routine and an obligation that, at times, I began to feel as an enslavement. Could this marriage last? Time, rather than lessening our difference in age, would little by little make it more dramatic, until it turned our relationship into something artificial. The family’s predictions would come true, sooner or later, and that romantic marriage would perhaps end up foundering.
These gloomy thoughts arose indirectly, during those days, as my tours of Paris and my flirtation with Bernadette went on. She devoured me with questions about Julia — her feminine curiosity was stronger than her polite upbringing — and she kept after me to show her a photograph of my wife. With this young girl I felt young myself, and in a certain way I relived, in those weeks, my early years in Miraflores and my amorous skirmishes in Diego Ferré. For not since I was thirteen or fourteen had I had a “sweetheart” or whiled away my time in such a marvelous way, wandering about and having fun, as I did during those four weeks in Paris. In the last few days, when my return to Peru was imminent, I was overcome by a tremendous anxiety attack and the temptation to stay in France, to break with Peru, break with my family, and immediately begin a new life, in that city, in that country, where being a writer appeared to be possible, where everything gave me the impression of having conspired to favor it.
The night I bade Bernadette goodbye was very tender. It was late, it was drizzling, and we kept endlessly saying goodbye to each other in the doorway of the building where she lived. I kept kissing her hands and tears glistened in her pretty eyes. The next morning, as I was about to leave for the airport, we had one last conversation over the phone. Then after that, we wrote to each other several times, but I never saw her again. (Thirty years later, at the most crucial moment of the election campaign, someone whom I was never able to identify slipped a letter from her under the door of my house.)
The trip to Lima, which was scheduled to take a couple of days, lasted all that week. We flew the first leg, from Paris to Lisbon, without problems, and took off from there exactly on time. But almost as soon as we started flying over the Atlantic, the pilot of the Avianca Super Constellation announced to us that one of the engines wasn’t working properly. We went back to Lisbon. We stayed two days in that city, at Avianca’s expense, waiting for the plane that was coming to our rescue, a delay that enabled me to have a glimpse of that pretty, melancholy capital. My money was all gone and I was dependent on the coupons that the airline gave us for lunches and dinners, but on one of those days a fellow passenger from Colombia invited me to a picturesque Lisbon restaurant to sample the cod à la Gomes de Sá. He was a young man who was a member of the Conservative Party. I looked on him as a strange creature — he wore a big broad-brimmed sombrero wherever he went and pronounced his words with the pretentiously and perversely precise accent of people from Bogotá—and I irritated him by asking him a number of times: “How can anyone be young and conservative?”
Finally, after two days, we boarded the replacement plane. We reached the Azores, but there bad weather kept it from landing. We were diverted to an island whose name I’ve forgotten, where, in the course of the terrifying landing, the pilot managed to damage one of the plane’s wheels and put us through several moments of panic. When I arrived in Bogotá, my flight to Lima had left three days before, and hapless Avianca had to lodge me and feed me in Bogotá for several more days. The moment I was installed in the Hotel Tequendama, I went out for a stroll down one of the main downtown streets. I was looking into the show windows of a bookstore when I saw people running toward me, in the midst of a skirmish of some sort. Before I understood what was going on, I heard shots and saw policemen and soldiers dealing out blows right and left with their truncheons, so I too started to run, knowing neither where to nor why, and wondering what sort of city this was, where I had just landed and already they were trying to kill me.
I finally arrived in Lima, full of energy, determined to finish my thesis as soon as possible and perform miracles to win the Javier Prado Fellowship. I told Julia, Lucho and Abelardo, my aunts and uncles about my trip to Paris with unbridled enthusiasm, and my memory relived with vast delight everything I had seen and done there. But I didn’t have much time for nostalgia, since, in fact, I set to work on my thesis on Rubén Darío’s short stories, in all my free moments, at the library of the Club Nacional, between news bulletins at Panamericana, and at night, at home, until sometimes I fell asleep over my typewriter.
A mishap occurred that interrupted that work pace. One morning my groin began to hurt — what I thought was my groin, that is, and turned out to be my appendix. I went to San Marcos to have a doctor see me. He prescribed several medicines for me to take, which didn’t have the slightest effect on me, and shortly thereafter, Genaro Delgado Parker, who saw me limping, put me in his car and drove me to the Clínica International, with which Panamericana had some sort of a deal. I had to have an emergency operation, since my appendix was now badly inflamed. According to Lucho Loayza, when I came out from under the anesthesia, I was shouting swear words, my mother was shocked and covered my mouth with her hand and Julia was protesting: “You’re smothering him, Dorita.” Although Radio Panamericana paid for half the expenses of my operation, the part I had to pay for plus paying back the thousand-dollar loan I owed to the bank left me nearly broke. I compensated for those expenditures by churning out extra articles in the supplement of El Comercio, in the form of book reviews, and writing for the magazine Cultura Peruana, whose kindly editor-in-chief, José Flórez Aráoz, let me have two signed columns in each issue and publish notes or articles without a byline.