Lieutenant Olivera made us get into formation, took us up to our dormitories, and assigned us our beds and lockers — they were bunk beds and I was assigned the top of the second one from the entrance. He made us change out of our civilian clothes into our everyday uniforms — a shirt and trousers of green twill, a field cap, and coffee-colored half boots — and then, lining us up in formation again in the courtyard, he gave us the basic instructions concerning proper respect, the way to salute, and the way to behave toward our superiors. And then everyone in our year was lined up in company formation so that the head of the academy, Colonel Marcial Romero Pardo, could welcome us. I am sure that he spoke of “the supreme values of the spirit,” a subject that continually cropped up in his speeches. Then we were taken to lunch, in the enormous pavilion on the other side of an esplanade covered with grass on which a vicuña was wandering about, and where we saw our superiors for the first time: the cadets of the fourth and fifth years. We all contemplated with curiosity and slight alarm the four-year cadets, since they would be the ones who would initiate us. We perros knew that the hazing was the bitter test that we had to go through. Now, once we’d finished this meal, the fourth-year cadets would take out on us what had been done to them, on a day like today, the year before.
When lunch was over, officers and noncommissioned officers disappeared, and the fourth-year cadets flung themselves on us like a flock of ravens. We “whities” were a small minority in the vast ocean of Indians, mestizos, blacks, and mulattos, and aroused the inventiveness of our hazers. A group of cadets took me and a boy from a section of “shorties” to a fourth-year dormitory. They made us go through a “right angle” contest. We had to kick each other in the backside as we doubled over alternately; the one who kicked more slowly than the other was in turn kicked, hard, by the hazers. Afterward, they made us open our trousers fly and take out our penis and masturbate: the one who came first would be let go and the other would stay behind to make our torturers’ beds. But, however hard we tried, fear kept us from getting an erection, and finally, bored by our incompetence, they took us out to the soccer field. They asked me what sport I went in for: “Swimming, sir.” “Swim on your back from one end of the athletic field to the other, then, perro.”
I still have a sinister memory of that hazing, a savage and irrational ceremony which, beneath the appearance of a virile game, of a rite of initiation into the rigors of military life, served to allow the resentments, envies, hatreds, and prejudices that we had inside us to turn, without inhibitions, into a sadomasochistic bash. On that very first day, in the hours that the hazing lasted — it went on during the days that followed, in a more moderate way — I discovered that the adventure at Leoncio Prado wasn’t going to be what, led astray by novels, I had imagined, but something more prosaic, and that I was going to detest boarding school and military life, with its mechanical hierarchies based on chronology, the authorized violence that they signified, and all the rites, symbols, rhetorical devices, and ceremonies that constitute it, and that we, young as we were — fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old — only half understood and distorted by putting it at times to comic and at times to cruel and even monstrous uses.
My two years at Leoncio Prado were quite hard and I spent a number of horrible days there, above all on weekends when I was being punished — the hours became immeasurably long, the minutes endless — but, looking back from a distance, I think that that couple of years were more beneficial than harmful to me. Although not for the reason that had led my father to enroll me there. On the contrary. During 1950 and 1951, shut up behind those bars corroded by the dampness of La Perla, on those gray days and nights filled with the gloomiest fog imaginable, I read and wrote as I had never done before and began to be (even though at the time I didn’t know it) a writer.
Moreover, I owe to Leoncio Prado the discovery of what the country where I had been born was like: a society very different from that tiny one, marked off by the boundaries of the middle class, in which I had lived up until then. The Leoncio Prado Academy was one of the few institutions — perhaps the only one — that reproduced on a small scale the ethnic and regional diversity of Peru. Enrolled there were youngsters from the jungle and from the highlands, from every departamento, every race, and every economic stratum. As it was a state school, the fees for room, board, and tuition we paid were minimal; moreover, there was an ample system of scholarships — a hundred or so a year — that made the school accessible to boys from humble families, of peasant origin, or from marginal city neighborhoods and towns. A large part of the tremendous violence — what seemed to me tremendous but for other cadets less fortunate than I was their natural way of life — stemmed precisely from that mixture of races, regions, and economic levels of the cadets. The majority of us brought to this cloistered space the prejudices, complexes, animosities, and social and racial rancors that we had sucked in with our mother’s milk. All these found expression at Leoncio Prado in personal and official relations, and found ways of venting themselves in rites and activities, like the hazing or the military hierarchies among the students themselves, which legitimized the bullying and the abuse. The scale of values erected around the basic myths of machismo and virility served, moreover, as a moral coverup for that Darwinian philosophy or law of the jungle that ruled at the school. To be brave, that is to say, loco, was the supreme form of manliness, and to be a coward the most abject and base. Any boy who denounced a superior for the mistreatment of which he was a victim merited the generalized contempt of the cadets and exposed himself to reprisals. The lesson was soon learned. During the hazing, some fourth-year cadets made one of my section mates, named Valderrama, climb up to the top of a ladder and then moved it so as to make him tumble down. He had a bad fall and when the ladder itself fell it cut off one of his fingers against the edge of a washbasin. Valderrama never told on the guilty parties and we all respected him for it.
There were a number of ways of proving one’s manhood. Being strong, daring, and aggressive, knowing how to fight — to “get one off” was the expression that summed up marvelously well that ideal, with its mixture of sex and violence — was one of them. Another, to dare to defy the rules, engaging in bold or wild exploits which, if they were discovered, meant being expelled. To bring off such feats gave one entry into the coveted category of loco. To be loco was a blessing, because then it was publicly recognized that one would never belong to the much-feared category of huevón, to be yellow-bellied, or cojudo, without balls.
To be huevón or cojudo was to be chicken: not daring to butt or punch out someone who came to batirlo—to rag you or do you harm; not to know how to fight, not to dare, out of timidity or lack of imagination, to tirar contra—to sneak out of school after retreat, so as to go to a movie or a party, or at least to hide out somewhere to smoke or play dice in the arbor or in the abandoned building by the pool instead of going to classes. All those who belonged to this category were the scapegoats, whom the locos mistreated by word and by deed for their amusement and that of the others, urinating on them when they were asleep, demanding a certain quota of cigarettes, short-sheeting them, and making them suffer all sorts of humiliations. A good part of these doings were the typical deviltry of adolescence, but the characteristics of the school — being kept shut up, the heterogeneous composition of the student body, the military philosophy — frequently exacerbated mere pranks, turning them into extremes of real cruelty. I remember a sad sack of a cadet whom we nicknamed Fish Eggs. He was skinny as a rail, pale, and very timid; worst of all, at the beginning of the year, one day when the fearful Bolognesi — he had been a classmate of mine at La Salle and when we entered Leoncio Prado he showed himself to be an unrestrained loco by nature — tormented him with his taunts, he burst into tears. From that day on, he became the laughingstock of the company, whom anyone could insult or mistreat to show everyone, himself included, how macho he was. Fish Eggs finally turned into a sluggard, with no initiative, voiceless and almost lifeless: one day I saw him spat on by a loco, and his only response was to wipe his face off with his handkerchief and continue on his way. Of him, and of all the huevones, it was said that “their will had been broken.”