In order not to have one’s will broken, it was necessary to do daring things, so as to earn the good feeling and the respect of the others. I began doing them from the start: from the masturbation contests — the one who ejaculated first or who shot his sperm the farthest — to the famous escapades at night, after lights out. Tirar contra—going over the wall — was the most daring thing you could do, since anyone who got caught was expelled from the academy, without appeal. There were places where the wall was lower and could be scaled without risk: near the stadium, near La Perlita — a refreshment stand whose owner, a man from the highlands, sold us cigarettes — and near the abandoned building. Before taking off, you had to make a deal with the student on dormitory guard duty so that, when he reported on how many were present, he always included you. This could be managed by paying him off in cigarettes. After the bugle sounded retreat and the lights went out in the dorms, stealing out, then hugging the wall like a shadow, you had to go across the courtyards and playing fields, at times on all fours or crawling, until you reached the wall you’d chosen. After jumping over it, you made a quick getaway by cutting through the small farms and the open country that surrounded the school in those days. You took off to go to the Bellavista movie theater, to one of those in Callao, to some mediocre party not worth mentioning in those lower-middle-class neighborhoods, inhabited by impoverished families that had once been middle class and were now almost proles, where being at Leoncio Prado had a certain prestige (it had none, on the other hand, in San Isidro or Miraflores, where it was considered a school for half-breeds), and, at times — although this was seldom because they were quite far away — to go prowl around the brothels down by the port. But many times you went over the wall because it was risky and exciting and because you felt good when you got back in without having been discovered.
The most dangerous part was getting back in. You could run into the patrols of soldiers who made the rounds of the school, or learn, after jumping back over the wall, that the officer on guard had discovered the contra—the escape — because of the bricks or the planks that we used to scale the wall, and was waiting, crouching in the dark, for those who’d gone over the wall to come back so as to aim his flashlight at them and order: “Halt right there, cadet!” During the trip back, your heart pounded and the least noise or shadow, until you were curled up back in bed in the dorm, made you panic.
Tirar contra had great prestige and the boldest contras, surrounded by a legendary aura, were the talk of the school. There were famous contreros, who knew every inch of the hundreds of meters of walls of the school, and to tirar contra with them gave you a sense of security.
Another important activity was stealing articles of clothing. We had review once a week, usually on Fridays, the night before we got out on leave for the weekend, and if the officer found cigarettes in a locker, or if one or another of the regulation articles of clothing — ties, shirts, trousers, field caps, boots, or the heavy woolen jacket that we wore in winter — was missing, the cadet was confined to quarters for the weekend. To lose an article of clothing was to lose one’s freedom. When someone stole a piece of clothing from you, you had to steal another one or pay one of the locos to do the job for you. There were experts at it, with a picklock in their pocket that opened all the lockers.
Another way of being a real man was to have lots of balls, boast of being a “mad jock with a big cock,” who made out with countless females, and who, moreover, could “fire three shots in a row.” Sex was an obsessive subject, the object of jokes and affectations, of shared secrets and of the dreams and nightmares of the cadets. At Leoncio Prado, sex and sexuality gradually lost for me the disgusting, repellent aspect that they had had ever since I found out how babies were born, and while there I began to think and fantasize about women without displeasure or guilt feelings. And to feel ashamed of being fourteen years old and never having made love. I didn’t tell this, of course, to my pals, to whom I boasted of being a “mad jock with a big cock” too.
I had a friend from Leoncio Prado, Víctor Flores, with whom I used to box for a while alongside the swimming pool, on Saturdays after maneuvers. We confessed to each other one day that we had never gone to bed with a woman, and we decided that the first day we had weekend passes we would go to Huatica. So we did, one Saturday in June or July of 1950.
The Jirón Huatica, in the working-class district of La Victoria, was the street where the whores were. The little rooms were lined up, one adjoining the other, on both sidewalks, for some seven or eight blocks below the Avenida Grau. The whores—polillas, they were called — were at the little windows, showing themselves to the crowd of presumed clients who were filing by, looking them over, stopping now and again to discuss the price. A strict hierarchy was the rule along the Jirón Huatica, according to the block the whores were located in. The most expensive block — where the French whores were — was the fourth one; on the third and the fifth block, the prices dropped, then dropped further, until on the first, old and miserable whores, human wrecks, could be had for two or three soles (the ones on the fourth charged twenty). I remember very well that Saturday when Víctor and I went, with our twenty soles in our pockets, nervous and excited, to have the great experience. Smoking like chimneys so as to look older, we went up and down the block where the French whores were several times, without being able to make up our minds to go in. Finally, we let ourselves be persuaded by a very talkative woman, with dyed hair, who leaned halfway out onto the street to charm us into it. Víctor went first, then I went in. The room was tiny, with a bed, a basin full of water, a little chamber pot, and a light bulb enveloped in red cellophane that shed a more or less blood-colored light. The woman did not undress. She raised her skirt and, seeing me so disconcerted, burst out laughing and asked me if this was the first time. When I said yes, she was delighted, because, she assured me, giving a boy his first fuck brought good luck. She had me come closer and murmured something like “You’re very afraid now but afterwards how pleased you’re going to be.” Her Spanish was odd, and when it was all over she told me she was Brazilian. Feeling that we were real men, Víctor and I then went off to have a beer.