From January to March, I worked at the INS as a messenger, taking to La Crónica the cables and articles from the news service. I began at five o’clock in the afternoon and finished work at midnight on the dot, which left me a good part of the day free to go to the beach with my friends from the barrio. Most of the time we went to Miraflores-Los Baños, as people still called it — which, despite being a stony beach, had the best waves for bodysurfing. Bodysurfing was a marvelous sport. The waves at Miraflores broke far from shore and the experienced surfer could get carried along for fifty meters or more by tensing his body and giving the necessary arm strokes at just the right moment. On the beach at Miraflores was the Club Waikiki, the symbol of snobbery; its members rode waves on Hawaiian surfboards, at the time a very expensive sport, since the boards, made of balsa wood, were imported from the United States, and only a handful of Peruvians had the financial means to practice it. When fiberglass surfboards began to be manufactured, the sport became a more democratic one, and today it is practiced by Peruvians of all social classes. But in those days, middle-class people from Miraflores, such as I was, looked on those surfboards of the members of the Waikiki as something unattainable, cutting through the waves at Miraflores while we had to be content to bodysurf. We also went to La Herradura, with a fine sandy beach and fierce waves where the pleasure was not in letting oneself be carried along by them but in daring to ride down with them as they broke, and always placing one’s body very far ahead of the crest so as not to be trapped by the underside and slammed against the bottom.
That summer was also the one of a frustrated romance with a girl from Miraflores, whose appearance in the mornings, atop the terrace of Los Baños, in her black bathing suit and little white slippers, her short hair and her honey-colored eyes, left me speechless. Her name was Flora Flores and I fell in love with her at first sight. But she never formally acknowledged my suit, although she allowed me to accompany her, after the beach, to her house, near the Colina movie theater, and sometimes came out for long walks with me, under the ficus trees of the Avenue Pardo. She was pretty and graceful, quick-witted too, and when I was with her I turned into a boy who was slow-witted and stammered. My timid advances to make her my sweetheart were rejected in such a subtly flirtatious way that I was always left with what seemed to be a lingering hope. Until, on one of our walks along the promenade lined with poplars, I introduced her to a handsome friend of mine, who, to top it all off, was a swimming champion: Rubén Mayer. Under my very nose he began to butter her up and shortly thereafter she fell for him, head over heels. To make a girl fall for you and formally declare that she is your sweetheart is a custom that was to decline little by little, until today it is something that to the younger generations, speedy and pragmatic when it comes to love, seems like prehistoric idiocy. I still have a tender memory of those rituals that love consisted of when I was an adolescent and it is to them that I owe the fact that that stage of my life has remained in my memory not only as violent and repressive but also as made up of delicate and intense moments that compensated me for all the rest.
I believe that it was in that summer of 1951 that my papa went on a trip to the United States for the first time. I am not quite certain, but it must have been in those months, since I remember having enjoyed during that period a freedom that would have been inconceivable if he had been in the house. The year before, we had moved, yet again. My father sold the little house in La Perla and rented an apartment in Miraflores, in the block of townhouses on the Calle Porta to which, at more or less the same time, my grandparents moved. Despite their being neighbors now, the relations of my father with the Llosas would continue to be nonexistent. If he met my grandparents on the street, he greeted them, but they never visited each other, and only my mama and I often dropped in at the houses of my aunts and uncles.
Going to the United States was a dream my father had long cherished. He admired that country, and one of the things he prided himself on was having learned English as a young man, something that had been of help to him in getting his jobs with Panagra and, later on, his position as representative of the INS in Peru. Ever since my brothers had moved there, he had been talking about that plan. But on that first trip he did not go to Los Angeles, where Ernesto and Enrique lived with their mother, but to New York. I remember going to say goodbye to him at the Limatambo airport with my mama and the INS employees. He was in the United States for several weeks, perhaps a couple of months, trying to set up a clothing business, which apparently turned out badly for him, since, later on, I heard him complain of having lost part of his savings in that New York venture.
The fact is that that summer I felt more free. My job kept me tied down from late afternoon until midnight, but that didn’t bother me. It made me feel like an adult and it made me proud that my father paid me a salary at the end of the month, just like the editors and radio operators of the International News Service. My work was less important than theirs, naturally. It consisted of running from the office to La Crónica, which was on the sidewalk just across the street, the Calle Pando, bringing the news bulletins, every hour or every two hours, or whenever a news flash came in. I had the rest of the time free to read those novels that had become an addiction. At around 9 p.m., the editor, the radio operator on duty, and I went to have dinner at an inexpensive restaurant on the corner, full of motormen of the San Miguel streetcar line, whose terminal was just opposite.
In those months, as I ran between the editing tables of the office and La Crónica, the idea of becoming a newspaperman occurred to me. This profession, after all, wasn’t all that far from what I liked — reading and writing — and seemed like a practical version of literature as a vocation. Why should my father object to the fact that I was a newspaperman? Wasn’t he one, in a manner of speaking, by working at International News Service? And, as a matter of fact, the idea that I would become a newspaperman didn’t strike him as a bad one.
In my second year at Leoncio Prado I don’t believe I told anybody that I was going to be a navy officer, but instead repeated over and over, until I’d convinced myself of it, that, after finishing at Leoncio Prado, I would study journalism. And on one of those weekends, my father told me that he would speak with the editor-in-chief of La Crónica so that I might work there for the three months of the next summer. That way I would see from the inside what that profession was like.
In that year of 1951 I wrote a play: La huida del inca (The Inca’s Escape). I read one day, in La Crónica, that the Ministry of Education was soliciting entries for a contest of theatrical works for children, and that was what spurred me on. But the idea of writing drama haunted me from that time forward, as did that of being a poet or a novelist, and perhaps even more than these two latter. The theater was my first literary love. I have a very vivid memory of the first stage play I saw, when I was still just a little boy, in Cochabamba, in the Achá theater. The performance was at night and for grownups, and I don’t know why my mama took me along with her. We took our seats in a box and suddenly the curtain rose and there, beneath a very strong light, some men and women didn’t tell a story but lived it. As in the movies, but even better, because these weren’t figures on a screen but beings of flesh and blood. At one point, during an argument, one of the gentlemen gave a lady a hard slap in the face. I burst out crying and my mama and my grandparents laughed: “But it’s only make-believe, silly.”