In any event, when I began to speak, after a Proustian introduction by Miguel Cruchaga (because, in accordance with his fondness for allegories, this time Miguel used Proust to construct one of them), it was about 10 p.m. I hadn’t taken five minutes developing the first subject — the changes in the national political panorama, in which, previously, the ruling ideas were those focused on state control, whereas now public debate was centered on a market economy, privatization, and popular capitalism — when I began noticing a stir in the stands. The spotlights blinded me and I couldn’t see what was happening, but it seemed to me that the stands were emptying. As a matter of fact, people were leaving in a stampede. Only the section that I was facing directly, the two or three hundred municipal candidates, and leaders of the Democratic Front remained in their seats until the end of my speech, which I brought to a hasty close, wondering what the devil was going on. The buses and trucks had been hired till 10 p.m. and the audience, especially the people from distant “young towns”—the shantytowns that had grown up on the outskirts of Lima — didn’t want to return home by walking five, ten, or twenty kilometers.
In short, our inexperience and lack of coordination turned the festivities of the second anniversary of the Movement into a disaster as far as publicity was concerned. La República, La Crónica, El National, and other semiofficial government publications made particular mention of the half-empty stands of the Amauta as I was speaking and illustrated the news stories with the shapely backsides of Delgado Aparicio’s salsa dancers. In order to counteract the bad effect, Lucho Llosa produced in the days that followed a TV spot showing another aspect of the celebration: stands jammed full of people, and ancient Inca princesses dancing a stately huaynito.
Seven. Journalism and Bohemia
The three months that I worked at La Crónica, before my last year of secondary school, brought great upheavals in my life. While I was there, I learned what journalism actually was, and I became acquainted as well with a Lima that up until then had been unknown to me, and for the first and last time I lived a bohemian life. I hadn’t yet reached the age of sixteen — my sixteenth birthday wasn’t till the 28th of March of that year — but my wish to cease to be an adolescent, my impatience to reach adulthood, was fulfilled in that summer of 1952.
I have recalled that adventure in my novel Conversation in The Cathedral, with the inevitable cosmetic changes and additions. The excitement and the churning stomach with which I went up the stairs of the very old two-story building on the Calle Pando where La Crónica is located, in order to present myself that morning in the office of the managing editor, Señor Valverde, a very kindly gentleman who passed on to me certain notions about journalism and announced to me that I would earn five hundred soles a month. That day or the next I was given a press card, with my photo and seals and signatures that said “journalist.”
The administrative offices and then, through a courtyard with ornamental grilles and tile flooring, the print shop were on the ground floor. On the second floor were the editorial room for the morning paper, a small room where the evening edition was put out, and the living quarters of the managing editor, whose two good-looking daughters we sometimes watched, in admiring silence, as they passed through the corridor just outside the editorial room.
The main editorial room was a vast space with some twenty desks, at the very back of which was the conductor who directed that orchestra: Gaston Aguirre Morales. The local news staff, the one for the international news, and the one for the crime page divided up the territory between them, separated like building lots by invisible frontiers that everyone respected (the staff that covered sports had its own office). Aguirre Morales — a man from Arequipa, tall, thin, likable, and extremely courteous — welcomed me, sat me down at an empty desk in front of a typewriter, and gave me my first assignment: writing up an item on the presentation of his credentials by the new Brazilian ambassador. And right there and then I received from his own lips my first lesson in modern journalism. I had to begin the news item with the lead, the main fact, summed up in a brief sentence, and develop it in the remainder of the news item in a direct and objective manner. “A reporter’s success lies in knowing how to find the lead, my friend.” When, in fear and trembling, I brought him the finished piece, he read it, struck out a number of useless words—“Conciseness, precision, total objectivity, my friend”—and sent it to the printers’. I must not have slept that night, waiting to see my very own writing in print. And the next morning, when I bought La Crónica and leafed through it, there was the box: “This morning the new Brazilian ambassador, Señor Don…presented his credentials.” I was now a journalist.
Around five o’clock in the afternoon I would go to the editorial room to receive my assignments for the day and for the next morning: inaugurations, ceremonies, well-known public figures who were arriving or departing, parades, prizes, winners of lotteries or of the polla and the pollón—winning bets on horses that in those days amounted to very large sums — interviews with singers, circus managers, bullfighters, scholars, eccentrics, firemen, prophets, occultists, and all the activities, occupations, or human characters who for one reason or another deserved to be mentioned in the news. I had to go from one district of Lima to another, in a station wagon belonging to the paper, along with a photographer, sometimes the chief one himself, the great Ego Aguirre, if the subject warranted it. When I came back to write up the news items, the editorial room was just as it should have been. A thick cloud of smoke hovered above the desks and the typewriters were clacking away. It smelled of tobacco, ink, and paper. There was the sound of voices, of laughter, of the running footsteps of reporters bringing their copy to Aguirre Morales, who, red pencil in hand, read it, corrected it, and sent it down to the printers’.
The arrival of the chief editor of the crime page, Becerrita, was the high point of each night. If he came in sober, he went, wordless and ill-tempered, through the editorial room to his desk, followed by his assistant, the pale and ramrod-straight Marcoz. Becerrita was a short, husky man, with his hair slicked down with brilliantine and the square and angry face of a bulldog, in which there stood out, as straight as if drawn with a ruler, a little hairline mustache, which looked as though it had been traced with a charcoal pencil. He had created the “red page”—the one reporting major crimes and felonies — one of the greatest attractions of La Crónica, and it sufficed to see him and hear him, with his vitriolic little eyes, grainy from lack of sleep, perpetually watchful, his shiny suits, pressed countless times, reeking of tobacco and sweat, with lapels full of grease spots, and the microscopic knot in his filthy tie, to surmise that Becerrita was a citizen of Hell, that the underworld haunts of the city held no secrets for him. If he came in drunk, his fierce mineral laugh preceded him, loud guffaws, resounding from the stairway, that shook the grimy windows and the paint-chipped walls of the editorial room. Milton would begin to tremble, for he was Becerrita’s favorite victim. Becerrita would go over to Milton’s desk to make fun of him, cracking jokes that made the reporters on the staff hold their sides laughing, and sometimes, aiming his “piece” at him — because he always went about armed, the better to resemble his caricatural image — chased him about among the desks, his pistol at the ready. On one of those occasions, to everyone’s terror, he accidentally got off a shot that ended up embedded in the spiderwebs on the ceiling of the editorial room.