But, despite the bad times he gave us, neither Milton, nor Carlos Ney, nor I, nor any of the other reporters felt any animosity toward Becerrita. We all felt a sort of fascination with him, because he had created in the journalism of Lima a distinct genre (which, with time, was to degenerate into something unimaginable), and because, despite his binges and his ugly face, he was a man whom nightfall in Lima turned into a prince.
Becerrita knew and frequented, in addition to the police stations, all the brothels in Lima, where he was feared and fawned upon because a scandalous news item in La Crónica meant a fine or having the place closed down. Sometimes he took Milton, Carlos, and me (we three became inseparable) with him, after the paper had been put to bed around midnight, to Nanette’s, on the Avenida Grau, or to the brothels in Huatica, or to the more elegant ones on the Avenida Colonial, and almost the moment we crossed the threshold, there was the madam, in person, and the bouncers on duty, welcoming him with kisses and slaps on the back. He never smiled or returned their greetings. He confined himself to growling, without taking his cigar stump out of his mouth: “Beer for the boys.”
Then, installed at a little table in the bar, with all of us sitting around him, he would drink one beer after another, raising the cigar stump to his lips every once in a while, indifferent to the hubbub all around him, to the couples dancing, or to the fights started by certain belligerent patrons whom the bouncers shoved out into the street. Sometimes Becerrita would start recalling, in a gravel voice, anecdotes about his adventures as a police reporter. He had known and seen from close up the worst hoods, the most hardened criminals of Lima’s underworld, and remembered with pleasure their horrifying deeds, their rivalries, their knife fights, their heroic or ignoble deaths. Even though I felt a touch of the fear aroused by someone who has spent his years among the most pestilential low life, Becerrita dazzled me. He seemed to me to have stepped out of a disturbing novel about the lower depths. When it came time to pay the bill — on the rare occasions when he was charged anything — Becerrita used to grab his pistol and lay it on the table: “I’m the only one here who’s going to take out his wallet.”
When, after I had worked at La Crónica for two or three weeks, Aguirre Morales asked me if I wanted to substitute for one of the crime page reporters who was sick, I gladly accepted. Although Becerrita was terrifying because of his fearful temper, the reporters who worked with him were as devoted as dogs to him, and in the month that I worked under him I too came to feel proud of being part of his team. This consisted of three or four reporters, although sometimes it would have been more accurate to call them data gatherers, since a couple of them confined themselves to bringing us bare facts that Marcoz and I took charge of writing up. The most picturesque one of the bunch was a gaunt young man who appeared to have stepped out of a comic strip or a puppet show. I’ve forgotten his real name, but I remember the name he went by at the radio station — Paco Denegri — his wraith-like appearance, and the thick eyeglasses that enlarged his myopic eyes to a monstrous size. And his velvet voice as the male lead of a radio serial, an activity he engaged in at Radio Central during his hours off.
Becerrita was a tireless worker, with an unbridled passion, a fixation on his job. Nothing in the world seemed to interest him but those bloody feasts of violence — lovers’ suicides, accounts settled by knife thrusts, rapes, deflorations, incest, filicides, holdups and fast getaways, arson, clandestine prostitution, corpses washed up by the sea or thrown off a cliff — that we, his peons, kept collecting night and day in our rounds of the police headquarters of the most ill-famed districts in Lima: La Victoria, El Porvenir, and Callao. He reviewed these happenings and a second was all it took for him to shuffle through them and identify the one that had the right amount of filth. “This one’s news.” His instructions were brief and categoricaclass="underline" “Interview this one, go and check that address, this one smells to me like a fake.” And when a reporter came back with the news item, written up according to his instructions, he always knew — his little eyes gleamed and his jaws hung open as he crossed out or added — how to make the spectacular, terrible, cruel, base, or devious feature or detail of what had happened stand out. Sometimes, after the beers at the brothel, he would still drop by the print shop of La Crónica to make sure that his page — a page that in reality was two or three pages and sometimes even more — had come out intact, with the amounts of blood and filth that he had specified.
My tour of police headquarters began at around seven at night, but it was later, from ten or eleven o’clock on, that the patrol cars arrived back at the stations with their loads of thieves, bloodthirsty lovers, those badly injured from fights in bars and bordellos, or transvestites, who were cruelly hounded and who always merited the honors of the police-blotter page. Between PIPs (police detectives) and Civil Guards, Becerrita had a fine-meshed network of informers, whom he had done favors for — hiding facts or giving on his page the information that put them in the best light — and thanks to those sources we often scooped our rival, Última Hora. Becerrita’s page had been the sovereign queen of violent death and scandal for many years. But this new daily, Última Hora, the evening edition of La Prensa, which had introduced slang and cant — local idioms and vulgar expressions — into their headlines and their news items, fought Becerrita for the scepter and on certain days snatched it away from him: that left him beside himself. Scooping Última Hora, outdoing it with bigger doses of death and pandering, on the other hand, made him growl with pleasure and let out those outlandish guffaws that seemed to come from the innermost depths of a tunnel or a stone quarry, and not from a human throat.
Despite the fierce competition that brought our two daily papers face to face in their fight for the sensationalist kingdom, I came to be a very good friend of the chief editor of the crime page of Última Hora, Norwin Sánchez Geny. He was a Nicaraguan and had come to study law at the Catholic University in Lima. He began to work as a journalist in his free time and thereby discovered his vocation. And his talent as well, if talent is the right name for what he and Becerrita had created (something that other journalists would later develop to criminal extremes). Norwin was young, skinny, an inveterate bohemian, generous, a tireless, lecherous whoremaster and beer drinker. After the third or fourth glass he would begin to recite the first chapter of the Quijote, which he knew by heart. His eyes would fill with tears: “What great prose, damn it all!” Very often, Carlos, Milton, and I would go by to get him at the Última Hora editorial room, upstairs at La Prensa, on the Jirón de La Unión, or he would pick us up on the Calle Pando, and we would go have a few beers, or on payday take off for a brothel. (Norwin, that likable fellow, returned some years later to Nicaragua, where he became a serious, upright man, according to what he wrote me in a letter that I unexpectedly received in 1969, while I was giving a series of lectures at the University of Puerto Rico. He gave up journalism, studied economics, graduated, and became a bureaucrat. But shortly thereafter he met the sort of end that Última Hora capitalized on: he was murdered, in a cheap bar in Managua, during a fight.) The places we went to most often were some little Chinese bars, on La Colmena and its environs, very old, smoke-filled, stinking, crowded places which stayed open all night, in some of which the tables were separated from each other by screens or thin wooden partitions — as in Chinese restaurants — covered with graffiti in pencil or carved with a knife and cigar burns. All of them had soot-stained, grimy ceilings, red-tiled floors on which the waiters, young mountain boys who could barely get out a few words in Spanish, threw bucketfuls of sawdust so as to sweep up the puke and gobs of spit of drunks more easily. In the dim light the night owls of downtown Lima, the dregs of humanity, could be seen: inveterate souses, bourgeois gays cruising for pickups, hookers, no-account pimps, office clerks winding up a bachelor dinner. Those of us from La Crónica would talk and smoke together, the others would recount their adventures as journalists, and I would listen to them, feeling very much older than my sixteen years — a birthday I had not yet reached — and yet I was a real bohemian, a real journalist. And I secretly thought that I was living the same life that had been lived, right here, when he came to the capital from his provincial Trujillo, by the great César Vallejo, whom I began to read for the first time — surely following the advice of Carlos Ney — during that summer. Hadn’t he spent his nights in the bars and brothels of bohemian Lima? Didn’t his poems, his short stories testify to it? This was the path, then, to literature and to genius.