Carlos Ney Barrionuevo was my literary mentor during those months. He was five or six years older than I and had read a great deal, modern literature in particular, and published poems in the cultural supplement of La Crónica. Sometimes, late at night, when beers took away his timidity — his nose already red and his greenish eyes gleaming feverishly — he took out of his pocket a poem scribbled in a page of his reporter’s notebook and read it to us. He wrote poems that were hard to understand, full of strange words, that intrigued me as I listened to them, for they revealed to me a completely unknown world, that of modern poetry. It was from him that I learned of the existence of Martín Adán, many of whose sonnets from Poesía de extramares (Poetry from Beyond the Sea) he could recite from memory, and whose bohemian figure — shuttling back and forth between the madhouse and the tavern — Carlos would go religiously to spy on at the Cordano bar next to the Presidential Palace, headquarters of the poet Martín Adán on the days when he left the psychiatric clinic in which he had decided to live.
I am more in debt for my literary education to Carlitos Ney than to all my teachers at secondary school and most of the ones I had at the university. Thanks to him, I became acquainted with some of the books and authors that would brand my adolescence with fire — the Malraux of Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope, the American novelists of the Lost Generation, and above all Sartre, whose short stories, collected in The Wall, Ney gave me one afternoon, in the Losada edition with a prologue by Guillermo de Torre. Through this book there began a relationship with Sartre’s work and thought that was to have a decisive effect on my vocation. And I am certain that it was also Carlitos Ney who first spoke to me of Eguren’s poetry, of Surrealism and of Joyce, whose Ulysses he must have bought me, in the dreadful translation published by Santiago Rueda, which, let me say in passing, I was hardly able to get through, skipping whole pages and not understanding very much of what I read.
But, even more than what he had me read, I owe to my friend Carlos Ney his having taught me, on those bohemian nights, everything I didn’t know about books and authors that were making the rounds in the vast outside world, without my even having heard that they existed, and having given me an intuition of the complexity and richness that went to make up that literature, which for me, up until then, had meant little more than adventure stories and a handful of classic or modernist poets.
Talking about books, about authors, about poetry with Carlitos Ney, in the filthy little rooms of downtown Lima, or in boisterous and promiscuous brothels, was exciting. Because Carlos was sensitive and intelligent and had an inordinate love of literature, which, I am convinced, must have represented for him something more profound and basic than the journalism to which he was to devote his whole life. I always believed that, at one time or another, Carlitos Ney would publish a book of poems which would reveal to the world that enormous talent he seemed to be hiding and which, in the wee hours, when alcohol and staying up all night had made all his timidity and sense of self-criticism disappear, he let us catch a glimpse or two of. That he didn’t bring out such a book, and that his life was spent instead, I suspect, between the frustrating editorial rooms of Lima daily papers and his “nights of bohemian investigations,” is not something that surprises me today. For the truth is that, as happened to Carlitos Ney, I have seen other friends of my youth who appeared to have been called to be the princes of our republic of letters gradually become inhibited and fade away, because of that lack of conviction, that premature and profound pessimism that is the sickness par excellence, in Peru, of the best and the brightest — a curious means, it would seem, adopted by those who are worth the most, to defend themselves from the mediocrity, the frauds, and the frustrations that intellectual and artistic life offers in such an unfavorable milieu.
When we had a bit of money, instead of going to the Chinese bars on La Colmena, we used to go to a chic bohemian place: the Negro-Negro. In that basement underneath the arcades of the Plaza San Martín I felt as though I were in the Paris I dreamed of, in one of the caves where Juliette Greco sang, with the existentialist writers listening. The Negro-Negro was a boîte with intellectual pretensions; in it theatrical performances and recitals were given and French music was played. In the wee hours, at its tiny tables and between its walls papered with covers from The New Yorker, an exquisite and eccentric fauna got together: painters such as Sérvulo Gutiérrez, who had been a boxer and who one night recounted there how he had challenged a member of the armed forces to a fistfight in a taxi; actors, actresses, or musicians who’d just finished their performances, or, simply, bohemians and night owls in suits and ties. It was there, one night after many beers, that a sophisticate from Arequipa named Velando had me try a “snort,” assuring me that, if I breathed in those grains of white powder, they would make my dizziness from the alcohol disappear in one fell swoop and leave me fresh and ready to go on for the rest of the night. In fact, the “snort,” because it was too big a dose or because I was constitutionally allergic to it, left me in a state of nervous overexcitement, an anxiety and a malaise worse that any “downer” from drinking too much, and took away all desire to repeat that experience with drugs. (That “sniff” of cocaine, the only one I ever took in my life, was to have a melodramatic resurrection, forty years later, during the 1990 electoral campaign.)
During that summer, and because of my job at La Crónica, I saw a corpse for the first time in my life. The image has lingered in my memory, which brings it back to me every so often to grieve me or depress me. One afternoon, when I arrived at the paper, Becerrita sent me off to El Porvenir in search of a scoop that a “data gatherer” had just phoned in to him. The San Pablo was a miserable cheap hotel, with rooms to take hookers to, on a street that crossed the Avenida 28 de Julio, in those days a neighborhood with a bad reputation for prostitution, robbery, and mayhem. The police let me past after I’d shown them my press card with my photograph, and at the end of several dark hallways, lined on each side with symmetrical little rooms, I suddenly came upon the naked corpse of a very young mestiza who had been stabbed to death with a knife. As he photographed her from different angles, the great Ego Aguirre joked with the PIPs. The atmosphere exuded squalor and grotesque depravity, in addition to the cruelty of the underground. For several days I filled whole pages of La Crónica with news stories on the mysterious murder of the “night moth” of the Hotel San Pablo, investigating her life, tracking down friends and relatives of hers, going and coming amid bars, bordellos, and miserable back streets, trying to dredge up facts about her, and then writing the sort of hair-raising pieces that were the specialty of La Crónica.