When I went back to the local news section, I had a certain nostalgia for those lower depths that work under Becerrita had given me a glimpse of. But I didn’t have time to get bored. The editor-in-chief assigned me the job of chasing down the winners of the polla and the pollón and interviewing them. The first or the second week of this hunt, we were informed that the winner of several millions was in Trujillo. They put me into a station wagon belonging to the paper, along with a photographer, and the two of us started out to track him down. At Kilometer 70 or 71 along the highway, a truck coming in the opposite direction forced our driver off the road. The car turned over once or twice on the sandy ground and I was thrown out, breaking the windshield as my body went through it. When I came to, a red station wagon, with a compassionate driver, was taking me back to Lima. They put the photographer, who also had several slight injuries, and me in a private clinic and La Crónica published a little box with the news of the accident, picturing us as war heroes.
A moment of grave danger came about on one of those days when I was in the clinic, when there suddenly appeared, in the room I shared with the photographer, a night moth of the Avenida Colonial, who went by the name of Magda, with whom I had been having a romance for a time. She was young, with a pretty little face, dark chestnut hair and bangs, and one night, in that brothel, I had agreed to let her offer me her services on credit (I barely had enough money for the room). We saw each other later, in the daytime, in a Crem Rica that was next to La Cabaña in the Parque de la Exposición, and we went to the movies, holding hands and kissing each other in the dark. I had seen her two or three times after that, where she worked or on the street, before her sudden appearance in my hospital room. She was sitting on my bed, alongside me, when through the window I spied my father approaching, and such fear must have showed on my face that she immediately realized that something serious might happen, and quickly got to her feet and left the room, meeting my father on the threshold. He must have thought that the young lady with all the makeup was a visitor of the photographer’s, because he didn’t ask me anything about her. Despite the work and the great time I was having that summer as a grownup, when confronted with the figure of my father I was still a little boy.
I mention Magda — I don’t know if that was her real name — because of this anecdote, and because I believe I fell in love with her, although at the time, doubtless, I wouldn’t have confessed it to any of my bohemian friends, since what man in his right mind fell in love with a hooker? That day at the clinic was the last time I saw her. A number of events followed each other in rapid succession. A few days after being let out of the hospital I had to go to Piura, and the night I went looking for her, at that house on the Avenida Colonial, she hadn’t come to work. And a year later, when I came back to Lima and went nosing around to see if I could find her, the house was no longer a bordello and (as had more or less happened to me) she had become respectable.
After a month or a month and a half of working at La Crónica, I had a conversation with my father about my future. Just for a change, we had moved yet again, from the apartment on the Calle Porta to a little house on Juan Fanning, also in Miraflores. Since I got home very late from work — just as dawn was breaking, as a matter of fact — my father had given me the key to the house. We talked together in the dining room for about an hour, with the melodramatic solemnity that he was so fond of. As always in his presence, I felt uncomfortable and mistrustful, and, with a slight stammer, I told him that journalism was my real vocation. I would devote myself to it after finishing school. But, now that I was working on La Crónica, why didn’t I keep my job while I went through the final grade of secondary school? Instead of going through it at Leoncio Prado, I could enroll at some state school, such as Guadalupe or Melitón Carbajal, and work and study at the same time. After that, I would enter the University of San Marcos and continue my studies without giving up my job at La Crónica. That way, I would be practicing my profession at the same time that I was studying.
He heard me out and then agreed: it was a good idea. The one who wasn’t at all pleased by this plan was my mother. That job that kept me out of the house all night worried her terribly and made her suspect the worst (that is to say, the truth). I knew that on many a night she stayed awake, waiting for me to come home, and sometimes, half asleep, I would hear her, early in the morning, tiptoeing into my room to fold and hang up the suit that I had thrown down on the bed any which way. (After her passion for my father, my mother’s other ones were for cleanliness and order. I have inherited from her the first of these: dirt, in particular the literal sort, is intolerable to me; as for order, it has never been my strong point, except where writing is concerned.) But, even though the idea that I would go on working at night at La Crónica while I finished the last year of secondary school frightened her, she did not dare oppose my father’s decision, something that, moreover, would have been of little avail.
And so, when the accident on the highway going north happened while I was on the job — in mid-March — I had already received the reports of my grades from Leoncio Prado, announced to the military academy that I wouldn’t be back, and made vague inquiries at two or three state schools about enrolling for my final year. At all of them they put me on the waiting list, and trusting that one or another of them would accept me, I forgot all about the matter. I thought that at the last moment a recommendation would open for me the doors of Guadalupe, of Melitón Carbajal, or of some other state school. (It had to be a public high school because they were free and because I imagined that they would be more lenient about my working at the same time as a journalist.)
But all these plans fell through, without my knowing it, as the doctors at the private hospital were treating me for the contusions I had received when the car turned over. Besides my mother, my aunts and uncles too were alarmed about my nightly forays. They had heard gossip here and there about my having been seen in bars or boîtes and one night, to top it all off, I ran into the most happy-go-lucky and party-loving of my uncles, Jorge, in the Negro-Negro. I was sitting at a table with Carlitos Ney, Norwin Sánchez, and the sketch artist Paco Cisneros, and there were also two or three other individuals at the table whom I hardly knew. But Uncle Jorge knew them very well, and taking me aside to have a few words with me, he told me that they were shady characters, drunks and cocaine addicts, and what was I, a mere snotnosed kid, doing in such company? My explanations, instead of reassuring him, worried him even more.