Patricia, whom to my surprise I had already seen giving interviews on television — something she had always refused to do before — and delivering speeches in the young towns, used to ask me, when she saw me come back from these inaugurations covered from head to foot with confetti: “Do you still remember that once upon a time you were a writer?”
Nine. Uncle Lucho
If, of the fifty-five years that I have lived, I were allowed to relive just one, I would choose the one I spent in Piura, at Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s, doing my final year of secondary studies at the Colegio San Miguel and working at La Industria. Everything that happened to me there, between April and December 1952, kept me in a state of intellectual enthusiasm and joie de vivre that I have always recalled with nostalgia. Of all those things, the main one was Uncle Lucho.
He was the oldest of my uncles, the one who, after Grandfather Pedro, had been the head of the Llosa tribe, the one to whom everybody went for help and the one whom I had secretly been fondest of, ever since I possessed the faculty of reason, there, in Cochabamba, when he made me the happiest creature in the world by taking me to swimming pools where I learned to swim.
The family was proud of Uncle Lucho. My grandparents and Auntie Mamaé told how, in Arequipa, he had won the prize for excellence, every year, at the Jesuit school, and Granny dug up his report cards to show us the outstanding grades he received when he graduated. But Uncle Lucho hadn’t been able to pursue the career in which, with his talent, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would have achieved all sorts of triumphs, because his being such a good-looking young man and being such a success with the ladies was his downfall. When he was still a youth, about to enter the university, he got one of his girl cousins pregnant, and the scandal, in serene and straitlaced Arequipa, forced him to go off to Lima until the family calmed down. The mere fact of his return caused another scandal, when, while still scarcely past adolescence, he married Mary, a woman from Arequipa twenty years older than he was. The couple had to leave the horror-stricken city and go off to Chile, where Uncle Lucho opened a bookstore and went on with his adventures as a Don Juan, which finally ruined his precocious marriage.
Once separated from his wife, he journeyed to Cochabamba, to his grandparents’. Among my early memories are those of his handsome presence — like a movie actor’s — and of the jokes and anecdotes that were told at the big family dinner table on Sundays concerning the conquests and gallantries of Uncle Lucho, who, from that time on, helped me to do my homework and gave me extra classes in math. Then he left to work in Santa Cruz, first with my grandfather on the Saipina hacienda and then on his own as the representative for various firms and products, among them Pommery, the champagne. Santa Cruz has the reputation of being the place in Bolivia with the prettiest women, and Uncle Lucho always said that he spent all the money he made in his business dealings there on Pommery champagne, which he sold to himself so as to court the beauties of Santa Cruz. He often came to Cochabamba and his arrivals brought a great tidal wave of energy into the house on Ladislao Cabrera. Of all the comings and goings in that family, I was most delighted by his visits, because even though I loved all my uncles dearly, Uncle Lucho was the one who seemed to me to be my real papa.
He finally settled down and married Aunt Olga. They went off to live in Santa Cruz, where legend has it that one of Uncle Lucho’s spiteful sweethearts from the town, a beautiful woman also named Olga, came on horseback one afternoon to shoot five bullets at Aunt Olga’s windows for having monopolized — in theory at least — such a choice catch. My predilection for Uncle Lucho was owed not only to how affectionate he was with me, but also to the aura of adventure, of life in perpetual renewal, that surrounded him. Ever since then I have felt a fascination for people who appear to have stepped out of novels, the ones who have made a reality of Chocano’s line of verse: “I want my life to be a torrential stream…”
Uncle Lucho spent his life changing jobs, trying his hand at all sorts of businesses, always unsatisfied with what he was doing, and although most of the time what he tried turned out badly, there is no doubt that he was never bored. The last year we were in Bolivia, he was smuggling rubber into Argentina. It was an undertaking that the Bolivian government, outwardly, tried to wipe out but secretly encouraged, since it was a good source of foreign currency for the country. Argentina, the victim of an international embargo because of its favorable stance toward the Axis during the war, paid a price equal to its weight in gold for this product from the Amazon jungles — whether India or gum rubber. I remember having gone with Uncle Lucho to some warehouses in Cochabamba where the rubber, before being hidden in the trucks that would take it to the border, had to be sprinkled with talcum powder to mask its odor, and having felt a sinful excitement when I too was allowed to throw a few handfuls of talcum onto the forbidden product. Shortly before the end of the war, one of Uncle Lucho’s convoys was confiscated at the border, and he and his partners lost their shirts. Just in time for him and Aunt Olga — and their two little daughters, Wanda and Patricia — to come settle in Piura with my grandparents.
Once arrived there, Uncle Lucho had worked for several years for the Romero Company, in a car distributorship, but in 1952, when I went to live with him, he was a farmer. He had rented the San José rural holding, on the banks of the Chira River, on which he grew cotton. San José was between Paita and Sullana, some two hours’ journey from Piura by car, and I often went out there with him, in the two or three trips a week that he made, in a rickety black truck, to oversee the irrigation, the spraying of pesticides, or the clearing of the land. As he spoke with the farmhands, I rode horseback, swam in the irrigation ditch, and invented stories about earth-shaking passions between young landowners and peasant girls who picked cotton. (I remember having written a long story of this sort to which I gave the elegantly euphuistic title “La zagala” [“The Shepherdess”].)
Uncle Lucho was very fond of reading and as a young man had written poetry. (Later on, at the university, I learned through professors who had been his friends in his youth, in Arequipa — Augusto Tamayo Vargas, Emilio Champion, and Miguel Ángel Ugarte Chamorro, for instance — that in those days all his intimate friends were convinced that his vocation was to be an intellectual.) I still remember some of his verses, in particular a sonnet, in which he compared a lady’s beautiful moral qualities to the beads of a necklace, and in our conversations during that year in Piura, when I spoke to him of my vocation and told him that I wanted to be a writer even if I starved to death, because literature was the best thing there was in the world, he used to recite that sonnet to me, as he encouraged me to follow my literary inclinations without giving a thought to the consequences, because — it is a lesson that I learned and have tried to transmit to my children — the worst misfortune that can befall a man is to spend his life doing things that he doesn’t like to do instead of those that he would have liked to do.
Uncle Lucho listened to me read aloud to him La huida del inca, and many poems and short stories, offering me certain criticisms at times — exuberance was my major defect — but tactfully, so as not to hurt my feelings as a novice writer.
Aunt Olga had fixed up a room for me at the back of the little patio of their tiny house on the Calle Tacna, just a little way away from its intersection with the Avenida Sánchez Cerro, opposite the Plaza Merino, where my brand-new school, San Miguel, was located. The house occupied the lower floors of an old building, and consisted of a small living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms, plus the bathrooms and bedrooms for the household help. My arrival wrecked the orderly household, which had grown — besides Wanda and Patricia, nine and seven years old, Lucho had been born and was two years old by then — and the three cousins had to be jammed together in one bedroom so that I could have my own, all to myself. In it, on a couple of shelves, were Uncle Lucho’s books, old volumes published by Espasa-Calpe, editions of classics put out by Ateneo, and, above all, the complete collection of the Biblioteca Contemporánea, published by Losada, some thirty or forty books of novels, essays, poetry, and theater that I am certain I read from beginning to end, in that year of voracious reading. Among Uncle Lucho’s books, I found an autobiography, published by Diana, a Mexico City publishing house, that kept me awake for many nights and gave me a violent political jolt: Out of the Night, by Jan Valtin. Its author had been a German Communist, in the Nazi era, and his autobiography, full of episodes of clandestine militancy, of sacrifices of fates and fortunes to the cause of revolution, and of hideous abuses was, to me, a detonating device, something that for the first time gave me pause and made me think about justice, political action, revolution. Although, at the end of the book, Valtin severely criticized the Communist Party, which sacrificed his wife and dealt with him in the most cynical way, I remember having finished the book feeling great admiration for those lay saints who, despite the risk of being tortured, decapitated, or condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the underground cells of the Nazis, dedicated their lives to fighting for socialism.