Since the school was just a few meters from the house — all I had to do was cross the Plaza Merino to get to it — I got up out of bed as late as possible, dressed in a mad rush, and raced off when they were already blowing the whistle for the beginning of classes. But Aunt Olga refused to let me skip breakfast and would send the maid to San Miguel with a cup of milk and a slice of buttered bread for me. I don’t know how many times I had to go through the embarrassing experience of seeing the head supervisor, “el Diablo”—“the Devil”—come into the classroom just after the first morning lesson had started, to summon me: “Vargas Llosa, Mario! To the door, to have his breakfast!” After my three months as a night-owl reporter on La Crónica and a steady customer of brothels, I had gone back to being a youngster with a family.
I didn’t regret it. I felt happy that Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho pampered me, and that at the same time they treated me like a grownup, giving me complete freedom to go out at night, or stay home reading until all hours, something that I often did. For that reason it took a superhuman effort on my part to get up in time for school. Aunt Olga signed blank cards for me, so that I could invent excuses myself for being late. But since I turned them in too often, Wanda and Patricia were given the responsibility for waking me up each morning. Wandita did so gently; her younger sister, Patricia, took advantage of this chance to give free rein to her wicked instincts and had no compunction about throwing a glass of water all over me. She was a little seven-year-old demon hidden behind a cute turned-up nose, flashing eyes, and curly hair. Those glasses of cold water she poured on top of me became a nightmare and I awaited them, still half asleep, with anticipated shivers. Stunned and startled by the sudden dash of cold water, I would throw the pillow at her in fury, but she would answer me with a great burst of laughter too big to have come out of her semi-skeletal little body. Her bad behavior beat all the records of family tradition, including my own. When something wasn’t to her liking, Cousin Patricia was capable of crying and stamping her feet for hours on end, until her tantrums infuriated Uncle Lucho, whom I once observed putting her under the shower fully dressed, to see if that would make her stop screaming. At a certain period when she slept in my room, I took it into my head to write her a poem, and she learned it by heart and used to fill me with embarrassment by reciting it in front of Aunt Olga’s friends, lingering over each word and giving it gelatinous accents so that it would sound even worse:
Duerme la niña
The little girl sleeps
cerquita de mí
right next to me
y su manecita
and her little hand
blanca y chiquitita
white and wee
apoyada tiene
she keeps folded tightly
muy junta de sí…
right next to her…
At times, I gave her a quick pinch or pulled her ears, whereupon she would kick up a fuss and begin howling as though she were being skinned alive, and in order that Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga wouldn’t believe I’d been mistreating her, I had to placate her by pleading with her or putting on a clown act. She used to exact a price for the deaclass="underline" “Either you buy me a cup of chocolate or I’ll go on screaming…”
San Miguel de Piura was opposite the Salesian school, but unlike it, it didn’t have a roomy and comfortable building; it was in an old house made of reeds and clay with a corrugated zinc roof, not at all suited to its needs. But San Miguel, thanks to the efforts of its headmaster — Dr. Marroquín, to whom I gave so many headaches — was a splendid school. In it many youngsters from humble Piura families — from La Mangachería, from La Gallinacera and other districts on the outskirts of the city — attended classes with youngsters from the middle class and even from the top families of Piura, who were enrolled there either because the priests of the Salesian school wouldn’t put up with them any longer or because they were attracted by the good teachers at San Miguel. Dr. Marroquín had managed to persuade distinguished professionals of the city to come to the school to give classes — above all to pupils in my year, the last one before graduation — and thanks to this I had the good luck, for instance, to study political economy with Dr. Guillermo Gulman. It was this course, I believe, and also Uncle Lucho’s advice, that made me make up my mind to study, later on at the university, for degrees in Letters and in Law. But in those classes of Dr. Gulman’s, the law seemed much more profound and important than something that had to do merely with lawsuits: it was an open door to philosophy, to economics, to all the social sciences.
We also had an excellent history teacher, Néstor Martos, who wrote a daily column in El Tiempo entitled “Voto en Contra” (“A Vote Against”) on local issues. Professor Martos, an impenitent bohemian with a debauched face, who seemed to arrive in class, every so often, directly from some little bar where he had spent the whole night drinking chicha, his hair uncombed, his chin stubbled, and with a muffler covering half his face — a muffler, in torrid Piura! — was transformed in the classroom into an Apollonian expositor, a painter of frescoes of the pre-Inca and Inca eras of American history. I listened to him spellbound, and my face turned beet-red one morning in that class, in which, without mentioning my name, he devoted himself to enumerating all the reasons why no true Peruvian could be a “Hispanist” or praise Spain (which I had done, that same day, in my column in La Industria, on the occasion of the visit to Piura of the ambassador of that country). One of his arguments was this: In the three hundred years of colonialism, had any ruler ever deigned to visit the American possessions of the Spanish Empire?
The literature teacher was a little less lofty — we had to memorize the adjectives that described the classics: San Juan de la Cruz, “profound and essential” Góngora, “baroque and classicist” Quevedo, “ornate, festive, and imperishable” Garcilaso, “Italianizing, dead before his time, and a friend of Juan Boscáu’s”—but this blind teacher, José Robles Rázuri, was a very fine person. When he discovered my vocation, he held me in high esteem and used to lend me books — he had put pink paper covers on all of them and a little seal with his name — among which I remember the first two of Azorín’s that I read: Al margen de los clásicos (Marginal Notes to the Classics) and La ruta de Don Quijote (The Path of Don Quixote).