Pedro del Pino Fajardo had had a lung disease and had stayed for a time at the famous hospital for tuberculosis at Jauja (the one they used in order to scare me, at my grandparents’, when I was a little boy, so as to force me to eat), about which he wrote a novel that fell somewhere between being festive and being macabre, which he gave me shortly after we met. And he also showed me several of his works for the theater. He looked kindly on my vocation and encouraged it, but the real help he gave me was of a negative sort, causing me to have a presentiment from that time on of the mortal danger that bohemia represented for literature. Because in his case, as in that of so many writers, living and dead, in my country, his literary vocation had foundered on disorder, a lack of discipline, and above all alcohol, before the creative light dawned in him. Pedro was an incorrigible bohemian; he could spend entire days — entire nights — in a bar, telling extremely funny stories, and absorbing immeasurable quantities of beer, pisco brandy or any other alcoholic drink. He soon reached a scintillating, overexcited state, and remained in it, for hours and hours, days and days, burning up, in dazzlingly brilliant and ephemeral soliloquies, what were no doubt, by that time, the last vestiges of a talent that never managed to take definite shape because of his dissolute life. He was married to a granddaughter of Ricardo Palma, a heroic young blonde, who, with the responsibility for the care of a child who was only a few years old, used to come to rescue Pedro from the little bars.
I have never learned how to drink; in my short bohemian life, in the summer in Lima that I worked on La Crónica, more out of mimicry than out of a liking for it, I had drunk a great deal of beer — though I could never go on pisco binges, for instance, with my colleagues — but even beer had a bad effect on me, since I soon began to have a headache and feel nauseated. And now that I was in Piura, I had so many things to do, what with classes, my job on the newspaper, the books and other things I was trying to write, that the whole business of spending hours in a café or a bar, talking endlessly, as around me people began to get plastered, bored me and exasperated me. I would invent any sort of pretext to escape. That allergy began there in Piura, I believe, and had to do with a physical intolerance for alcohol that I no doubt inherited from my father — who was never able to drink — and with the distaste I felt at the spectacle of the way my friend Pedro del Pino Fajardo deteriorated, a distaste that gradually grew stronger until it had become a phobia. Neither in my years at the university nor afterward have I lived the bohemian life, not even in its most pleasant and benign forms, those back-room gatherings at table, those evenings in a coterie of like-minded friends, from which I have always fled like a cat from water.
Pedro del Pino stayed for no more than a year and a half or two years in Piura. He went back to Lima and there he became the editor-in-chief of a publication touting the policies of Odría’s dictatorship, La Nación, in which, without my permission, he reprinted several of my columns from La Industria. I sent him a furious letter of protest, which he didn’t publish, and I didn’t see him again. When the dictatorship ended, in 1956, he emigrated to Venezuela and died shortly afterward.
We began to rehearse La huida del inca at the end of April or the beginning of May, in the afternoons, three or four times a week, after classes let out, in the library of the school, a vast room on the top floor lent to us by San Miguel’s affable librarian, Carmela Garcés. In the cast, the selection of which took several days, there were students of the school, the Raygada brothers, Juan León and Yolanda Vilela from my class, and Walter Palacios, who was later to become a professional actor as well as a revolutionary leader. But the stars were the Rojas sisters, two girls from outside the school, very well known in Piura — one of them, Lira, for her magnificent voice, and the other, Ruth, for her dramatic talent (she had already played roles in several plays). The lovely voice of Lira Rojas caused General Odría, who had heard her sing while on an official visit to Piura, to offer her a scholarship and send her to Lima, to the National Music School.
I feel no need to remember the work (a soap opera with Incas, as I have said), but I am touched when I recall what slowly brought it to life, over a period of two months and a half, with the enthusiastic collaboration of the eight actors and the persons who helped us with the stage sets and the lighting. I had never directed, or ever seen anybody direct a play, and I spent entire nights without a wink of sleep, taking notes on the staging. The rehearsals, the atmosphere that was created, the camaraderie, and my dream of seeing the little play finally taking shape, convinced me that year that I would be not a poet but a playwright: drama was the prince of genres and I would inundate the world with works for the theater like those of Lorca or Lenormand. (I have not reread nor have I seen the plays of the latter performed on the stage, but two works of his, which had been published in the Biblioteca Contemporánea series and which I read that year, left a profound impression on me.)
From the first rehearsal I fell in love with my female lead, the slender Ruth Rojas. She had wavy hair that kissed her shoulders, a long neck like the stem of a flower, very pretty legs, and a walk like a queen’s. Hearing her speak was a pleasure fit for the gods, because as she did so she added to the warm, lingering, and musical cadence of Piuran speech a lilt of coquetry and gentle irony all her own that went straight to my heart. But the timidity that always came over me with the young women I fell in love with kept me from ever addressing a flirtatious remark to her or anything that might make her suspect what I felt for her. What was more, Ruth had a sweetheart, a young man who worked in a bank and who used to come to get her when rehearsals were over.
We could only run through a couple of rehearsals in the theater itself, in mid-July, just before the performance, when it seemed impossible that Maestro Aldana Ruiz would finish painting the stage sets in time; he didn’t finish them until the very morning of July 17. The advertising for the work was tremendous, in La Industria and in El Tiempo, over the radio, and, finally, over loudspeakers going up and down the streets — I remember having seen Javier Silva go past the door of the newspaper office, shouting into a megaphone, from atop a truck: “Don’t miss the event of the century, in an evening performance, at the Teatro Variedades…,” as a result of which all the seats were sold out. On the night of the performance, many people who hadn’t been able to get tickets broke through the barriers and poured into the theater, filling the aisles and the orchestra. What with all the disorder, the prefect himself, Don Jorge Checa, lost his seat and had to witness the entire performance standing up.
The work proceeded without mishap — or almost — and there was loud applause when I came out onto the stage, along with the actors and actresses, to acknowledge my authorship of it. The one semi-mishap occurred at the romantic moment of the work, when the Inca — Ricardo Raygada — kissed the heroine, who was supposed to be deeply in love with him. At just that point a look of disgust crossed Ruth’s face and she began to screw up her face. Later she explained to us that it was not the Inca who had repelled her, but a live cockroach that had attached itself to his mascaipacha—his symbolic imperial tassel. The success of La huida del inca was responsible for our giving, the following week, two performances more, to one of which I managed to sneak in Wanda and Patricia, since the censorship board’s classification of the work as one “suitable for minors over fifteen years of age” made it necessary to get them in on the sly.