In addition to La huida del inca, the show included some sung numbers, by Lira Rojas, and a performance by Joaquín Ramos Ríos, one of the most original characters in Piura. He was an outstanding exponent of an art that no longer exists today, or at any event, is considered obsolete and ridiculous, but at that time was a prestigious one: recitation. Joaquín had lived in Germany in his early years and had imported from there the German language, a monocle, a cape, a number of extravagant aristocratic mannerisms and an unbridled fondness for beer. He recited Lorca, Darío, Chocano marvelously well, and the Piuran bard Héctor Manrique — whose sonnet “Querellas del jardín” (“Quarrels in the Garden”), which began: “Era la agonía de una tarde rubia…” (“It was the death agony of a golden afternoon…”) Uncle Lucho and I used to declaim at the top of our lungs as we crossed the desert on the way to his farm — and he was the star of all the literary-musical evenings in Piura. Apart from reciting, all he did was wander about the streets of Piura, with his monocle and his cape, dragging along after him a kid goat that he introduced as his gazelle. He always went around half drunk, mimicking — in the grimy holes-in-the-wall of the chicherías, in the bars, and at the liquor stands in the market — the turn-of-the-century extravagances of Oscar Wilde or of his imitators in Lima, the poet and short-story writer Abraham Valdelomar and the colónidas, the Parnassian and Symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century, before a public of Piuran mestizos who didn’t pay the slightest attention to him and treated him with the contemptuous tolerance that one accords idiots. But Joaquín wasn’t one, because, amid the alcoholic haze in which he spent his life, he would suddenly start talking about poetry and poets in a very intense way, which revealed a profound familiarity with them. In addition to respect, I felt tenderness for Joaquín Ramos and I was deeply grieved, years later, to run into him in the center of Lima, a total wreck and so drunk he was unable to recognize me.
For the vacation during national holiday week, my class wanted to organize a trip to Cuzco, but the money we raised — with the performances of La huida del inca, raffles, lotteries, fairs — wasn’t enough and we got only as far as Lima, for a week. Although I slept at night with my classmates at a normal school on the Avenida Brasil, I spent the daytime hours with my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, in Miraflores. My parents were in the United States. It was the third trip my father had taken there, but my mother’s first. They had gone to Los Angeles and this was to be another attempt on my father’s part to set up a business or find a job that would allow him to leave Peru. Even though he never talked to me about his financial situation, I have the impression that it had begun to deteriorate, because of the money he had lost in his commercial experiment in New York, and because his income had dwindled. This time they stayed in the United States for several months and when they came back, instead of renting a house in Miraflores, they took a little apartment, with just one bedroom, in a very poor district, Rímac, an unmistakable sign of financial difficulties. And so, when, at the end of that year, I came back to Lima to enter the university, I didn’t go to live with my father, but with my grandparents, on the Calle Porta. I was never again to live with him.
Shortly after returning to Piura, I received an unexpected piece of news (everything went well for me during that year in Piura): La huida del inca had won second place in the theatrical competition. The news, published in the Lima daily papers, was reprinted by La Industria on the first page. The prize consisted of a small amount of money, and many months were to go by before Grandpa Pedro — who took the trouble to go to the Ministry of Education every week to ask for it — could collect it and send it to me in Piura. I doubtless spent it on books, and perhaps on visits to the Casa Verde.
Uncle Lucho encouraged me to be a writer. He wasn’t so naïve as to advise me to be only a writer, because what would I have lived on? He thought that practicing law would allow me to reconcile my literary vocation with keeping food on my table and urged me to put money aside from then on so as to get to Paris someday. From that time forward, the idea of traveling to Europe — to France — became a polestar. And until I managed to get there, six years later, I lived with the eagerness to be off and the conviction that if I stayed in Peru I wouldn’t ever attain my goal, because what Peruvian who had stayed here had ever managed to become a real writer?
I didn’t know any Peruvian writers, except dead ones or ones I knew only by name. One of these latter, who had published poems and written works for the theater, passed through Piura around that time: Sebastián Salazar Bondy. He was the literary adviser of Pedro López Lagar’s Argentine company, which had a brief run at the Teatro Variedades (it put on a work by Unamuno and another by Jacinto Grau, if memory serves me). At both performances I kept fighting against my shyness so as to approach Sebastián, whose tall, slender silhouette I saw strolling up and down the aisles of the theater. I wanted to talk to him about my vocation, to ask him for advice, or merely to have concrete verification that a Peruvian could manage to become a writer. But I couldn’t work up my nerve, and years later, when we had become friends and I told him about my hesitation, Sebastián couldn’t believe it.
I often went with my Uncle Lucho on trips to the interior of the departamento and one time to Tumbes, where he was exploring a business deal having to do with fish. We went to Sullana, Paita, Talara, Sechura, and also to the provinces in the highlands of Piura, such as Ayabaca and Huancabamba, but the landscape that lingered in my memory and conditioned, I feel, my relationship with nature was that Piuran desert that has nothing monotonous about it, that changes with the sun and with the wind, and in which, because of the vast horizon and the clear blue sky, one always has the sensation that, just on the other side of one sand dune or another, the sea will suddenly appear, with its silvery glints and its foamy waves.
Every time we went out of town in the creaking black station wagon and that nearly endless white or gray expanse stretched out before us, undulating, burning-hot, interrupted every so often by patches of mesquite, by little huts made of wild reeds and clay, and traversed by mysterious flocks of goats that seemed to be lost in the immensity that surrounded them, over which lizards suddenly zigzagged or iguanas toasted themselves in the sun, motionless and disquieting, I felt great excitement, a seething impulse. That vast space, that boundless horizon — every so often the lower ranges of the Andes appeared, like the shadows of giants — filled my head with adventurous ideas, with epic tales, and the number of stories and poems I planned to write using this setting, peopling it, was endless. When in 1958 I left for Europe, where I was to remain for many years, that landscape was one of the most frequently recurring images I preserved of Peru, and also the one that used to make me feel the most homesick.
When the semester was already well along, one fine day Dr. Marroquín announced to those of us in our last year that this time final exams would not be given in accordance with a preestablished schedule, but rather without prior notice. The reason for this experimental procedure was so as to be able to evaluate the student’s knowledge with greater accuracy. Examinations announced beforehand, for which the students prepared by memorizing the material of the course in question the night before, gave an imprecise idea of what they had assimilated.
The whole class panicked. The fact that a student prepared for a chemistry exam could go to school only to be tested in geometry or logic left us with our hair standing on end. We began to imagine a cataract of classes that we’d flunk. And in our last year at school!