Lea was the first girl whose fast friend I became who had not been brought up, as had my girlfriends from the barrio in Miraflores, to get married as soon as possible and be a good housewife. She had an intellectual background and was determined to get into San Marcos, to practice her profession, to stand on her own two feet. While she was intelligent and possessed of a strong personality, she was gentle at the same time, and could be so tenderhearted as to be moved to tears by a story about an incident in someone’s life. I think she was the first one to talk to me about José Carlos Mariátegui, the Marxist ideologue, and the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality). Even before classes started, we became inseparable. We went to exhibitions, to bookstores, and to the movies — to see French films, of course, in the two art houses downtown that showed them, Le Paris and Biarritz.
On the day I turned up on the Calle Fano to learn the results of the entrance exams, the minute they discovered my name on the list of those who had passed, a group lying in wait flung itself on me and baptized me. The San Marcos baptism was humane: they gave you a really short crew cut so as to oblige you to shave your head. From the Calle Fano I went with my close-cropped head to buy myself a beret and to a barbershop on La Colmena to get myself sheared almost to the scalp, so that my head looked like a coconut.
I had enrolled at the Alliance Française, so as to learn French. Two of us in my class were males: a young black who was studying chemistry and myself. The twenty or so females — all of them well-brought-up girls from Miraflores and San Isidro — amused themselves at our expense, making fun of our accent in French and playing pranks on us. After a few weeks, the black got fed up with their mockery and gave up coming to class. My shorn head as a San Marcos freshman was, of course, the object of the irreverence and hilarity of those fearsome girl classmates (among them was a Miss Peru). But I enjoyed the classes taught by the wonderful instructor, Madame del Solar, thanks to whom I was able within a few weeks to begin to read in French, with the aid of dictionaries. I spent many blissful hours in the little library of the Alliance, on the Avenida Wilson, peeking into magazines and reading such authors of transparent prose as Gide, Camus, or Saint-Exupéry, who gave me the illusion of having mastered the language of Montaigne.
In order to have a little money, I spoke with Uncle Jorge, the one in the family with the best job. He was the manager of a construction company and he gave me work by the hour to do — making bank deposits, writing letters and other documents, and taking them to government offices — which did not interfere with my classes. In that way I was able to buy cigarettes — I smoked like that proverbial bat, always dark tobacco, Incas at first and later on oval-shaped National Presidents — and to go to the movies. Shortly thereafter I got another, more intellectual job: a writer for Turismo magazine. The owner and managing editor was Jorge Holguín de Lavalle (1894–1973), a very fine sketch artist and cartoonist, who had been famous thirty years before, in the big magazines of the 1920s, Variedades and Mundial. An aristocrat and very poor, a Limeño to the bone, an indefatigable and charming raconteur of traditions, myths, and gossip about the city, Holguín de Lavalle was an absent-minded dreamer who brought out the magazine when he remembered to, or rather, when he had garnered enough ads to pay for printing an issue. The magazine was laid out by him and written from first page to last by him and by the current staff writer. Well-known intellectuals had passed by way of the magazine’s very scanty editorial staff, among them Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and Señor Jorge Holguín de Lavalle, on the day that I went to talk with him, reminded me of this, thereby indicating that, even though the pay would be a paltry sum, my succeeding such illustrious individuals in the job would make up for that fact.
I accepted the job, and from then on, for two years, I wrote half or perhaps three-quarters of the magazine under different pseudonyms (among them the French-sounding Vincent Naxé, with which I signed the drama reviews). Of all that material I remember one text, “En torno a una escultura” (“Concerning a Statue”), written in protest against a barbarous deed committed during the dictatorship by the minister of education, General Zenón Noriega, who ordered the handsome statue of the hero withdrawn from the sculpture group of the monument to Bolognesi (created by the Spaniard Agustín Querol) because his pose did not strike General Zenón as heroic. And he had the original image of Bolognesi — shown at the moment he fell to the ground riddled with bullets — replaced by the grotesque puppet waving a flag that today makes what was once one of the fine monuments of Lima among its ugliest. Holguín de Lavalle was indignant at the mutilation but feared that my article would anger the government and the magazine would be closed down. In the end, he published it and nothing happened. With my salary from Turismo, four hundred soles per issue — and the magazine didn’t come out every month, but only every second or even every third month — I could pay for (what days those were and how solid the Peruvian sol was!) subscriptions to two French periodicals, Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes and Maurice Nadeau’s Les Lettres Modernes, which I went to pick up, every month, at a little downtown office. I was able to live on this income — at my grandparents’ I didn’t pay for either my room or my board — and above all I had free time to read, for San Marcos and, in a very short time, for the revolution.
Classes began late, and with one exception, they were disappointing. San Marcos hadn’t yet fallen into the decadence that in the 1960s and 1970s was little by little to turn it into the caricature of a university, and later on into a bastion of Maoism and even terrorism, but it was no longer even a shadow of what it had been in the 1920s, in the days of the famous generation of the 1919 Conversatorio, its high point as far as the humanities were concerned.
Of that famous generation of the Conversatorio two historians — Jorge Basadre and Raúl Porras Barrenechea — were still at San Marcos, and a few illustrious figures of a previous generation, such as Mariano Iberico in philosophy, or Luis Valcárcel in ethnology. And the Faculty of Medicine, in which Honorio Delgado taught, had as professors the best doctors in Lima. But the atmosphere and the way classes were conducted at the university were neither creative nor demanding. There was a breakdown both of morale and of intellectual standards, still not particularly noticeable, although widespread; professors skipped one class and turned up at the next, and along with some who were competent, others were of a mediocrity that put the students in their classes to sleep. Before entering the Faculty of Law and before becoming a candidate for a degree in literature, a student had to have had two years of general studies, among which there could be several electives. All the ones I chose were literature courses.
The majority of them were given without enthusiasm, by professors who did not know very much or who had lost all interest in teaching. But among these courses I remember one that ranks among the best intellectual experiences I have ever had: Sources of Peruvian History, given by Raúl Porras Barrenechea.
To me, that course, and what stemmed from it, justifies the years I spent at San Marcos. Its subject could not have been more limited or scholarly, since it was not about Peruvian history but about where to study it. But thanks to the wisdom and eloquence of the professor giving it, every lecture was a formidable display of knowledge about the past of Peru and the contradictory versions and interpretations of it that chroniclers, travelers, explorers, literati had offered, in the most diverse collections of correspondence and documents imaginable. Pintsized, potbellied, dressed in mourning — for the death, that year, of his mother — with a very broad forehead, blue eyes boiling over with irony and lapels covered with dandruff, Porras Barrenechea turned into a giant on the little classroom dais and every last one of his words was followed by us with religious devotion. He lectured with consummate elegance, in a pungent and pure Spanish — he had begun his university career teaching the classics of the Golden Age, which he had thoroughly mastered, and traces of this mastery remained in his prose and in the precision and magnificence with which he expressed himself — yet he was not, even remotely, the garrulous professor, an empty-headed wordmonger who listens to himself talk. Porras was a fanatic when it came to exactitude and he was incapable of stating anything about anything that he hadn’t thoroughly checked. His splendid lectures were always documented by his reading from note cards in his minute handwriting, raising them up close to his eyes so as to decipher them. In each one of his classes we had the sensation that we were hearing something not to be found in any book, the result of personal research. The following year, when I began to work with him, I discovered that, in fact, Porras Barrenechea prepared that course, which he had been giving for so many years, with the rigor of someone about to face a class for the first time.