In my first two years at San Marcos I was someone I hadn’t been in high schooclass="underline" a very diligent student. I studied all my courses thoroughly, even the ones I didn’t like, handing in every one of the assignments given us, and in some cases asking the professor for a supplementary list of books, so as to go read them at the San Marcos library or at the National Library on the Avenida Abancay, in both of which I spent many hours during those first two years. Although they were far from being exemplary — at the National one had to share the reading room with very young schoolchildren who went there to do their homework and turned the place into a madhouse — I acquired there the habit of reading in libraries and I have frequented them ever since, in all the cities I have lived in, and in one of them, the beloved Reading Room of the British Museum, I have even written a good part of my books.
But in none of the courses I took did I read and work as much as for Sources of Peruvian History, dazzled as I was by Porras Barrenechea’s brilliance. After a masterly class on pre-Hispanic myths, I remember having rushed to the library in search of two books that he had cited, and although one of them, by Ernst Cassirer, defeated me almost immediately, the other was one of the most impressive of my readings of 1953: Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Porras’s course had such a great influence on me that during those first months at the university I often came to the point of asking myself whether I ought to specialize in history instead of literature, since the former, embodied in Porras Barrenechea, had all the color, the dramatic power, and the creativity of the latter, and seemed more deeply rooted in life.
I made good friends among my classmates and convinced a group of them that we should put on a play. We chose a comedy of manners, by Pardo y Aliaga, and even had copies of it made and cast the roles, but in the end the project came to nothing, through my own fault, I believe, since I had already begun to be active in politics, which started to absorb more and more of my time.
Of that whole group of friends, Nelly Alba was a special case. She had studied piano at the Conservatory since she’d been a little girl, and her vocation was music, but she had entered San Marcos to acquire an overall culture. From our first conversations under the palm trees of the courtyard of the Faculty of Letters, my lack of musical culture horrified her, and she took on the task of educating me, taking me to concerts at the Teatro Municipal, in the first row of the balcony, and passed on to me a somewhat hasty smattering of information about interpretative artists and composers. I gave her advice on what literary works she should read, and I remember how much the two of us liked the volumes of Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, which we bought, a volume or two at a time, in Juan Mejía Baca’s bookstore, on the Calle Azángaro. The kindly, effusive Don Juan gave us the books on credit and let us pay him in monthly installments. To pass by that bookstore once or twice a week, to have a look at what was new, was obligatory. And on days when we were lucky, Mejía Baca invited us to the tavern next door, to have a coffee and a hot meat pie, on him.
But the person I saw most often, every day in fact, inside and outside of classes, was Lea. Shortly after the beginning of the academic year, we had been joined by another student, Félix Arias Schreiber, with whom we were soon to constitute a triumvirate. Félix had entered San Marcos the year before, but had had to break off his studies because of illness, and therefore was in the freshman class with us. He belonged to a family of high social standing — one associated his surname with bankers, diplomats, and lawyers — but to a branch that was poor and perhaps even extremely poor. I don’t know whether his mother was a widow or separated from her husband, but Félix lived alone with her, in one of a group of little townhouses with a common entrance on the Avenida Arequipa, and although he had studied in Santa María, the private high school for rich kids in Lima, he never had a cent and it was plain to see, from the way he acted and dressed, that he was having a hard time making ends meet. Félix’s political vocation was much stronger — in his case excluding every other interest — than Lea’s or mine. He already knew a bit about Marxism, he had a few books and pamphlets which he lent to us, and which I read in a state of bedazzlement at the forbidden nature of such fruits, which I had to carry around with paper covers concealing them so they would not be detected by the stool pigeons that Esparza Zañartu had infiltrated into San Marcos to flush out what La Prensa called “subversive elements” and “agitators.” (All the daily papers of the period backed the dictatorship and, it goes without saying, were anti-Communist, but Pedro Beltrán’s La Prensa was more so than all the others put together.) Once Félix joined us, other subjects were relegated to a secondary place and it was politics — or rather, socialism and revolution — that our conversations centered on. We chatted together in the patios of San Marcos — still located in the old mansion of the Parque Universitario, right in downtown Lima — or in little coffeehouses on La Colmena or Azángaro, and Lea sometimes took us to have coffee or a Coca-Cola on the downstairs floor of the Negro-Negro, in the arcades of the Plaza San Martín. By contrast to my earlier visits to the place, during my bohemian days on La Crónica, I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol now and we talked about very serious things: the abuses committed by the dictatorship, the great ethical, political, economic, scientific, and cultural changes that were taking place in the U.S.S.R. (“in that country / where there exist / neither whores, thieves, nor priests,” Paul Éluard’s poem said), or in the China of Mao Tsetung that the French writer Claude Roy had visited and about which he had written so many marvelous things, in Clefs pour la Chine (Into China), a book whose every word we believed implicitly.
Our conversations went on till late at night. Often we walked back from downtown to Lea’s house, on Petit Thouars, and then Félix and I went on to his house on the Avenida Arequipa, almost as far out as Angamos, and I then went on alone to the Calle Porta. The walk from the Plaza San Martín to my house took an hour and a half. Granny left me my dinner on the table and it didn’t matter to me that it was cold (it was always the same, the only dish I could finish in those days: rice with breaded beef cutlets and fried potatoes). And if food didn’t matter much to me (“For the poet, food is prose,” my grandfather teased me), I didn’t need much sleep either, for, even though I climbed into bed late at night, I read for hours before going to sleep. I indulged in friendship with my usual passionate enthusiasm and exclusivism, and Félix and Lea became a full-time occupation; when I wasn’t with them, I was thinking how good it was to have friends like them, three of us who got along together so well and were planning a shared future. I also thought, although I was careful to keep it to myself, that I shouldn’t fall in love with Lea, because it would be fatal for the trio we formed. What was more, wasn’t the whole business of falling in love a typical bourgeois weakness, inconceivable in a revolutionary?