Around that time, we had made the longed-for contact. In one of the courtyards of San Marcos, someone had approached us, found out who we were, and, in a seemingly offhand way, asked what we thought of the students who were in jail, or questioned us about cultural subjects that, unfortunately, were not taught at the university — dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and scientific socialism, for example — subjects that anyone with an eye to the future ought to know about, as a matter of general information. And the second or third time, returning to the same subject, he had casually introduced into the discussion the question of whether it wouldn’t interest us to form a study group, to investigate those problems that censorship, the fear of the dictatorship, or the fact that San Marcos was a bourgeois university kept from reaching it. Lea, Félix, and I said we’d be delighted. A month hadn’t yet gone by since we entered the university and already we were in a study group, the first step that should be followed by militants of Cahuide, the name under which the Communist Party was trying to regroup in secret after repression and desertions and internal divisions had caused it nearly to disappear in previous years.
Our first instructor in that circle was Héctor Béjar, who in the 1970s was to be the head of a guerrilla group, the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacionaclass="underline" National Liberation Army), and spend several years in jail for that reason. He was a tall, likable lad, with a face as round as a wheel of cheese, with a voice that had a very fine timbre, which allowed him to earn his living as an announcer at Radio Central. He was a little older than we were — he was already in law school — and studying Marxism with him proved to be enjoyable, for he was intelligent and adept at conducting the circle’s discussions. The first book we studied was Georges Politzer’s Beginning Lessons in Philosophy, and then Marx’s Communist Manifesto and The Class Struggle in France, and after that Engels’s Anti-Dühring and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? We bought the books — and sometimes received in return, as a bonus, a back number of Cultura Soviética, on whose covers there were always smiling peasant lasses with robust cheeks, against a background of wheat fields and tractors — in a little bookstore on the Calle Pando, whose owner, a mustachioed Chilean always bundled up in a little scarf, kept a great deal of subversive literature hidden in a trunk in the back room of his shop. Later on, when I read Conrad’s novels, full of shady conspirators, the mysterious, ashen face of that bookseller who purveyed clandestine books always came back to my mind.
We met in places that kept changing. In a miserable little room, at the back of an old building on the Avenida Abancay, where one of our comrades lived, or in a little house on Bajo el Puente, the home of a very pale girl whom we baptized the Bird, where one day we had a sudden scare, for in the middle of our discussion, a soldier showed up. He was the Bird’s brother and wasn’t surprised at seeing us; but we didn’t go back there. Or in the rooming house in Barrios Altos, whose woman owner, a discreet sympathizer, lent us a room full of spider webs, at the far end of a garden. I belonged to at least four circles and the following year became the instructor and organizer of one of them, and I have forgotten the faces and the names of the comrades who taught me in them, of those who were taught along with me, and those whom I taught. But I remember very well those of the first circle, with the majority of whom we eventually formed a cell, when we began to take militant action in Cahuide. Besides Félix and Lea, there was a skinny young man with a voice as thin as a thread, in whom everything was small-sized: the knot in his tie, his tiny polite gestures, the little steps he took to get around in the world. His name was Podestá and he was the one who was nominally in charge of our cell. Martínez, on the other hand, a student studying for a degree in anthropology, was as hale and hearty as they come: he was an Indian, strong and warm, a dogged worker whose reports in the group were always interminable. His coppery, stony face never changed expression, and not even the most heated debates ever disturbed that impassivity. Antonio Muñoz, a highlander from Junín, on the other hand, had a sense of humor and allowed himself to break the mood of deadly seriousness of our meetings by making jokes now and again (I was to meet him once more, during the election campaign of 1989 and 1990, organizing committees of Libertad for the provinces of Junín). And there was also the Bird, that mysterious girl who made Félix, Lea, and me wonder at times whether she knew what the circle was all about, if she realized that she could be put in prison, that she was already a subversive militant. With her resplendent pallor and her delicate manners, the Bird dutifully did all the required reading and made reports, but she did not appear to absorb very much; one day she abruptly bade the circle goodbye, saying that she was going to be late for Mass…
After we’d been in the circle for a few weeks, Héctor Béjar decided that Lea, Félix, and I were ripe for a major commitment. Would we agree to an interview with a higher-up in the Party? We arranged to meet at nightfall, on the Avenida Pardo in Miraflores, and there was Washington Durán Abarca — at the time I was introduced to him only by his pseudonym — who surprised us by saying that the best way to dupe informers was to meet in bourgeois neighborhoods and out-of-doors. Sitting on a bench, under the ficus trees along the same promenade where I had tried without success to get the beautiful Flora Flores and other daughters of the bourgeoisie to fall for me, Washington gave us a synoptic picture of the history of the Communist Party, from its foundation in Peru by José Carlos Mariátegui, in 1928, up to our own day, when, under the name of Cahuide, it was being reborn from its ruins. After this historic beginning, under the inspiration of Mariátegui — whose Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana we also studied in the group — the Party had fallen into the hands of Eudocio Ravines, who, after having been its secretary general and acting as an envoy of the Comintern in Chile, Argentina, and Spain during the Spanish Civil War, had become a turncoat, assuming the role of Peru’s great anti-Communist and an ally of La Prensa and Pedro Beltrán. And, later on, the dictatorships and the severe repression had kept the Party outside the law and in hiding, surviving underground in more and more difficult conditions, with the brief exception of the three years of Bustamante y Rivero’s administration, in which it was able to surface and act in plain sight. But then “liquidating and antiworker” currents had undermined the organization, separating it from the masses and leading it to make deals with the bourgeoisie: one former leader of the Party, Juan P. Luna, for example, had sold out to Odría and was now one of the senators of the fraudulent Congress of the military regime. The real leaders of the Party such as Jorge del Prado were in exile or in prison (as was the case with Raúl Acosta, the last secretary general).