Despite all this, the Party was still active behind the scenes and in the past year had played a decisive role in the strike at San Marcos. Many comrades who participated in it were in exile or in the penitentiary. Cahuide had been formed by combining the surviving cells, until a congress could be convoked. It consisted of a student section and a workers’ section, and for reasons of security each cell knew only one responsible militant from the level immediately above. In no document or conversation were Party members’ real names to be used, only pseudonyms. One could enter Cahuide as a sympathizer or as a militant.
Félix and I said that we wanted to be sympathizers, but Lea asked for full membership immediately. The oath administered to her by Washington Durán, in the murmur of an altar boy, was a solemn one—“Do you swear to fight for the working class, for the Party…?”—and it impressed us. Then we had to choose our pseudonyms. Mine was Comrade Alberto.
Although we continued in the study circle, whose members and instructor changed every so often, the three of us began to work, at the same time, in a cell of the student section, which Podestá, Martínez and Muñoz also joined. The circumstances limited our militancy to handing out leaflets or selling, on the sly, a little clandestine periodical called Cahuide, for which several times I was called upon to write about international subjects from the “proletarian” and “dialectical” point of view. It cost fifty centavos and in it the two bêtes noires of the Party, the APRA and the Trotskyites, were attacked almost as severely as Odría’s dictatorship.
This first target is understandable. In 1953, and despite having had to go underground, the APRA still had control of the majority of the labor unions and was the first, in fact the only Peruvian political party for which the word popular was appropriate. It was precisely the deep roots of the APRA in the popular sectors that had been an obstacle in the way of the development of the Communist Party, up until that time a small organization of intellectuals, students, and little workers’ groups. At San Marcos then (and perhaps always), the vast majority of students were apolitical, with a vague preference for the left but without any party affiliation. Within the politicized sector, the majority of students were Apristas. And the Communists, a small minority, were concentrated above all in the Faculties of Letters, Economics, and Law.
What was practically nonexistent was Trotskyism, and it said a great deal about the ideological unreality in which Cahuide functioned that we dedicated so much time to denouncing a mere phantom in our leaflets or in our periodical. At that time there were no more than half a dozen Trotskyites at San Marcos, gathered around the person we thought of as their ideologue: Aníbal Quijano. The future sociologist held forth every morning in the courtyard of the Faculty of Letters, speaking in flowing words and devastatingly impressive statistics about the advances of Leon Davidovich Trotsky’s partisans in the Soviet Union itself. “We have 22,000 Trotskyite comrades within the Soviet armed forces,” I heard him announce, with a triumphant smile, in one of his perorations. And on another morning, one of Quijano’s supposed supporters, who was later to be an AP representative — Raúl Peña Cabrera — left me dumbfounded: “I know you’re studying Marxism. That’s fine. But you should take a broad view of it, without sectarianism.” And he presented me with a copy of Trotsky’s Revolution and Art, which I read in secret, with a morbid feeling of transgression. Only two or three years later the picturesque Ismael Frías would arrive, bundled up in an outlandish gray overcoat totally unsuited to the climate of Lima and with the appearance of an obese matron, to replace Peña and Quijano as the Trotskyite ideologue of Peru. At the time, in 1953, he was living in Mexico City, in Trotsky’s house in Coyoacán, where he officiated as the secretary of Trotsky’s illustrious widow, Natalia Sedova.
But just as it was very difficult, not to say impossible, to know who was a Trotskyite, it was also hard to identify the Apristas and our comrades. Outside of the people in our own cell and the leaders at higher levels who came to give us talks or instruction — such as the spirited Isaac Ahumala, who in his speeches invariably spoke of the helots of Greece and of Spartacus’s rebellion — only by divination or sympathetic magic was it possible to identify the militants of the parties that the military government had outlawed. Esparza Zañartu’s informers and the fierce animosity between Apristas and Communists, and between Communists and Trotskyites, all of whom suspected the others of being informers, made the political atmosphere of the university almost intolerable.
But finally it became possible for us to hold elections at the university for the student committees in the several Faculties and then for the University Federation of San Marcos (dismantled after the 1952 strike). Among the candidates put up by Cahuide from the Faculty of Letters, Félix and I were elected, and the two of us were also among the five delegates that the committee in our Faculty elected for the Federation. I don’t know how we managed this latter, since in both the committee and the Federation the majority were Apristas. And shortly thereafter an episode occurred which, as far as I was concerned, was to have literary consequences.
I have already said there were a fair number of students imprisoned. The Internal Security Act allowed the government to send any “subversive” to jail and keep him or her there for an indefinite period, without a court trial. The conditions in which those arrested found themselves in the penitentiary — a red building in the downtown area of Lima, where the Hotel Sheraton is also located, and which only years later I would discover to be one of the rare panopticons* to have been built according to the instructions of Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher who invented them — were tough: they were obliged to sleep on the floor, without blankets or mattresses. We took up a collection to buy them blankets, but when we took them to the penitentiary, the warden informed us that those who had been arrested were incommunicado, because they were political prisoners — an infamous word during the dictatorship — and that only with the authorization of the administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior could the blankets be given to them.
Ought we, for humanitarian reasons, to ask for an interview with the brain of the repression under Odría? The subject gave rise to one of those discussions that leave everyone panting for breath, in the cell first, and then in the Federation. We were in the habit of discussing all questions beforehand in Cahuide, of planning a strategy and carrying it out in the student organizations, where we acted with a discipline and a coordination that very often allowed us to reach agreements despite our being a minority as compared to the Apristas. I don’t know what position we defended with regard to the request for an audience with Esparza Zañartu, but I do know that the discussions were intensely bitter. Finally, the request for the interview was approved. The Federation named a committee, among whose members were Martínez and I.
The administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior gave us a midmorning appointment, in his office on the Plaza Italia. We were overcome with nervousness and excitement as we waited, amid grease-stained walls, police in uniform and in civvies, and office clerks crowded together in claustrophobic little cubicles. Finally we were ushered into his office. There was Esparza Zañartu, in the flesh. He did not get to his feet to greet us, nor did he ask us to sit down. He impassively scrutinized us from his desk. I have never forgotten that bored face with the look of parchment. He was a ludicrous little man, around forty or fifty, or rather, ageless, modestly dressed, with a scrawny, decrepit body, the incarnation of the harmless, of the man without qualities (at least physically speaking). He gave an almost imperceptible nod to indicate to us to say what we wanted to, and without uttering a word, listened to those of us who took the responsibility for speaking up — or rather, for stammering out an explanation of the matter of the mattresses and blankets. He didn’t move a muscle and his mind appeared to be somewhere else, but he observed us as though we were insects. Finally, with the same expression of indifference, he opened a drawer, took out a pile of papers and waved them in our faces, murmuring “And what about this?” and shaking in his fist several issues of the clandestine Cahuide.