He said that he knew everything that was happening at San Marcos, including who it was who had written those articles. He thanked us for devoting our attention to him in every issue. But he warned us that we should be careful, because students went to the university to study and not to organize the Communist revolution. He spoke in a faint little voice without a cutting edge to it or subtle shadings, with the inexpressiveness and the mistakes in grammar of someone who has never read a book since leaving high school.
I don’t remember what happened about the bedding, but I do remember my impression on discovering how completely out of proportion to the mediocrity we had before us was the idea Peru had of the shadowy figure responsible for so many exiles, crimes, censorship decrees, and imprisonments. On leaving after that interview I realized that sooner or later I was going to write what would eventually become my novel Conversation in The Cathedral. (When the book appeared, in 1969, and journalists went out to ask Esparza Zañartu, who in those days was living in Chosica, devoting his time to philanthropical causes and horticulture, what he thought of that novel, whose main character, Cayo Mierda, bore such a close resemblance to him, he answered [I can just imagine his bored gesture]: “Listen…if Vargas Llosa had consulted me, I’d have told him so many things…”)
In the little more than a year that I was in Cahuide our epic revolutionary deeds were few and far between: an abortive attempt to get rid of a professor, a little periodical put out by the students’ committee that had trouble surviving for even two or three issues, and a strike at San Marcos to demonstrate our solidarity with streetcar workers. And in addition, a free academy to prepare students seeking admission to San Marcos, in which I taught the literature course; this permitted us to recruit members for the study circles and Cahuide. The right to get bad professors fired (which became the right to get rid of reactionary ones) was one of those achieved by the university reform movement of the 1920s; it was abolished after the military coup of 1948. We tried to revive it in order to get rid of our professor of logic, Dr. Saberbein — for reasons I don’t understand, since there were worse professors than he on the faculty — but we failed; in two tumultuous student assemblies, his defenders turned out to be more numerous than his attackers.
As for the periodical, my memory retains above all else the exhausting discussions in Cahuide concerning a trivial question: whether the articles should be signed or anonymous. Like everything we did, that too was the object of ideological analyses, in which the theses of all the participants were torn to pieces by dialectical and class arguments. The most serious accusation was: bourgeois subjectivism, idealism, lack of class consciousness. My readings of Sartre and Les Temps Modernes helped me to be less dogmatic than other comrades, and sometimes I dared to put forward certain Sartrean criticisms of Marxism, arousing the wrath of Félix, who, as he became more militant, had gradually become more and more inflexible and orthodox. The debate about signatures lasted for several days, and during one of these interchanges Félix lashed out at me with a devastating accusation: “You’re a subhombre—a subhuman.”
But, despite our disagreements in the internal debates of Cahuide (never in public), I went on being fond of him and of Lea, knowing full well that the business of being fond of one’s friends was bourgeois. And it had pained me a great deal when we were separated, first in the circle and then in the cell, where Lea and Félix were to remain together. On both occasions it had seemed to me that Félix, in a way that would be imperceptible for anyone who didn’t have very alert antennae, had slyly furthered that separation while at the same time giving every appearance of being resigned to it. Since I am by nature mistrustful and sensitive, I told myself that I was imagining conspiracies out of the envy I felt because they would be staying together. But I couldn’t help thinking that, with that ultimate inflexibility of his, Félix had perhaps schemed to bring that separation about so as to toughen me, curing me of sentimentality, one of my most stubborn class defects…
Despite that, we three continued to see a great deal of each other. I sought them out whenever I could. One afternoon — six or eight months must have gone by since we had first met — Lea told me she wanted to talk to me. I went to her house, on Petit Thouars, and found her alone. We went out for a walk along the promenade that ran down the middle of the Avenida Arequipa, beneath the tall trees, between the double rows of cars that were going downtown or toward the ocean. Lea was nervous. I felt her trembling in her light dress, and although in the dim light I could barely see her eyes — night was beginning to fall — I knew that they must be gleaming and a little damp, as always when something was greatly troubling her. I was very nervous too, waiting to hear her tell me what was on her mind. Finally, after a long silence, in a very faint voice, but without searching for words, because she always knew how to choose them well, whether in a conversation or in an argument, she told me what Félix had confided to her the night before. That he had been in love with her for some time, that she was more important to him than anything else, including the Party…I felt cramps in my stomach and I cursed myself for having been so cowardly and for not having dared to do before what Félix had now done. But when Lea finished her account and confessed to me that, because of how close we were to each other, she had felt obliged to tell me what had happened, since she didn’t know what to do, I, with the masochism that habitually takes possession of me at certain times, hastened to cheer her up: she should accept the situation, how could she doubt that Félix loved her? That turned out to be the most sleepless night I spent in my years at San Marcos.
I went on seeing Félix and Lea, but our relationship gradually grew chillier. Because of the strict propriety that revolutionaries observed in such personal affairs, the fact that both of them were now in love or engaged or living together (I don’t know which, in fact) was invisible simply from watching how they behaved, except for their always going about together, since they were never seen to hold hands, or make any other gesture toward each other that would betray a sentimental relationship between them. But I knew that it existed, and even though they hid it very well whenever I was with them, I felt in my stomach that hollow, upset feeling experienced by resentful bourgeois.
Sometime afterward — perhaps one or two years later — I heard a story about them, told by someone who could not have suspected that I had been in love with Lea. It happened in the cell to which they belonged. They had had some sort of personal dispute, something more serious than a mere tiff. In the cell meeting, Lea all of a sudden accused Félix of acting like a bourgeois toward her and asked for a political analysis of his behavior. The subject took the others by surprise and the session ended in a psychodrama, with Félix engaging in the ritual of self-criticism. For a reason I am unable to explain, that episode, which I heard about long after the fact and perhaps in a distorted form, has been on my mind throughout the years and I have tried many times to reconstruct it and intuit its context and reverberations.