By the time I dropped out of Cahuide, in the middle of the following year, 1954, I hardly ever saw Lea and Félix, and from then on I practically never saw them. We didn’t talk together or seek each other out in the remaining years at San Marcos, exchanging at most a brief hello when we ran into each other as classes were beginning or ending. When I lived in Europe, I had scarcely any news of them, except that they had gotten married and had children, and that both of them, or Félix at least, had followed the jagged trajectory of so many militants of his generation, leaving the Party and going back to it, being a leader of it or suffering from the divisions, ruptures, reconciliations, and new divisions of the Peruvian Communists in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1972, on the occasion of President Salvador Allende’s visit to Lima, I ran into both of them, at a reception at the Chilean embassy. There among the crowd of guests, we were barely able to exchange even a few words. But I still haven’t forgotten Lea’s joke about Conversation in The Cathedral—“Those demons of yours…” It is a novel in which several episodes of our years at San Marcos appear, transfigured.
Eighteen or twenty years went by without my hearing any more about them. And then one fine day, during the election campaign, on the eve of the launching of my candidacy in Arequipa, in May of 1989, my secretaries handed me the list of journalists who were requesting interviews with me, on which Félix’s name appeared. I immediately granted him an interview, wondering whether it was the same person. It was. Almost four decades older, but still identical to the Félix I remembered: suave and conspiratorial, with the same modesty and the same carelessness in his dress and the same conscientiousness when it came time to ask questions, the ever-exclusive political perspective on the tip of his tongue, and writing for a little periodical as marginal and precarious as the one that we had put out together at San Marcos. I was moved, seeing him, and I imagine that he was too. But neither of us allowed the other to glimpse those embers of sentimentality.
Of my passage through Cahuide the one episode that gave me the feeling that I was working for the revolution was the strike at San Marcos to show our solidarity with the streetcar employees. Their union was controlled by militants from Cahuide. The student section threw itself wholeheartedly into seeing to it that the Federation of San Marcos joined the strike, and we succeeded. Those were exciting days because, for the first time, the members of my cell had the chance to take action outside the university — and with workers! We attended the meetings of the union and put out, with the strikers, in a little print shop in La Victoria, a daily bulletin that we handed out in the places where people who had been left without any means of transportation gathered. And in those days, too, in the meetings of the strike committee, I had the chance to discover several members of Cahuide I’d never known.
How many of us were there? I never found out, but I suspect that there were no more than a few dozen. Just as I never knew, either, who our secretary general was nor who the members of the central committee were. The harsh repression of those years — only after 1955 would the state security system be relaxed, after the fall of Esparza Zañartu — required secrecy with regard to our activities. But it also had to do with the nature of the Party, its conspiratorial predisposition, that vocation for the clandestine that had never permitted it — despite the fact that we talked so much about the prospect — to become a party of the masses.
It was this, in part, that made me fed up with Cahuide. When I stopped going to the meetings of my cell, around June or July of 1954, I had felt bored for some time by the inanity of what we were doing. And I no longer believed a word of our class analyses and our materialist interpretations which, although I wouldn’t have said so straight out to my comrades, seemed puerile to me, a catechism of stereotypes and abstractions, of formulas—“petty bourgeois opportunism,” “revisionism,” “class interest,” “class struggle”—which were used as all-purpose clichés, to explain and defend the most contradictory things. And, above all, because there was in my nature, in my individualism, in my growing vocation as a writer, and in my intractable temperament a visceral inability to embody that patient, tireless, docile revolutionary, a slave to the organization, who accepts and practices democratic centralism once a decision has been arrived at by the organization and all the militants adopt it as their own and apply it with fanatical discipline. Against this, even though I paid lip service to the fact that it was the price of being effective, my whole being rebelled. Ideological differences, which came to me, above all, from Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, of which I was a devoted reader, also played a role in my withdrawing from Cahuide. But I believe that this was a secondary factor. For, despite all that I read in the study circles, what I managed to learn about Marxism at the time was fragmentary and superficial. Only in the 1960s, in Europe, would I make a serious effort to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, and heterodox Marxists such as Lukács, Gramsci, and Goldmann or the superorthodox Althusser, spurred on by the enthusiasm awakened in me by the Cuban revolution, which, from 1960 on, revived that interest in Marxism-Leninism which, ever since I had parted company with Cahuide, I had thought no longer existed.
Although San Marcos, Cahuide, Lea, and Félix had been, for all that time, my all-absorbing preoccupation, I continued to see my aunts and uncles — I dropped by one or another of their houses in turn for lunch or dinner throughout the week — and wrote to Uncle Lucho, to whom I gave a detailed account of everything I was doing or dreaming of doing and from whom I always received letters full of encouraging words. I also saw a great deal of friends from Piura who had come to Lima to prepare for careers at the university, especially Javier Silva. Several of them lived with Javier in a boardinghouse on the Calle Schell, in Miraflores, a place they called Slow Death because of the terrible food they were served. Javier had decided to study architecture and went about disguised as an architect, with a little intellectual’s beard and black turtlenecks, St.-Germain-des-Prés style. I had already convinced him that we had to go off to Paris, and I even encouraged him to write a short story, which I published for him in Turismo. His mysterious text began as follows: “My footsteps took on a larger surface area…” But the following year, he suddenly decided to be an economist and entered San Marcos, so that, from 1954 on, we were also fellow university students.
Thanks to Javier, who had joined it, I resumed contact with my Diego Ferré barrio. I did so a little furtively, because those boys and girls were bourgeois and I had ceased to be one. What would Lea, Félix, or the comrades from Cahuide have said if they saw me, on the corner of the Calle Colón, talking about those “terrific babes” who had just moved to the Calle Ocharán, or planning the Saturday night surprise party? And what would the boys and girls of the barrio have said of Cahuide, an organization which, in addition to being Communist, had Indians, mestizos, and blacks in it like the ones who were servants in their houses? They were two worlds, separated by an abyss. When I went from one to the other I felt I was changing countries.
The ones I saw least in all that time were my parents. They had spent several months in the United States — and then, soon after returning home, my father went back. These visits were yet other attempts to find some sort of job or set up a business that would allow him to move there permanently. My mother stayed with my grandparents, where there was barely room for us. My father’s absence greatly distressed her and I suspected that she was afraid that, in a fit of rage, he would disappear, as he had the first time. But he came back, just as the year 1953 was coming to an end, and one day he summoned me to his office.