Porras also succumbed at times to Macera’s intellectual spell, and listened to him, amused by his verbal fireworks, but he very soon reacted and became furious at Macera’s inner chaos, his snobbery and the complacency with which he gloried in his own neuroses, which Pablo cultivated the way others care for kittens or water their garden. During those years, Porras convinced Macera that he should enter a contest that International Petroleum was sponsoring for the best essay on history, and kept Pedro locked up in his library for several weeks until he finished the work. This book, which won the prize—Tres etapas en el desarrollo de la conciencia nacional (Three Stages in the Development of the National Consciousness)—was later to be disavowed by Macera himself, who has eliminated it from his bibliography and mentions it only to rail against it.
Although he later subjected himself to discipline and worked in a more or less orderly way at San Marcos, where, I believe, he is still teaching, and has published many works on travelers, historiography, and economic history, Macera still has not written that great comprehensive work that his teacher Porras was waiting for from him, and for which that intelligence with which he was endowed had, so to speak, predestined him. What Macera said — in the introduction to his conversaciones with Jorge Basadre — about Valcárcel, Porras, and Jorge Guillermo Leguía, now fits him like a ring on his own finger: “They have not completed their work and have done less than what their greatness asked of them.”* Like Porras himself, his intellectual life appears to have been broken up into fragmentary efforts. Moreover, although it is many years since I have seen him or talked to him, judging by those interviews in which he allows himself to be exploited by a certain sort of publication, copies of which sometimes reach me, the old habit of the ukase and of tremendous absurdities has not disappeared with the passage of the years, although how moth-eaten and rusty it all sounds nowadays, what with everything that has happened in the world and, above all, in Peru.
In those years, in which we were quite close friends, it delighted me to get his goat and argue with him. Not so as to win the argument — a difficult task — but to enjoy his dialectical method, his feints and his traps, and the lighthearted nonchalance with which he could change his mind and refute himself with arguments as forceful as those that he had just used to defend precisely the opposite proposition.
My work at Porras’s, and what I continually learned there, turned out to be a great incentive. In those years of 1954 and 1955 I threw myself into writing and reading, morning and night, more convinced than ever that my true vocation was literature. My mind was made up: I would devote my life to writing and to teaching. My university career was the ideal complement to my vocation, since there was a great deal of time free between classes at San Marcos.
I had stopped writing poems and plays, because I now felt more fascinated by fiction. I did not dare to embark on a novel, but I trained myself by writing short stories, of all lengths and on all possible subjects, almost always ending up by tearing them to bits.
Carlos Araníbar, whom I told that I was writing short stories, proposed to me one day that I read one of them in a group headed by Jorge Puccinelli, a professor of literature and the editor of a review that, although it came out late, came out erratically, or never came out at all, contained writing of quality and was one of the outlets that young writers counted on: Letras Peruanas. Dreaming of the prospect of passing this test, I searched through my texts, chose the short story that seemed to me to be the best one — it was called “La parda” (“The Woman with Dusky Skin”), and dealt with a vaguely described woman who wandered from one café to another telling stories about her life. I corrected it and on the appointed night presented myself where the literary circle was meeting that time: El Patio, a café frequented by bullfight fans, artists, and bohemians, in the little square in front of the Teatro Segura. The experience of that first reading in public of a text of mine was a disaster. There were at least a dozen people there, sitting around the large table on the second floor of El Patio, among whom I remember, besides Puccinelli and Araníbar, Julio Macera, Pablo’s brother, Carlos Zavaleta, the poet and critic Alberto Escobar, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and perhaps Abelardo Oquendo, who was to become a close friend of mine a couple of years later. A bit intimidated, I read my story. An ominous silence followed the reading. No comments, no sign of approval or of disapprovaclass="underline" nothing but a depressing silence. After an interminable pause, various conversations started up again, on other subjects, as though nothing had happened. Much later in the evening, talking about something else, in order to emphasize his argument in favor of fiction that was realistic and national, Alberto referred disdainfully to what he called “abstract literature” and pointed to my story, which was still lying there in the middle of the table. When the gathering broke up and we’d all said goodbye to each other, once we were down on the street, Araníbar made amends by offering a few comments on my mistreated story. But once I arrived home, I tore it up and swore to myself never to go through an experience like that again.
The literary world in Lima in those days was rather mediocre, but I watched it enviously and tried to edge my way into it. There were two playwrights, Juan Ríos and Sebastián Salazar Bondy. The former lived the life of a recluse in his house in Miraflores, but the latter was often seen wandering about the courtyards of San Marcos, trailing after a good-looking classmate of mine, Rosita Zevallos, for whom he sometimes waited as classes let out, holding a romantic red rose in his hand. That courtyard of the Faculty of Letters at San Marcos was the general headquarters for the country’s potential and virtual poets and writers of fiction. The majority of them had published at most one or two very slender volumes of poems and hence Alejandro Romualdo, who in those days had returned to Peru after a long stay in Europe, would make fun of them and say: “¿Poetas? ¡No! ¡Plaquetas!” (“Poets? No! Pamphleteers!”). The most mysterious of them was Washington Delgado, whose stubborn silence some interpreted as a sign of buried genius. “When that mouth opens — they said — Peruvian poetry will be filled with memorable arpeggios and trills.” (The fact is that, when the mouth opened, years later, Peruvian poetry was filled with imitations of Bertolt Brecht.) Pablo Guevara, an intuitive poet, had just come out with a collection of verse entitled Retorno de la creatura (Return of the Human Being), whose exuberant poetry didn’t seem to have anything to do with him, nor he to have anything to do with books — which, a little later on, he would abandon to devote himself to filmmaking. And poets in exile began to come back to Peru, a number of whom — Manuel Scorza, Gustavo Valcárcel, Juan Gonzalo Rose — had quit the APRA and turned into militant Communists (Valcárcel, for instance) or fellow travelers. The most sensational abandonment of the APRA was Scorza’s, who from Mexico addressed a public letter to the leader of the Aprista party, accusing him of having sold out to imperialism—“Goodbye, Mr. Haya”—which circulated all over San Marcos.