Among the writers of fiction, the most respected, although he had not yet published a book, was Julio Ramón Ribeyro, who lived in Europe. Dominical, the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, and other publications occasionally printed his stories, ones like “Los gallinazos sin plumas” (“The Turkey Buzzards without Feathers”), which everyone commented on with respect. Of those in Peru, the most active was Carlos Zavaleta, who, in addition to publishing his first short stories in those years, had translated Joyce’s Chamber Music, and was a great promoter of Faulkner’s novels. It is to him, no doubt, that I owe my having discovered around this time the author of the saga of Yoknapatawpha County, which, from the first novel of his that I read—The Wild Palms—left me so bedazzled that I still haven’t recovered. He was the first writer whom I studied with paper and pencil in hand, taking notes so as not to get lost in his genealogical labyrinths and shifts of time and points of view, and also trying to unearth the secrets of the baroque construction that each one of his stories was based on, the serpentine language, the fracturing of chronological sequence, the mystery and the profundity and the disturbing ambiguities and psychological subtleties which that form gave to his stories. Although I read a great many American novelists in those years — Erskine Caldwell, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Waldo Frank — it was when I read Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom! Intruder in the Dust, These Thirteen, Knight’s Gambit, and other of Faulkner’s works that I discovered the adaptability and the creativity of the narrative form and the marvels that could be wrought in a work of fiction when used by a novelist with Faulkner’s skill. Along with Sartre, Faulkner was the author I most admired in my years at San Marcos; he made me feel that it was urgent for me to learn English so as to be able to read his books in their original language. Another writer, a somewhat elusive one, who appeared like a will-o’-the-wisp around San Marcos was Vargas Vicuña, whose subtle collection of stories, Nahuín, published in that period, aroused expectations of a body of work from him that, unfortunately, never was forthcoming.
But of all those poets and writers of fiction that I met every day in the courtyard of the Faculty of Letters at San Marcos, the flashiest figure was Alejandro Romualdo. A short little man, with mannerisms reminiscent of Tarzan and the legs of a flamenco dancer, he had been, before going off to Europe with a scholarship from Cultura Hispánica — the bridge to the outside world for penniless Peruvian writers — a sumptuous, musical poet, of the sort called a formalist (by contrast to socially oriented poets), who had written a beautiful book, La torre de los alucinados (The Tower of the Hallucinated), that won the National Poetry Prize. At the same time, he had become famous for his political caricatures — in particular, hybrids of different persons — in Pedro Beltrán’s La Prensa. Romualdo — Xano to his friends — came back from Europe converted to realism, to political commitment, to Marxism, and to revolution. But he had not lost his sense of humor or the wit and cleverness that came pouring out in the form of wordplay and jokes in the courtyard of San Marcos. “I didn’t hear that abstract painting well,” he would say, and also, puffing out his chest: “I believe in dialectical materialism and my wife supports me.” He brought with him the originals of what was to be a magnificent book—Poesía concreta (Concrete Poetry)—politically committed poems animated by a spirit of justice, written with fine craftsmanship and a good ear, wordplay, disconcerting run-on lines, and moral and political defiance, in somewhat the same direction in which Blas de Otero, who had become a good friend of Romualdo’s, had oriented his poetry in Spain. And in a reading that he gave at San Marcos, in which several poets participated, Romualdo was the star, milking his audience — above all with his flamboyant “Canto coral a Túpac Amaru, que es libertad” (“Choral Chant to Túpac Amaru, Who Is Freedom”) of ovations that turned the reception room at San Marcos into the stage for what was practically a political rally.
In all truth, that was what that reading was. It must have taken place at the end of 1954 or the beginning of 1955 and at it all the poets read or recited something that could be interpreted as an attack on the dictatorship. It was one of the first manifestations of a progressive mobilization of the country against that regime which, since October of 1948, had governed with an iron hand, crushing every attempt to criticize it.
San Marcos was the focal point and amplifier of the protests. These often took the form of lightning demonstrations. Not very numerous groups of us — a hundred, two hundred people — would agree to meet in some very crowded place, the Jirón de la Unión, the Plaza San Martín, La Colmena, or the Parque Universitario, and at the hour when there were the most people there, we would gather in the middle of the street and begin to shout in chorus: “Freedom! Freedom!” Sometimes we paraded for one or two blocks, inviting passersby to join us, and then broke up as soon as the mounted Civil Guards or the antiriot vehicles equipped with high-pressure hoses that shot foul-smelling water at us appeared on the scene.
I went to all the lightning demonstrations with Javier Silva, who, with all his fat, had to exert superhuman efforts so as not to be left behind as we ran from the police. His political vocation was becoming more widely known in those days, as well as his unrestrained personality, which made him want to be in on everything and be everywhere at once, playing a major role in all the conspiracies. One afternoon I went with him to visit Luciano Castillo, the head of the minuscule Socialist Party, and a Piuran, like Javier, in his little office on the Jirón Lampa. After a few minutes Javier came out of his office, beaming. He showed me a card: in addition to signing him up as a member of the party, Luciano Castillo had promoted him to the post of secretary general of the Socialist Youth Movement. As such, a while later, on the stage of the Teatro Segura one night, he read a violent revolutionary speech against Odría’s regime (which I wrote for him).