Javier Silva and I attended all the political gatherings at the Teatro Segura voicing opposition to Odría, meetings that the dictator gone soft now permitted: the one sponsored by the National Coalition, with Pedro Roselló as the main speaker, the one of the Socialist Party, with Luciano Castillo, and the one of the Christian Democrats, which was by far the best of all of them, by virtue of the quality of its backers and of its speakers. In a burst of enthusiasm, Javier and I signed the initial manifesto of the group, published in La Prensa.
And both of us were also present, of course, at the Córpac airport to receive Bustamante y Rivero, when he was able to return to Peru after seven years in exile. My friend Luis Loayza tells an anecdote about that arrival that I am not certain is true, but could well have been. A group of young people had organized to protect Bustamante when he got off the plane and escort him to the Hotel Bolívar, foreseeing that he might be attacked by thugs hired by the government or by Aprista “buffaloes” (who, with the liberalization of the dictatorship, had reappeared, launching attacks on Communist meetings). They had given us instructions to stand with our arms linked together, forming an unbreakable ring. But according to Loayza, who apparently was also part of that sui generis phalanx of bodyguards made up of two aspiring writers and a handful of good kids from Catholic Action, the moment Bustamante y Rivero appeared on the steps of the plane with his inevitable hat edged in ribbon — which he ceremoniously doffed to greet those who had come to welcome him — I broke the iron circle and ran to meet him, shouting feverishly: “Mr. President! Mr. President!” In short, the circle was broken, we were overrun, and Bustamante was pawed, pushed, and shoved by everyone — among them by my Uncle Lucho, a Bustamante fan whose suit coat and shirt were torn in the struggles of this encounter — before he reached the car that drove him to the Hotel Bolívar. Bustamante spoke, briefly, from one of the balconies of the hotel to express his gratitude for his reception, without giving the slightest hint of any intention of becoming active in politics again. And, in fact, in the months that followed, Bustamante was to refuse to enroll in the Christian Democratic Party or play any role whatsoever in active politics. Beginning at that time, he adopted the role that he kept up till his death: a wise patrician, above partisan squabbles, whose competence in international juridical questions would be frequently sought in the country and abroad (he was eventually named president of the International Court of Justice at The Hague), and who, in moments of crisis, was in the habit of sending a message to the country exhorting it to remain calm.
Although the climate in 1954 and 1955 was an improvement over the dense and oppressive atmosphere of preceding years, and the first public demonstrations tolerated, plus the new publications, created in the country a feeling of freedom in the air that stimulated political action, I nonetheless devoted quite a bit more time to intellectual work than to politics: attending classes at San Marcos, almost all of them in the morning, as well as those at the Alliance Française, and reading and writing nothing but short stories from that time on.
I believe that the bad time I had had with “La parda” in Jorge Puccinelli’s coterie had the effect of unconsciously keeping me away from dealing with timeless cosmopolitan subjects, on which most of the stories that I wrote in those years had been based, and attracting me toward other, more realistic, ones, in which I deliberately made use of my own memories. Around that time there was a short story contest announced by the Faculty of Letters of San Marcos, to which I submitted two stories, both of them set in Piura, one of which, “Los jefes,” was inspired by the abortive strike at the Colegio San Miguel, and the other, “La casa verde,” by the brothel on the outskirts of the city, the warm haven of my adolescence. My stories didn’t even receive honorable mention, and when I took the manuscript back, “La casa verde” struck me as a very bad piece of writing and I tore it up (I would return to the subject years later, in a novel), but the one of “Los jefes,” with its bare hint of an epic air about it, in which my readings of Malraux and Hemingway were obvious, struck me as being recoverable, and in the months that followed I wrote it over several times, until it seemed to me to be worth publishing. It was very long for Dominical, the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, whose first page always had a story with a color illustration, so I proposed it instead to the historian César Pacheco Vélez, the editor-in-chief of Mercurio Peruano. He accepted it, published it (in February 1957), and made me fifty tear-sheet copies that I distributed among my friends. It was my first story to see print and was to furnish the title for my first book. That short story prefigures much of my later practice as a novelist: using a personal experience as a point of departure for the imaginary; employing a form that pretends to be realistic by virtue of its precise geographical and urban details; an objectivity arrived at through dialogues and descriptions observed from an impersonal point of view, effacing the author’s tracks; and finally, a politically committed, critical attitude toward a certain set of problems that is the context or horizon of the story line.
In those years, an election was called for the rectorate of San Marcos. I don’t remember who launched Porras Barrenechea’s candidacy; he accepted with great hopes, and perhaps with a touch of self-congratulation — in those days being rector of San Marcos still meant something — but above all out of his enormous affection for his alma mater, to which he had devoted so many years and so much passionate enthusiasm. That candidacy was to be fatal for him and for his history of Peru. From the beginning, circumstances turned it into an antigovernment candidacy. His rival, Aurelio Miró Quesada, one of the owners of El Comercio, regarded as one of the symbols of the aristocracy, the oligarchy, and opposition to the APRA (the Miró Quesada family had never forgiven the APRA for having murdered the former editor-in-chief of El Comercio, Don Antonio Miró Quesada, and his wife), assumed the character of an official candidacy. Student organizations, controlled by the APRA and the left, backed Porras, as did the Aprista professors (many of whom, such as Sánchez, were still in exile). Porras and Aurelio Miró Quesada, who up until then had had cordial relations, had a falling out, in a vitriolic polemic in the form of open letters and editorials, and El Comercio (whose building was stoned by demonstrators from San Marcos who came out in force to run through the downtown streets shouting in chorus the slogans “Freedom” and “Porras for rector”) banished the name of Porras Barrenechea from its pages for some time (the famous “civil death” to which El Comercio condemned its adversaries was more feared, it was said, by those who belonged to Lima society than was political persecution).