Needless to say, those of us who worked with him and all his disciples engaged in brave efforts to ensure that Porras Barrenechea was elected. We divided up between us the professors who had the right to vote and the members of the University Council, and it fell to my lot and Pablo Macera’s to visit those from Sciences, Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine at their homes. Except for just one of them, they all promised us their vote. When, on the eve of the election, in the dining room of the house on the Calle Colina, we totted up the probable results, Porras had two-thirds of the votes. But in the University Council, when the time came for the secret ballot, Aurelio Miró Quesada won handily.
In his speech in the courtyard of the Faculty of Law, after the election, standing before a crowd of students who tried to make up for his losing with their cheers and applause, Porras was indiscreet enough to say that, even though he had lost, he was happy to know that some of the most eminent professors of San Marcos had voted for him and mentioned by name some of those who had assured us of their vote. A number of them immediately sent letters to El Comercio denying that they had voted for him.
His victory did not offer Aurelio Miró Quesada any satisfaction whatsoever. The fierce — and very unjust — political hostility of the students toward him after his election, turning him into little less than the symbol of the dictatorial regime, something he never was, resulted in his almost never being able to set foot in the most important locales of San Marcos and forced him to attend to matters concerning the rectorate from an office on the periphery, the object of permanent harassment and the enmity of university cloisters where, thanks to the regime’s increasing powerlessness, the heretofore clandestine forces of the APRA and the left were regaining the initiative and would soon be ready to take over the university. Shortly thereafter, this climate would lead the refined and elegant essayist that Aurelio Miró Quesada is to give up the rectorate and leave San Marcos.
Porras’s defeat deeply affected him. I have the impression that the rectorate was the post he coveted the most — more than any political distinction — because of his close and long-standing relationship with the university, and not having attained it left in him a frustration and a bitterness that induced him, in the 1956 elections, to agree to be a candidate for a senatorial seat on a list of the Democratic Front (a creation of the Aprista party) and, during Prado’s administration, to accept the post of minister of foreign relations, which he would occupy until a few days before his death, in 1960. It is true that he was a first-rate senator and minister, but that immersion in a political absorbent cut short his intellectual activities and kept him from writing that history of the Conquest which, when I began to work with him, he appeared to be determined to finish once and for all. He was occupied with it when the campaign for the rectorate intervened. I remember that, after keeping me busy making note cards on myths and legends for several months, Porras had me type out, in a single manuscript, all of his published monographs and articles and his unpublished chapters on Pizarro as well, to which he gradually added notes, corrected pages, and added more.
The fact that his candidacy for the rectorate of San Marcos had been supported by the APRA and the left — a curious paradox since Porras had never been an Aprista or a socialist, but rather a liberal inclined to be a conservative*—earned him the revenge of the regime, in whose publications he began to be attacked, at times in the basest of terms. A weekly that backed Odría, Clarín, brought out several articles against him, full of abominations. It occurred to me to write a manifesto of solidarity with him as a person and to collect signatures among intellectuals, professors, and students. We secured several hundred signatures, but there was nowhere to publish the manifesto, so we had to content ourselves with presenting it to Porras.
Thanks to this manifesto I met someone who was to be one of my best friends in those years and help me a great deal in my first efforts as a professional writer. We had given printed copies of the manifesto to various people to circulate and gather signatures for, and I was informed that a student at the Catholic University wanted to lend a helping hand. His name was Luis Loayza. I gave him one of the copies and a few days later we met in the Crem Rica on the Avenida Larco so that he could hand the signatures over to me. He had secured only one: his own. He was tall, seemingly absent-minded and aloof, two or three years older than I was, and although he was studying law, the only thing he cared about was literature. He had read everything and spoke of authors that I hadn’t even known existed — men like Borges, whom he frequently quoted, and the Mexican writers Juan Rulfo and Juan José Arreola — and when I revealed my enthusiasm for Sartre and politically committed literature, his reaction was a crocodile-sized yawn.
We saw each other again soon thereafter, in his house on the Avenida Petit Thouars, where he read me some prose works that he was to publish, sometime later, in a private edition—El avaro (The Miser), which came out in Lima in 1955—and where we had long, uninterrupted conversations in his library crammed full of books. Loayza, along with Abelardo Oquendo, with whom I didn’t make friends until later, were to become my best pals of those years, and intellectually the most kindred spirits. We exchanged and discussed books and plans for our literary endeavors, and eventually constituted a warm and stimulating confraternity. Apart from our passion for literature, Lucho and I had great differences concerning many things, and for that reason we never got bored, for we always had something to have a heated argument about. Unlike me, always interested in politics and capable of becoming impassioned about almost any aspect of it and devoting myself entirely to it without thinking about it twice, politics bored Loayza stiff, and in general this and every other enthusiasm — except one for a good book — merited his subtle and sarcastic skepticism. He was against the dictatorship, of course, but more for aesthetic reasons than for political ones. Every once in a while I dragged him to lightning demonstrations and during one of them, in the Parque Universitario, he lost a shoe: I remember him running alongside me, never losing his composure, before a charge by the mounted Civil Guards, and asking me in a soft voice if doing such things was absolutely indispensable. My admiration for Sartre and his exhortations concerning social commitment sometimes bored him and sometimes irritated him — he preferred Camus, naturally, because he was more of an artist and wrote better prose than Sartre — and he dismissed both Sartre’s ideas and my admiration for them with a sibylline irony that made me howl with indignation. I avenged myself by attacking Borges, whom he idolized, calling him a formalist, an antipurist, and even the chien de garde of the bourgeoisie. Our Sartre-versus-Borges arguments lasted for hours and sometimes made us stop seeing or speaking to each other for several days. It was surely Loayza — or perhaps it was Abelardo: I never found out which — who gave me the nickname they used to pull my leg: the fierce little Sartrean, el sartrecillo valiante.