It was because of Loayza that I read Borges, in the beginning with a certain reluctance — what is purely or excessively intellectual, what seems dissociated from a very direct experience of life, always arouses in me a refusal to let myself become involved in it — but with an amazement and a curiosity that always made me come back to him. Until little by little, down through the months and the years, that distance turned into admiration. And, in addition to Borges, I turned to many other Latin American authors who, before my friendship with Loayza, I knew nothing of, or out of sheer ignorance held in contempt. The list would be a very long one, but among them are Alfonso Reyes, Bioy Casares, Juan José Arreola, Juan Rulfo, and Octavio Paz, a thin volume of whose poetry Loayza discovered one day—Piedra de sol (Sunstone)—which we read aloud and which led us to eagerly seek out other books of his.
My lack of interest in the literature of Latin America — with the sole exception of Pablo Neruda, whom I always read devotedly — had been total before I met Lucho Loayza. Rather than lack of interest, perhaps I should say hostility. This was because the only modern Latin American literature studied at San Marcos or discussed in literary reviews and supplements was of the indigenist or folkloric and regionalist sort, that of novelists like Alcides Arguedas, author of Raza de bronce (Race of Bronze); Jorge Icaza, author of Huasipungo; Eustasio Rivera, author of La vorágine (The Vortex); Rómulo Gallegos, author of Doña Bárbara; Ricardo Güiraldes, author of Don Segundo Sombra; or even Miguel Ángel Asturias.
I had been forced to read that sort of narrative and its Peruvian equivalent in classes at San Marcos, and I detested it, since it appeared to me to be a provincial and demagogic caricature of what a good novel should be. Because in those books the background was more important than the flesh-and-blood characters (in two of them, Don Segundo Sombra and La vorágine, nature finally swallowed up the heroes) and because their authors apparently didn’t know the first thing about how to put a story together, beginning with the ability to stay with the chosen point of view: in them the narrator was always butting in and offering his opinion, even when he was supposedly invisible, and furthermore, their ornate, bookish styles — especially in the dialogue — made stories that presumably took place among rude and primitive people so hard to believe that the illusion of reality never managed to break through the surface of them. All the so-called indigenist literature was a string of clichés about nature and of such great artistic poverty that one had the impression that for the authors writing good novels consisted in looking around for “good” subjects — weird and terrible events — and writing about them in unusual words taken straight out of dictionaries, as far removed as possible from everyday speech.
Lucho Loayza enabled me to discover another Latin American literature, more urbane and cosmopolitan, and more elegant as well, that had sprung up mainly in Mexico and in Argentina. And then, as he did, I began to read Victoria Ocampo’s review, Sur, every month, a window opened out onto the world of culture, whose arrival in Lima seemed to set the pitifully provincial city to shaking with a mighty cascade of ideas, debates, poems, short stories, essays, from every language and every culture, and place those of us who devoured it in the middle of the contemporary culture of the entire planet. What Victoria Ocampo did through her Sur—and along with her, of course, all those who collaborated in this editorial adventure, beginning with José Bianco — is something for which we Hispano-American readers and writers can never be grateful enough, in the lifetimes of at least three generations. (That is what I told Victoria Ocampo when I met her, in 1966, at a Pen Club congress in New York. I always remember the happiness it gave me, many years after the ones that I am here recalling, to see a text of mine published in that review which each month made us experience the illusion of being in the intellectual avant-garde of the time.) In one of the recent or past issues of Sur that Loayza collected, I read the famous debate between Sartre and Camus concerning the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union.
My association with Lucho, which soon became an intimate one, did not depend solely on books or on our shared vocation. It also had to do with his generous friendship and how pleasant it was to spend time with him listening to him talk about jazz, which delighted him, or about films — we never liked the same ones — or compete with him in the great national sport of raje, or watch him compose his prose pieces of a languid, refined aesthete, au-dessus de la mêlée, with which he liked at times to entertain his friends. At a certain period he began having an amusing — but most bothersome — ethical and aesthetic reaction: everything that struck him as ugly or earned his scorn made him sick to his stomach. It was a real risk to go with him to an exhibit, a lecture, a recital, a movie, or simply to stop in the middle of the street to exchange a few words with someone, for if the person or the performance didn’t meet his standards, he would begin retching right there on the spot.
Lucho had become acquainted with those Latin American authors thanks to a professor from the Catholic University, who had arrived not long before from Argentina: Luis Jaime Cisneros. He also taught a course in Spanish literature at San Marcos that I was enrolled in, but I became friends with him only later on, thanks to Loayza and Oquendo. Luis Jaime Cisneros also had a passion for teaching, and engaged in it outside the classroom, in a corner of his library — in a townhouse in Miraflores, on a street that crossed the Avenida Pardo — where he met with students who had a special liking for philology (his specialty) and literature, to whom he lent books (jotting the names of them down, with the date and the title, in a huge account book). Luis Jaime was thin, refined, polite, but he affected a slightly pedantic and bullying attitude toward his colleagues which earned him bitter enemies at the university. I myself had a mistaken impression of him until I began to visit him and form part of the little circle which was the recipient of Luis Jaime’s culture and friendship.
Luis Jaime had signed the first manifesto of the Christian Democrats, and the latter, who were taking the first steps to form a party, had asked him to be the editor of the periodical of the group. He asked me if I would like to give him a hand and I told him I’d be delighted to. And thus there came into being Democracia, in theory a weekly, but which came out only when we had scared up enough money for the issue, sometimes twice a month and sometimes monthly. For the first issue I wrote a long article on Bustamante y Rivero and the coup that overthrew him. We got the review together in Luis Jaime’s library, and had it printed in different shops each time, for they were all afraid that Esparza Zañartu — whom Odría had promoted to the post of minister of the interior, a political error that was providential for the reestablishment of democracy in Peru — would take reprisals against the printers. Since Luis Jaime, in order not to compromise his work at the university, did not want to appear as editor-in-chief on the masthead, I offered to let my name be used instead, and that was how Democracia appeared. On the first page there was an article, an unsigned one, as I remember, by Luis Bedoya Reyes, criticizing “Pradism,” which was reorganizing in order to launch a second candidacy for the presidency by Manuel Prado, a former holder of that office.