As we were talking together, I could hear Julia and Aunt Olga in the distance, behind the locked bedroom door, and it seemed to me that Olga had raised her voice and was crying.
I went from there to the apartment on the Calle Porta. My grandparents and Auntie Mamaé were a model of discretion. But the confrontation with my mother, who was there, was dramatic, with tears and outcries on her part. She said I’d ruined my life and didn’t believe me when I swore to her that I’d be an attorney and even a diplomat (her great ambition for me). Finally, calming down a little, she told me that my father was beside himself and that I should keep out of his way, since he was capable of killing me. He was carrying his famous revolver in his pocket.
I bathed and dressed as hurriedly as I could to go see Javier, and just as I was leaving the house a summons came for me from the police. My father had had me summoned to police headquarters in Miraflores to declare there whether it was true that I had gotten married, and where and with whom. The policeman in civvies who questioned me made me spell out my answers as he typed them out, with two fingers, on a clattering old hulk of a machine. I told him that, as a matter of fact, I had married Doña Julia Urquidi Illanes, but that I wasn’t going to declare in what mayor’s office because I was afraid my father would try to annul the marriage and I didn’t want to make the task any easier for him. “What he’s going to do is denounce her as a corrupter of minors,” the policeman warned me amiably. “He told me so when he swore out this complaint.”
I left police headquarters in search of Javier and we went to consult an attorney from Piura who was a friend of his. He was very obliging, and didn’t even charge me for the consultation. He told us that altering my birth certificate did not annul the marriage in and of itself, but that it might be a reason to declare it annulled if there was a court trial. If not, in two years, the marriage was automatically “legal.” But my father could formally accuse Julia of corrupting minors, although, in view of my age, nineteen, in all likelihood no judge would take the accusation seriously.
Those were days of yearning bordering on the absurd. I continued to sleep at my grandparents’ and Julia at Aunt Olga’s, and I saw my brand-new wife only for a few hours at a time, when I went to visit her, as before the wedding. Aunt Olga treated me with her usual affection, but one night her face was grim. Through my mother, my father had sent me threatening messages: Julia was to leave the country or be prepared to suffer the consequences.
On the second or third day, I received a letter from him. It was ferocious, the ravings of a madman. He set a date just a few days away for Julia to leave the country on her own initiative. He had spoken with one of the ministers in Odría’s government, who was a friend of his, and the friend had assured him that, if she didn’t leave motu proprio, he would have her expelled as an undesirable. As it went on, the letter became more and more exasperating. He ended up by telling me, amid obscenities, that if I didn’t obey him, he would kill me as if I were a rabid dog. After his signature, as a postscript, he added that I could go to the police to ask for help, but that that would not keep him from pumping five shots into me. And he signed his name a second time as proof of his determination.
I talked over with Julia what we should do. I had plans impossible to carry out, such as leaving the country (using what for a passport? using what for money?) or going to some province too far away for my father’s long arm to reach (living on what? with what sort of job?). Finally, she was the one who proposed the most practical solution. She would leave and go to stay with her parents in Chile. Once my father had calmed down, she would come back. Meanwhile, I could arrange to secure other sources of income and find a boardinghouse or an apartment. Uncle Lucho argued in favor of this strategy. It was the only sensible one, in view of the circumstances. Filled with rage, with sorrow, with a feeling of powerlessness, after a fit of tears I had to resign myself to Julia’s leaving.
In order to pay for her ticket to Antofagasta I sold almost all my clothes and took out a loan, at the pawnshop run by the Municipality of Lima, with my typewriter, my watch, and everything I owned that could be pawned as collateral. On the eve of her departure, feeling sorry for us, Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho discreetly withdrew after dinner, and I was able to be alone with my wife. We made love and wept together and promised to write each other every day. We didn’t sleep all night long. At dawn, Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho and I went with her to the Limatambo airport to see her off. It was one of those typical winter mornings in Lima, with the invisible mist making everything damp and that fog that turns the façades of the houses, the trees, and the silhouettes of people into ghostly apparitions. My heart raged with fury, and I could hardly hold back my tears as, from the terrace, I saw Julia going off toward the gangplank of the plane taking her to Chile. When would I see her again?
Beginning that very day, I entered a period of frantic activity to secure work that would allow me to be independent. I had the research for Porras Barrenechea and the small assignments on the side with Turismo. Thanks to Lucho Loayza — who, on learning the story of my incredible marriage, made an unpleasant remark on how superior those silent and unreal English marriages were to Latin ones, so disorderly and earthy — I got an assignment to write a weekly column in the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, the editor-in-chief of whose literary section was Abelardo Oquendo. An intimate of Loayza’s, Abelardo was to be a close friend of mine too from then on. Abelardo had me write up weekly interviews I had with Peruvian writers, with magnificent sketches by Alejandro Romualdo to illustrate them, for which I was paid some thousand soles a month. And Luis Jaime Cisneros immediately got me another job: writing the volume on Civic Education in a series of textbooks that the Catholic University was preparing for its applicants for admission. Despite my not being a student at Católica, Luis Jaime arranged matters so as to persuade the rector of the university to entrust the writing of that book to me (the first work of mine ever published, although it has never appeared in my bibliography).
Porras Barrenechea for his part immediately secured for me a couple of jobs that were easy and decently paid. My interview with him was rather surprising. I began explaining to him why I had not showed up for two or three days, when he interrupted me: “I know all about it. Your father came to see me.” He paused and elegantly skirted this pitfalclass="underline" “He was very nervous. A quick-tempered man, isn’t that so?” I tried to imagine what the interview would have been like. “I calmed him down with an argument that may have impressed him,” Porras added, with that wicked gleam in his eyes that suddenly appeared when he made sly remarks. “After all, getting married is an act of manhood, Señor Vargas. An affirmation of virility. It’s not all that terrible, then. It would have been much worse if his boy had turned out to be a homosexual or a drug addict, isn’t that true?” He assured me that, on leaving the Calle Colina, my father appeared to have calmed down.
“You did the right thing by not coming to tell what you were planning to do,” Porras said to me. “Because I would have tried to knock a nonsensical idea like that out of your head. But now that it’s a fait accompli, we’ll have to find you more decent sources of income.”
He promptly did so, with the same generosity with which he poured forth his wisdom for his students. The first job was as a library assistant at the Club Nacional, the institution that symbolized the aristocracy and the oligarchy of Peru. The president of the club, a hunter of wild beasts and a collector of gold art objects, Miguel Mujica Gallo, had placed Porras on its directorate as head librarian, and my job consisted of spending a couple of hours every morning in the beautiful rooms of the library, with pieces of English furniture and coffered mahogany ceilings, cataloguing the new acquisitions. But since the library bought few books, I was able to devote those hours to reading, studying, or working on my articles. The fact is that between 1955 and 1958 I read a great deal in those few short hours in the morning, in the elegant solitude of the Club Nacional. The club’s library was a fairly good one — or rather, it had been, since the time came when its budget gave out — and it had a splendid collection of erotic books and magazines, a good part of which I read or at least leafed through. I remember above all the volumes of the series Les Maîtres de l’amour, edited by Apollinaire and often with a foreword by him, thanks to which I became acquainted with Sade, Aretino, Andrea de Nerciat, John Cleland, and, among many others, the picturesque and monothematic Restif de la Bretonne, a freakish writer who laboriously reconstructed the world of his time, in his novels and in his autobiography, from the point of view of his fetishistic obsession for the feminine foot. Those readings were very important, and for a fair time I believed that eroticism was a synonym of rebellion and of freedom in the social and artistic realm, and a marvelous source of creativity. That is what it seems to have been, at least in the eighteenth century, in the works and the attitudes of the libertins (a word which, as Roger Vailland liked to recall, does not mean “pleasure-loving,” but “a man who defies God”).