But it did not take me long — that is to say, only a few years — to realize that, with modern permissiveness, in the open industrial society of our day, eroticism changed sign and content, and became a commercial, manufactured product, as conformist and conventional as it could possibly be, and almost always of a dreadful artistic indigence. The discovery of erotic literature of high quality, which I made unexpectedly on the shelves of the Club Nacional, has had an influence on my work and left its deposit on what I have written. Moreover, the prolix and prolific Restif de la Bretonne helped me to understand an essential characteristic of fiction: that it serves the novelist to re-create the world in his image and likeness, to subtly rearrange it in accordance with his most secret appetites.
The other job that Porras Barrenechea secured for me was a gloomy one: cataloguing the graves of the oldest sections of the colonial cemetery of Lima, the Presbítero Maestro, whose registers had been lost. (The running of the cemetery was the responsibility of the Public Welfare Office of Lima, at that time a private institution, of which Porras was a member of the board of directors.) The advantage of this job was that I could do it very early in the morning or late in the afternoon, on work days or on holidays, and for as many hours or minutes as I liked. The head administrator of the cemetery paid me by the number of dead I catalogued. I managed to make some five hundred soles a month from this minor job. Javier sometimes accompanied me on my scouting trips through the cemetery, with my notebook, my pencils, my ladder, my spatula (to remove the crust of dirt that covered some of the tombstones), and my flashlight in case we were still there after dark. As I counted my dead and totted up the hours I’d worked, the head administrator, a tubby, likable, talkative man, told me anecdotes about the first sessions of each presidential session of Congress, which he had never failed to attend, from the days when he’d been just a youngster.
Before only a couple of days had gone by, I had taken on six jobs (a year and a half later, there would be seven of them, when I began working for Radio Panamericana), multiplying my pay by five. With the three thousand or three thousand five hundred soles a month they brought in, it was now possible for Julia and me to survive, if we found some inexpensive place to live. Luckily, the little apartment that had been promised to Nancy was now empty. I went to see it, was delighted by it, took it, and Esperanza La Rosa, the landlady, waited a week until, with my first pay from the new jobs, I was able to put down the deposit and the first month’s rent. It was in an ocher-colored townhouse, divided up into individual dwellings so tiny that they seemed like doll houses, at the end of the Calle Porta, where the street grew narrower and narrower and finally dwindled to nothing at the foot of a wall that in those days separated it from the Diagonal. Our apartment consisted of two bedrooms and a little kitchen and a bathroom, both of these so tiny that only one person at a time could fit into them and then only by sucking in his or her belly. But despite its diminutive dimensions and its spartan furnishings, there was something utterly charming about it, with its cheerful curtains and the little patio with old furniture and pots of geraniums that each of the apartments looked out upon. Nancy helped me clean the place and decorate it to receive the bride.
After her departure, Julia and I wrote to each other every day and I can still see Granny Carmen handing me the letters with a wicked smile and a joke: “Now who can this little letter be from, who can it be from? Who can be writing so many letters to my little grandson?” Four or five weeks after Julia’s departure for Chile, when I had already secured all those jobs, I phoned my father and asked him for an appointment. I hadn’t seen him since before the wedding, nor had I answered his homicidal letter.
I became very nervous that morning on my way to his office. I was determined, for the first time in my life, to tell him that he could fire his damned revolver once and for all, but, now that I was able to support her, I wasn’t going to go on living apart from my wife. Nonetheless, deep down, I was afraid, once the moment was at hand, that I would again lose my courage and again feel paralyzed in the face of his wrath.
But I found him oddly serene and rational as we spoke together. And because of certain things he said and others he forbore to mention, I have always suspected that that conversation with Dr. Porras — to which neither he nor I made the slightest allusion — had had its effect and helped him to resign himself in the end to a marriage planned without his consent. Very pale, he listened to me without a word as I told him of the jobs I had gotten and what I was going to earn from all of them, then assured him that it would be enough to support myself. And how, moreover, despite those various jobs, some of which I could do at home at night, I could attend classes and take the exams at the university. Finally, swallowing hard, I told him that Julia was married to me and that we couldn’t go on living with her alone, there in Chile, and me here in Lima.
He didn’t voice the slightest reproach. Instead, he spoke to me as though he were a lawyer, using certain legal technicalities on which he had collected detailed information. He had a copy of my declaration to the police, which he showed me, marked in red pencil. I gave myself away by admitting that I had gotten married when I was only nineteen. That was enough to start legal proceedings to annul the marriage. But he wasn’t going to try to do that. Because, even though I had made a stupid mistake, getting married, after all, was a manly thing to do, a virile act.
Then, making a visible effort to employ a conciliatory tone of voice that I didn’t remember his ever having used with me before, he immediately began to advise me not to abandon my studies, not to ruin my career, on account of this marriage. He was sure that I could go a long way, as long as I didn’t do any more crazy things. If he had always acted harshly toward me, it had been for my own good, to straighten out what, through a misguided affection, the Llosas had twisted. But contrary to what I had thought, he loved me, because I was his son, and how could a father help loving his son?