A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (33 page)

I made good friends among my classmates and convinced a group of them that we should put on a play. We chose a comedy of manners, by Pardo y Aliaga, and even had copies of it made and cast the roles, but in the end the project came to nothing, through my own fault, I believe, since I had already begun to be active in politics, which started to absorb more and more of my time.

Of that whole group of friends, Nelly Alba was a special case. She had studied piano at the Conservatory since she’d been a little girl, and her vocation was music, but she had entered San Marcos to acquire an overall culture. From our first conversations under the palm trees of the courtyard of the Faculty of Letters, my lack of musical culture horrified her, and she took on the task of educating me, taking me to concerts at the Teatro Municipal, in the first row of the balcony, and passed on to me a somewhat hasty smattering of information about interpretative artists and composers. I gave her advice on what literary works she should read, and I remember how much the two of us liked the volumes of Romain Rolland’s
Jean Christophe
, which we bought, a volume or two at a time, in Juan Mejía Baca’s bookstore, on the Calle Azángaro. The kindly, effusive Don Juan gave us the books on credit and let us pay him in monthly installments. To pass by that bookstore once or twice a week, to have a look at what was new, was obligatory. And on days when we were lucky, Mejía Baca invited us to the tavern next door, to have a coffee and a hot meat pie, on him.

But the person I saw most often, every day in fact, inside and outside of classes, was Lea. Shortly after the beginning of the academic year, we had been joined by another student, Félix Arias Schreiber, with whom we were soon to constitute a triumvirate. Félix had entered San Marcos the year before, but had had to break off his studies because of illness, and therefore was in the freshman class with us. He belonged to a family of high social standing—one associated his surname with bankers, diplomats, and lawyers—but to a branch that was poor and perhaps even extremely poor. I don’t know whether his mother was a widow or separated from her husband, but Félix lived alone with her, in one of a group of little townhouses with a common entrance on the Avenida Arequipa, and although he had studied in Santa María, the private high school for rich kids in Lima, he never had a cent and it was plain to see, from the way he acted and dressed, that he was having a hard time making ends meet. Félix’s political vocation was much stronger—in his case excluding every other interest—than Lea’s or mine. He already knew a bit about Marxism, he had a few books and pamphlets which he lent to us, and which I read in a state of bedazzlement at the forbidden nature of such fruits, which I had to carry around with paper covers concealing them so they would not be detected by the stool pigeons that Esparza Zañartu had infiltrated into San Marcos to flush out what
La Prensa
called “subversive elements” and “agitators.” (All the daily papers of the period backed the dictatorship and, it goes without saying, were anti-Communist, but Pedro Beltrán’s
La Prensa
was more so than all the others put together.) Once Félix joined us, other subjects were relegated to a secondary place and it was politics—or rather, socialism and revolution—that our conversations centered on. We chatted together in the patios of San Marcos—still located in the old mansion of the Parque Universitario, right in downtown Lima—or in little coffeehouses on La Colmena or Azángaro, and Lea sometimes took us to have coffee or a Coca-Cola on the downstairs floor of the Negro-Negro, in the arcades of the Plaza San Martín. By contrast to my earlier visits to the place, during my bohemian days on
La Crónica
, I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol now and we talked about very serious things: the abuses committed by the dictatorship, the great ethical, political, economic, scientific, and cultural changes that were taking place in the U.S.S.R. (“in that country / where there exist / neither whores, thieves, nor priests,” Paul Éluard’s poem said), or in the China of Mao Tsetung that the French writer Claude Roy had visited and about which he had written so many marvelous things, in
Clefs pour la Chine (Into China)
, a book whose every word we believed implicitly.

Our conversations went on till late at night. Often we walked back from downtown to Lea’s house, on Petit Thouars, and then Félix and I went on to his house on the Avenida Arequipa, almost as far out as Angamos, and I then went on alone to the Calle Porta. The walk from the Plaza San Martín to my house took an hour and a half. Granny left me my dinner on the table and it didn’t matter to me that it was cold (it was always the same, the only dish I could finish in those days: rice with breaded beef cutlets and fried potatoes). And if food didn’t matter much to me (“For the poet, food is prose,” my grandfather teased me), I didn’t need much sleep either, for, even though I climbed into bed late at night, I read for hours before going to sleep. I indulged in friendship with my usual passionate enthusiasm and exclusivism, and Félix and Lea became a full-time occupation; when I wasn’t with them, I was thinking how good it was to have friends like them, three of us who got along together so well and were planning a shared future. I also thought, although I was careful to keep it to myself, that I shouldn’t fall in love with Lea, because it would be fatal for the trio we formed. What was more, wasn’t the whole business of falling in love a typical bourgeois weakness, inconceivable in a revolutionary?

Around that time, we had made the longed-for contact. In one of the courtyards of San Marcos, someone had approached us, found out who we were, and, in a seemingly offhand way, asked what we thought of the students who were in jail, or questioned us about cultural subjects that, unfortunately, were not taught at the university—dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and scientific socialism, for example—subjects that anyone with an eye to the future ought to know about, as a matter of general information. And the second or third time, returning to the same subject, he had casually introduced into the discussion the question of whether it wouldn’t interest us to form a study group, to investigate those problems that censorship, the fear of the dictatorship, or the fact that San Marcos was a bourgeois university kept from reaching it. Lea, Félix, and I said we’d be delighted. A month hadn’t yet gone by since we entered the university and already we were in a study group, the first step that should be followed by militants of Cahuide, the name under which the Communist Party was trying to regroup in secret after repression and desertions and internal divisions had caused it nearly to disappear in previous years.

Our first instructor in that circle was Héctor Béjar, who in the 1970s was to be the head of a guerrilla group, the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional: National Liberation Army), and spend several years in jail for that reason. He was a tall, likable lad, with a face as round as a wheel of cheese, with a voice that had a very fine timbre, which allowed him to earn his living as an announcer at Radio Central. He was a little older than we were—he was already in law school—and studying Marxism with him proved to be enjoyable, for he was intelligent and adept at conducting the circle’s discussions. The first book we studied was Georges Politzer’s
Beginning Lessons in Philosophy
, and then Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
and
The Class Struggle in France
, and after that Engels’s
Anti-Dühring
and Lenin’s
What Is to Be Done?
We bought the books—and sometimes received in return, as a bonus, a back number of
Cultura Soviética
, on whose covers there were always smiling peasant lasses with robust cheeks, against a background of wheat fields and tractors—in a little bookstore on the Calle Pando, whose owner, a mustachioed Chilean always bundled up in a little scarf, kept a great deal of subversive literature hidden in a trunk in the back room of his shop. Later on, when I read Conrad’s novels, full of shady conspirators, the mysterious, ashen face of that bookseller who purveyed clandestine books always came back to my mind.

We met in places that kept changing. In a miserable little room, at the back of an old building on the Avenida Abancay, where one of our comrades lived, or in a little house on Bajo el Puente, the home of a very pale girl whom we baptized the Bird, where one day we had a sudden scare, for in the middle of our discussion, a soldier showed up. He was the Bird’s brother and wasn’t surprised at seeing us; but we didn’t go back there. Or in the rooming house in Barrios Altos, whose woman owner, a discreet sympathizer, lent us a room full of spider webs, at the far end of a garden. I belonged to at least four circles and the following year became the instructor and organizer of one of them, and I have forgotten the faces and the names of the comrades who taught me in them, of those who were taught along with me, and those whom I taught. But I remember very well those of the first circle, with the majority of whom we eventually formed a cell, when we began to take militant action in Cahuide. Besides Félix and Lea, there was a skinny young man with a voice as thin as a thread, in whom everything was small-sized: the knot in his tie, his tiny polite gestures, the little steps he took to get around in the world. His name was Podestá and he was the one who was nominally in charge of our cell. Martínez, on the other hand, a student studying for a degree in anthropology, was as hale and hearty as they come: he was an Indian, strong and warm, a dogged worker whose reports in the group were always interminable. His coppery, stony face never changed expression, and not even the most heated debates ever disturbed that impassivity. Antonio Muñoz, a highlander from Junín, on the other hand, had a sense of humor and allowed himself to break the mood of deadly seriousness of our meetings by making jokes now and again (I was to meet him once more, during the election campaign of 1989 and 1990, organizing committees of Libertad for the provinces of Junín). And there was also the Bird, that mysterious girl who made Félix, Lea, and me wonder at times whether she knew what the circle was all about, if she realized that she could be put in prison, that she was already a subversive militant. With her resplendent pallor and her delicate manners, the Bird dutifully did all the required reading and made reports, but she did not appear to absorb very much; one day she abruptly bade the circle goodbye, saying that she was going to be late for Mass…

After we’d been in the circle for a few weeks, Héctor Béjar decided that Lea, Félix, and I were ripe for a major commitment. Would we agree to an interview with a higher-up in the Party? We arranged to meet at nightfall, on the Avenida Pardo in Miraflores, and there was Washington Durán Abarca—at the time I was introduced to him only by his pseudonym—who surprised us by saying that the best way to dupe informers was to meet in bourgeois neighborhoods and out-of-doors. Sitting on a bench, under the ficus trees along the same promenade where I had tried without success to get the beautiful Flora Flores and other daughters of the bourgeoisie to fall for me, Washington gave us a synoptic picture of the history of the Communist Party, from its foundation in Peru by José Carlos Mariátegui, in 1928, up to our own day, when, under the name of Cahuide, it was being reborn from its ruins. After this historic beginning, under the inspiration of Mariátegui—whose
Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana
we also studied in the group—the Party had fallen into the hands of Eudocio Ravines, who, after having been its secretary general and acting as an envoy of the Comintern in Chile, Argentina, and Spain during the Spanish Civil War, had become a turncoat, assuming the role of Peru’s great anti-Communist and an ally of
La Prensa
and Pedro Beltrán. And, later on, the dictatorships and the severe repression had kept the Party outside the law and in hiding, surviving underground in more and more difficult conditions, with the brief exception of the three years of Bustamante y Rivero’s administration, in which it was able to surface and act in plain sight. But then “liquidating and antiworker” currents had undermined the organization, separating it from the masses and leading it to make deals with the bourgeoisie: one former leader of the Party, Juan P. Luna, for example, had sold out to Odría and was now one of the senators of the fraudulent Congress of the military regime. The real leaders of the Party such as Jorge del Prado were in exile or in prison (as was the case with Raúl Acosta, the last secretary general).

Despite all this, the Party was still active behind the scenes and in the past year had played a decisive role in the strike at San Marcos. Many comrades who participated in it were in exile or in the penitentiary. Cahuide had been formed by combining the surviving cells, until a congress could be convoked. It consisted of a student section and a workers’ section, and for reasons of security each cell knew only one responsible militant from the level immediately above. In no document or conversation were Party members’ real names to be used, only pseudonyms. One could enter Cahuide as a sympathizer or as a militant.

Félix and I said that we wanted to be sympathizers, but Lea asked for full membership immediately. The oath administered to her by Washington Durán, in the murmur of an altar boy, was a solemn one—“Do you swear to fight for the working class, for the Party…?”—and it impressed us. Then we had to choose our pseudonyms. Mine was Comrade Alberto.

Although we continued in the study circle, whose members and instructor changed every so often, the three of us began to work, at the same time, in a cell of the student section, which Podestá, Martínez and Muñoz also joined. The circumstances limited our militancy to handing out leaflets or selling, on the sly, a little clandestine periodical called
Cahuide
, for which several times I was called upon to write about international subjects from the “proletarian” and “dialectical” point of view. It cost fifty centavos and in it the two bêtes noires of the Party, the APRA and the Trotskyites, were attacked almost as severely as Odría’s dictatorship.