A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (38 page)

During Alan García’s term in office the contacts had continued, in a more worrisome way. There was a strange purchase by the Ministry of the Interior of North Korean submachine guns and rifles to update the weaponry of the police and the Civil Guard. Nonetheless, only a part of that weaponry in fact reached those forces, and there were many reports concerning the final destination of the remainder—ten thousand firearms, apparently. It was another affair about which the government had never offered a convincing explanation. The alarm about the weapons imported from North Korea came not only from the press, but from the armed forces as well. The officers of the navy and the army with whom I talked in unbelievable meetings—in which it was necessary to change vehicles and places several times—had all referred to this subject. What had happened to those rifles? According to the most alarmist among them, they had ended up in the hands of the shock forces of the Aprista party and their paramilitary commando units, while according to others, they had been resold to drug traffickers, terrorists, or on the international market, to the profit of the few high-ranking officers and civilian bureaucrats closest to the president.

What benefit could bring Peru to legitimize a terrorist regime, which had trained and financed groups of Peruvian guerrilla fighters from the MIR and the FLN in the 1960s, and which was not in a position to be a market for our products nor a source of investment? The drawbacks, on the other hand, were going to be enormous, beginning with the obstacle that this would present for our obtaining credits and investments from the government of South Korea—which by contrast had abundant financial resources.

In accordance with the Front’s committee on foreign policy, which was headed by a retired ambassador, Arturo García, and which (discreetly) advised various civil servants who were active in the administration, I announced, on November 29, that once installed, my government would put an end to all relations with Kim Il Sung’s regime. Several members of the consultative commission of the Ministry of Foreign Relations resigned from it in protest against Alan García’s decision to recognize North Korea.

I worked with Raúl Porras Barrenechea from February 1954 until a few days before I left for Europe, in 1958. The three hours a day I spent there, in those four years and a half, from Monday to Friday, between two and five in the afternoon, taught me more about Peru and contributed more to my education than the classes at San Marcos.

Porras Barrenechea was a master in the old style, who liked being surrounded by disciples, from whom he demanded complete loyalty. An elderly bachelor, he had lived in that old house with his mother until she died the year before, and he now shared it with an aged black servant who had perhaps been his nursemaid. She addressed him with the familiar
tú
and scolded him like a little boy, prepared the delicious cups of chocolate with which the historian received the intellectual luminaries who came by on a pilgrimage to the Calle Colina. Of those, I remember as the most delightful conversationalists the Spaniard Don Pedro Laín Entralgo; the Venezuelan Maríano Picón-Salas, a historian, essayist, and sharp-witted humorist; the Mexican Alfonso Junco, whose timidity disappeared when the conversation turned to the two subjects that impassioned him, Spain and the faith, for he was a militant crusader for Hispanism and Catholicism; and our compatriots the poet José Gálvez, who spoke a very pure Spanish and had a mania for genealogy, and Víctor Andrés Belaunde—in those days Peru’s ambassador to the United Nations—who often passed through Lima, and who, on one occasion I am thinking of, talked all night and didn’t allow either Porras or any of the guests at the gathering over chocolate given in his honor to get a word in edgewise.

Víctor Andrés Belaunde (1883–1966), who belonged to the generation before Porras’s, a philosopher and a Catholic essayist as well as a diplomat, had a celebrated controversy with José Carlos Mariátegui, whose theories on Peruvian society he refuted in his
La realidad nacional
,
^*
in which he defended a Christian corporatism that was as artificial and unreal as the schematic—although a most novel approach for the time and widely influential—Marxist interpretation of Mariátegui’s
Siete ensayos
. Porras esteemed Belaunde, although he did not share his ultramontane Catholicism, or that of José de la Riva Agüero (1885–1944), or the latter’s crepuscular enthusiasms for fascism, although he did appreciate his erudite and all-inclusive vision of the Peruvian past, which Riva Agüero interpreted as a synthesis of the indigenous and the Spanish. Porras professed an admiration without reservation for Riva Agüero, whom he regarded as his master and with whom he had in common meticulousness, exactitude regarding facts and quotations, a love of Spain and of history understood in Michelet’s romantic fashion, a certain ironic disdain for the new intellectual currents which held the individual and the anecdotal in contempt—anthropology and ethnohistory, for instance; while at the same time he stood apart from him by virtue of a much more flexible turn of mind with regard to religion and politics.

Diplomacy, to which Porras Barrenechea had devoted part of his life, had taken up a great deal of his time and energy, keeping him from crowning his career with what everyone expected of him, that masterwork on the history of the Discovery and the Conquest of Peru—or the biography of Pizarro—subjects on which he had been preparing to write the definitive work since his early years and on which he had managed to acquire so much information that it resembled omniscience. Up until then, Porras’s wisdom had taken the form of a series of learned monographs on chroniclers, travelers, or ideologists and defenders of emancipation, as well as of beautiful anthologies on Lima and Cuzco or of essays, that were to appear over those years, on Ricardo Palma, Riva Agüero’s
Paisajes peruanos (Peruvian Landscapes)
, or his textbook on
Fuentes históricas peruanas
.
^†
But those of us who admired him, and he himself, knew that these were mere crumbs of the great overall work on that watershed era of Peruvian history, that of its establishing close relations with Europe and the West, which he knew more about than anyone else. A fellow scholar of his generation, Jorge Basadre, had fulfilled an equivalent undertaking in his monumental
Historia de la República
, which Porras had annotated from beginning to end and on which he had passed judgment, an opinion at once respectful and severely critical, in his microscopic handwriting, at the end of the last volume. Another fellow scholar of his generation, Luis Alberto Sánchez, exiled at the time in Chile, had also crowned his career with a voluminous history of Peruvian literature, under the title
Literatura peruana
. Although he had certain reservations and differences of opinion with Basadre, Porras had intellectual respect for him; for Sánchez, a disdainful commiseration.

Unlike Basadre or Porras, that third musketeer of the celebrated generation of 1919, Luis Alberto Sánchez (the fourth, Jorge Guillermo Leguía, died very young, leaving only the bare outline of an
oeuvre
), who, as the leader of the APRA, had lived for many years in exile, was the most international and the most fecund of the trio, but also the most devil-may-care and the least rigorous when it came time to publish. That he should write entire books in one go, trusting in his memory alone (even if it was the impressive memory of Luis Alberto Sánchez), without verifying the data, citing books he hadn’t read, making mistakes as to dates, titles, names, as frequently occurred in the flood of his publications, made Porras furious. Sánchez’s inaccuracies and carelessness—even more than his ill-will and his retaliations against his political adversaries and his personal enemies that can be found in abundance in his books—exasperated Porras for a reason that from a distance I think I now understand better, a loftier reason than what, at the time, appeared to me to be a mere rivalry between scholars of the same generation. Because those liberties that Sánchez took in the practice of his profession took for granted the underdevelopment of his readers, the inability of his audience to identify them and condemn them. And Porras—like Basadre and Jorge Guillermo Leguía and, before them, Riva Agüero—even though he wrote and published little, always did so as though the country to which he belonged were the most cultivated and best-informed one in the world, demanding of himself an extreme rigor and perfection, as would be only proper for a historian whose research is going to be subjected to the examination of the most responsible scholars.

Those years also brought the polemic between Luis Alberto Sánchez and the Chilean critic Ricardo A. Latcham, who, reviewing the former’s essay on the novel in Latin America
—Proceso y contenido de la novela hispanoamericana (History and Content of the Hispano-American Novel)—
pointed out a number of errors and omissions in the book. Sánchez answered with lively rejoinders and jokes. Latcham thereupon overwhelmed his adversary with an inexhaustible list of inaccuracies—dozens and dozens of them—which I remember seeing Porras read, in a Chilean publication, murmuring half to himself: “How shameful, how shameful.”

Since Sánchez survived Leguía, Porras, and Basadre by many years, his version of the generation of ’19—the intellectual quality of which would not be repeated again in Peru—has been enthroned in a manner little short of canonical. But, in all truth, it suffers from the same defects as the innumerable books of this good underdeveloped writer for underdeveloped readers that Sánchez represented. I am thinking, above all, of the prologue he wrote for Porras’s posthumous book on Pizarro, published in Lima in 1978 by a group of Porras’s disciples, and put together piecemeal, without giving the proper bibliographic information, jumbling together published and unpublished texts in a confused and uneven hodgepodge. I do not know to whom we owe the responsibility, or rather the irresponsibility, for this ugly edition—with commercial advertisements inserted in between the pages—which would have horrified that historian who was a perfectionist, but even today I understand still less the reason for entrusting the prologue to Luis Alberto Sánchez, who, faithful to his character and his habits, made of this introduction a subtle masterwork of malice, recalling amid saccharine manifestations of friendship for “Raúl” those episodes that had been especially embarrassing to Porras, such as his having supported General Ureta and not Bustamante y Rivero in the 1945 elections and not having resigned as ambassador to Spain, a post to which Bustamante had appointed him, at the time of Odría’s military coup in 1948.

Porras Barrenechea’s disciples and friends, of different generations and professions—among them were historians and professors and diplomats—all dropped by the Calle Colina, to visit him, to attend the chocolate gatherings as night fell, to pass on to him gossip about the university, politics, or the Ministry of Foreign Relations, which delighted him, or to ask him for advice and recommendations. The most frequent visitor of all was a close companion who belonged to his own generation, also a diplomat, a regional historian (of Piura) and a journalist, Ricardo Vegas García. Nearsighted, neat as a pin, impossibly ill-tempered, Don Ricardo had solitary fits of rage about which Porras told most amusing anecdotes, such as how he had seen him—or rather, heard him—smash to bits a toilet whose chain he’d had difficulty pulling, and pummeling to pieces with his fists a table on which he had begun by giving slaps of his hand to demand service. Don Ricardo Vegas García would enter the house on the Calle Colina like the waterspout of a tornado and invite everyone to have tea at the Tiendecita Blanca, where he always would order ladyfingers. And woe to anyone who resisted his invitations! Beneath his arrogance and his brusque remarks, Don Ricardo was a generous and likable man, whose friendship and loyalty Porras appreciated enormously and whom he later was to miss a great deal.

The university professors who dropped by most often were Jorge Puccinelli and Luis Jaime Cisneros, and César Vallejo’s widow came by too—the fearsome Georgette, whom Porras protected following the death of her husband in Paris—and many culturally lionized poets, writers, or journalists, whose presence gave the house on the Calle Colina a warm and stimulating atmosphere, in which the intellectual discussions and dialogues were larded with gossip and ill-will—the great Peruvian sport of
raje—
bad-mouthing—of which Porras, an old Lima hand (even though he’d been born in Pisco), was an outstanding practitioner. The gatherings used to last till far into the night and end up in some café in Miraflores—El Violín Gitano or La Pizzería on the Diagonal—or in El Triunfo, in Surquillo, an ill-reputed little bar that Porras had renamed Montmartre.

My first task, at the historian’s house, consisted of reading the chronicles of the Conquest, making note cards on the myths and legends of Peru. I have an exhilarating memory of those readings in search of data on the Seven Cities of Cíbola, the Kingdom of the Great Paititi, the marvels of El Dorado, the land of the Amazons, that of the Fountain of Youth and all the time-hallowed fantasies of utopian kingdoms, enchanted cities, continents that had disappeared, which the encounter with America brought back to life in the present among those migrating Europeans who ventured, dazzled by what they saw, into the lands of Tahuantinsuyo and resorted, in order to understand them, to the classical mythologies and the arsenal of medieval legends. Although very different in their composition and their aim, some of them written by rough, unlettered, uncultivated men induced by the sure sense that they were witnessing events of transcendent importance to leave behind testimony as to what they did, saw, and heard, these chronicles mark the appearance of a written literature in Spanish America, and already, through their most unusual mixture of fantasy and realism, of unbridled imagination and fierce verisimilitude, as well as through their abundance, their picturesqueness, their epic breadth, their descriptive itch, lay down the pattern for certain characteristics of the future literature of Latin America. Some accounts, above all those of monastic chroniclers, like Father Calancha, could be prolix and boring, but others, such as those of the Inca Garcilaso or Cieza de León, I read with genuine pleasure, as monuments of a new genre that combined the best of literature and history, for it had, like the latter, its feet immersed in lived experience and its head in fiction.

It was not only fun to spend those three hours consulting chronicles; in addition, if I had any sort of question of my own, there was the possibility of hearing a disquisition from Porras on persons and episodes having to do with the Conquest. I remember, one afternoon, because of some question or other that I don’t recall which Araníbar or I put to him, a master class that he gave us on “the heresy of the sun,” a deviation or heterodoxy from the point of view of the official religion of the Inca empire that he had reconstructed through the testimony of the chronicles, about which he was thinking of writing an article (a project which, like so many others, he never managed to get around to and actually finish). Porras had known the great figures of Peruvian literature, and many of Latin American and Spanish literature, and I listened to him, all ears, as he spoke of César Vallejo, with whom he had been on intimate terms before Vallejo died and the posthumous publication of whose
Poemas humanos
Porras was responsible for, or of José María Eguren, whose childish tender feelings and innocence he made fun of with the greatest irreverence, or of the apocalyptic end of Oquendo de Amat, a poet done in by tuberculosis and sheer rage, in a Spanish sanatorium to which he and the Marquesa de la Conquista—a descendant of Pizarro’s—had had him transferred on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.

Although only Carlos Araníbar and I worked in the house on the Calle Colina on a regular schedule and with a salary (which the bookseller-editor Mejía Baca paid us at the end of each month), all Porras’s old and new disciples—Félix Álvarez Brun, Raúl Rivera Serna, Pablo Macera, and, later on, Hugo Neyra and Waldemar Espinoza Soriano—often visited. Of all of them, the one in whom Porras had placed his greatest hopes, but also the one who managed to exasperate him and drive him almost out of his mind by the way he behaved, was Pablo Macera. Some five or six years older than I was, Pablo had already finished the courses for a degree in Letters but never presented his thesis, despite the exhortations and admonitions forthcoming from Porras, who could not foresee a time when Macera would subject his life to a little discipline and turn his talent toward doing solid, serious work. As for talent, Pablo had an abundance of it and it amused him to show it off and, above all, to waste it, in an oral exhibitionism that often was dazzling. He would drop into Porras’s library all of a sudden, and without giving Araníbar and me time enough even to say hello to him, he would propose to us that we found the “Herren Club” of Peru, inspired by the geopolitical doctrines of Karl Haushofer, so that, in league with a group of industrialists, in five years we could take over the country and turn it into an aristocratic and enlightened dictatorship whose first step would be to reestablish the Inquisition and burn heretics in the main square once again. The following morning, having forgotten all about his delirious despotic scheme, he would perorate on the need to legitimize and promote bigamy, or to revive human sacrifices, or to call for a national plebiscite to determine democratically whether the earth was square or round. The worst foolishness, the most grotesque paradoxes became suggestive realities in Macera’s mouth, since he had, as no one else did, that perverse faculty of the intellectual that Arthur Koestler speaks of: that of being able to demonstrate everything he believed in and of believing everything that he could demonstrate. Pablo believed in nothing, but he could demonstrate anything, eloquently and brilliantly, and he enjoyed noting the surprise that his maniacal theories, his paradoxes and puns, his sophisms and ukases aroused in us. His intellectual snobbery was blended with sparks of humor. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes he threw away after having taken just one puff, so as to provoke a comment from the disconcerted spectator that allowed him to reply, voluptuously savoring each syllable: “I smoke nervously.” That adverb,
nerviosamente
, which cost him many a sol, gave him shivers of pleasure.