A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (65 page)

Finally, after two days, we boarded the replacement plane. We reached the Azores, but there bad weather kept it from landing. We were diverted to an island whose name I’ve forgotten, where, in the course of the terrifying landing, the pilot managed to damage one of the plane’s wheels and put us through several moments of panic. When I arrived in Bogotá, my flight to Lima had left three days before, and hapless Avianca had to lodge me and feed me in Bogotá for several more days. The moment I was installed in the Hotel Tequendama, I went out for a stroll down one of the main downtown streets. I was looking into the show windows of a bookstore when I saw people running toward me, in the midst of a skirmish of some sort. Before I understood what was going on, I heard shots and saw policemen and soldiers dealing out blows right and left with their truncheons, so I too started to run, knowing neither where to nor why, and wondering what sort of city this was, where I had just landed and already they were trying to kill me.

I finally arrived in Lima, full of energy, determined to finish my thesis as soon as possible and perform miracles to win the Javier Prado Fellowship. I told Julia, Lucho and Abelardo, my aunts and uncles about my trip to Paris with unbridled enthusiasm, and my memory relived with vast delight everything I had seen and done there. But I didn’t have much time for nostalgia, since, in fact, I set to work on my thesis on Rubén Darío’s short stories, in all my free moments, at the library of the Club Nacional, between news bulletins at Panamericana, and at night, at home, until sometimes I fell asleep over my typewriter.

A mishap occurred that interrupted that work pace. One morning my groin began to hurt—what I thought was my groin, that is, and turned out to be my appendix. I went to San Marcos to have a doctor see me. He prescribed several medicines for me to take, which didn’t have the slightest effect on me, and shortly thereafter, Genaro Delgado Parker, who saw me limping, put me in his car and drove me to the Clínica International, with which Panamericana had some sort of a deal. I had to have an emergency operation, since my appendix was now badly inflamed. According to Lucho Loayza, when I came out from under the anesthesia, I was shouting swear words, my mother was shocked and covered my mouth with her hand and Julia was protesting: “You’re smothering him, Dorita.” Although Radio Panamericana paid for half the expenses of my operation, the part I had to pay for plus paying back the thousand-dollar loan I owed to the bank left me nearly broke. I compensated for those expenditures by churning out extra articles in the supplement of
El Comercio
, in the form of book reviews, and writing for the magazine
Cultura Peruana
, whose kindly editor-in-chief, José Flórez Aráoz, let me have two signed columns in each issue and publish notes or articles without a byline.

I finished my thesis before half a year had gone by, giving it a title that sounded scholarly—“Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío”—and began to harass my professors who were evaluating it—Augusto Tamayo Vargas and Jorge Puccinelli—to get them to write their reports as soon as possible so I could get my degree. One morning in June or July 1958, I was summoned by the historian Luis E. Valcárcel, at that time the dean of the Faculty of Letters, to defend my thesis in the auditorium at San Marcos, where degrees are awarded. My whole family attended this academic ceremony and the observations and questions put to me by the professors who constituted the jury were kindly. My thesis was approved cum laude, and it was suggested that it be published in the review of the Faculty of Letters. But I kept putting off having it published, having in mind the idea of making improvements on it first, something I never got around to. Written in fits and starts, in the gaps of a life taken up almost entirely by jobs to keep food on the table, it was worthless, and the grade I received is better explained by the good will of the professors on the jury and the declining academic standards of San Marcos than by its merits. But my work on that thesis gave me the opportunity to read a great deal of the writings of a poet gifted with a fabulous verbal richness, to whose inspiration and skill the Castilian language owes one of the seminal revolutions in its history. For with Rubén Darío—the starting point of all the avant-garde movements of the future—poetry in Spain and Latin America began to be modern.

In my application for the Javier Prado scholarship, to earn a doctorate from the Complutense University in Madrid, I expressed my intention of continuing the same studies in Spain, taking advantage of the Rubén Darío archives that a professor from the University of Madrid, Antonio Oliver Belmas, had discovered not long before—something that, had circumstances permitted, I would have been more than happy to do. But there were insuperable obstacles standing in the way of my consulting those archives, and once my thesis was approved at San Marcos my involvement as a Darío scholar was interrupted. But not my devotion as a reader of his, for ever since then, after long parentheses sometimes, I reread him and I always experience the same amazement and admiration that his poetry occasioned in me on first reading it. (Unlike what happens to me in the case of the novel, a genre in which I have an invincible weakness for so-called realism, in poetry I have always preferred a luxuriant unreality, above all if a spark of flashiness and fine music accompanies it.)

Loayza graduated a little before or a little after I did, he too being determined to take off for Europe. In order to make concrete plans for the journey, we were both waiting for the decision of the jury for the Javier Prado scholarship. On the morning of the day that the winner was to be announced, my heart was in my throat when I arrived at San Marcos. But Rosita Corpancho, who enjoyed passing on good news, got up from her desk the moment she saw me appear: “They gave it to you!” I staggered out of her office to tell Julia that we were going to Madrid. My happiness, as we walked along La Colmena to the Plaza San Martín to take the minibus to Miraflores, was so great that I felt like giving out with a yell like Tarzan’s.

We immediately began making preparations for the journey. We sold the furniture we had, so as to take a bit of money with us, and packed all my books in boxes and cartons, tossing inside them little balls of naphthalene and spreading packages of black tobacco around in them, since we had been assured that that was a good preventative against bookworms. It wasn’t. In 1974, when I came back to Peru to live, after sixteen years abroad—during which time I returned only for short stays, with one exception, in 1972, a stay that lasted six months—and reopened those boxes and cartons that up until then had been stored at my grandparents’ and at the houses of various aunts and uncles, a number of them offered a frightful spectacle: a green layer of mold covered the books, in which there could be glimpsed, as though it were a colander, the little holes through which the bookworms had bored their way inside to wreak their damage. Many of those boxes were now nothing but dust, bits and scraps, and vermin and had to be thrown into the trash. Less than a third of that first library of mine survived Lima’s uncultured bad weather.

At the same time, I went on working at all my jobs and Lucho and Abelardo and I prepared the second issue of
Literatura
, in which an article of mine on César Moro appeared, and in which we rendered a brief homage to the Cubans of the 26th of July, who, with a romantic guerrilla fighter as their leader—that was what Fidel Castro seemed to us to be—fought against Batista’s tyranny. There were a few Cubans in exile in Lima and one of them, active in the resistance, worked at Radio Panamericana. He kept me informed about the
barbudos
with whom, needless to say, I sentimentally identified myself. But in that last year in Lima, except for that emotional loyalty to the resistance movement against Batista, I did not engage in the slightest political activity and I had drawn apart from the Christian Democratic Party, in which, however, I remained enrolled as a member for several months more until, following Fidel’s victory and in view of the lukewarm support that the Peruvian Christian Democrats gave him, I formally resigned from the party, in a letter that I wrote them from Europe.

All my energy and time, in those last months in Lima, were devoted to working so as to get a little money together, and to preparing for my stay abroad. Although the latter, in theory, was to last a year—the time limit of the scholarship—I had resolved that it would be forever. After Spain, I would find a way to get to France and would stay there for good. In Paris I would become a writer and if I returned to Peru, it would be for a visit, since in Lima I would never get past being that protowriter that I had become and the Peruvian writers whom I knew seemed to me to be. I had talked it over very seriously with Julia and she agreed to our uprooting ourselves. She too had high hopes for our European adventure and was completely confident that I would succeed in becoming a novelist and promised to help me reach that goal by making whatever sacrifices were necessary. When I heard her talk to me like that, I was assailed by bitter remorse for having allowed myself to be overcome, in Paris, by the bad thoughts I had had. (I have never been good at the widespread sport of cheating on one’s wife, which I have seen being engaged in all around me, by the majority of my friends, with self-confident offhandedness; I fall passionately in love and my infidelities have always brought me moral and emotional traumas.)

The one person to whom I confided my intention of never returning to Peru was Uncle Lucho, who, as always, encouraged me to do what I thought best for my vocation. To the others, this represented a postgraduate stay abroad, and at San Marcos, Augusto Tamayo Vargas managed to get me a leave of absence, which assured me of having classes to teach in the Faculty of Letters on my return. Porras Barrenechea helped me secure two free passages on the Brazilian mail plane, from Lima to Rio de Janeiro (the flight took three days, since the plane made overnight stops in Santa Cruz and in Campo Grande), so that all Julia and I had to pay for was our passage by boat, in third class, from Rio to Barcelona. Lucho Loayza would travel to Brazil on his own and from there we would go on together. The only trouble was that Abelardo wouldn’t be going along with us, but he assured Lucho and me that he would pull all the strings he could to get the scholarship from the Faculty of Law to go to Italy. Within a few months he was to surprise us by suddenly turning up in Europe.

When our preparations were already well under way, at the Faculty of Letters one day, Rosita Corpancho asked me if I wouldn’t be tempted by the prospect of taking a trip to Amazonia. A Mexican anthropologist born in Spain, Juan Comas, was about to arrive in Peru, and for this reason the Summer Institute of Linguistics and San Marcos had organized an expedition to the Alto Marañon region, the homeland of the Aguaruna and Huambisa tribes, in which he was interested. I accepted, and thanks to this brief journey I became acquainted with the Peruvian jungle area and saw landscapes and people and heard stories that, later on, would be the raw material for at least three of my novels:
The Green House, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
, and
The Storyteller
.

Never in my life, and I can assure my reader that I’ve been to quite a few places in the world, have I taken a more fruitful journey, one that afterward would arouse such stimulating memories and images for inventing stories. Thirty-five years later, every so often I still remember certain anecdotes and moments of that expedition by way of territories nearly virgin at that time and remote villages, where existence was very different from the other regions of Peru that I was acquainted with, and where, in the little settlements of Huambisas, Shapras, and Aguarunas that we reached, prehistory was still alive, they still shrank heads and still practiced animism. But, precisely because of how important it turned out to be for my work as a writer and how greatly I have profited from it, I feel more diffident about referring to that experience than I do about any other, since in no other has imagination, which jumbles everything together, become so intermingled with the experience itself. Moreover, I have written and spoken so much about that first journey I made to the jungle that I am certain that if someone were to take the trouble to verify all those eyewitness accounts and personal interviews that I have told about, he or she would notice the subtle changes, which are doubtless abrupt ones as well, that my unconscious and my imagination have continually incorporated into the memory of that expedition.
^*

What I am sure of is this: discovering the awesome power of the still untamed landscape of Amazonia, and its adventure-filled, primitive, fierce world, with a freedom unknown in urban Peru, left me filled with amazement. It also enlightened me in an unforgettable way with regard to the extremes of savagery and total impunity to which injustice might lead for certain Peruvians. But at the same time, it unfolded before my eyes a world in which, as in great novels, life could be an adventure with no frontiers, where there was room for the most inconceivable feats of daring, where living almost always meant risk, boldness, permanent change—all within the framework of forests, rivers, and lakes that seemed like those of Paradise on Earth. It would come back to my mind a thousand and one times in years to come and would be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for my writing.

We went first to Yarinacocha, near Pucallpa, where the base of the Summer Institute of Linguistics was located, and there met its founder, Dr. Townsend, who had created it for a purpose that was at once scientific and religious: so that his linguists—who at the same time were also Protestant missionaries—could learn languages and primitive dialects in order to translate the Bible into them. We then took off to visit the Alto Marañon tribes and were in Urakusa, Chicais, Santa María de Nieva, and many villages and settlements where we slept in hammocks or on makeshift cots; in order to reach some of them, after disembarking from the seaplane, we had to be taken to them in the frail canoes of native ferrymen. In one of the Shapra villages, the tribal chief, Tariri, explained to us the technique used to shrink heads, which his people still practiced; they had a prisoner there from a neighboring tribe with which they were at war; the man roamed about freely among his captors, but they kept his dog in a cage. In Urakusa, I met the tribal chief Jum, recently tortured by some soldiers and “bosses” from Santa María de Nieva, whom we also met, and whom I was later to try to bring to life in
The Green House
. In all the places we visited I learned of unbelievable things and met extraordinary people.