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By Root 1145 0

success that season in the Plaza de Acho. Following his first corrida, he had been awarded several ears, and at his second, after a miraculous faena, he was awarded a hoof and the crowd bore him on their shoulders in triumph from the Rímac to his hotel on the Plaza San Martín. But at his third and last corrida—he had scalped his own tickets for it for astronomical prices—he didn’t even get close enough to the bulls to see them, since he was seized with a deerlike panic and ran from them all afternoon; he didn’t make even one decent pass at them and went in for the kill so clumsily that on his second bull of the day he was given four warnings. There had been a major riot in the stands: the indignant spectators had tried to burn down the Plaza de Acho and lynch the Venezuelan, who, amid deafening jeers, and boos and a hail of cushions, had had to be escorted to his hotel by the Guardia Civil. The next morning, a few hours before he was to take the plane, I interviewed him in a little reception room in the Hotel Bolívar. I was dumfounded when I realized that he was less intelligent than the bulls he fought and almost as incapable as they were of expressing himself in words. He was unable to put a coherent sentence together, his verb tenses were all wrong, his manner of coordinating his ideas made one think of tumors, aphasia, monkey men. And the form in which they were uttered was no less extraordinary than the content: his speech habits were most unfortunate, an intonation full of diminutives and apocopes and shading off, during his frequent mental vacuums, into zoological grunts.

The Mexican I was assigned to interview on the Monday of this memorable week was, on the contrary, a lucid thinker and an eloquent speaker. He was the editor and publisher of a review, he had written books on the Mexican revolution, he was visiting Peru as the head of a delegation of economists and was staying at the Bolívar. He agreed to come to the radio station and I went to get him myself. He was a tall, erect, well-dressed gentleman with white hair who must have been close to his sixties. He was accompanied by his wife, a slight woman with bright eyes who was wearing a little hat with flowers. We blocked out the interview on our way from the hotel to the station and it was recorded in fifteen minutes. Genaro Jr. was terribly upset because, in answer to one question, the economist and historian violently attacked military dictatorships (we were suffering from one in Peru at the time, headed by a certain Odría).

The unexpected happened as I was escorting the couple back to the Bolívar. It was noon and the Calle Belén and the Plaza San Martín were jammed with people. We were walking along the street, with the husband in the center, his wife on his right, and me on his left on the curb side.

We had just passed by Radio Central, and simply to make conversation I was telling the important man once again that the interview had turned out magnificently, when all of a sudden I was definitely interrupted by the tiny voice of the Mexican lady. “Jesus, Mary, I’m about to faint…”

I looked at her: she was haggard, and blinking her eyes and moving her mouth in a most peculiar way. But what was really surprising was the economist-historian’s reaction. On hearing his wife’s warning, he glanced swiftly at her, and then at me, with a bewildered expression on his face, whereupon he immediately looked straight ahead of him again and, instead of stopping, quickened his pace. The Mexican lady was now beside me, grimacing. I managed to grab her by the arm just as she was about to collapse to the sidewalk. As she was such a frail little thing, I was able fortunately to hold her up and help her along, as the important man took off in great long strides, leaving me with the delicate task of dragging his wife along the street. People moved aside to let us by, stopped to stare at us, and at one point—we had gotten as far as the Cine Colón and, in addition to making faces, the little Mexican lady was now leaking spittle, mucus, and tears—I heard a cigarette vendor say: