two hours a day there, between morning news bulletins at the station, making a list of the new books and magazines that arrived and cataloguing everything already in the library. A history professor at San Marcos, in whose course I had had outstanding grades, took me on as an assistant; every day from three to five I went to his home in Miraflores, where I noted down on filing cards various subjects that had been dealt with by chroniclers, for a projected History of Peru for which he would be writing the volumes on the Conquest and Emancipation. The most picturesque of these new jobs was a contract from the Lima Bureau of Public Welfare. In the Presbítero Maestro Cemetery were a series of grave plots, dating from the colonial era, for which all records had been lost. My task was to decipher the inscriptions on the gravestones and compile lists of all the names and dates. It was a job I could do whenever I found the time, and I was paid at piecework rates for it: one sol per dead person. I worked at this in the late afternoons and early evenings, between the 6 p.m. news bulletin and the Panamericana newscast, and Javier, who was free at those hours, would go with me. As it was winter and it got dark early, the director of the cemetery, a fat man who claimed that he had witnessed in person the inauguration of eight presidents of Peru before Congress, lent us flashlights and a little ladder so that we could read the inscriptions way up high in the tombs. At times, pretending to each other that we heard voices, moans, chains clanking and spied ghostly silhouettes flitting about amid the tombs, we ended up giving ourselves a real scare. Besides going to the cemetery two or three times during the week, I devoted every Sunday morning to this task. The remaining jobs were more or less (rather less than more) of a literary nature. In a column entitled “The Man and His Work,” I interviewed a poet, novelist, or essayist each week for the Sunday supplement of El Comercio; I wrote a monthly article in the magazine Cultura Peruana for a section that I had invented, called “Men, Books, and Ideas”: and, finally, another professor who was a friend of mine entrusted me with the job of writing a text on Civic Education for candidates for enrollment at the Universidad Católica (despite the fact that I was a student at the rival university, San Marcos); every Monday I had to come up with an essay for him on one or another of the many subjects dealt with in this pre-enrollment course, ranging from symbols of the Motherland to the polemics between the Indigenists and the Hispanicists, and passing by way of native flora and fauna.
Thanks to all these jobs (which made me feel something like a rival of Pedro Camacho’s), I contrived to triple my income and earn enough with the seven of them for two people to live on. I asked for advances on each job and was able to redeem my typewriter, indispensable for the newspaper and magazine assignments (although I wrote many of the articles at Panamericana), and also give Nancy money to buy things to furnish and decorate the rented apartment, which the owner had ready for occupancy within the two weeks promised. The morning she turned this little studio apartment and the minuscule bathroom over to me was one of great joy. I continued to sleep at my grandparents’, however, because I decided I’d celebrate definitely moving into the apartment on the day that Aunt Julia arrived, but I went there almost every night to write articles and draw up my lists of the dead. Even though all my time was taken up at one or another of my jobs all daylong, and continually running back and forth between them, I didn’t feel tired or depressed; on the contrary, I was full of energy and, as I remember, I even read as much as I always had (though I did so only in the innumerable buses and jitneys I had to take every day).
Faithful to the promise we’d made each other, Aunt Julia wrote me every day, and my granny would hand me the letters with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, murmuring: “Well now, I wonder who this little letter