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By Root 1117 0

rest for a second and from which I returned to Europe exhausted. Just between the countless relatives of my vast forest of a family and my numerous friends, we had invitations to lunch and dinner every single day, and the remainder of my time was occupied doing background research for my writing. One year, for instance, I’d taken a trip to the Alto Marañón area to see, hear, and smell from close up a world that was the scene of the novel I was writing, and another year, accompanied by diligent friends, I had systematically explored the nocturnal haunts—cabarets, bars, brothels—that were the locales of the dissipated life led by the protagonist of another story. Mixing work and pleasure—since I never considered this “research” a duty but, rather, a task that always enriched my life and was a most enjoyable diversion in itself, above and beyond the literary benefits that I might gain from it—I did things on these trips that in earlier days, when I lived in Lima, I had never done, and that now that I’ve returned to Peru to live I never do either: going to little popular clubs and to theaters to see indigenous folk dances, wandering about the tenements of slum districts, strolling through sections of town that I was not very familiar with or didn’t know at all, such as El Callao, Bajo el Puente, and Los Barrios Altos, betting at the racetrack, nosing about in the catacombs of colonial churches and the (supposed) house of La Perricholi.

That year, however, I devoted my time to more bookish research. I was writing a novel that took place in the era of General Manuel Apolinario Odría (1948–56), and during my month’s vacation in Lima I went to the periodicals section of the Biblioteca Nacional a couple of mornings each week, to leaf through newspapers and magazines from those years and even read, somewhat masochistically, some of the speeches the dictator’s advisors (all lawyers, to judge from the forensic rhetoric) wrote for him. On leaving the Biblioteca Nacional around noon I would walk down the Avenida Abancay, which was beginning to turn into an enormous market of itinerant peddlers. On the sidewalks a dense crowd of men and women, many of them dressed in ponchos and peasant skirts, sold the most heterogeneous collection of wares imaginable, everything from needles and hairpins to dresses and suits, laid out on blankets or newspapers spread out on the ground or at stands knocked together out of wooden crates, oil drums, and canvas awnings, plus all sorts of things to eat, of course, prepared right there on the spot in little braziers. This Avenida Abancay was one of the thoroughfares in Lima that had changed the most. Jam-packed now and possessed of a distinct Andean flavor, a street on which it was not rare to hear Quechua spoken amid the strong odor of fried food and pungent seasonings, it in no way resembled the broad, austere avenue frequented by white-collar workers and an occasional beggar down which, ten years before, when I was a first-year student at the university, I used to walk on my way to that same Biblioteca Nacional. There in those blocks, one could see, and touch, in a nutshell, the problem of the migration from the countryside to the capital, which in that decade had doubled the population of Lima and caused to spring up like mushrooms, on the hillsides, the dunes, the garbage dumps, that ring of slums where thousands and thousands of people ended up, rural folk who had left the provinces because of the drought, the back-breaking working conditions, the lack of prospects for a better future, hunger.

Getting to know this new face of the city, I walked down the Avenida Abancay toward the Parque Universitario and what had previously been San Marcos (the various faculties had been moved to the outskirts of Lima and the building where I had studied humanities and law was now occupied by a museum and offices). I was visiting the place not just out of curiosity and a certain nostalgia but also for literary reasons, since, in the novel I was working on, a number of episodes took place in the Parque Universitario,