Explore "A Fish in the Water" by Mario Vargas Llosa on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The three months that I worked at La Crónica, before my last year of secondary school, brought great upheavals in my life. While I was there, I learned what journalism actually was, and I became acquainted as well with a Lima that up until then had been unknown to me, and for the first and last time I lived a bohemian life. I hadn't yet reached the age of sixteen-my sixteenth birthday wasn't till the 28th of March of that year-but my wish to cease to be an adolescent, my impatience to reach adulthood, was fulfilled in that summer of 1952.
I have recalled that adventure in my novel Conversation in The Cathedral, with the inevitable cosmetic changes and additions. The excitement and the churning stomach with which I went up the stairs of the very old two-story building on the Calle Pando where La Crónica is located, in order to present myself that morning in the office of the managing editor, Señor Valverde, a very kindly gentleman who passed on to me certain notions about journalism and announced to me that I would earn five hundred soles a month. That day or the next I was given a press card, with my photo and seals and signatures that said "journalist."