A Fish in the Water by Mario Vargas Llosa — Read

I spent the summer of 1953 shut up in my grandparents' apartment, in the white townhouse on the Calle Porta, studying for the entrance exam to the University of San Marcos, writing a play (it took place on a desert island, with storms), and writing poems to a young neighbor, Madeleine, whose mother, who was French, was the owner of the house. It was another half-romance, not because of my timidity this time but due to the very strict watch kept by Madeleine's mother on her blond daughter. (Almost thirty years later, one night as I was going into the Teatro Marsano in Lima, where they were giving the first performance of a work of mine, a pretty lady whom I did not recognize blocked my path. With an indescribable smile she handed me one of those same love poems, whose first verse, the only one I dared read, made my face turn as red as a torch.)

We took the examination for admission to the Faculty of Letters in one of the old houses belonging to San Marcos scattered all through the downtown district of Lima, on the Calle de Padre Jerónimo, where a phantasmagoric Institute of Geography did its work. I made two new friends that day, Lea Barba and Rafael Merino, who were candidates for admission as I was, and also shared my passion for reading. Rafo had been enrolled at the Police Academy before deciding to study law. Lea was the daughter of one of the owners of the Negro-Negro, all of them descended from an anarcho-syndicalist leader of the famous workers' battles in the 1920s. Between one exam and the next, and during the days and weeks of waiting to be summoned to the oral exam, Rafo and Lea and I talked about literature and politics, and I felt rewarded for the long wait by being able to share my anxieties with people my own age. Lea talked so enthusiastically of César Vallejo, some of whose poems she knew by heart, that I began to read him attentively, trying my best to come to like him at least as much as I did Neruda, whom I had read since high school with constant admiration.