A Fish in the Water by Mario Vargas Llosa — Read

I worked with Raúl Porras Barrenechea from February 1954 until a few days before I left for Europe, in 1958. The three hours a day I spent there, in those four years and a half, from Monday to Friday, between two and five in the afternoon, taught me more about Peru and contributed more to my education than the classes at San Marcos.

Porras Barrenechea was a master in the old style, who liked being surrounded by disciples, from whom he demanded complete loyalty. An elderly bachelor, he had lived in that old house with his mother until she died the year before, and he now shared it with an aged black servant who had perhaps been his nursemaid. She addressed him with the familiar tú and scolded him like a little boy, prepared the delicious cups of chocolate with which the historian received the intellectual luminaries who came by on a pilgrimage to the Calle Colina. Of those, I remember as the most delightful conversationalists the Spaniard Don Pedro Laín Entralgo; the Venezuelan Maríano Picón-Salas, a historian, essayist, and sharp-witted humorist; the Mexican Alfonso Junco, whose timidity disappeared when the conversation turned to the two subjects that impassioned him, Spain and the faith, for he was a militant crusader for Hispanism and Catholicism; and our compatriots the poet José Gálvez, who spoke a very pure Spanish and had a mania for genealogy, and Víctor Andrés Belaunde-in those days Peru's ambassador to the United Nations-who often passed through Lima, and who, on one occasion I am thinking of, talked all night and didn't allow either Porras or any of the guests at the gathering over chocolate given in his honor to get a word in edgewise.