Roy stood at the window of his room, which offered a panoramic view of San Miguel Avenue in the Santa Isabel neighborhood, and watched the cool evening breeze, just a few minutes before dusk.
He thought it was a delightful hour, decorated by the vibrant red sky of Piura, in the moment before twilight. Enveloped in the dim atmosphere illuminated by the streetlights that were beginning to come on, Roy remembered the previous night spent at the home of poet Alberto Alarcón in the Pachitea neighborhood. He had arrived there with Sigfredo Burneo, his dear friend and partner in published poetic adventures such as the booklets Sueños de Ecce Homo and Niebla púrpura, while Sigi, together with Alarcón, had launched El cuchillo entre los dientes. For his part, Alberto edited the magazine Papeles del payador. Those were golden, beautiful days for that small group of young poets for whom living meant remaining in that sensitive sphere of folly called poetry.
A wonderful night well watered with beer at Alarcón’s house, where an elderly woman with long white hair loose around her lap, dressed entirely in black with her skirt reaching the floor, sat unflinching by the front door, waiting for time to pass. unperturbed, sitting by the front door, an elderly woman with very long white hair loose around her lap, dressed entirely in black with a floor-length skirt and of incalculable age, whom Sigfredo called, with impunity, Úrsula Iguarán. The party started early. El Negro Alarcón lived there with his wife Nelly and their young children, among whom little Lira stood out. And very close by, around the corner, lived Matilde Ordinola, a well-known teacher from Piura and leader of the SUTEP, with whom Alberto had a romantic relationship. In an aside, Sigfredo blurts out to El Negro:
“What an idiot, here you have your wife and your lover right next to you.”
“Shhh, easy, brother, Nelly might hear you.”
And the party continued to the beat of salsa music from a transistor radio, with Matilde dancing wildly, barefoot, wearing tight purple pants and a neat white blouse that highlighted her dark skin. Roy throws himself into the fray and, taking her by the hand, leads her through the twists and turns of the devilish rhythm of Héctor Lavoe and Willy Colón: “Soon the day of my luck will come / the hope of my death / I swear my luck will change / Oh, when will it be?”
“So you’re the famous communist,” Roy says.
“And what do you know about that?” she replies aggressively.
“Everyone knows that you’re the main agitator of the SUTEP here in Piura,” he insists. And he continues with a smile:
“But you’re the richest communist in the world.”
Matilde then stands in the middle of the room and shouts:
“Who is this crazy guy who first attacks me and then praises me?”
“Let’s hear it from the patriarch of Piuran literature,” Sigfredo interjects.
“Cheers, damn it,” Alarcón concludes, raising his beer glass.
That year, 1974, one evening, Roy ended up at a party at the Country Club, where boys and girls moved about the gardens and terraces, murmuring and drinking copious amounts of alcohol, until Los Gatos Rojos del Chino Wong started playing and Chela Ruesta took the microphone—beautiful and low-cut—to sing: “And come back, come back, come back, / to your arms again,” thrilling the audience with her deep, sensual voice. Parada Roy spent those days with his two closest friends: Oswaldo Angulo and Manuel Arrese, former schoolmates, wandering morning, afternoon, and night in the Fiat 600 his father had given him when he entered the University of Piura—the private one—and smoking marijuana to their hearts’ content. But the activity that held his attention most was writing poetry and visiting Sigfredo Burneo and—often together—Alberto Alarcón, the only two poets in Piura at the time. Roy was always surprised to hear the sharp sound of the soap factory siren next to Santa Isabel at the most unexpected moments. Or it was suddenly the large pendulum clock hanging on the wall of his dining room. Perhaps he confused them. He would then go out into the street, get on the Chechento, and cross all of Piura to reach Sigfredo’s house on Cuzco Street, a stone’s throw from Bolognesi Avenue.
They were preparing the poetry plaquette Sueños de Ecce Homo, which was described as “erotic Piura” in a note by critic José Miguel Oviedo in his column “Las peras del olmo” in the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, much to the delight of Sigi and Roy, who shortly afterwards launched Niebla púrpura, the name of a famous song by Jimmy Hendrix, on the occasion of a poetry reading held at the Club Grau at the request of the Social Outreach Office of the National University of Piura. The two friends also published La peca de la jirafa, edited by Roy with poems by young Lima poets Armando Arteaga, Luis La Hoz, and Oscar Aragón. Suddenly, the sun was no longer shining with that incredible midday heat of Piura. The road began to darken as twilight descended. They were heading for Siete y medio. A few carob trees added their disappearing shadows to the natural gloom, and a couple of lonely goats ran around swallowing dirty pieces of paper left behind by the wind. At that hour, it was starting to cool down. They had picked up Ricardo Cevallos from his house on Tacna de Castilla Avenue. They arrived. Roy pulled the Fiat 600 over to the side. It wasn’t like when he went with Kiko and Jimmy on his saint’s day: Diana lying on her side in white panties and a bra. The pink walls. He couldn’t know what was going through Cevallos’ mind as he said, “What I just saw is very sad. What suffering, poor women. But Karina, a black girl in her threadbare sequined bikini, you fuck her first. No, no, you go in first, then Yovera,” as La Vaca Seminario used to say in fifth grade. They were already there with Sigi and Cevallos, but we just stood there watching. Piura was far away. Where could I go? Charo la chiclayana? How nice she was from the side, and she gave me a dirty look with her painted black eyes. “Be careful, you’ll get burned,” said Cevallos, who still wanted to become a priest. I visited him at the seminary in Trujillo, and Jimmy took out his dick to pee where the Saperoco is, and from a truck they shouted, “What a nice dick! Do you like it?” Jimmy replied, but that day no one got laid. It was all just literature.
When Roy arrived in Lima, he felt very lonely and wandered around the Cercado neighborhood. He would go into every bookstore he came across. He liked to mingle with the crowds on Abancay Avenue, in the University Park, and in La Colmena. He lived in the Villacampa neighborhood, in the working-class district of Rímac, without knowing anyone there. His life consisted of going out into the street and taking the 59-B bus to the corner of what was then the Ministry of Education, between Abancay and Colmena, and giving himself over to the city, enjoying his solitude. That’s how he wasted his time in the arteries of downtown. Curious about everything that this, at the time, unknown and immense metropolis had to offer, this urban monster won his heart and, little by little, caused him to become intensely fascinated by it. Then, when he returned home, he wrote:
What I like most is walking, wandering, roaming the streets of downtown Lima, the Cercado; but I don’t feel surrounded, quite the opposite: I feel liberated, perfectly free, surrendered to the crowd that completely fills Abancay Avenue and moving forward among street vendors, shops, commercial signs, dim neon signs, and people, more and more people, hurried, nervous, or calm, but following the route of their uncertain and unknown destination. An anonymous crowd, a massive human tide that travels along the wide sidewalk of the avenue and arrives —with me— at the corner of the immense Ministry of Education building, and turns onto Colmena Izquierda, once again teeming with passersby, among whom I find myself enveloped, mingling with the compact mass, breathing in the hallucinatory atmosphere created by so many people, and within which I am just another number, another anonymous figure lost in the hustle and bustle of the city, confused, lost and happy to be nobody, to disappear into that sea of people that leads me nowhere because I am going from one place to another, with no fixed destination, guided only by the pleasure of immersing myself in the river of streets and avenues, which reveal themselves to me as the paradise of my most august and profound solitude.
While in Lima, he knew he would never return to Piura, his hometown where he grew up until he was eighteen, when he began to visit Lima during the summer of 1974. He remembered the previous summers, those of his puberty and adolescence, spent at the San Pedro resort, crossing the Bajo-Piura river valley. He remembered the girls on the beach. The Coronado sisters, Silvia and Blanqui, with their infinite sweetness in their tight, youthful bikinis. But above all, Camiche Seminario, with her wonderful body, fresh smile, a little older, perhaps in her late teens, her blonde skin cinnamon-colored under the incomparable Piuran sun; along with Ceci Anticona, Roy’s friend, his only friend, who helped him overcome his shy loneliness at the time.
He didn’t really know why he liked to reminisce about the summers in San Pedro. Perhaps, he thought, it was because only there, sometimes, had he felt light, without the heaviness in his body that weighed him down every day. Or maybe it was because on the beach—like nowhere else—he stopped feeling like a nerd, which was how he perceived himself all the time. Suddenly he remembered the faint breeze of the nights in San Pedro, its intense calm whispering over the dunes of the Sechura desert. The undulating sense of the wind suddenly stirred the vibrant waters of the estuary and the sparkling sea surface emitted will-o’-the-wisps, reflecting the bright stars in the silent coastal darkness of northern Peru.
