On shelves and in drawers, in trunks and boxes, my grandmother hid the artifacts of her old house: decorative ceramics and saints, tea sets she never used, frames and photos, old books of stories (many from the Muscovite Progress publishing house), linens, clothes, and tins that had arrived in Iquitos along the Amazon from Brazil and Colombia, sweets, snacks, tools, newspapers. I wondered about the tea cups, felt their rough texture in my hands, was captivated by the flowers and landscapes, and asked myself who had ever used them, where, and when my grandmother had acquired them; I recreated the house my aunts had so often described to me and imagined them using these tea cups. When I saw the framed pictures, I wondered where in the house they’d hung, I imagined them new, adorning my aunt’s bedrooms, or the den. I imagined the city lights glancing off the sepia-tone photos, the air and breezes of those afternoons, and I did much the same with the jungle decorations that recalled the roanmulas, chullachakis, and tunches with which my aunts frightened me. My grandmother had dedicated herself to sewing in the old days and the antique, shut-in aroma of those fabrics, the designs, and the colors of that era intrigued me, the way the materials had been transformed by my grandmother’s handiwork and by time. When I saw these old garments, I found it hard to believe that my aunts had ever worn clothes my size. It would all morph and disappear one day, and what I had before me, this storage room, was the portal to a universe in which I could navigate freely without moving in space. And so when I discovered the empty jars of Brazilian unguents, the empty bottles of Bully vinegar, Leite de Rosas, and Agua Florida, and noticed that the odors had remained, I felt that objects remained in the world through sheer persistence, and their refusal to disappear colored my wandering. Everything became a beautiful chaos, source of all imagination.

At dusk, after these silent travels, my family would gather around a large high table that I could only reach by kneeling on my chair. My cousin and I were the first to be served, and I recall the aroma that piqued my senses and submerged me in an uneasy calm: the smell of hierbaluisa. The same odor had warmed us on those afternoons we spent at my grandmother’s fields, a plot of earth in the sierras of Lima, where we played with the barn animals, dogs, goats, and horses. When I drank hierbaluisa part of me fell away, and I left that old adobe house in the city and was transported to the rustic shack of palms amid a field of watermelon and sugarcane, to its starlit nights full of the furtive calls of insects, and its cold mornings, silent but for the intermittent song of a bird you could never see. When I drank hierbaluisa, when I took in its odor, I was embraced, completely and at once, by two different worlds, and within me, an awareness surged, a consciousness of beautiful and frightening events, something I could not control. This awareness was a voice, an I, that connected both universes, that called me and was part of my own nature. It was the age of the call…

“We’ll go live with your father,” my old lady told me one day. I had already celebrated my eighth birthday, and the idea of leaving that antique house, confronting a new neighborhood, a different house, disturbed me. I couldn’t tell my mother that I didn’t want to go live with the old man, though I barely knew him. She was glowing since the birth of my little sister, and had already visited the new house my father had bought at the opposite edge of the same district. And anyway, after my father’s accident in the bottle-blue Volkswagen, she wanted to take care of him. So I would finally have a normal family and a house just for us. It was a modern construction, though very small, on a miniscule street, an alley where all the mostly one- or two-story houses sat on similarly sized plots, had nearly identical facades, simple doors and austere windows. Ours was one of the few that had three floors and had been remodeled, which made it a strange place, warm, but somewhat dark. Everything within it was tiny: the living room which my mother furnished with leftovers from my old man’s office; the kitchen, equipped in those days with only a kerosene burner; the blue-tiled bathroom of yellow light. From the first moment I stepped into that house, my natural contemplativeness was manifest. Those dining room chairs of faux-leather and cloudy chrome against the sober geometry of the parquet floors—they welcomed me, and my imagination made space for them. I inspected every corner of the house, every drawer of every end table and dresser, I disappeared into the odors of the objects I found inside, those left behind by the previous owners. How did this golden button, this Christmas card, or this electricity receipt end up in this drawer? Who stuck these stickers on the window of my sister’s room or on the refrigerator?

From the upstairs window I could look out on the humble gray roofs of the other homes, corrugated metal populated with pigeons, bellicose stray cats, and various objects abandoned to the elements by their owners. I wanted to get closer to those things, to hear voices within them, to poke and prod them. Drawers and dresses, cribs and strollers, brooms, toys, artifacts fallen into disrepair—the natural deaths of these objects fascinated me as much as the streets that crisscrossed my neighborhood. I explored these too, first alone and then with the kids I met, with whom I discovered, between games and quarrels, all the profane and forbidden places of the area.

I recall the great noise of afternoons and the fine drizzle of winter. Little by little, along the cement sidewalks, narrow and bordered with weeds—sidewalks whose imperfections I knew by heart—I came to know the history and origins of every resident, and my imagination embellished this mosaic with other voices. Those tiny houses were inhabited by a gamut of people, each with their own customs, and a common destiny. There were those who felt fortunate to live there, and others who had, by some cruel stroke, lost their lucky star, and come to rest in this second-rate neighborhood. Provincials and foreigners, whites, cholos, blacks, Chinese, thieves and honest folk, pious old women, lonely people, whores, and swarms of tough kids playing soccer in a street dotted with potholes, kids who faced off against on-coming traffic like bullfighters with a death-wish. Bars and arcades; billiard halls where we’d pester some drunk to buy us sodas; dark alleys where we told stories of terror and sex, where we plotted to steal candy from a store or from the market, where we hid after kicking the door of an old lady who’d thrown water on us because she didn’t want us playing on the sidewalk in front of her house; the shouting matches between an arguing couple, and an entire neighborhood of heads that peered from open windows for a look. The long, dark path that led to the immense market, the size of an entire city block, a place filled with people from every region of Peru; the high, gray wall of that mysterious fortress, its incessant activity, the exhausted men who emerged each afternoon in their blue uniforms, and the trucks packed with cardboard boxes—the manufacturing zone. The workshops of thermoses and pots, textiles and clothing and the chemist’s laboratory, in whose parking lot we played soccer against the kids from other neighborhoods (whom we ended up fighting) and in whose unkempt gardens we found, each morning, sleeping drunks and drug addicts, and where, on one of those endless afternoons, we smoked cigarettes and drank rum for the first time, and spent the next two days ill, not from the stimulants, but from the beating we each received at home. Those girls I first liked, who never reciprocated perhaps because I was too shy, or too daring. That pink house of the first girl I ever loved, the one whom I never spoke to, the one who left the neighborhood suddenly after her mother hung herself. Between joys and miseries, secrets and fears, my neighborhood was a cauldron of daydreams where I took refuge, as I had in the darkness of my early childhood. And so, as time worked upon me and the memories of my grandmother’s house dimmed, the street became my obsession, my land of stories at every corner, and there I found a new universe to carry with me.

“Your father wants to know why you go out whenever he gets home,” my old lady said. “He doesn’t like you to have this bad habit. When you go to your new school you’ll have to stop.”

To escape, each time further away. To recreate the free spaces I was losing. Each time my wanderings were farther and my confabulations deeper. Little by little, I pushed beyond the invisible barriers of my world, my first playground receding like a wake as I went further into the streets of central Lima, among the pinball machines and the antique alleyways, the record stores, the magazine stands.

The street! What irresistible chaos! Life force and death force against its hostile geometry! I was just a snot-nosed kid thrown into its kingdom when I discovered that the language of objects stayed with me, like a parallel knowledge, a magical understanding that allowed me to make the world a game where everything had relevance and charm. It was the age of the call…

But in this new world, expansive and darker, I would not be alone. As I pushed deeper into the asphalt chaos, I understood that there were others who knew the language of objects, though they expressed it differently. It was there, in the posters I discovered on the streets of downtown, on the walls graffitied with the names of European rock groups—tributes to musicians who surely had no idea that in a distant third world country, in a place supposedly populated by indigenous people in feathers and loincloths, someone might spend their afternoons listening to songs that had been written on a drunken night or on a clear morning, when they themselves had had no sense of what was coursing through their heads. The walls held those stories beneath splotches of paint, hints of those blurred figures who’d sought rage as a way out of the daily tedium. Their existence made me feel less alone, and they became, little by little, part of who I was. Who wrote those phrases in red paint on the wall of the factory? When was the first time someone heard this band? Why had they written the name of the group and nothing else?

I began to look for those mysterious city dwellers, and to feel I was part of them even though I didn’t know who they were. In this way I collected icons, magical objects from these other lands, doorways to hearts like my own: cassette covers, music magazines, and Spanish comics—I loved seeing on the last page Printed on June 23, 1979 in the workshop of STAR, Barcelona, and feeling the atmosphere of that distant print shop, the heat and friction of the presses, the warmth of that dream factory, the elapsed time and the permanence of the object—the concert photos, the bands, the interviews and profiles, the reviews, the amateur recordings that included accidental music, errors, the slang printed on the photocopied paper of the fanzines, the anti-establishment symbols, the tediousness and anguish of being nothing but a member of the herd, the anonymous mass, the expressions on the faces of band members in the pictures. Where did they go after the show? Where were they from? What was on the other side of the door behind the drummer of Eskorbuto in that photo where he was shown laughing, bottle in hand? Why did the guitarist look so tired and sad? The color and the contrast, the wrinkled paper, the realistic lyrics of Polla Records, Eskorbuto, Ratos de Porão, MCD, RIP, Reincidentes—all this filled my afternoons on those long after-school walks toward home.

“People are not stupid because they lack intelligence,” Chusko used to say. “Intelligence is a utilitarian and empty idea. If you think about it, you’ll realize people are stupid because they don’t imagine, because they don’t dream, because they don’t believe in a future. Those who don’t dream are not self-aware and are easy to dominate.”

I remember the first slogans I came across in a fanzine I bought at Big Nose Pepe’s Underground Barricade, over there at the Plaza Francia. Obedience begins with consciousness, and consciousness with disobedience; Anarchism is the way, and history moves toward it; The rich make war so the poor can die; Order is the pleasure of reason; chaos is the joy of the imagination… A hundred loose phrases that arrived in my anxious brain like sharp reprimands. Rejecting them would have meant rejecting myself.

I spent my days steeped in this atmosphere, that gave the ordinary passing of hours a certain air of transcendence. I know what I’m saying sounds dramatic, but this is an effect of literature: within it, there are only key moments. That is how one perceives and understands the events in books, and this is how the world of the Subterraneans came to me, the world of Rock Radikal Vasco, English and Brazilian punk, the New York underground, the Catalán bohemia, the anarchist movement of the Spanish Civil War, the takeover of abandoned factories in Madrid. These were all significant episodes, dramatic events, crucial to the lives of those people I admired from a distance. They were the protagonists of something that deserved to be written down and taken into account. Their essence extended toward me, crossing the hills of a European province, an ocean and a jungle, to arrive in my room and sing to me, from that broken down radio of my adolescence, hymns of resistance, rebellion, and life. Above all the others, La Polla Records, that band from the Basque country that could do no wrong, arrived in my world to tell me that the Catholic Church was the most hypocritical institution on earth, that the bankers of some countries started wars for the sole purpose of selling weapons, that the armies were always ready to defend their interests, that a rich man never entered a prison, while a poor man never left one… I learned so many things from them. The essence of these people carved out a space within me, became part of me, and I wanted to be a part these faraway stories, to become ink and negative, and live far from this world that offered me so little. And these songs brought me memories of lives I’d never lived, a supernatural calling, something outside my experience.

“It’s not that the people don’t have dreams and hopes,” Chusko said. “Of course they do. But what are they? What elements constitute their dreams? The insipid music on commercial radio, the established culture, the weekend soccer games, the parties at the hip spots, voting every five years, studying, getting married, having children, working eight hours, filling the house with appliances, eating, shitting, sleeping… And on top of all that, they tell us this mediocre and empty life is the proper way to live, and whoever isn’t interested is a loser, and whoever wants something more is crazy, or is a terrorist.” Yes, I was a lunatic, a flamethrower—the people walked around dead and empty through the streets and I wanted to shout that I felt alone. This feeling took me by the hand and separated me from the world until it made of me a stranger, an intruder. I was no longer of this earth. I could spend hours re-reading the Spanish fanzines, their texture, their acrid photocopied smell, and every photo told me I should have lived then, that I should have been there. A parallel life was born, nurtured by the images and histories of others. A dream to chase, where everything that the Age of the Call had planted within me was reflected. Mixing with all human desires. It was a reckless illusion that made the world my toy.

This furious dream had a devastating coherence. It was a universal order in which each object, person, and craving had a role to play. Everything converged toward a reality that lived within me, a world born of music, paintings and writings from the hearts of men who lived far away. I wanted to be one of them. That world demanded, from the moment it was conceived and produced by the imagination, a discerning analysis of reality, and a corresponding action. Its manifestation was implicit. But how to represent that world in a land that was tyrannical, resentful, limited, hypocritical, mechanized, lacking in good will? I would not let that world drown my insides. I had to fight to maintain that fire, make it transcend, push it farther, confront this world of death, this sick dream. This was then, the only way to be where I should have been.

What world, what struggle did the Call seed in me? If someone sang, “A million people live in sadness and will die democratically and I don’t want to shut up,” or, “They’ll have you in their hands for three days, will deposit all their hate within you, you will suffer their interrogations, long hours of vile torture.” If an indigenous Ecuadorian, controlling color and form, rendered the face of a mestizo in an expression that revealed the torment of five centuries of struggle and called his work, “The Age of Pain.” If a Peruvian writer narrated the silent war waged between a North American mining company and a handful of peasants from a community in Sierra de Cerro de Pasco. If this was my daily bread, what kind of world did I dream of? To what cause would I pledge my resistance? How would that struggle be waged?

“When one acts according to what one believes in,” Chusko said, “the emptiness of life disappears. For this, one must act as if one believes, and it is these repeated systematically acts that give weight to one’s faith.”

I had created, almost unconsciously, a faith that I could not let die, and so I had to look for partners, people with which to fight. That struggle against all authority should mine the bases of human misery, ignorance, and this fight, comrade, will never end, because there is no final battle, nor is anything absolute, comrade, the only way to defeat Imperialism is through the teachings of the Central Committee of the Party, revolutionary practice teaches us what is useful and what is not to the Revolution, comrade, it’s necessary to avoid the advance of reactionaries, we must support the ideals of the first warriors of the People’s Global War, comrade, we must make the great leap forward that will guide us to strategic equilibrium and to the seizure of Power, we must stop history, move mountains, assault the heavens, comrade, the struggle demands it…