I: Young José Carlos

José Carlos is a young boy of nine years, with dark hair and large, interrogating eyes, his head covered with straight hair cut very short.

He has been dressed in a white sailor’s suit — no doubt his nicest clothes — and the photographer must have told him to be a good boy and to look very serious.

He looks fragile in his portrait, feeble — one leg looks malformed — but how much intelligence shines in that innocent and sweet face! And those eyes, with their probing, searching gaze!

There is in his white suit the neatness that poor mothers bring to clothes when they dress their children for special occasions — the everyday clothes have been patched and mended, they hang too loose or are too tight; he has grown quickly — and his tie is the very symbol of childlike elegance, of one’s Sunday best.

After he was done posing for the camera — photographers in the early years of the century knew nothing of the high-speed photos of 1945 — the little boy would not run off to play and frolic with the other boys and girls. He could not run or fool around much; a blow to his knee had left him nearly a little invalid.

His mother had taken him to a doctor, one Dr. Matos, who did all he could to save young José Carlos from invalidity. But he was left with a stiff, shrunken leg incapable of movement, and the boy was marked for the rest of his life. Another doctor, the French surgeon Dr. Larré, would later step in to treat the boy. José Carlos would spend several months immobile in a bed in the “Maison de santé,” a clinic established in Lima through French charity. His martyrdom began very early, at seven years old. Since then, he has known the stench of chloroform, the cold whiteness of hospital rooms, the painful prodding of doctors’ hands; immobility, loneliness, silence. He learns to spot, in his mother’s face, the particulars of his illness, to guess, by the tone of her voice, the curse of his malady. His mother, who has to work, cannot go to see him often, and he passes the hours alone in his bed, waiting, suffering, learning to be quiet, to bear his illness. But what he cannot bear is the nauseating stench of chloroform, and one day, when the doctor is preparing to make a surgical intervention — how many times the scalpel will plunge into his poor knee — he asks them not to put him to sleep. He bravely stretches out his leg on the operating table, like a man who does not mind suffering. He is nine years old.

But while this young boy cannot play and fool around, he can, on the other hand, find happiness and pleasure in books. Not many books are available to him; books are expensive and his mother is poor. His clear and lively intelligence quickly absorbs books — at least the few volumes he has on hand. He understands and savors them. The world of letters has opened for him, wide, cordial and friendly, and the sick boy, who frequents hospitals, finds in books his most constant and loyal companions.

José Carlos Mariátegui is born in Lima on June 14, 1895. It is the year of Piérola’s revolution. His father, Francisco Mariátegui, was employed by the High Court of Auditors. Through his father, José Carlos Mariátegui is descended from an illustrious figure in Peruvian history: Francisco Javier Mariátegui, who was secretary of the first Constituent Congress of Peru, tribune, journalist and writer.

His mother, Amalia La Chita, belonged to a family from Huacho province. A mestiza of pitch black eyes, aquiline nose, olive complexion, she transmitted to José Carlos the traits peculiar to the mestizos of the Peruvian coast. In José Carlos, the mental agility and grace of the old race which populated the coastal regions of Peru would be reborn, and the energy, will and tenacity of the Basque race — Mariátegui is a Basque name — would merge with this finesse, wit and agility of the people of the Chancay valley, thus forming the strong and delicate spiritual physiognomy of José Carlos Mariátegui.

This man, sometimes branded as “Europeanizing,” was among the most thoroughly Peruvian to be found; he descended, through his father, from a tribune and politician of the early years of our Independence and, through his mother, from a race older than the Incas, one whose origin is shrouded in the enchantment of myth and legend. José Carlos was a mestizo — like Garcilaso, Peru’s first writer of prose — in whom were fused the blood of the conquistadors and the primitive inhabitants of ancient Peru.

Three siblings, Julio César, Guillermina and Amanda round out the family. Amanda dies very young. Their father is transferred to the North, and the children, still young infants, will not see him again. It falls to their mother to bring up the children on her own. Because José Carlos is sickly, they will go to Huacho, where she has family, and whose invigorating atmosphere offers smiling gardens and a countryside with abundant resources for material life. José Carlos enters a tiny school, and in that school, he receives the blow on the knee which is believed to be the origin of his illness. After a time they will be forced to return to Lima to get the boy more effective treatment.

The Mariátegui household is a poor, nearly destitute one. There has been no news from their father. Their mother fights to support her children; bent over the sewing machine, she works on suits and dresses. As the sun begins to set, she sets out to deliver the day’s work to her clients. It sometimes falls to José Carlos to prepare the supper’s hot chocolate. Of course, he is not at all suited for such household tasks. He nearly spills the chocolate and scalds himself with the hot liquid. Tragedy of a poor boy without any servants to attend to him.

Amalia could not afford secondary school for her children, so when he turns fifteen, José Carlos starts working to help support his family.

What did this dark and fragile teenager, with such helter-skelter bearing and such piercing, slightly sad eyes, do for work? What could he do, this frail-looking boy, so lacking in physicality, but so brimming with spiritual energy? The newspaper, the press with its machines that spread thought to the city’s streets and corners, the workshop lit day and night by artificial light, where workers compose and assemble columns and pages with ink-stained hands. This fourteen year-old boy named José Carlos will go there, to the press, to work, to face off with life, to become a man, and learn the profession of a journalist.

Like a bullfighter entering the arena, he enters the the office of La Prensa, led by Alberto Ulloa.