The death of his mother marked César for the rest of his life and became the inspiration of many compositions.11 It’s difficult to emphasize enough the weight of this event on his writings. The mother figure seems to haunt the texts with absence, almost always appearing in spectral form, leading the author to contemplate union from divorce, to view wholeness from the fragment, and to conceive of being from the existential standpoint of orphanhood.
In October 1918 Vallejo rebounded from the tragedy and became romantically involved with a young woman named Otilia Villanueva, who appears to be the subject of many love poems in Trilce. According to Espejo, who was close to Vallejo during those years, the relationship lasted until August 1920. As it turns out, Otilia was the sister-in-law of one of Vallejo’s colleagues at Colegio Barrós, and when she was looking for commitment but he refused to marry her, he was scorned by the administration, since, in the eyes of aristocratic Lima, his failure to formalize the relationship diminished the dignity and social status of the young woman and her family. Vallejo was ultimately forced to resign in May 1919.
Yet, only a couple of months later, César saw his first major publication in print, The Black Heralds, released by Souza Ferreira in Lima on July 23, 1919. This forerunner of literary indigenism received a warm reception for its originality of style and thematic treatments of rural Peruvian life. Vallejo’s satisfaction with the monograph is reflected in two small but revealing documents: a dedicated copy of the book to his “brothers” in Trujillo (July 1919) and a second dedicated copy sent to his father in Santiago.12 The Black Heralds was the crowning achievement of Vallejo’s literary youth, and after its release he lost his innocence, demolishing the limits of Hispanic literature rather than securing a place for his writing within those boundaries.
The sweetness of this literary success, however, didn’t last long, and on August 1, 1920, when Vallejo went to visit his brother in Santiago on the last day of the festival of Saint James, he got caught up in a town feud that had been fueled by the last elections. The general store of Carlos Santa María went up in flames, a bystander was shot, and two police officers were killed. Despite the fact that Vallejo had been helping the subprefect write up the legal report of the shooting, the Santa María family indicted him, Héctor M. Vásquez, Pedro Lozada, and fifteen others. Vallejo fled to Mansiche (on the outskirts of Trujillo), where he stayed with his friend Antenor Orrego. After being pursued for nearly two months, in a letter to Óscar Imaña from October 26, 1920, Vallejo started to recognize what was awaiting him: “Maybe in a few days the case will be solved, and will be solved in my favor. I find it hard to believe. But, maybe …” In that same letter he expressed his plans to travel abroad. On November 6 he was captured and imprisoned in Trujillo Central Jail, where he was held for the next three and a half months. In the dehumanizing conditions of that provincial prison—a dungeon that haunted him for years to come and saturated his next two books with the excruciating anguish of incarceration, the feeling of condemnation, and the imagery of confinement—Vallejo wrote some of his most celebrated experimental poetry.13 On February 26, 1921, with the help of his attorney, Carlos Godoy, in addition to a publicity campaign mounted by students at La Universidad de La Libertad and influential figures like poet Percy Gibson, César was released on bail.
Whether Vallejo was innocent or guilty remains to be proven with certainty, and several important factors must be taken into consideration. As Stephen Hart explains, “Legal accounts show that—despite an adroit campaign mounted by the Trujillo intelligentsia in defense of the poet—Vallejo was directly involved in the events leading up to the destruction of the Santa María premises.” In his reading of El proceso Vallejo by Patrón Candela, Hart reports that the proceedings “indicate that Vallejo was at the front of the crowd that gathered in the main square that afternoon and was heard inciting others to take part in the mayhem. He was seen holding a revolver, and in much of the evidence for the prosecution, he is mentioned as the instigator.”14
This new reading contradicts the traditional claim of his innocence and seems plausible, given Vallejo’s later commitment to social revolution; however, we must be careful not to confuse official records for irrefutable truth, since there’s certainly the possibility of bias in a case like this. For example, in a rural setting like Santiago de Chuco circa 1920, authorities would’ve sought a scapegoat at any cost (especially a bohemian cholo like Vallejo) to appease a member of the mercantile class or send a message to other bothersome miscreants of that irreverent counterculture. Furthermore, Vallejo had already started to garner renown as an emerging poet; so in the eyes of his provincial prosecutors, his move to the capital could’ve been perceived as class betrayal. Vallejo alluded to this prejudice in a letter to Gastón Roger, where he claimed he’d been indicted because he came “from the heartland,” and that in “this provincial environment” there was no way he’d receive a fair trial.
After his 1921 release, Vallejo returned to Lima and was appointed to a teaching position at Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Leaving the prison experience behind him as best he could, he managed to publish a surprising number of important texts in a remarkably brief span. On November 15, 1921, his short story “Beyond Life and Death” won first prize in a competition organized by Entre Nous—a text subsequently published in the magazine Variedades on June 17, 1922, and finally placed in Scales. Then, in October 1922 César delivered a poetry manuscript to Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría in Lima, with a prologue by Antenor Orrego. The book was titled Bronze Skulls and, at the last minute, Vallejo slipped a correction sheet into the galley to change the title to Trilce, a word that he’d invented. Despite the great anticipation, in the months following the book’s publication, as Vallejo himself remarked in a letter to Orrego, “only a handful of young still-unknown writers and several college kids have shuddered at its message.” To put it bluntly, the book initially went unnoticed. Five months later, in March 1923, César delivered another manuscript to the same publisher, this time a collection of prose poems and short stories that had been composed during the same period as the texts of Trilce. This book was titled Scales and—never one to miss out on an opportunity to flaunt his youthful flair and so thematically rhyme this book with its predecessor—these Scales were to be “Melographed by César Vallejo.” Almost immediately after the publication of Scales, Vallejo’s other early prose fiction, Savage Lore, was included in La Novela Peruana, a biweekly edited by Pedro Barrantes Castro in Lima.
By the time this flurry of literary success was outlining an aura around the now thirty-one-year-old, his days in Peru were numbered, and his sights were set on the City of Light. Before he left, he signed on as a correspondent for the magazine El Norte, which his Trujillo friends were about to launch. He communicated with Enrique Casterot, also from Trujillo, who gave him the address of a Peruvian musician who, at that time, was living in Paris and going by the name Alfonso de Silva.15 Vallejo didn’t have the money for a grand European vacation, even if he intended on working while abroad, and he was only able to take the trip thanks to Julio Gálvez (Antenor Orrego’s nephew), who exchanged his own first-class ticket on the steamship Oroya for two third-class tickets, keeping one and giving the other to his friend.16 In the days preceding his departure, Vallejo was visited by his brother Néstor, who said good-bye in Lima. The day before leaving for Europe, César wrote to Carlos Godoy and said that he “would’ve liked to stop in Salaverry” to visit him in person, but the boat unfortunately didn’t pass through that port. He also asked his attorney to oversee the development of the case from August while he was out of the country and to mind the well-being of his family. Joined by the selfless Gálvez, Vallejo boarded the Oroya on June 17, 1923, and headed up the western coast of South America toward the Panama Canal, where the ship was to reach Atlantic waters and take its eastbound course.
* * *
A little less than one month later, on July 13, 1923, to be exact, Vallejo arrived in Paris at 7 a.m. on the express train from La Rochelle. Filled with unreal expectations and a somewhat incomprehensible naivety regarding his personal finances, César tested the waters of Parisian intellectual life. Although
