On his return to Lima, Toño Azpilcueta felt the urge to see Toni Lagarde and Lala Solórzano, to have lunch with them and talk about his project. He knew they went out for a walk in their neighborhood every afternoon. They were getting on in years—they must have been around ninety—but they still hadn’t lost the habit.
Their conversation began on the topic of Toni’s reading. Since his retirement, he’d developed a near-obsession with the history of Peru, and had devoured books by the masters in the field, such as Porras Barrenechea, Jorge Basadre, and Luis E. Valcárcel. These men had come to life in his head, the Hispanists fighting the indigenists, and he still wasn’t sure which side he was on. When he cracked open a book by José de la Riva Agüero and fell prey to the enchantments of his prose, with its fin-de-siècle flourishes, he told himself he was a Hispanist, but when he turned to authors from Cuzco, above all Uriel García, he became an incurable indigenist. His ideological changefulness amused him, but it got on everyone else’s nerves.
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