Mr. Rector of the Agrarian University and Students:
I am leaving you an envelope containing documents that explain the reasons for the decision I have made:
We professors and students have a common bond that cannot be invalidated even by unilateral denial of any one of us. This bond exists, even when it is denied: we are members of a corporation created for higher education and research. I invoke that bond or take it into account to do something here considered atrocious: suicide. Students and professors have an intellectual bond with me that is supposed and conceived to be generous and not endearing. In this way they will receive my body as if it had fallen in a friendly field, which belongs to them, and they will know how to tolerate this fact without sharp feelings but with indulgence.
They will welcome me into Our House, they will take care of my body and accompany it to the place where it must remain definitively. This act considered atrocious I cannot and should not do in my private house. My House for all my ages is this: the University. Everything I have done while I have had the energy belongs to the unlimited field of the University and, above all, to the selflessness and devotion to Peru and to the human being that drove me to work. I mention this argument for the only time. I do so, so that you will excuse me and accompany me without any anguish but with the greatest possible faith in our country and its people, in the University that I am sure inspires our passions, but above all our decision to work for the liberation of the artificial limitations that still impede the free flight of human capacity, especially in the Peruvian man.
I believe I have fulfilled my obligations with a certain sense of responsibility, as an employee, as a civil servant, as a teacher and as a writer. I am retiring now because I feel, I have verified, that I no longer have the energy and illumination to continue working, that is, to justify life. As age and prestige increase, so do responsibilities and the importance of these responsibilities, and if the fire of the spirit is not maintained and lucidity begins, on the contrary, to weaken, I personally believe that there is no other path to choose, honestly, than retirement. And many, hopefully all colleagues and students, justify and understand that for some, retirement at home is worse than death. I have dedicated this month of November to calculating my strength to discover if the last two tasks that involved my life could be carried out given the exhaustion that I have suffered for some years. No. I do not have the strength to direct the compilation of oral Quechua literature, much less to undertake it, but with Dr. Valle Riestra, Director of Research, it was agreed that I could carry out this task according to the plan that I have presented.
Please write to the Einaudi Publishing House in Turin, which accepted my proposal to publish a 600-page volume of Quechua myths and narratives. Our University can undertake and fulfill this urgent and almost agonizing task. You can do this if you hire, first, with my salary that will remain available and is in the budget, Alejandro Ortiz Recamere, my former disciple and distinguished student of Levi-Strauss for four years and appoint him later.
He has prepared himself as seriously as possible for this work and can form, with Dr. Alfredo Torero, a team of the highest level. I believe that the Einaudi Publishing House will accept my replacement by this team that would represent the University. As for the rest, it is set out in my letter to Lazada and in the "Last Diary" of my almost unfinished novel, "El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo", documents that I attach to this manuscript.
I declare that I have been treated with generosity at the Agrarian University and I regret that it has been the institution that I have served the most limitedly due to circumstances beyond my control. Here, at the Agrarian University, I was a member of a Faculty Council and I was able to verify how fruitful and necessary the intervention of the students is in the government of the University. I witnessed how fanatical and somewhat brutal student delegates were won over by common sense and the university spirit when the professors, instead of reacting only with indignation, did so with the greatest serenity, energy and intelligence. Unfortunately, I no longer have personal experience of what happened during the last thirteen months that I have been absent, but I believe that perhaps the changes have been so radical. I hope, I believe, that the University will never be destroyed; that from the current crisis it will rise more perfected and with greater lucidity and energy until it fulfills its mission.
Crises are resolved by improving the health of the living and never before has the University represented more or so profoundly the life of Peru. A people is not mortal and Peru is a body charged with powerful, burning wisdom of life, impatient to be realized; the University must guide it with lucidity, "without anger" as Inkari would have said, and the students are not attacked with rage anywhere, but by impatient generosity, and the true teachers act with wise and patient generosity. Not anger!
Forgive me these posthumous reflections. I have lived attentive to the heartbeat of our country. Forgive me for having chosen this House to pass, somewhat unpleasantly, to dismissal. If possible, accompany me in harmony of forces that, however contrary they may be, in the University and perhaps only in it, can nourish knowledge."
La Molina, Nov. 27, 1969
