A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (25 page)

We agreed to hold elections within the Movement before the national ones. This decision impressed many of our members as being an imprudent one, which was going to divert both our resources and our energies and serve as an excuse for squabbles inside the Movement, when what we ought to be doing was concentrate on fighting against our adversaries now that we were going into the final stretch of the campaign. I was one of those who defended the idea of these internal elections. It was my belief that they would serve to democratize many committees in the provinces, which thanks to these elections would free themselves of the entrenched local political bosses and emerge from them much stronger, with genuine representatives from the rank and file.

But I would venture the guess that in two-thirds of the provinces the caciques managed to rig the election procedures and get themselves elected handily. The clever tactics they used were technically unobjectionable. They published or spread word of the time limits for the registration of candidates or the date of the election in such a way that it was only their partisans who found out about them, or else they had the list of members drawn up in such a way that their potential adversaries were not registered to vote or were recorded as having registered after the date that had been set as the limit to participate in the elections. The head of our national committee on electoral affairs, Alberto Massa—an irresistibly humorous member of the political committee whom all the other members could hardly wait to hear ask for the floor because his remarks were always sparklingly witty and made us roar with laughter—on whose head there had rained down the condemnations, protests, and criticisms of the victims of such maneuvers, left us openmouthed with astonishment at the ruses and the cunning tricks that he had been learning of.

We did what we could to undo the chicanery. We declared null and void the elections in those provinces where the number of voters had been suspiciously low, and passed judgment on the internecine accusations wherever it was possible to do so. But in other cases—the national elections were already upon us—we were obliged to resign ourselves to recognizing certain committees of questionable legitimacy in the interior of the country.

In Lima it was different. The elections for the secretariat of the
departamento
, which Rafael Rey’s list was to win, were carefully planned and it was possible to avoid or to stop any dirty tricks in time. I made the rounds of the districts on election day, and it was exciting to see the long lines of members of the Freedom Movement waiting outside on the street to vote. But the one who had been Rey’s opposing candidate on our ticket—Enrique Fuster—could not bear having been defeated: he resigned from Libertad, attacked us in the government-controlled press and turned up a few months later as a candidate for a congressional seat on the list of a rival party.

The new departmental committee in Lima went on expanding the work of organizing all through the capital and, aided by the Solidarity program, in the young towns as well, from which, in the last months of 1989 and the first of 1990, Patricia and I had received invitations nearly every day to inaugurate new committees. We went every time we could. At this point my obligations began at seven or eight in the morning and ended after midnight.

In those inaugurations one rule was observed without exception: the more humble the neighborhood, the more elaborate the ceremony. Peru is an “old country,” as the novelist José María Arguedas reminded his readers, and nothing betrays how far back in time the Peruvian psyche goes as does the people’s love of ritual, form, ceremony. There was always a very colorful speakers’ platform, with flowers, little flags, noisemakers, paper garlands hanging from the walls and ceilings, and a table with things to eat and drink after the official ceremony. There was invariably a group of musicians and sometimes folk dancers, from the mountains and the coast. The parish priest never failed to show up, to sprinkle holy water about and bless the local headquarters (which might well be a crude structure made of reeds and rush matting in the middle of nowhere) and a crowd dressed in vivid colors, wearing what were obviously their very best clothes, as for a wedding or a baptism. The national anthem had to be sung at the beginning and the theme song of Libertad at the end. And in between the crowd had to listen to a great many speeches. For every last member of the directorate—the district secretary general, along with the heads of the district committees on basic principles and culture, on women’s initiatives, on youth programs, on voting registration, on social issues, et cetera, et cetera—had to speak, so that no one would feel left out. The ceremony went on and on—seemingly forever. And afterward a document in baroque legalese, complete with a great many seals, had to be signed, bearing witness to the fact that the ceremony had taken place, and anointing and sanctifying it. And then came the show, folk music and dances,
huaynitos
from the high country,
marineras
from Trujillo, black dances from Chincha,
pasillos
from Piura. Though I begged, ordered, pleaded—explaining that with such grand and glorious activities the whole campaign schedule went to hell—I very seldom managed to get them to make these inaugurations any shorter, or to beg off from the picture taking and the autograph sessions, or of course to get out of being the target of handfuls of
pica-pica
, a demoniacal powder that worked its way all over my body and into my most hidden recesses and made me itch like crazy. Despite all that, it was hard not to be won over by the extraordinary warmth and the unrestrained emotionalism of these popular sectors, so different in that respect from middle- and upper-class Peruvians, inhibited and emotionally undemonstrative.

Patricia, whom to my surprise I had already seen giving interviews on television—something she had always refused to do before—and delivering speeches in the young towns, used to ask me, when she saw me come back from these inaugurations covered from head to foot with confetti: “Do you still remember that
once upon a time
you were a writer?”

If, of the fifty-five years that I have lived, I were allowed to relive just one, I would choose the one I spent in Piura, at Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s, doing my final year of secondary studies at the Colegio San Miguel and working at
La Industria
. Everything that happened to me there, between April and December 1952, kept me in a state of intellectual enthusiasm and joie de vivre that I have always recalled with nostalgia. Of all those things, the main one was Uncle Lucho.

He was the oldest of my uncles, the one who, after Grandfather Pedro, had been the head of the Llosa tribe, the one to whom everybody went for help and the one whom I had secretly been fondest of, ever since I possessed the faculty of reason, there, in Cochabamba, when he made me the happiest creature in the world by taking me to swimming pools where I learned to swim.

The family was proud of Uncle Lucho. My grandparents and Auntie Mamaé told how, in Arequipa, he had won the prize for excellence, every year, at the Jesuit school, and Granny dug up his report cards to show us the outstanding grades he received when he graduated. But Uncle Lucho hadn’t been able to pursue the career in which, with his talent, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would have achieved all sorts of triumphs, because his being such a good-looking young man and being such a success with the ladies was his downfall. When he was still a youth, about to enter the university, he got one of his girl cousins pregnant, and the scandal, in serene and straitlaced Arequipa, forced him to go off to Lima until the family calmed down. The mere fact of his return caused another scandal, when, while still scarcely past adolescence, he married Mary, a woman from Arequipa twenty years older than he was. The couple had to leave the horror-stricken city and go off to Chile, where Uncle Lucho opened a bookstore and went on with his adventures as a Don Juan, which finally ruined his precocious marriage.

Once separated from his wife, he journeyed to Cochabamba, to his grandparents’. Among my early memories are those of his handsome presence—like a movie actor’s—and of the jokes and anecdotes that were told at the big family dinner table on Sundays concerning the conquests and gallantries of Uncle Lucho, who, from that time on, helped me to do my homework and gave me extra classes in math. Then he left to work in Santa Cruz, first with my grandfather on the Saipina hacienda and then on his own as the representative for various firms and products, among them Pommery, the champagne. Santa Cruz has the reputation of being the place in Bolivia with the prettiest women, and Uncle Lucho always said that he spent all the money he made in his business dealings there on Pommery champagne, which he sold to himself so as to court the beauties of Santa Cruz. He often came to Cochabamba and his arrivals brought a great tidal wave of energy into the house on Ladislao Cabrera. Of all the comings and goings in that family, I was most delighted by his visits, because even though I loved all my uncles dearly, Uncle Lucho was the one who seemed to me to be my real papa.

He finally settled down and married Aunt Olga. They went off to live in Santa Cruz, where legend has it that one of Uncle Lucho’s spiteful sweethearts from the town, a beautiful woman also named Olga, came on horseback one afternoon to shoot five bullets at Aunt Olga’s windows for having monopolized—in theory at least—such a choice catch. My predilection for Uncle Lucho was owed not only to how affectionate he was with me, but also to the aura of adventure, of life in perpetual renewal, that surrounded him. Ever since then I have felt a fascination for people who appear to have stepped out of novels, the ones who have made a reality of Chocano’s line of verse: “I want my life to be a torrential stream…”

Uncle Lucho spent his life changing jobs, trying his hand at all sorts of businesses, always unsatisfied with what he was doing, and although most of the time what he tried turned out badly, there is no doubt that he was never bored. The last year we were in Bolivia, he was smuggling rubber into Argentina. It was an undertaking that the Bolivian government, outwardly, tried to wipe out but secretly encouraged, since it was a good source of foreign currency for the country. Argentina, the victim of an international embargo because of its favorable stance toward the Axis during the war, paid a price equal to its weight in gold for this product from the Amazon jungles—whether India or gum rubber. I remember having gone with Uncle Lucho to some warehouses in Cochabamba where the rubber, before being hidden in the trucks that would take it to the border, had to be sprinkled with talcum powder to mask its odor, and having felt a sinful excitement when I too was allowed to throw a few handfuls of talcum onto the forbidden product. Shortly before the end of the war, one of Uncle Lucho’s convoys was confiscated at the border, and he and his partners lost their shirts. Just in time for him and Aunt Olga—and their two little daughters, Wanda and Patricia—to come settle in Piura with my grandparents.

Once arrived there, Uncle Lucho had worked for several years for the Romero Company, in a car distributorship, but in 1952, when I went to live with him, he was a farmer. He had rented the San José rural holding, on the banks of the Chira River, on which he grew cotton. San José was between Paita and Sullana, some two hours’ journey from Piura by car, and I often went out there with him, in the two or three trips a week that he made, in a rickety black truck, to oversee the irrigation, the spraying of pesticides, or the clearing of the land. As he spoke with the farmhands, I rode horseback, swam in the irrigation ditch, and invented stories about earth-shaking passions between young landowners and peasant girls who picked cotton. (I remember having written a long story of this sort to which I gave the elegantly euphuistic title “La zagala” [“The Shepherdess”].)

Uncle Lucho was very fond of reading and as a young man had written poetry. (Later on, at the university, I learned through professors who had been his friends in his youth, in Arequipa—Augusto Tamayo Vargas, Emilio Champion, and Miguel Ángel Ugarte Chamorro, for instance—that in those days all his intimate friends were convinced that his vocation was to be an intellectual.) I still remember some of his verses, in particular a sonnet, in which he compared a lady’s beautiful moral qualities to the beads of a necklace, and in our conversations during that year in Piura, when I spoke to him of my vocation and told him that I wanted to be a writer even if I starved to death, because literature was the best thing there was in the world, he used to recite that sonnet to me, as he encouraged me to follow my literary inclinations without giving a thought to the consequences, because—it is a lesson that I learned and have tried to transmit to my children—the worst misfortune that can befall a man is to spend his life doing things that he doesn’t like to do instead of those that he would have liked to do.

Uncle Lucho listened to me read aloud to him
La huida del inca
, and many poems and short stories, offering me certain criticisms at times—exuberance was my major defect—but tactfully, so as not to hurt my feelings as a novice writer.

Aunt Olga had fixed up a room for me at the back of the little patio of their tiny house on the Calle Tacna, just a little way away from its intersection with the Avenida Sánchez Cerro, opposite the Plaza Merino, where my brand-new school, San Miguel, was located. The house occupied the lower floors of an old building, and consisted of a small living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms, plus the bathrooms and bedrooms for the household help. My arrival wrecked the orderly household, which had grown—besides Wanda and Patricia, nine and seven years old, Lucho had been born and was two years old by then—and the three cousins had to be jammed together in one bedroom so that I could have my own, all to myself. In it, on a couple of shelves, were Uncle Lucho’s books, old volumes published by Espasa-Calpe, editions of classics put out by Ateneo, and, above all, the complete collection of the Biblioteca Contemporánea, published by Losada, some thirty or forty books of novels, essays, poetry, and theater that I am certain I read from beginning to end, in that year of voracious reading. Among Uncle Lucho’s books, I found an autobiography, published by Diana, a Mexico City publishing house, that kept me awake for many nights and gave me a violent political jolt:
Out of the Night
, by Jan Valtin. Its author had been a German Communist, in the Nazi era, and his autobiography, full of episodes of clandestine militancy, of sacrifices of fates and fortunes to the cause of revolution, and of hideous abuses was, to me, a detonating device, something that for the first time gave me pause and made me think about justice, political action, revolution. Although, at the end of the book, Valtin severely criticized the Communist Party, which sacrificed his wife and dealt with him in the most cynical way, I remember having finished the book feeling great admiration for those lay saints who, despite the risk of being tortured, decapitated, or condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the underground cells of the Nazis, dedicated their lives to fighting for socialism.

Since the school was just a few meters from the house—all I had to do was cross the Plaza Merino to get to it—I got up out of bed as late as possible, dressed in a mad rush, and raced off when they were already blowing the whistle for the beginning of classes. But Aunt Olga refused to let me skip breakfast and would send the maid to San Miguel with a cup of milk and a slice of buttered bread for me. I don’t know how many times I had to go through the embarrassing experience of seeing the head supervisor, “el Diablo”—“the Devil”—come into the classroom just after the first morning lesson had started, to summon me: “Vargas Llosa, Mario! To the door, to have his breakfast!” After my three months as a night-owl reporter on
La Crónica
and a steady customer of brothels, I had gone back to being a youngster with a family.

I didn’t regret it. I felt happy that Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho pampered me, and that at the same time they treated me like a grownup, giving me complete freedom to go out at night, or stay home reading until all hours, something that I often did. For that reason it took a superhuman effort on my part to get up in time for school. Aunt Olga signed blank cards for me, so that I could invent excuses myself for being late. But since I turned them in too often, Wanda and Patricia were given the responsibility for waking me up each morning. Wandita did so gently; her younger sister, Patricia, took advantage of this chance to give free rein to her wicked instincts and had no compunction about throwing a glass of water all over me. She was a little seven-year-old demon hidden behind a cute turned-up nose, flashing eyes, and curly hair. Those glasses of cold water she poured on top of me became a nightmare and I awaited them, still half asleep, with anticipated shivers. Stunned and startled by the sudden dash of cold water, I would throw the pillow at her in fury, but she would answer me with a great burst of laughter too big to have come out of her semi-skeletal little body. Her bad behavior beat all the records of family tradition, including my own. When something wasn’t to her liking, Cousin Patricia was capable of crying and stamping her feet for hours on end, until her tantrums infuriated Uncle Lucho, whom I once observed putting her under the shower fully dressed, to see if that would make her stop screaming. At a certain period when she slept in my room, I took it into my head to write her a poem, and she learned it by heart and used to fill me with embarrassment by reciting it in front of Aunt Olga’s friends, lingering over each word and giving it gelatinous accents so that it would sound even worse:

At times, I gave her a quick pinch or pulled her ears, whereupon she would kick up a fuss and begin howling as though she were being skinned alive, and in order that Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga wouldn’t believe I’d been mistreating her, I had to placate her by pleading with her or putting on a clown act. She used to exact a price for the deal: “Either you buy me a cup of chocolate or I’ll go on screaming…”

San Miguel de Piura was opposite the Salesian school, but unlike it, it didn’t have a roomy and comfortable building; it was in an old house made of reeds and clay with a corrugated zinc roof, not at all suited to its needs. But San Miguel, thanks to the efforts of its headmaster—Dr. Marroquín, to whom I gave so many headaches—was a splendid school. In it many youngsters from humble Piura families—from La Mangachería, from La Gallinacera and other districts on the outskirts of the city—attended classes with youngsters from the middle class and even from the top families of Piura, who were enrolled there either because the priests of the Salesian school wouldn’t put up with them any longer or because they were attracted by the good teachers at San Miguel. Dr. Marroquín had managed to persuade distinguished professionals of the city to come to the school to give classes—above all to pupils in my year, the last one before graduation—and thanks to this I had the good luck, for instance, to study political economy with Dr. Guillermo Gulman. It was this course, I believe, and also Uncle Lucho’s advice, that made me make up my mind to study, later on at the university, for degrees in Letters and in Law. But in those classes of Dr. Gulman’s, the law seemed much more profound and important than something that had to do merely with lawsuits: it was an open door to philosophy, to economics, to all the social sciences.