A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (29 page)

The trip to go meet Uncle Jorge was postponed several times, until finally we took to the road, at the end of December, very early in the morning. Our journey was marked by all sorts of mishaps—having to change a tire on the highway and confronting problems with the motor of the station wagon, which overheated. The meeting with the uncles coming from Lima took place in Chimbote, at that time still a quiet village of fishermen, with the very well-run Hotel de Turistas on the shores of a beach with crystal-clear water. We had a dinner with the whole family—Uncle Jorge’s wife, Aunt Gaby, and Uncle Pedro were there—and the next day, early in the morning, I said goodbye to Uncle Lucho, who was going back to Piura. When I gave him a hug, I burst into tears.

Ever since the rally in the Plaza San Martín, my life had ceased to be private. Never again, until I left Peru after the second round of voting for the presidency, in June 1990, did I enjoy that privacy that I had always guarded so jealously (to the point of remarking that what attracted me about England was the fact that since nobody there ever picked a quarrel with anybody else, people turned into ghosts). Ever since that rally, at any hour of the day or night, there were people at my house, holding meetings, conducting interviews, organizing something or other, or else standing in line to talk with me, with Patricia, or with Álvaro. Reception rooms, hallways, stairways were always occupied by men and women whom I’d often never met and whose reason for being there was utterly unknown to me, reminding me of a line from a poem by Carlos Germán Belli: “This is not your house, you’re a man of the wilds.”

Since María del Carmen, my secretary, soon found herself swamped with work, others came to give her a hand, first Silvana, then Rosi and Lucía and later on two volunteers, Anita and Elena, and a room next to my study had to be built to lodge that woman’s army and make room for paraphernalia that I (who have always written by hand) saw, as if in a dream, being brought into the house, being installed and beginning to work all around me: computers, faxes, photocopy machines, intercoms, typewriters, new telephone lines, rows of filing cabinets. That office, next to the library and a few steps away from our bedroom, operated from early in the morning till late at night, and till dawn in the weeks immediately preceding the election, so that I came to feel that everything about my life, including sleeping and even more intimate matters, had become public.

During the campaign against nationalization we had two bodyguards inside the house, till the day when, sick and tired of running at every turn into armed men with pistols that terrified my mother and Aunt Olga—who were both living with us then—Patricia decided that the security unit would stay outside the house.

The story of the bodyguards included a comic chapter on the night of the Plaza San Martín. With the sudden increase in terrorism and crime—kidnapping had become a flourishing industry—there began to be more and more private surveillance and protection agencies in Peru. One of them, known as “the Israelis,” since its owners or directors came from Israel, was in charge of protecting Hernando de Soto. And he arranged, along with Miguel Cruchaga, to have “the Israelis” guard me at that time. Manuel and Alberto, two ex-Marines, came to my house. They accompanied me to the Plaza San Martín and stood at the foot of the speakers’ platform on August 21. When I finished speaking, I invited the crowd to go with me to the Palace of Justice to hand over to the AP and the PPC members of Congress the list of signatures against nationalization. During the march, Manuel disappeared, swallowed up by the crowd. But Alberto stuck to me like glue amid all the chaos. A station wagon belonging to “the Israelis” was to pick me up on the steps of the neoclassic white building on the Paseo de la República. With Alberto there beside me as always, like my shadow, and the two of us nearly crushed to a pulp by the demonstrators, we went down the stairs. All of a sudden, a black car with the doors open appeared out of nowhere. I was lifted off my feet, shoved inside, and found myself surrounded by armed strangers. I took it for granted that they were “the Israelis.” But then I heard Alberto shouting: “It’s not them, it’s not them!” and saw him struggling. He managed to dive into the car just as it was taking off and landed like a dead weight on top of me and the other occupants. “Is this a kidnapping?” I asked, half jokingly and half seriously. “Our job is to look after you,” the bruiser who was driving answered. And immediately thereafter, he spoke a phrase straight out of a movie into the hand microphone he was holding: “The Jaguar is safe and we’re going to the moon.
Over
.”

It was Óscar Balbi, the head agent of Prosegur, a company that was a competitor of “the Israelis.” My friends Pipo Thorndike and Roberto Dañino had arranged for Prosegur to provide for my security that night, but had forgotten to tell me. They had spoken with Jorge Vega, the chairman of the board of directors of Prosegur, and the entrepreneur Luis Woolcot had paid the expenses (I learned this two years afterward).

A while later, and through arrangements made by Juan Jochamowitz, Prosegur decided to take over the responsibility for the security of my house and my family for the three years of the campaign, without ever asking us for a fee (as a result, the government canceled the contracts it had with Prosegur to guard state enterprises). Óscar Balbi organized the security for all my trips and for the rallies of the Democratic Front and was invariably at my side in the planes, helicopters, trucks, light vans, motorboats, and on the horses that I used in those years to make two complete swings around the whole of Peru. Only once did I see a situation get the better of him: in the late afternoon of September 21, 1988, in the little rural community of Acchupata, in Cajamarca, in the Cumbe mountain range, where the 14,500-foot altitude made him fall off his horse and we had to resuscitate him by giving him oxygen.

I am grateful to him and to all his companions, because they lent me services that there would have been no way to pay for—and ones that are indispensable in a country where political violence has reached the extremes that it has in Peru. But I must say that living under permanent protection is like living in prison, a nightmare for anyone who enjoys his freedom as much as I do.

I could no longer do what I have always liked doing, ever since I was a youngster, in the afternoon after finishing writing: wander about through different parts of town, explore the streets, slip into matinees at those neighborhood movie houses so old they creak and where the fleas eventually drive a person out, climb into jitneys and public buses, with no fixed goal, so as to come to know, little by little, the innermost parts and the people of that heterogeneous labyrinth, so full of contrasts, that is Lima. In recent years I had become known—more for a television program that I put on than for my books—so that it was no longer as easy for me to amble about without attracting attention. But from August 1987 on it was impossible for me to go anywhere without being immediately surrounded by people and applauded or booed. And going through life followed by reporters and in the middle of a ring of bodyguards—at first there were two of them, then four, and finally fifteen or so in the last months—was a spectacle somewhere between a clown act and an annoyance that took away all my pleasure. It is true that my killing schedules left me practically no time for anything unrelated to politics, but even so, in my rare free moments it was unthinkable, for example, for me to go into a bookstore—where I was so besieged I couldn’t do what a person does in such places: browse about among the shelves, leaf through books, turn everything topsy-turvy in the hope of coming across some superb unexpected find—or to a theater, where my appearance gave rise to demonstrations, as happened at a recital by Alicia Maguiña, at the Teatro Municipal, when the audience, on seeing me come in with Patricia, divided into adherents who applauded and adversaries who jeered. In order for me to see a play, José Sanchís Sinisterra’s
Ay, Carmela
, without incident, friends from the Ensayo group seated me, all by myself, in the balcony of the Teatro Británico. I mention these performances because, as I remember, they were the only ones I attended during those years. And as for the movies, something that I’m as fond of as I am of books and the theater, I went to two or three of them at most, and always more or less stealthily (entering after the film had begun and leaving before it was over). The last time—it was at the Cine San Antonio, in Miraflores—Óscar Balbi came to my seat halfway through the movie to get me because they had just thrown a bomb at one of the local headquarters of Libertad and left a watchman with a bullet wound. I went to soccer games two or three times and to a volleyball match too, as well as to bullfights, but these were appearances that were decided on by the campaign directors of the Democratic Front, for the obligatory sessions of “mingling with the crowd.”

The diversions, then, that Patricia and I could allow ourselves consisted of going to the houses of friends for dinner and every once in a while to a restaurant, though we were well aware that this latter would make us feel spied on or like performers in a stage show. I often thought, with shivers running up and down my spine: “I’ve lost my freedom.” If I were president, it would be like that for five more years. And I remember the sense of amazement and the happiness that came over me on June 14, 1990, when, after all that was over, I landed in Paris and even before unpacking any of the suitcases went for a walk down the Boulevard St.-Germain, feeling like an anonymous passerby once again, without escorts, without police details, without being recognized (or nearly so, since all of a sudden, as if by spontaneous generation, there appeared in front of me once more, blocking my way, the ubiquitous, omniscient Juan Cruz, of
El País
, to whom I found it impossible to deny an interview).

Once my political life began, I made a decision: “I’m not going to stop reading or writing for at least a couple of hours every day. Not even if I’m president.” It was only partially a selfish decision. It was also dictated by the conviction that what I wanted to do, as a candidate and as head of the government, I would do better if I kept intact a private, personal space, walled in to keep out politics, a space consisting of ideas, reflections, dreams, and intellectual work.

I kept this promise I’d made to myself only insofar as reading was concerned, although not always the minimum of two hours a day that I’d set myself. As for writing, it was impossible for me. Writing fiction, that is to say. It wasn’t only the lack of time. It was impossible for me to concentrate, to give myself over to the play of imagination, to attain that state of breaking completely away from and suspending everything around me, which is what is so marvelous about writing novels and works for the theater. Preoccupations of the moment, far removed from the realm of pure literature, kept interfering, and there was no way of escaping from the exhausting march of events. Moreover, I never managed to get used to the idea that I was alone, even though it was very early in the morning and the secretaries hadn’t come in yet. It was as if my beloved demons had fled from my study, resentful at my lack of solitude during the rest of the day. It distressed me, and I gave up trying. In those three years, I wrote only a light erotic divertissement
—Elogio de la madrastra
(
In Praise of the Stepmother
)—along with speeches, articles, brief political essays, and a number of forewords for a collection of modern novels published under the Círculo de Lectores imprint.

Having a schedule that permitted so little time for reading made me very exacting: I couldn’t offer myself the luxury of reading as anarchically as I have always been in the habit of doing, and I read only books that I knew were going to hypnotize me. And so I reread certain novels very close to my heart, among them Malraux’s
La Condition humaine
(
Man’s Fate
), Melville’s
Moby Dick
, Faulkner’s
Light in August
, and Borges’s short stories. A bit unnerved at discovering how little intellect—how little intelligence—is involved in the daily round of political tasks, I also made myself read difficult works that forced me to think while I read and to take notes. Ever since
The Open Society and Its Enemies
fell into my hands in 1980, I had promised myself to study Karl Popper. I did so in these three years, every day, early in the morning, before going out for my daily run, when often it was just barely daylight and the quiet of the house reminded me of the prepolitical period of my life.

And at night, before going to sleep, I read poetry—always the classics of the Spanish Golden Age, and usually Góngora. Each time it was a purifying bath, if only for half an hour, to get away from arguments, plots, intrigues, invectives, and be the guest of a perfect world, freed of all contemporaneity, resplendently harmonious, inhabited by all the nymphs and literary villains anyone could wish for and by mythological monsters, who moved about in landscapes refined to quintessences, amid references to Greek and Roman fictions, subtle music, and pure, clean architecture. I had read Góngora since my university years, with rather distant admiration, because his very perfection struck me as just a touch inhuman and his world too cerebral and chimerical. But between 1987 and 1990 how grateful I was to him for being all of that, for having built that baroque enclave outside of time, suspended in the most illustrious heights of intellect and sensibility, emancipated from the ugly, the mean and petty, the mediocre, from all that sordid warp and woof of which daily life is woven for the majority of mortals.

Between the first and the second electoral round—between April 8 and June 10, 1990—I was unable to do my studious hour or hour and a half of reading in the mornings, even though I sat down in my study with a copy of Popper’s
Conjectures and Refutations
or
Objective Knowledge
in my hands. My head was too immersed in the problems, in the tremendous tension of each day, in the news of attempts on people’s lives and of murders—for over a hundred persons with ties to the Democratic Front, district leaders, candidates for national or regional offices, or sympathizers, were assassinated in those two months, humble people, beings no different from others who all over the world are the privileged victims of political terrorism (and also of counterterrorism)—and I had to give up. But not a single day, not even the day of the election, went by without my reading a sonnet of Góngora’s, or a strophe of his
Polifemo
or his
Soledades
or one or another of his ballads or rondelets, and through these verses to feel that, if only for a few minutes, my life became purer. May these present lines stand as evidence of my gratitude toward the great man of Córdoba.