A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (32 page)

Simplifications, however, must be avoided in this respect as well. The defense of human rights is one of the weapons that extremism makes most effective use of in order to paralyze governments that it wishes to overthrow, manipulating well-intentioned but ingenuous persons and institutions. In the course of the campaign I had several meetings with officers of the army and the navy, who informed me in detail about the state of the revolutionary war in Peru. And that was how I learned of the extremely difficult, not to say impossible, conditions in which soldiers and sailors are obliged to carry on that war, owing to the lack of adequate training and equipment, and owing to the demoralization that the economic crisis was causing in the ranks. I remember a conversation, in Andahuaylas, with a young army lieutenant who had just come back from a scouting expedition in the area of Cangallo and Vilcashuamán. His men, he explained to me, had enough ammunition for just one engagement. In a second skirmish with the insurgents, they no longer had the means to shoot back. As for provisions, they had none with them at all. They had to hustle up their own food as best they could. “You probably think we were obliged to pay the peasants for that grub, right, Doctor Vargas? What with? I haven’t received my pay for two months now. And what I earn [less than a hundred dollars a month] doesn’t even go far enough to support my mother back in Jaén. The extra money handed out to soldiers who do really tough jobs gives them enough to buy smokes. Kindly explain to me how we can get hold of enough cash to pay for what we eat when we go out on patrol.”

By 1989, the inflation of the past few years had reduced the real pay of the military, as well as of all the other employees of the state, to a third of what it had been in 1985. The detachments sent out to fight subversion suffered a similar decrease. The dejection and the frustration of officers and troops connected to the counterinsurgency campaign were enormous. In the barracks, at the bases, the lack of spare parts had put trucks, helicopters, jeeps, and armaments of every sort out of service. There was, furthermore, a tacit rivalry between the national police and the armed forces. The former considered themselves discriminated against by the latter, and soldiers and sailors accused the Civil Guard of selling their weapons to drug traffickers and terrorists, who were allies in the valley of the Huallaga. And both forces of order recognized that the terrible lack of resources had dramatically increased corruption in the military institutions, to neither a greater nor a lesser degree than in public administration.

Only a determined participation of civil society alongside the forces of order could reverse that tendency whereby, since the time it first made its dramatic appearance in 1979 up until the present, it is subversion that is winning points and the democratic system of government that is losing them. My idea was that, as in Israel, civilians should organize to protect work centers, cooperatives and communes, public services, and means of communication, and that all of this should be done in collaboration with the armed forces, though under the direction of the civil authorities. This close collaboration would serve—as had been the case in Israel, where there are doubtless many things to criticize but also others to imitate, among the latter the relationship that exists between their armed forces and civil society—not to militarize society but to “civilize” the police and the military, thereby closing the breach caused by their lack of acquaintance with each other, if not the outright antagonism, which in Peru, as in other countries of Latin America, characterizes the relationship between military and civilian life. In our program for civil peace, prepared by a committee headed by an attorney—Amalia Ortiz de Zevallos—and made up of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, social workers, jurists, and military officers, the activity of the patrols was regarded as part of a multiple process, aimed at the recovery by civil society of the emergency area placed under military control. At the same time that the exceptional emergency laws would be abrogated in the area and the patrols would begin to function, flying brigades of judges, doctors, social workers, organizers of agrarian programs, and teachers would go there, so that a peasant would have additional reasons to combat terrorism besides that of mere survival. I had decided, moreover, that in case I were elected, I would go to the emergency area to live, more or less permanently, in order to direct from there the civilian mobilization against terrorism.

At nightfall on January 19, 1989, a man who lived in Los Jazmines, a slum neighborhood adjoining the airport of the city of Pucallpa, saw two strangers come out of a patch of underbrush and run, carrying something, to the landing strip where the planes brake to a stop and make a turn to taxi to the disembarkation area. One of the two scheduled flights from Lima had just landed. The two strangers, seeing that the recent arrival was a commercial AeroPerú flight, went back to the thicket. The man who lived in Los Jazmines ran to alert the other people who lived in the area, whose residents had formed a patrol. A group of these civilian patrolmen, armed with clubs and machetes, went to check on what the two strangers were doing out there next to the runway. The patrol surrounded them, questioned them, and were about to take them to the police station when the two men drew revolvers and fired point-blank at the civilian patrolmen. They perforated Sergio Pasavi’s intestines in six places; they shattered José Vásquez Dávila’s femur; they fractured the collarbone of Humberto Jacobo the barber and wounded Víctor Ravello Cruz in the lumbar area. In the ensuing chaos, the strangers got away. But they left behind a bomb that weighed two kilos, a so-called Russian cheese, which contained dynamite, aluminum, nails, buckshot, bits of metal, and a short fuse. They were going to throw this bomb at the Faucett plane, which leaves Lima at the same time as the AeroPerú flight, but was two hours late that day. I was coming in on that plane, to set up the Libertad committee of Pucallpa, visit the Ucayali area, and preside over a political rally at the Teatro Rex in the city.

The civilian patrol brought their wounded to the regional hospital and made a deposition concerning the attempted bombing to the representative chief of police, a major in the Civil Guard (the chief of police had gone off to Lima), to whom they handed over the bomb. When they sought me out to tell me about what had happened, I rushed to the hospital to visit the wounded. What a horrible sight! Patients piled one atop the other, sharing beds, in rooms swarming with flies, and nurses and doctors working miracles to care for their patients, operate, heal, without medicine, without equipment, lacking the most basic sanitary conditions. After taking steps to see that the two civilian patrolmen in the most serious condition were transferred to Lima by Solidarity, I went to the police. One of the attackers, Hidalgo Soria, seventeen years old, had been captured, and according to the befuddled officer of the Civil Guard who took care of me, had confessed that he belonged to the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and admitted that the intended target of the bomb had been my plane. But like so many others, the suspect never got as far as the courts. Every time that the press tried to find out what had become of him, the authorities in Pucallpa put them off with evasive answers, and one day they announced that the judge had let him go free because he was a minor.

For Christmas 1989 the Solidarity program organized a show on December 23 in the Alianza Lima stadium, with the participation of film, radio, and TV artists, which was attended by some 35,000 people. Shortly after the performance had begun, it was announced over the radio that a bomb had been found in my house and that the bomb demolition squad of the Civil Guard had managed to defuse it and remove it, obliging my mother and my in-laws, the secretaries and the servants to leave the house. The fact that this bomb was found just as the show at the stadium began seemed suspect to us, a coincidence no doubt meant to spoil the celebration by forcing us to leave, and because we smelled a rat Patricia and my children and I deliberately remained on the platform until the Christmas festivities were over.
^*
The suspicion that it was not a real attempted bombing but a psychological ploy was further confirmed that night, when we came back home to Barranco and the demolition squad of the Civil Guard assured us that the bomb—discovered by the watchman at a tourism school next door—wasn’t filled with dynamite but with sand.

On November 26, a Sunday, a navy officer, dressed in civvies, came to my house, taking extraordinary precautions. Jorge Salmón, a mutual friend, had arranged for him to speak to me in private, face to face, since all my telephones had been bugged. The officer arrived in a car with one-way glass windows, which drove directly into the garage. He had come to tell me that the office of naval intelligence, to which he belonged, had learned of a secret meeting held in the National Museum, attended by President Alan García, his minister of the interior, Agustín Mantilla—widely held to be the organizer of the counterterrorist gangs—and the congressman Carlos Roca, together with Alberto Kitasono, head of the security units of the APRA, and a high-ranking official of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. And that at this meeting it had been decided to rub me out, along with a group that included my son Álvaro, Enrique Ghersi, and Francisco Belaunde Terry. The assassinations were to take place in such a way that they would appear to be the work of Sendero Luminoso.

The officer had me read the report that the intelligence service had forwarded to the commander in chief of the navy. I asked him how seriously his institution took this report. He shrugged and said that if the river made a noise it was carrying stones along with it, as the saying had it. Through Álvaro, news of this fantastic conspiracy shortly thereafter reached the ears of Jaime Bayly, a young television reporter, who dared to make it public, causing a great furor. The navy denied the existence of such a report.

This was one of the many revelations that I received of attempts on my life and the lives of my family. Some of them were so absurd that they made us burst out laughing. Others were obvious fabrications of the informants, who used them as pretexts in an attempt to get to see me personally. Others, like the anonymous telephone calls, appeared to be psychological maneuvers by Alan García’s followers, intended to demoralize us. And then there were the tips by well-wishers, by people of good will, who in reality knew nothing precise but suspected that I might be killed, and since they didn’t want that to happen, came to talk to me about vague ambushes and mysterious planned attempts on my life because that was their way of begging me to take good care of myself. In the final stage of the campaign this reached such proportions that it became necessary to put a stop to it and I asked Patricia, María del Carmen, and Lucía, who were in charge of my agenda, not to give any more appointments to anyone who wished to discuss “a serious and secret subject having to do with Doctor Vargas’s security.”

I have often been asked whether I was afraid during the campaign. Apprehensive, yes, many times, but more of objects hurled at me, the kind that can be seen coming, than of bullets or bombs. As on that tense night of March 13, 1990, in Casma, when, as I was going up to the speakers’ platform, a group of counterdemonstrators bombarded us from the shadows with stones and eggs, one of which hit Patricia on the forehead and broke. Or that morning in May 1990, in the Tacora district of Lima, when the good head (in both senses) of my friend Enrique Ghersi, who was walking along beside me, stopped the stone that had been hurled at me (all they managed to do to me was douse me in smelly red paint). But terrorism never robbed me of sleep in those three years, nor did it keep me from doing and saying what I wanted to.

I spent the summer of 1953 shut up in my grandparents’ apartment, in the white townhouse on the Calle Porta, studying for the entrance exam to the University of San Marcos, writing a play (it took place on a desert island, with storms), and writing poems to a young neighbor, Madeleine, whose mother, who was French, was the owner of the house. It was another half-romance, not because of my timidity this time but due to the very strict watch kept by Madeleine’s mother on her blond daughter. (Almost thirty years later, one night as I was going into the Teatro Marsano in Lima, where they were giving the first performance of a work of mine, a pretty lady whom I did not recognize blocked my path. With an indescribable smile she handed me one of those same love poems, whose first verse, the only one I dared read, made my face turn as red as a torch.)

We took the examination for admission to the Faculty of Letters in one of the old houses belonging to San Marcos scattered all through the downtown district of Lima, on the Calle de Padre Jerónimo, where a phantasmagoric Institute of Geography did its work. I made two new friends that day, Lea Barba and Rafael Merino, who were candidates for admission as I was, and also shared my passion for reading. Rafo had been enrolled at the Police Academy before deciding to study law. Lea was the daughter of one of the owners of the Negro-Negro, all of them descended from an anarcho-syndicalist leader of the famous workers’ battles in the 1920s. Between one exam and the next, and during the days and weeks of waiting to be summoned to the oral exam, Rafo and Lea and I talked about literature and politics, and I felt rewarded for the long wait by being able to share my anxieties with people my own age. Lea talked so enthusiastically of César Vallejo, some of whose poems she knew by heart, that I began to read him attentively, trying my best to come to like him at least as much as I did Neruda, whom I had read since high school with constant admiration.

We occasionally went with Rafael Merino to the beach, we exchanged books, and I read him short stories that I’d written. But with Lea it was politics above all that we discussed, in a conspiratorial spirit. We confessed that we were enemies of the dictatorship and supporters of revolution and of Marxism. But could there possibly be any Communists left in Peru? Hadn’t Esparza Zañartu killed, jailed, or deported all of them? At the time, Esparza Zañartu occupied the obscure post of administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior, but the whole country knew that that person without a history or a political past, whom General Odría had lured away from his modest wine business to bring him into the government, was the brain behind that security to which the dictatorship owed its power, the man behind the censorship of the press and radio broadcasts, and behind the detention and deportations, and also the one who had put together the network of spies and informers in labor unions, universities, public posts, and the communications media, the one who had kept any effective opposition against the regime from developing.

Nonetheless, the year before, 1952, the University of San Marcos, faithful to its tradition of rebellion, had defied Odría. On the pretext that they were reclaiming their rights as university students, those at San Marcos had demanded the resignation of the rector, Pedro Dulanto, gone out on strike, and occupied the university’s traditionally inviolable inner grounds, which the police entered to drive them out. Almost all the leaders of the strike were in jail or had been deported. Lea knew many details about what had happened, about the debates in the San Marcos Federation and its allied chapters and the underground battles between Apristas and Communists (both of them groups persecuted by the government but each other’s merciless enemies), to which I listened openmouthed.

Lea was the first girl whose fast friend I became who had not been brought up, as had my girlfriends from the
barrio
in Miraflores, to get married as soon as possible and be a good housewife. She had an intellectual background and was determined to get into San Marcos, to practice her profession, to stand on her own two feet. While she was intelligent and possessed of a strong personality, she was gentle at the same time, and could be so tenderhearted as to be moved to tears by a story about an incident in someone’s life. I think she was the first one to talk to me about José Carlos Mariátegui, the Marxist ideologue, and the
Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality)
. Even before classes started, we became inseparable. We went to exhibitions, to bookstores, and to the movies—to see French films, of course, in the two art houses downtown that showed them, Le Paris and Biarritz.

On the day I turned up on the Calle Fano to learn the results of the entrance exams, the minute they discovered my name on the list of those who had passed, a group lying in wait flung itself on me and baptized me. The San Marcos baptism was humane: they gave you a really short crew cut so as to oblige you to shave your head. From the Calle Fano I went with my close-cropped head to buy myself a beret and to a barbershop on La Colmena to get myself sheared almost to the scalp, so that my head looked like a coconut.

I had enrolled at the Alliance Française, so as to learn French. Two of us in my class were males: a young black who was studying chemistry and myself. The twenty or so females—all of them well-brought-up girls from Miraflores and San Isidro—amused themselves at our expense, making fun of our accent in French and playing pranks on us. After a few weeks, the black got fed up with their mockery and gave up coming to class. My shorn head as a San Marcos freshman was, of course, the object of the irreverence and hilarity of those fearsome girl classmates (among them was a Miss Peru). But I enjoyed the classes taught by the wonderful instructor, Madame del Solar, thanks to whom I was able within a few weeks to begin to read in French, with the aid of dictionaries. I spent many blissful hours in the little library of the Alliance, on the Avenida Wilson, peeking into magazines and reading such authors of transparent prose as Gide, Camus, or Saint-Exupéry, who gave me the illusion of having mastered the language of Montaigne.

In order to have a little money, I spoke with Uncle Jorge, the one in the family with the best job. He was the manager of a construction company and he gave me work by the hour to do—making bank deposits, writing letters and other documents, and taking them to government offices—which did not interfere with my classes. In that way I was able to buy cigarettes—I smoked like that proverbial bat, always dark tobacco, Incas at first and later on oval-shaped National Presidents—and to go to the movies. Shortly thereafter I got another, more intellectual job: a writer for
Turismo
magazine. The owner and managing editor was Jorge Holguín de Lavalle (1894–1973), a very fine sketch artist and cartoonist, who had been famous thirty years before, in the big magazines of the 1920s,
Variedades
and
Mundial
. An aristocrat and very poor, a Limeño to the bone, an indefatigable and charming raconteur of traditions, myths, and gossip about the city, Holguín de Lavalle was an absent-minded dreamer who brought out the magazine when he remembered to, or rather, when he had garnered enough ads to pay for printing an issue. The magazine was laid out by him and written from first page to last by him and by the current staff writer. Well-known intellectuals had passed by way of the magazine’s very scanty editorial staff, among them Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and Señor Jorge Holguín de Lavalle, on the day that I went to talk with him, reminded me of this, thereby indicating that, even though the pay would be a paltry sum, my succeeding such illustrious individuals in the job would make up for that fact.

I accepted the job, and from then on, for two years, I wrote half or perhaps three-quarters of the magazine under different pseudonyms (among them the French-sounding Vincent Naxé, with which I signed the drama reviews). Of all that material I remember one text, “En torno a una escultura” (“Concerning a Statue”), written in protest against a barbarous deed committed during the dictatorship by the minister of education, General Zenón Noriega, who ordered the handsome statue of the hero withdrawn from the sculpture group of the monument to Bolognesi (created by the Spaniard Agustín Querol) because his pose did not strike General Zenón as heroic. And he had the original image of Bolognesi—shown at the moment he fell to the ground riddled with bullets—replaced by the grotesque puppet waving a flag that today makes what was once one of the fine monuments of Lima among its ugliest. Holguín de Lavalle was indignant at the mutilation but feared that my article would anger the government and the magazine would be closed down. In the end, he published it and nothing happened. With my salary from
Turismo
, four hundred soles per issue—and the magazine didn’t come out every month, but only every second or even every third month—I could pay for (what days those were and how solid the Peruvian sol was!) subscriptions to two French periodicals, Sartre’s
Les Temps Modernes
and Maurice Nadeau’s
Les Lettres Modernes
, which I went to pick up, every month, at a little downtown office. I was able to live on this income—at my grandparents’ I didn’t pay for either my room or my board—and above all I had free time to read, for San Marcos and, in a very short time, for the revolution.

Classes began late, and with one exception, they were disappointing. San Marcos hadn’t yet fallen into the decadence that in the 1960s and 1970s was little by little to turn it into the caricature of a university, and later on into a bastion of Maoism and even terrorism, but it was no longer even a shadow of what it had been in the 1920s, in the days of the famous generation of the 1919 Conversatorio, its high point as far as the humanities were concerned.

Of that famous generation of the Conversatorio two historians—Jorge Basadre and Raúl Porras Barrenechea—were still at San Marcos, and a few illustrious figures of a previous generation, such as Mariano Iberico in philosophy, or Luis Valcárcel in ethnology. And the Faculty of Medicine, in which Honorio Delgado taught, had as professors the best doctors in Lima. But the atmosphere and the way classes were conducted at the university were neither creative nor demanding. There was a breakdown both of morale and of intellectual standards, still not particularly noticeable, although widespread; professors skipped one class and turned up at the next, and along with some who were competent, others were of a mediocrity that put the students in their classes to sleep. Before entering the Faculty of Law and before becoming a candidate for a degree in literature, a student had to have had two years of general studies, among which there could be several electives. All the ones I chose were literature courses.

The majority of them were given without enthusiasm, by professors who did not know very much or who had lost all interest in teaching. But among these courses I remember one that ranks among the best intellectual experiences I have ever had: Sources of Peruvian History, given by Raúl Porras Barrenechea.

To me, that course, and what stemmed from it, justifies the years I spent at San Marcos. Its subject could not have been more limited or scholarly, since it was not about Peruvian history but about where to study it. But thanks to the wisdom and eloquence of the professor giving it, every lecture was a formidable display of knowledge about the past of Peru and the contradictory versions and interpretations of it that chroniclers, travelers, explorers, literati had offered, in the most diverse collections of correspondence and documents imaginable. Pintsized, potbellied, dressed in mourning—for the death, that year, of his mother—with a very broad forehead, blue eyes boiling over with irony and lapels covered with dandruff, Porras Barrenechea turned into a giant on the little classroom dais and every last one of his words was followed by us with religious devotion. He lectured with consummate elegance, in a pungent and pure Spanish—he had begun his university career teaching the classics of the Golden Age, which he had thoroughly mastered, and traces of this mastery remained in his prose and in the precision and magnificence with which he expressed himself—yet he was not, even remotely, the garrulous professor, an empty-headed wordmonger who listens to himself talk. Porras was a fanatic when it came to exactitude and he was incapable of stating anything about anything that he hadn’t thoroughly checked. His splendid lectures were always documented by his reading from note cards in his minute handwriting, raising them up close to his eyes so as to decipher them. In each one of his classes we had the sensation that we were hearing something not to be found in any book, the result of personal research. The following year, when I began to work with him, I discovered that, in fact, Porras Barrenechea prepared that course, which he had been giving for so many years, with the rigor of someone about to face a class for the first time.

In my first two years at San Marcos I was someone I hadn’t been in high school: a very diligent student. I studied all my courses thoroughly, even the ones I didn’t like, handing in every one of the assignments given us, and in some cases asking the professor for a supplementary list of books, so as to go read them at the San Marcos library or at the National Library on the Avenida Abancay, in both of which I spent many hours during those first two years. Although they were far from being exemplary—at the National one had to share the reading room with very young schoolchildren who went there to do their homework and turned the place into a madhouse—I acquired there the habit of reading in libraries and I have frequented them ever since, in all the cities I have lived in, and in one of them, the beloved Reading Room of the British Museum, I have even written a good part of my books.

But in none of the courses I took did I read and work as much as for Sources of Peruvian History, dazzled as I was by Porras Barrenechea’s brilliance. After a masterly class on pre-Hispanic myths, I remember having rushed to the library in search of two books that he had cited, and although one of them, by Ernst Cassirer, defeated me almost immediately, the other was one of the most impressive of my readings of 1953: Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
. Porras’s course had such a great influence on me that during those first months at the university I often came to the point of asking myself whether I ought to specialize in history instead of literature, since the former, embodied in Porras Barrenechea, had all the color, the dramatic power, and the creativity of the latter, and seemed more deeply rooted in life.