A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (48 page)

But of all my interviewees, the most picturesque and original one was, by far, Enrique Congrains Martin, who at the time was at the height of his popularity. He was a few years older than I was, blond and fond of sports, but very serious, to the point, I believe, of being impermeable to humor. He had a somewhat disconcerting fixed stare and his whole person exuded energy and action. He had come to literature for purely practical reasons, although that seemed scarcely believable. From an early age he had been a salesman of various products, and rumor had it that he was also the inventor of a special soap to wash saucepans, and that one of the fantastic projects he’d thought up had been to organize a union of domestic cooks who worked in Lima, so as to require, through this entity (he would be pulling the strings), all the housewives of the city to have their kitchenware scrubbed with the soap that he’d invented. Everyone thinks up mad undertakings; Enrique Congrains Martin had the ability—unheard of in Peru—to invariably put into practice the crazy projects that he came up with. From being a soap salesman he went on to be a book salesman, and so one day he decided to write and publish the books he sold himself, convinced that no one would resist this argument: “Buy this book, of which I am the author, from me. Have a good time reading it and help the cause of Peruvian literature.”

That was how he had come to write the collection of short stories
Lima, hora cero (Lima, Zero Hour), Kikuyo
, and most recently the novel
No una, sino muchas muertes (Not One, but Many Dead)
, with which he brought his career as a writer to an end. He published his books and sold them from office to office, from house to house. And nobody could say no to him, because to anyone who told him he didn’t have any money, his reply would be that payment could be made in weekly installments of a few centavos. When I interviewed him, Enrique had dazzled all the Peruvian intellectuals who couldn’t see how he could be, at one and the same time, all the things he was.

And this was only the beginning. As soon as he got to literature he left it behind and went on to become a designer and salesman of peculiar pieces of furniture with three legs, a grower and seller of miniature Japanese trees, and, finally, a clandestine Trotskyite and a conspirator, and therefore thrown in prison. He got out and fathered twins. One day he disappeared and I had no news of him for a long time. Years later I discovered that he was living in Venezuela, where he was the prosperous owner of a speed-reading school, where a method was used that he himself, naturally, had invented.

A couple of months after her return from Chile, Julia became pregnant. The news came as an indescribable shock to me, because I was convinced at the time (was this too an obvious proof of Sartre’s influence on me?) that my vocation might possibly be compatible with marriage, but that it would irremediably founder if children who had to be fed, dressed, and educated entered the picture. Goodbye dreams of going off to France! Goodbye plans to write extra-long novels! How to devote oneself to an activity that didn’t put food on the table and work at things that brought in money to support a family? But Julia was looking forward to having a baby with such high hopes that I was obliged to hide my deep distress, and even to simulate an enthusiasm I didn’t feel at all at the prospect of being a father.

Julia hadn’t had any children during her previous marriage and the doctors had told her that she couldn’t have any, which was a great frustration in her life. This pregnancy was a surprise that overjoyed her. The German woman doctor who saw her gave her a very strict regimen to follow in the first months of her pregnancy, in which she was to move about as little as possible. She obeyed the doctor’s orders with great self-discipline, but after several warning signs, she lost the baby. It was very soon after the beginning of her pregnancy and it did not take long for her to recover from her disappointment.

I believe it was around that time that someone gave us a puppy. He was a lovable mutt, although a bit neurotic, and we named him Batuque—Rumpus. Little and wiggly, he would leap all about to welcome me home and used to jump up onto my lap as I read. But at times he would suddenly be overcome by unexpected fits of bad temper and make a lunge at one of our neighbors in the townhouse on the Calle Porta, the poet and writer María Teresa Llona, who lived by herself, and whose calves, for some reason, attracted and infuriated Batuque. She put up with it graciously, but we often found ourselves very embarrassed.

One day, when I came home at noon, I found Julia bathed in tears. The dogcatchers had taken Batuque to the pound. The men in the van had practically grabbed him out of her arms.

I rushed off to get him at the pound, which was near the Puente del Ejército. I managed to get there in time and rescue poor Batuque, who, the minute they took him out of the cage and I picked him up, pissed and shat all over me and lay trembling in my arms. The spectacle at the pound left me as terrified as he was: two
zambos
(men half Indian and half black) who worked there were beating to death, right in plain sight of the dogs in cages, the animals who had not been reclaimed by their owners after several days had gone by. Driven half out of my mind by what I had seen, I went off with Batuque and sat down in the first cheap little coffeehouse I came across. It was called La Catedral. And it was there that the idea crossed my mind to begin with a scene like that the novel that I would write someday, inspired by Esparza Zañartu and Odría’s dictatorship, which, then in 1956, was gasping its last.

It is a custom that at CADE, the Annual Conference of Executives, the presidential candidates present their plans for governing. The meetings arouse great interest and the explanatory speeches are delivered before audiences full of entrepreneurs, political leaders, government officials, and many journalists.

Of the ten candidates, CADE invited those four of us who, according to the opinion polls, were the only ones in December 1989 who might possibly be elected: the candidates of the Democratic Front, of the APRA, of the United Left, and of the Socialist Alliance. Four months away from the elections, Alberto Fujimori’s name did not turn up in the surveys, and when eventually it did, he was vying for last place with the Prophet Ezequiel Ataucusi Gamonal, the founder of the Israelite Church of the New Universal Pact.

I was impatiently awaiting the chance to present my program, showing the Peruvian people what was new about my candidacy and the drive for reform that inspired it. I was chosen to give the final speech ending the conference, on the afternoon of the second day, after the speeches by Alva Castro and Henry Pease, and the one by Barrantes, who set forth his ideas in the morning of the second day, Saturday, December 2. Speaking last seemed to me to be a good sign. Those chosen to be on the panel with me were a man who was for the Front, Salvador Majluf, the president of the National Association of Industries, and two dignified adversaries: the agrarian technician Manuel Lajo Lazo and the journalist César Lévano, one of the few judicious Marxists in Peru.

Although those in charge of our Plan for Governing had not finished drawing up the program, in the last week of November Lucho Bustamante handed me the draft of a speech setting forth its main features. Performing miracles as far as time was concerned, since those were the days of the public controversy with Alan García regarding the number of government employees, I managed to seclude myself for two whole mornings so as to write the text of my speech,
^*
and on the eve of the CADE conference I met with the directorate of the Plan for Governing for a practice session in answering the predictable objections of the panel and the audience.

After describing the impoverishment of Peru in recent decades and the contribution of the Aprista government to the cataclysm (“Those who, taking Señor Alan García Pérez at his word, as set forth in his speech at this same forum in 1984, invested their entire savings, made a miserable deal: today they have less than 2 percent of their savings left”), I explained our proposal for “saving Peru from mediocrity, from demagoguery, from hunger, from underemployment, and from terror.” From the very start, coming straight to the point, I made the aim of our reforms clear: “We already have political freedom. But Peru has never really tried to follow the path of economic freedom, without which any democracy is imperfect and condemned to poverty…All our efforts will be directed toward turning Peru from the country of proletarians, the unemployed, and the privileged elites that it is today into a country of entrepreneurs, property owners, and citizens equal before the law.”

I promised to take on the task of leading the fight against terrorism and mobilizing civil society, arming peasant patrols and making every effort to have this example of self-defense be imitated in urban and rural centers of production. Civil authorities and institutions would again take control of the emergency zones that had been entrusted to the military.

This step would be a strong one, but one within the law. There must be an end to the violations of human rights committed by the forces of order in their antisubversive campaign: the legitimacy of democracy depended on it. Peasants and humble Peruvians would never aid the government in confronting the terrorists as long as they felt that police and soldiers were riding roughshod over them. In order to demonstrate my administration’s resolve not to tolerate abuses of this sort, I had decided—as I outlined to Ian Martin, the secretary general of Amnesty International, who visited me on May 4, 1990—to appoint a commissioner of human rights, who would have an office in the Presidential Palace. In the following months, after shuffling through many names, I asked Lucho Bustamante to sound out Diego García Sayán, a young attorney who had founded the Andean Committee of Jurists and who, although he had ties to the United Left, seemed capable of carrying out the duties of this post impartially. This commissioner would not be appointed simply for show; he would have powers to follow up on complaints and accusations, to conduct investigations on his own, to initiate court proceedings, to draft projects for informing and educating public opinion, in schools, labor unions, agricultural communes, barracks, and police headquarters.

In addition to this commissioner, there would be another who would be responsible for the national program of privatization, a key reform of the program, that I too wanted to follow closely. Both commissioners would have ministerial rank. For this latter task I had designated Javier Silva Ruete, who at that time was the head of the program for privatization.

The first year would be the most difficult stage, owing to the inevitable recessionary nature of the anti-inflationary policy, the aim of which was to reduce the increase in prices to 10 percent per year. In the next two years—of liberalization and of major reforms—the increase in production, employment, and revenues would be moderate. But from the fourth year on, we would enter a very dynamic period, on a solid foundation, in which employment and revenues would increase. Peru would have begun the takeoff toward freedom accompanied by material well-being.

I explained all the reforms, beginning with the most controversial ones, from the privatization of public enterprises—it would begin with some seventy firms, among them the Banco Continental, the Society Paramonga, the Empresa Minera Tintaya, AeroPerú, Entel Perú, the Compañía de Teléfonos, the Banco Internacional, the Banco Popular, Entur Perú, Popular y Porvenir Compañía de Seguros, EPSEP, Laboratorios Unidos, and the Reaseguradora Peruana, and would continue until the whole of the public sector had been handed over to private hands—until the present number of ministries had been cut in half.

In education, I anticipated a thoroughgoing reform, so that equality of opportunity would at last be possible. Only if poor Peruvian children and young people received a high-level technical or professional education would they have equal status for getting ahead in life along with those children and young people from families with middle and high incomes who could attend private schools and universities. In order to raise the educational level of the poor, it was necessary to reform the programs of study so that they would take into account the cultural, regional, and linguistic heterogeneity of Peruvian society, modernize the training given teachers, pay them good salaries and give them well-equipped schools, with libraries, laboratories, and an adequate infrastructure. Did the impoverished Peruvian state have any way to finance this reform? Of course not. For that, we would have to put an end to the indiscriminate access to a free education. After the third year of secondary school, it would be replaced by a system of scholarships and grants, so that those who were in a position to do so would finance, in whole or in part, their own education. No student who lacked financial resources would be left without a secondary school or a university education; but middle and high income families would contribute to giving the poor the means to acquire an education that would prepare them to emerge from poverty. Parents would participate in the administration of the school centers and in determining the contributions made by each family.

Almost immediately, this proposal was used against us and became one of the most fiery warhorses sent into battle against the Front. Apristas, Socialists, and Communists proclaimed that they would defend “free education” with their lives, maintaining that we wanted to do away with it so that not only having enough to eat and having a job, but also getting an education would be a privilege of the rich alone. And a few days after my speech at CADE, Fernando Belaunde came to my house with a memorandum, reminding me that a free education was a firm plank in the Popular Action campaign platform. They would not abandon it. Populist leaders began to make statements along the same lines. The criticisms of the allied parties assumed such proportions that I called a meeting of all the parties of the Democratic Front in the Freedom Movement in order to discuss this measure. The meeting was a stormy one. In it, León Trahtenberg, the chairman of the committee on education, was relentlessly questioned by the populists Andrés Cardó Franco, Gastón Acurio, and others.

I myself intervened in the argument, on that and other occasions, as the defender of our proposal. It is demagoguery to uphold in principle universal free education, if the result of it is that three children out of four study in schools that lack libraries, laboratories, bathrooms, desks, and blackboards, and often even ceilings and walls, that teachers receive inadequate training and earn starvation wages, and that therefore only the young people of the middle and upper classes—who can afford to pay for good schools and good universities—receive an education that assures them of a successful professional career.

In my conversation with Belaunde I made myself very clear: I would not yield on this or any other point of our program. I had given in when it came to the municipal elections and the congressional lists, allowing Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party a great many advantages, but when it came to the Plan for Governing I would make no concessions. The one reason why I wanted to be president was to carry out
those
reforms. The educational one was among the most important, since it was aimed at putting an end to one of the most unjust forms of cultural discrimination: that stemming from differences in income.

Finally, although we were unable to keep dissident voices within the alliance from speaking out against this measure from time to time, we managed to get Popular Action, against their will, to put up with it. But our adversaries continued to attack us mercilessly on the subject, with advertising campaigns and pronunciamentos by teachers’ unions and associations in defense of “popular education.” The campaign was such that León Trahtenberg himself sent me his letter of resignation from the committee (I did not accept it) and came to me, at the beginning of January 1990, to propose that we retreat from our position, in view of the negative reactions. With the backing of Lucho Bustamante, I insisted that it was our duty, since the measure seemed to us to be necessary, to go on defending it. But despite my constant preaching about it—from that time on, in all my speeches I brought the subject up—this was one of the reforms that frightened the voters most and made a fair number of them decide to vote against me.

I am writing these lines in August 1991, and I see, by clippings from newspapers in Lima, that the teachers in state schools—380,000 of them—have been on strike for five months, in despair over their living conditions. Pupils in public schools risk missing out on the entire year of studies. And even if they don’t, a person can easily imagine what, with the huge parenthesis of five months of no schooling, this year will mean for these students in academic terms. The bishop of Huaraz states in a magazine that it is a scandal that the average pay of a schoolteacher is scarcely more than a hundred dollars a month, which means that they and their families go hungry. For five months now, because of the strike, all the state schools have been closed, and since the new administration took office the state has not built a single classroom, because of a lack of funds. But education continues to be free and Peruvians should congratulate themselves that the great victory of the people was not cast aside!

This controversy taught me a great deal about the power of ideological myth, which is able to completely replace reality. Because the free public education that my adversaries defended so zealously was nonexistent, a dead letter. For some time, the well-nigh total bankruptcy of the nation’s treasury kept the state from erecting schools, and the immense majority of classrooms that were constructed in marginal districts and young towns to meet the growing demand were built by the people of the neighborhood themselves. And the parents also took over the maintenance, the cleaning, and the repair of the national primary and secondary schools because of the inability of the state to cover these expenses.

Every time I toured a poor neighborhood, in Lima or in the provinces, I visited a number of schools. “Did the government build these classrooms?” “No! We did!” Owing to the economic crisis, it had been some time since the Peruvian state had contributed anything except the teachers’ salaries. The parents had filled the vacuum by taking it upon themselves to build and maintain the schools in the poorest neighborhoods and districts in the country. In my speeches I always emphasized that, in just a couple of years, our Solidarity program had built, thanks to donations, volunteer work, and the collaboration of the local residents, more day-care centers and schoolrooms than the Peruvian state. Moreover, Enrique Ghersi discovered that that same Aprista government that harped day and night on the threat to free public education had passed measures that required parents who enrolled their children in state schools to pay “fees” to parents’ associations which would go to a national education fund. Like many other unrealistic measures, making education free, which had served only to do further harm to the poor by increasing discrimination, had gradually been modified in practice, owing to the force of circumstances.

I placed great hopes in the reform of education. I was convinced that the most effective way to achieve justice in Peru was high-level public instruction. Sometimes I pointed out that I had studied in public schools, such as Leoncio Prado and San Miguel in Piura, and at the University of San Marcos, so that I knew the defects of the system (although they had grown worse since my days as a student). But these efforts to persuade my compatriots of the sound principles underlying our proposed reform of education were useless, and those who accused me of wanting to keep the people ignorant prevailed.