A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (52 page)

We left at dawn on the 21st, with my daughter Morgana, who was on vacation, and in Ayacucho we were welcomed, along with the departmental committee of Libertad, by the younger of my two sons, Gonzalo, who, for several years by then, had devoted his winter and summer vacations—he was attending London University—to lending a helping hand to the Andrés Vivanco Amorín children’s center. This institution had sprung up as a result of the revolutionary war being waged by Sendero Luminoso, which broke out in 1980 in this region. Because of it, Ayacucho was filled with abandoned children, who begged in the streets and slept on the benches of the Plaza de Armas or under the arcades bordering it. An old secondary schoolteacher, as poor as a church mouse but with a heart like the sun of his native land, Don Andrés Vivanco got to work. By knocking on people’s doors, by begging at public and private offices, he managed to secure a place to house many of those children and give them a mouthful of bread. That orphanage required heroic efforts on his part, and Violeta Correa, President Belaunde’s wife, helped him a great deal at the beginning. Thanks to her, the children’s center obtained a plot of land on the outskirts of the city. In 1983, I donated to Don Andrés Vivanco the $50,000 that I had received as the Ritz-Hemingway Prize for my novel
La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World)
, and Patricia had managed to get aid from the Ayacucho Emergency Association, which, through the initiative of Anabella Jourdan, the wife of the United States ambassador, she and a group of her friends had created at the beginning of the 1980s to bring help to the martyred region of Ayacucho.

Since then my younger son, Gonzalo, had conceived a passion for the orphanage. He collected money from his acquaintances and friends, and on each of his vacations he brought the nuns who had taken charge of the institution food, clothing, and little trinkets. Unlike his brother Álvaro, he was never interested in politics, and when I began the electoral campaign, he kept going to Ayacucho several times a year to bring provisions to the children’s center as though nothing had changed.

The distribution of presents in Ayacucho was made at the children’s center with an orderliness that did not cause us to foresee in any way what would happen in other cities, and afterward, I went to place flowers on Don Andrés Vivanco’s grave, to visit the soup kitchen for the poor of San Francisco, the University of Huamanga, and to go through the Central Market. We lunched with the leaders of the Freedom Movement, in a little restaurant behind the Hotel de Turistas, and that was the last time I ever saw Julián Huamaní Yauli, who was murdered a few weeks thereafter.

From Ayacucho we went by plane to the jungle, to Puerto Maldonado, where, after the distribution of Christmas gifts, a street rally had been planned. The instructions to the committees of Libertad had been quite clear: the distribution was a celebration
within
the Movement, the object of which was to bring a little present to the children of militants, a ceremony not open to everyone, since we didn’t have enough gifts for the millions of poor children in Peru. But in Puerto Maldonado the news of the distribution had spread throughout the city, and when I arrived at the fire station, the place selected for the ceremony, there were thousands of children and mothers with babies in their arms and on their shoulders, pushing and shoving desperately to get a place in line, since they had a presentiment of what in fact happened: the presents came to an end before the lines of people waiting did.

The sight was heartbreaking. Children and mothers had been there, roasting in the burning-hot sun of Amazonia, since very early that morning, four, five, six hours, to receive—if they managed to—a plastic sand bucket, a little wooden doll, a bit of chocolate, or a package of caramels. I was upset, hearing the mothers of Libertad trying to explain to that horde of children and barefoot mothers dressed in rags that the toys had given out, that they would have to go away empty-handed. The image of those sad or angry faces did not leave me for a single second, as I spoke at the rally and visited the local headquarters of Libertad, and as I held a discussion that night with our leaders, in the Hotel de Turistas, with the sounds of the jungle as a background, about our electoral strategy in Madre de Dios.

The next morning we flew to Cuzco, where the departmental committee of Libertad, headed by Gustavo Manrique Villalobos, had organized the distribution in a more sensible way, in the Movement’s local headquarters itself, and for the families of enrolled members and active supporters. This was a committee of young people new to politics, in which I had great faith, since, unlike other committees, there seemed to exist an atmosphere of understanding and friendship among the men and women who constituted it. I discovered that morning that I was mistaken. As I left, two leaders of the Cuzco committee handed me, separately, letters that I read on the plane taking me to Andahuaylas. Both contained sulfuric accusations, with the usual charges against the other faction—disloyalty, opportunism, nepotism, intrigues—so that it did not surprise me to learn, shortly thereafter, that with regard to the candidacies for Congress, our Cuzco committee was also experiencing divisions and desertions.

In Andahuaylas, following the rally in the main square, Patricia and I were taken to the place where the Christmas presents were to be given out. My heart sank when I saw that, as in Puerto Maldonado, here too all the children and mothers of the city seemed to have crowded together in the lines that went around an entire block. I asked my friends from Andahuaylas who belonged to Libertad whether they hadn’t been too optimistic by inviting the entire city to come receive presents when there wouldn’t be enough for even a tenth of those lined up. But, gamboling about in high spirits because of the rally, which had filled the square, they laughed at my apprehensions. After the distribution began, Patricia and I went on our way, and as we left the place, we saw children and mothers flinging themselves, amid indescribable chaos, on the presents, knocking over barriers set up by the young people of Mobilization. The women and girls distributing the gifts saw a horde of eager hands advancing toward them. I don’t believe that that Christmas won us a single voter in Andahuaylas.

In order to have a few days of complete rest, before the last stage of the campaign, Patricia and I, along with my brother- and sister-in-law and two couples who were friends of ours, went to an island in the Caribbean to spend the last four days of 1989. Shortly thereafter, back in Lima again, I came across a stern editorial in the magazine
Caretas
,
^*
criticizing me for having gone to spend the end of the year in Miami, since my trip would be interpreted as support of the U.S. military intervention in Panama to overthrow Noriega. (The Freedom Movement had expressed its disapproval of that intervention, in a communiqué that I wrote and that Álvaro read to the entire press corps. Our unequivocal rejection of military intervention included a severe condemnation of the dictatorship of General Noriega, which I had long criticized—and done so, even more pointedly, at the time when President García invited the Panamanian dictator to Lima and awarded him a decoration. Our solidarity with the democratic opposition to Noriega, moreover, had been made public, months before, on August 8, 1989, in a ceremony at the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, to which we invited Ricardo Arias Calderón and Guillermo Fort, the two vice presidents elected with Guillermo Endara in the elections that Noriega refused to recognize, an event at which Enrique Ghersi and I spoke. Furthermore, on that very short vacation, I did not visit Miami nor did I set foot on United States territory.) The little editorial combined factual errors and malevolence in a way that surprised me, coming from that magazine. I had been a contributor to
Caretas
for many years and considered its owner and editor-in-chief, Enrique Zileri, to be my friend. When the magazine was hounded and he himself was persecuted by the military dictatorship I made bold efforts to denounce the fact both inside and outside the country, even to the point, as I have said, that I asked to have an audience with General Velasco himself, despite the distaste I felt for him, in order to plead Zileri’s cause, the most legitimate one in the world: the freedom of the press. When
Caretas
began to move closer to Alan García because such proximity brought the magazine profits in the form of paid state advertising or because, it was said, Zileri had been seduced by García’s eloquence and flattery, I continued to figure among his contributors. Then, in May 1989, I agreed to speak in Berlin, at Zileri’s insistence, at the congress of an international press institute that he was presiding over. At the time,
Caretas
had already given indications of its antipathy toward my political activity and toward Libertad, but without having recourse to methods that were incompatible with the tradition of the magazine.

Hence, with a certain regret, I confess, since for many years the magazine had been my forum in Peru, I resigned myself to expecting no support whatsoever from
Caretas
in the months to come, but rather hostility that the approach of the elections would make even more stubborn. But I never imagined that the magazine—one of the few in the country with a certain intellectual standing—would become one of Alan García’s most docile instruments for turning public opinion against the Democratic Front, against the Freedom Movement, and against me personally. That editorial was like taking off the mask—the
careta—
of the
Caretas
that we were familiar with; since then and up until the end of the first round of voting—in the second, it changed its stance—its reporting was tendentious, aimed at aggravating the contention within the Front, at giving the appearance of respectability to many lies against me invented by the APRA or at making them public through the hypocritical device of repeating them so as to deny them, while at the same time it placed little value in, or ignored, any information that might be of benefit to us.

In the case of
Caretas
certain forms were respected, and it did not resort to the contemptible tactics of
La República
or of
Página Libre;
it specialized in sowing confusion and discouragement with regard to my candidacy in that middle class to which the readers of the magazine belonged, rightly supposing that they were inclined to favor me as a candidate and trying to manipulate them with more elegant subtleties than the journalistic swill eagerly consumed by readers of the scandal sheets.

Despite the fact that my advisers tried to persuade me not to do so, after that editorial appeared I had my name taken off the masthead of that weekly which, in the days of its founders—Doris Gibson and Francisco Igartua—surely would not have played the role that it did in the electoral campaign. My letter of resignation to Zileri, dated January 10, 1990,
^*
contained only one sentence: “I request you to remove my name from the list of contributors to the magazine, since I am no longer one.”

Since my marriage, what with my classes at the university and the jobs to keep food on the table, I hadn’t had much time left over for politics, although, every so often, I attended the meetings of the Christian Democratic Party and contributed to the sporadic issues of
Democracia
. (After the third year, I gave up going to the Alliance Française, but by then I read French easily; besides, for the degree in literature at San Marcos, I chose French for the foreign language requirement.) But politics would enter my life again in the summer of 1956 in the most unexpected way: as paid employment.

The electoral process that put an end to Odría’s dictatorship was under way, and three candidates were coming to the fore as contenders for the presidency: Dr. Hernando de Lavalle, a wealthy man, an aristocrat, and a prestigious Lima attorney; the former president Manuel Prado, recently back from Paris, where he had lived since he left the presidency in 1945; and the one who appeared to be the minor candidate, because of a lack of financial resources and the air of youthful improvisation that marked his campaign: the architect and university professor Fernando Belaunde Terry.

The election finally took place in a very questionable way, in legal terms, under the unconstitutional Law of Domestic Security, approved by the Congress that was a fruit of the dictatorship, which placed the APRA and the Communist Party outside the law—and kept them from presenting candidates. The votes that the Communist Party would have garnered were few and far between; those of the APRA, the party of the masses and with a disciplined organization that it had maintained during the time that it was an outlawed party, would have been decisive. From the beginning Lavalle, Prado, and Belaunde sought, in secret negotiations and sometimes ones that were not so secret, an accord with the Apristas.

The APRA rejected Belaunde Terry from the start, with an instinctive certainty that in him Haya de la Torre, the founder of the APRA, would have not a cat’s paw but, in a short time, a competitor. (Such a serious one that he was to win out over the Apristas in the elections of 1963 and 1980.) And its support of Manuel Prado, who during his presidency from 1939 to 1945 had outlawed the APRA and imprisoned, exiled, and persecuted many Apristas, was presumed to be impossible to secure.

Hence Hernando de Lavalle appeared to be the favorite. The APRA demanded to be made a legal party again and Lavalle promised the Aprista leaders to back a law defining the status of political parties that would allow the APRA to reenter civic life. In order to negotiate these accords a number of Aprista leaders had returned to Peru from exile, among them Ramiro Prialé, the great architect of what was to become the regime of coexistence (1956–1961).

Porras Barrenechea collaborated in establishing this rapprochement between Hernando de Lavalle and the APRA. Although he had never been an Aprista, nor a party outsider favorably inclined toward it—a status that included a fair number of the middle and even the upper bourgeoisie—Porras, who, as a member of the same generation as Haya de la Torre and Luis Alberto Sánchez, kept up a friendship with them, on the surface at least, had many contacts with the APRA during the electoral campaign, and agreed to be a candidate for a seat in the Senate on the list of friends of the APRA, headed by the poet José Gálvez, whom this party supported in the 1956 elections.

A close friend of Lavalle’s, whose classmate he had also been at the university, Porras had actively supported the great alliance or civil coalition on which Lavalle wanted to base his candidacy. These forces included Luis A. Flores’s old and almost extinct Revolutionary Union and the Christian Democratic Party, with whom he held conversations looking toward the future.

One afternoon, Porras Barrenechea summoned Pablo Macera and me and offered us jobs with Dr. Lavalle, who was looking for two “intellectuals” to write speeches and political reports for him. The pay was quite good and there were no fixed working hours. That night Porras took us to Lavalle’s house—an elegant residence, surrounded by gardens and tall trees, on the Avenida 28 de Julio in Miraflores—to meet the candidate. Hernando de Lavalle was a kindly, elegant man, extremely circumspect, timid almost, who received Pablo and me most courteously and explained to us that a group of intellectuals, headed by a young and distinguished professor of philosophy, Carlos Cueto Fernandini, was preparing his program for governing, in which he would place great emphasis on cultural activities. Pablo and I would not be working with this group, however, but with the candidate alone.

Although I didn’t vote for him in the 1956 elections, but for Fernando Belaunde Terry—I will explain why later—in those months during which I worked alongside him I came to respect and esteem Hernando de Lavalle. Ever since he had been a young man it was said in Lima that someday he would be president of Peru. The descendant of an old family, Dr. Lavalle had been a brilliant student at the university and after that was a very successful attorney. Only now, when he was past sixty, had he decided—or rather, others had decided for him—that he should enter politics, an activity for which, as became clear during the electoral process, he was not well equipped.

He always believed what he told Pablo Macera and me on the night we first met him: that the aim of his candidacy was to reestablish democratic life and civil institutions in Peru after eight years under a military regime, and that in order to achieve that goal what was needed was a great coalition of Peruvians of all persuasions and a scrupulous respect for the law.

“The harebrained Lavalle wanted to win the election
fair and square
,” I heard a friend of Porras Barrenechea’s once say sarcastically, at one of the historian’s evening gatherings over cups of chocolate. “The elections of 1956 were rigged so that he’d win them; but this arrogantly proud, self-important candidate wanted to win
fair and square
. And that’s why he lost!” Something like that did in fact occur. But Dr. Lavalle did not want to win that election fair and square out of arrogant pride and self-importance, but because he was a decent person, and naïve enough to believe that he could win with clean hands an election which the existence of the dictatorship corrupted from the very beginning.

Pablo and I were installed in an office as empty as a tomb—there was never anybody in it except for the two of us—on the second floor of a building on La Colmena, right in the downtown section of Lima. Dr. Lavalle would drop in unexpectedly to ask us for drafts of speeches or proclamations. At our first meeting, Macera, in one of his typical outbursts, confronted Lavalle with this insolent remark: “The masses can be won over by contempt or by flattery. Which method should we use?”

I saw Dr. Lavalle’s face of a sad tortoise pale behind his glasses. And I listened to him for some time, embarrassed and disconcerted, as he explained to Macera that there was another way, outside of those two extremes, of winning over public opinion. He preferred a more moderate one, one more in harmony with his temperament. Macera’s brusque comments and wild remarks scared Lavalle—whom Macera wanted to have slip into his speeches every so often a quote from Freud or Georg Simmel or whoever else Pablo was reading at the time—but at the same time Lavalle was fascinated by him. He listened, enthralled, to his mad theories—Pablo expounded a great number of them every day, all of them contradictory, and then immediately forgot about them—and one day Lavalle said to me in confidence: “What an intelligent young man, but what an
unpredictable
one!”

An internal debate began within the Christian Democratic Party with regard to what its policy should be in the ’56 election. The wing consisting of supporters of Bustamante, the most conservative one, proposed supporting Lavalle, whereas many others, above all among the young members, favored Belaunde Terry. When the subject was discussed in the departmental committee, I let it be known that I was working with Dr. Lavalle, but that if the party agreed to support Belaunde I would respect its decision and resign. At first, the idea of supporting Lavalle prevailed.

As the period for the registration of candidates for the presidential election was about to close, the rumor circulated all through Lima that the national board of elections would refuse to register Belaunde, on the pretext that he did not have the number of signatures required. Belaunde immediately called for a street demonstration, on June 1, 1956, which—a tactic that, in a manner of speaking, was to transform his small and enthusiastic candidacy into a great movement destined to give birth eventually to Popular Action—he wanted to lead to the very gates of the Presidential Palace. On the Jirón de la Unión he and the few thousand people who followed him (among them was Javier Silva, who never failed to show up at every demonstration) were stopped by the police with high-pressure water hoses and tear gas. Belaunde faced the police charge waving the Peruvian flag on high, a gesture that would make him famous.

That same night, with elegant circumspection, Dr. Hernando de Lavalle sent word to General Odría that if the national board of elections did not register Belaunde, he would give up his own candidacy and denounce the electoral process. “This idiot doesn’t deserve to be president of Peru,” it is said that Odría sighed when he received the message. The dictator and his advisers thought that Lavalle, with his idea of a grand coalition, in which there was room even for Odría’s party—the name of which at the time was the Partido Restaurador (the Restoration Party)—was the one who would be their best rear guard if the future Congress was bent on investigating the crimes committed during the dictatorship. That gesture showed them that the timid conservative aristocrat was not the right person for that task. The fate of Hernando de Lavalle was sealed.

Odría ordered the national board of elections to allow the registration of Belaunde, who, in a large rally in the Plaza San Martín, thanked the “people of Lima” for entering his name on the list of candidates. After the famous incident of the flag and the police attack with water hoses, it began to appear that he could run for office on an equal footing with Prado and Lavalle, who, because of the costly publicity and the infrastructure on which they were counting, appeared to be the candidates with the greatest chances of winning.

Manuel Prado, meanwhile, negotiated behind the scenes to rally support for the APRA, to which he offered immediate legalization without going through the procedure of changing the status of political parties that Lavalle was proposing. Whether this was the decisive factor, or whether there were additional promises or gifts on Prado’s part, as was rumored, was never proved one way or the other. The fact is that agreement was arrived at, a few days before the elections. The orders given by the Aprista party to its militants that, instead of voting for Lavalle, they were to vote for the ex-president who had outlawed them, jailed and persecuted them, were obeyed, in another demonstration of the APRA’s iron discipline, and the votes of the Apristas won Manuel Prado the election.

In the end, Lavalle had been defeated by his public acceptance of the support of the Restoration Party, and by his statement, in the ceremony whereby the latter, through David Aguilar Cornejo, gave him its backing, that “he would continue the patriotic labors of General Odría.” The Christian Democratic Party immediately withdrew its support from him and allowed its members to vote as they pleased. And many independents who would have voted for him, won over by his image as a capable and decent man, felt put off by a declaration implying that he sanctioned the dictatorship. Like the majority of Christian Democrats, I voted for Belaunde, who, although he ended up in third place, won an important percentage of the vote, and the necessary support to found Popular Action some months later.

When I lost my job with Dr. Lavalle, my income was reduced, but not for very long, since, almost immediately, I found two other jobs, one real and the other theoretical. The real job was the one on the magazine
Extra
, whose owner, Don Jorge Checa, the ex-prefect of Piura, had known me since I was a little boy. He took me on when the magazine was already on the verge of bankruptcy. At the end of each month, those of us on the editorial staff lived through moments of anxiety, because only the ones who arrived first at the head office received their pay; the others received vouchers for payment sometime in the future. Every week while I was there I wrote film reviews and articles on cultural subjects. Sometimes I too was left without a paycheck. But I didn’t carry off
Extra
’s typewriters and even its office furniture, the way several of my colleagues did, because of my liking for Jorge Checa. I don’t know how much money the prodigal Don Jorge lost in this publishing venture; but he lost it with the nonchalance of a great lord and a Maecenas, without complaining and without getting rid of the horde of journalists he kept on the payroll, a number of whom stole him blind in the most cynical way. He apparently realized what was going on but it didn’t matter to him as long as he was having fun. And it was true that he was having a great time. He used to take the journalists from
Extra
to the house of his mistress, a good-looking woman whom he had set up in a house along Magdalena Vieja, where he organized lunches that ended up as orgies. The first jealous scene Julia ever made with me, after we’d been married a year and a half, must have been after one of those lunches, in what by now were the final weeks of existence of
Extra
, when I came back home in a rather unseemly state and with red stains on my handkerchief. The fight we had was a tooth-and-nail one and didn’t leave me with much enthusiasm for going back to Don Jorge’s hectic lunches. There wasn’t much chance of that, moreover, because a few weeks later the editor-in-chief of the magazine, the intelligent and refined Pedro Álvarez del Villar, skipped the country with Don Jorge’s mistress, and the staff of the weekly who hadn’t been paid their salaries carried off the last remaining pieces of furniture and typewriters, so that
Extra
died of consumption. (I will always remember Don Jorge Checa, when he was prefect of Piura and I a senior at San Miguel, ordering me, one night at the Grau club: “Marito, you who are halfway toward being an intellectual, go up onstage and introduce The Andalusian gypsies from Spain to the audience.” Don Jorge’s idea of an intellectual was based, doubtless, on the intellectuals whom he had happened to meet and hire.)