A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (62 page)

On April 3 two good things happened. The attractive Gisella Valcárcel, who, after being a music hall performer, had gone on to host one of the most popular shows on television, after interviewing Fujimori on it announced to her audience, in his presence, that she was going to vote for me. It was a brave gesture, because Channel 5 had previously tried to keep Gisella from participating in the festivities that Acción Solidaria organized for Christmas. Nonetheless, she went to the stadium and emceed the show—even getting me to dance a
huayno—
and now, on the eve of the election, she had given me a public endorsement, trying to persuade her viewers to vote for me. I called to thank her, and to swear to her that this would not bring her reprisals; fortunately, none took place.

The second piece of good news was the results of the last nationwide opinion poll that Mark and his analysts, Paul, Ed, and Bill, brought to the house late that Wednesday afternoon: I had maintained my average of some 40 percent of the electorate intending to vote for me, and Fujimori’s offensive, which included not only Lima but also the remainder of Peru—with the sole exception of the Amazon region—was taking votes away from the APRA and the United Left for the most part, causing them to drop down to third and fourth place respectively in almost all of the
departamentos
. Fujimori’s advance in the marginal sections of the capital appeared to have been halted; and in districts such as San Juan de Lurigancho and Comas I had regained several percentage points.

Hundreds of reporters from all over the world were in Lima for the election on Sunday, April 8, and the campaign directors feared that the 1,500-seat capacity of the auditorium of the Sheraton would not provide enough room for them all. My house in Barranco was surrounded by photographers and cameramen night and day and the security guards had trouble holding off those who tried to scale the walls or leap into the garden. In order to maintain some privacy we had to close the blinds and draw the curtains and have visitors drive their cars inside the garage if they didn’t want to be hounded by the hordes of reporters. The election law didn’t allow polls to be published for the two weeks preceding an election, but the daily papers abroad had already printed news stories about the surprising appearance at the last minute of a dark horse of Japanese origin in the Peruvian presidential election.

I didn’t feel alarmed, as I had been at the time of the excessive ad campaign of our congressional candidates—which, in these two final weeks, was reduced to less extravagant dimensions—although I couldn’t help thinking that between that campaign and the “Fujimori phenomenon” there was a reciprocal relation. That spectacle of economic immodesty presented by our candidates had suited the purpose of someone who made himself out to poor Peruvians to be just one more “poor man,” disgusted with a “political class” that had never solved the country’s problems. I thought, however, that the vote for Fujimori—the vote meant to castigate us—couldn’t possibly amount to more than 10 percent or so of the electorate, the most uninformed and uncultured voters. Who else would vote for an unknown, without a program, without a team for governing, without any political credentials whatsoever, who had hardly campaigned outside of Lima, who had been jury-rigged overnight to serve as a candidate? No matter what the opinion polls said, it never entered my head that a candidacy so devoid of ideas and with no planning staff could carry weight in the face of the monumental effort we had put in over a period of almost three years of work. And secretly, without saying as much to Patricia, I was still cherishing the hope that Peruvians would give me a mandate for the “great change, in freedom” that Sunday.

A dream like that was nurtured, in large part, by a misinterpretation of the last rallies, all of which, beginning with the one in the Plaza de Armas of Cuzco, were most impressive. So was the one on April 4, on the Paseo de la República, in Lima, when I spoke of myself and my family in a very intimate way, explaining, against the propaganda that presented me as one of the privileged, that I owed everything I was and everything I possessed to my own work, and the one in Arequipa, the last one, on April 5, when I promised my countrymen that I would be “a rebellious and obstreperous president,” just as the part of the country that I was born in had been in the history of Peru. Those very well organized ceremonies, those public squares and avenues teeming with overexcited people hoarse from shouting our slogans in chorus—so many young people, above all—gave the impression of an overwhelming mobilization, of a country dazzled by the Front. Before the final rally, Patricia and my three children and I went through the streets of the city in an open touring car, in a motorcade that lasted for several hours, joined at every street corner in Arequipa by more and more people, with bunches of flowers or confetti, in an atmosphere of real delirium. During one of those tours of Arequipa, I had one of the most unexpected and nicest experiences of those years. A young woman approached the car, held up a baby just a few months old for me to kiss him, and shouted to me: “If you win, I’ll have another baby, Mario!”

But anyone who had sat down with a cool head to add and subtract and attentively observe the sort of people who attended those marches and rallies would have had reservations: those who took part in them represented almost exclusively the third of Peruvians with the largest incomes. Although a minority, there were enough of them to fill the main squares of Peruvian cities, above all now that, for one of the few times in our history, those middle and upper classes had backed, en bloc, a political plan. But there were the remaining two-thirds, all those Peruvians who had been most impoverished and most frustrated by the national decline of recent decades—including those who had once been interested by my proposals only to have their interest flag out of fear, confusion, and displeasure at the manifestation, in the last months of the campaign, of what appeared to be the old elitist, arrogant Peru of the whites and the rich, something that our advertising contributed as much to as did the campaign of our adversaries—and as I presided over those grandiose rallies that left me with the impression that I was retaining the very nearly absolute majority that the opinion polls said I enjoyed, these Peruvians, the other two-thirds, had already begun to change their minds in a way that would make the election results turn out quite differently.

A number of friends had arrived in Peru from abroad, among them Carmen Balcells, my literary agent from Barcelona who had kept me company in any number of my ups and downs, my English publisher, Robert McCrum, and the Colombian writer and journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, all of whom I had a chance to see on the eve of election day, in the midst of the killing series of interviews with foreign correspondents that figured on my schedule. I had another surprise when my Finnish publisher, Erkki Reenpaa, and Sulamita, his wife, also showed up in Barranco. Their snow-white Scandinavian faces had suddenly appeared as though by magic amid the crowd at the rally in Piura, without my being able to figure out how it was possible for those two friends from Helsinki to have turned up in that remote corner of Peru. I learned later that they had followed me, all during that last week, from one city to another, accomplishing miracles so that, by renting cars and taking planes, they could be present at all my final rallies. And that night, I found at home a telegram that had been sent to me from Geneva by the close friend of my youth, Luis Loayza, whom I hadn’t seen for years. It read: “An embrace, fierce little Sartrean,” and I was deeply touched.

On Sunday the 8th, Patricia, Álvaro, Gonzalo, and I went to vote early in the morning at the Colegio Mercedes Indacochea, in Barranco, and Morgana came with us, dying with envy because her brothers could already vote. Then, before leaving for the Hotel Sheraton, I checked to see how those tens of thousands of representatives of our alliance, which a team headed by Miguel and Cecilia Cruchaga had been training for this day for months, were doing at the electoral tables in polling places all over the country. Everything was in good order; the transportation arrangements had worked and our representatives had been at their posts since dawn.

We had reserved several floors of the Sheraton for election day. On the first floor were the press offices of the Front, with Álvaro and his team, and on the second floor fax machines, telephones, and desks for correspondents had been installed and the conference room where I was to speak after the results were in had been made ready. On the eighteenth floor there was a computer network office, where Mark Malloch Brown and his team received projections of how the vote was going, reports from our representatives, and the results of exit polls that came in via the computers that Miguel Cruchaga had installed, in semisecrecy, in San Antonio. They handed me the first projection around noon.

The nineteenth floor was reserved for my family and close friends, and the security service had orders to allow no one else to set foot on it. I had a suite in which I shut myself up around eleven in the morning, all by myself. I was watching on television as the leaders of the various political parties, or famous sports stars and singers, came to the polling places to vote, and all of a sudden I was tormented by the idea that for five years it was more than likely that I wouldn’t read or write anything literary again. Then I sat down and in a little book that I always carry around with me in my pocket I wrote this poem which, ever since I had read a book by Alfonso Reyes on Greece, I had been mulling over in my mind in my free moments:

ALCIDES

Pienso en el poderoso Alcides, Ilamado también Hércules. Era muy fuerte. Aún en la cuna Aplastó a dos serpientes, una por una. Y, adolescente, mató a un león, gallardamente. Cubierto con su piel, peregrino audaz, fue por el mundo. Lo imagino musculoso y bruñido, dando caza al león de Nemea. Y, en la plaza calcinada de Lidia, sirviendo como esclavo y entreteniendo a la reina Onfale. Vestido de mujer, el venido de Grecia hilaba y tejía y, en su gentil disfraz, divertía a la corte
.

Allí lo dejo al invicto joven trejo: en el ridículo sumido y, paf, lo olvido
.

ALCIDES

I think of the powerful Alcides, also called Hercules. He was very strong. In his cradle still he was known to have killed two serpents, crushed to death, one by one. And before reaching maturity he killed a lion, valiantly. Wearing its pelt, a fearless pilgrim, he roamed the world. An image I can't erase:

Muscular, burnished, giving chase to the lion of Nemea. And in the torrid public square in Lydia, serving as a slave and entertaining the Queen, Omphale. Dressed as a woman, the man arrived from Greece spun and wove and, in his charming disguise, amused the court.

There I leave the young man, unbeaten yet, neck deep in ridicule: whom, just like that, I forget.

Around one o’clock in the afternoon, Mark, Lucho, and Álvaro came up to see me with the first projection: I had close to 40 percent and Fujimori 25 percent. The dark horse was giving further proof of the remarkably solid base he had established everywhere in the country. Mark explained to me that my percentage would tend to go on increasing, but, seeking the look on his face, I could tell that he was lying. If these figures proved to be correct, the electorate hadn’t given me a mandate and there would be a congressional majority hostile to our program.

I went downstairs to talk to my mother and my aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, and ate a couple of sandwiches with them without telling them what I knew. Even Uncle Lucho, despite his stroke and paralysis, was there, smiling behind his immobility and silence, keeping me company on the great day. I went back up to the suite on the nineteenth floor, where at two-thirty they brought me a second and more complete nationwide projection. I immediately saw that it was disastrous: I had lost three points—I now had 36 percent—Fujimori was maintaining his 25 percent, the APRA had just under 20 percent and the two parties of the left, taken together, 10 percent. It didn’t require gifts of prophecy to see into the future: there would be a second round in which Apristas, Socialists, and Communists would do an about-face and vote en bloc for Fujimori, making him the winner by a comfortable margin.

Álvaro stayed alone with me for a moment. He was very pale, with those dark blue circles underneath his eyes that, when he was a little boy, presaged a temper tantrum. Of my three children, he is the one who is most like me, in his passionate outbursts and in his enthusiasms, in his excessive surrender, without reserve or calculation, to his loves and his hates. He was twenty-four, and this campaign had been an extraordinary experience in his life. It was not my idea but Freddy Cooper’s to make him our communications director, because he was a journalist, because he was continually obsessed by Peru, because he was so close to me and so closely identified with liberal ideas. It had been hard work to get him to accept. He said no to Freddy and me, but finally Patricia, who is even more stubborn than he is, persuaded him. Because of this, we have been accused of nepotism and baptized by the Aprista press as “the royal family.” He had done his job very well, having fights with many people, of course, because he refused to make the slightest concession when it came to matters of principle or agree to anything that we might regret later, just as I had asked him to do. In all these months he had learned a great deal more than he had in his three years at the London School of Economics, about his country, about people, and about politics, a passion that he acquired in his adolescence and that had absorbed him ever since, just as in his childhood religion had absorbed him. (I still have the surprising letter he sent me, from boarding school, when he was twelve, informing me of his decision to leave the Catholic Church to be confirmed by the Church of England.) “Everything’s turned to shit,” he said, livid. “There won’t be any liberal reform. Peru won’t change and it’ll go on the way it always has. The worst thing that can happen to you now is to win.” But I knew that there was no longer any danger of that.