A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  When dawn came, I drew up a stern letter* addressed to Belaunde and Bedoya, informing them that, in view of their inability to reach an agreement, I was withdrawing as a presidential candidate. I woke Patricia up to read her the text, and it surprised me that, instead of rejoicing, she had certain reservations regarding my resigning as a candidate. We made plans to go abroad immediately so as to avoid the predictable pressures. I had been invited to receive a literary prize in Italy—the Scanno, in the Abruzzi—so the next day we bought our tickets, in secret, for twenty-four hours later. That afternoon I sent the letter, via Álvaro, my older son, to Belaunde and to Bedoya, after informing the executive committee of Libertad of my decision. I saw some of my friends with sad faces—I remember Cruchaga’s, paper-white, and Freddy’s, as red as a prawn’s—but none of them attempted to dissuade me. The truth is that they too were tired of the absurd way in which the Front had bogged down. I gave instructions to the security guards not to allow anyone to enter the house and we unplugged the telephone. The news reached the communications media early that evening and had the effect of a bombshell. All the channels began their nightly news program with it. Dozens of reporters surrounded my house and immediately a parade of people from all the political camps of the Front began. But I received no one nor did I appear when, later on, a spontaneous demonstration of some hundreds of members of Libertad surrounded the house, with Enrique Chirinos Soto, Miguel Cruchaga, and Alfredo Barnechea as speakers.

  Early in the morning on June 22, the security guards took us to the airport and managed to get us aboard the Air France flight immediately, thereby enabling us to dodge another demonstration of members of Libertad, headed by Miguel Cruchaga, Chino Urbina, and Pedro Guevara, whom I glimpsed in the distance from the little window of the plane.

  When we arrived in Italy, two journalists were waiting there for me, both of whom, heaven only knows how, had discovered where I was headed: Juan Cruz, from El País in Madrid, and Paul Yule, from the BBC, who was making a documentary on my candidacy. My conversation with them surprised me, since both of them were convinced that my resignation was simply a tactic to force the intractable allies to give in.

  In the end, that was what everyone would believe, and the practical result, when the episode was over, was that after all, contrary to what many people thought, I wasn’t as bad a politician as I seemed to be. The truth of the matter is that my resignation was not planned with the intention of marshaling public opinion so as to put pressure on AP and the PPC. It was genuine, stemming from my loathing for the political maneuvering in which the Front was submerged, the conviction that the alliance was not going to work, that we would disappoint the expectations of many people, and that my effort was going to be useless. But Patricia, who never lets me get away with anything, says that that, too, is a debatable truth. For if I had really believed that there was no hope, I would have used the word irrevocable in my letter of resignation, something I had not done. So that perhaps, as she believes, in some secret compartment I harbored the illusion—the desire—that my letter would settle our differences.

  It did settle them, temporarily. From the day I left the country, the independent communications media severely criticized the PPC and AP, and criticisms rained down on the heads of Bedoya and Belaunde in the form of editorials, articles, and statements. The number of people who announced their intention to vote for me suddenly rose impressively all over the country and in every social sector. Up until then public opinion polls had always shown me to be the leading candidate against the candidates of the APRA (Alva Castro) and the United Left (Alfonso Barrantes), but with a potential vote that never went beyond 35 percent of the total. At this point the figure rose to 50 percent, the highest I had attained at any point in the campaign. Libertad enrolled thousands of new members, to the point that membership cards gave out and more had to be printed in a great hurry. Our various local headquarters were filled to overflowing, day and night, by a multitude of supporters and members who urged us to break with AP and the PPC and go before the voters by ourselves. And on my return to Lima, I found 4,890 letters (according to Rosi and Lucía, who counted them) from all over Peru, congratulating me for having broken with the other parties (with Popular Action in particular, which had aroused more antagonisms).

  Some months before, we had hired the Sawyer/Miller Group as advisers, an international firm with extensive experience in election campaigns, since they had worked with Cory Aquino in the Philippines and with a number of presidential candidates in Latin America, among them the Bolivian Sánchez de Lozada, who was the one who recommended the firm to us. This matter of asking a foreign company for advice concerning an electoral battle in Peru seemed to arouse in Belaunde, who had twice won the presidency without the need for this sort of help, a hilarity that his inbred sense of politeness kept under control with only the greatest difficulty. But the fact is that Mark Malloch Brown and his collaborators at the Sawyer/Miller Group were a great help with their opinion polls, which allowed me to keep close track of the feelings, fears, hopes, and changing mood of that complicated mosaic that goes to make up Peru. Their predictions were usually right on the mark. A great deal of Mark’s advice was rejected because it clashed with certain matters of principle—I wanted the election to be won in a certain way and for a specific purpose—and frequently the consequences were precisely the ones that he had predicted. One of these pieces of advice, from the first opinion survey in depth taken at the beginning of 1988 down to the eve of the second electoral round—in June 1990—was to break with the allies and present myself as an independent candidate, with no ties to the political establishment, and to represent myself, rather, as coming to save Peru from the state into which the politicians had plunged it—all of them, regardless of their ideologies. His advice was based on a conclusion that all the surveys had shown from the beginning of the campaign to the end: that there was, in the heart of the country—the C and D sectors, those poor and extremely poor Peruvians who represented two-thirds of the electorate—a profound disillusionment with and great rancor toward political parties, particularly those that had already enjoyed power. The surveys also showed that the positive feelings I had been able to arouse in the heart of the country bore a direct relationship to my image as someone who came from outside the political milieu, of an independent with no ties to the established parties. The creation of the Democratic Front and my constant presence in the media alongside two such long-standing establishment figures as Bedoya and Belaunde were inevitably going to erode that image during the long campaign and support for me would shift toward one or another of my adversaries (Mark thought that it would be Barrantes, the leftist candidate).

  When Mark Malloch Brown learned of my resignation he was happy. He was not surprised by the instant shift of public opinion in my favor, nor by my increase in popularity in the surveys. And he too presumed that I had planned it that way. “Well, you’re learning,” he must have thought—he who once assured me that I was the worst candidate he had ever worked with.

  All this news reached me by telephone, through Álvaro, Miguel Cruchaga, and Alfredo Barnechea, a congressman who, because of the nationalization, had given up his membership in the APRA and joined Libertad. After Italy, I had gone with Patricia to take refuge in the south of Spain, fleeing from being besieged by the press. It was already decided that I would stick with my determination to resign and remain for a time in Europe. I had a long-standing offer to spend a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg, in Berlin, and I proposed to Patricia that we go there, to learn German.

  At this juncture the news reached us. AP and the PPC had come to an agreement on all the points of contention between them and had put together joint lists of candidates in even the most remote parts of the country. Their differences had vanished as if by magic and they were waiting for me to come back to lead the Front and resume the campaign.

  My first reaction was to say: “I’m not coming. I’m no good at that sort of thing. I don’t know how
to carry it off, and what’s more, I don’t like it. These months have given me more than enough time to realize that. I’ll stick to my books and my papers, which I should never have left.” My wife and I then had yet another politico-conjugal argument. She, who had come close to threatening to divorce me if I were a candidate, now urged me to go back to Peru, marshaling both moral and patriotic arguments. Since Belaunde and Bedoya had backed down, there was no alternative. That had been the reason for my withdrawal, hadn’t it? Well then, it no longer existed. Too many good, unselfish, decent people were working day and night for the Front, back there in Peru. They had believed my speeches and my exhortations. Was I going to let them down, now that AP and the PPC seemed to be beginning to behave decently? The sawtooth mountain ranges of the lovely Andalusian town of Mijas bear witness to her admonitions: “We’ve taken on a responsibility. We have to go back.”

  That is what we did. We went back and this time Patricia threw herself into working in the campaign as though she had politics in her blood. And I didn’t break with the allied parties, as many friends in Libertad too would have liked me to do, and as I ought to have done had I followed the opinion surveys, for the reasons I have already mentioned, which impressed me as being more worthy of being taken into consideration than the others.

  Five

  The Cadet

  In the years that I lived with my father, before I entered Leoncio Prado in 1950, innocence, the ingenuous vision of the world that my mother, my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles had inculcated in me, vanished. In those three years I discovered cruelty, fear, bitterness, a tortuous and violent dimension that is continually, at times more and at times less, counterbalanced by the kind and generous side of every human destiny. And it is probable that without my progenitor’s contempt for literature I would never have pursued so obstinately what at the time was a game, but was gradually to turn into an obsessive and pressing need: a vocation. If in those years I had not suffered so much when he was around and if I hadn’t felt that it was the best way I could think of to pull the wool over his eyes, I probably wouldn’t be a writer today.

  That I would be entering the Leoncio Prado Military Academy had been on my father’s mind ever since he brought me to live with him. He would announce it to me when he gave me a tongue-lashing and when he bewailed the fact that the Llosas had brought me up like a spoiled child. I don’t know whether he was well aware of what sort of an education pupils at Leoncio Prado received. I imagine he wasn’t, or else he wouldn’t have placed such high hopes in it. His idea was the same as that of many middle-class fathers with sons who were disobedient, rebellious, inhibited, or suspected of being queer: that a military college, with instructors who were career officers, would make of them young men who were disciplined, brave, respectful of authority, and with their balls in the right place.

  Since in those days the idea of someday being just a writer never entered my head, when I was asked what I would be when I was grown up, my answer was: a sailor. I liked the sea and adventure novels, and being a sailor seemed to me to be a good way to combine those two things I was so fond of. Entering a military academy whose pupils received the rank of officers in the reserves was an advantageous jumping-off place for someone who aspired to enter the Naval Academy.

  So when, on my completing the second year of secondary school, my father enrolled me in an academy on the Jirón Lampa, in the heart of Lima, to prepare me for the entrance exam to Leoncio Prado, I was all for his plan for me. To be a boarding student, to wear a uniform, to parade on the twenty-eighth of July along with the air corps, navy, and army cadets, would be fun. And living far away from him, all week long, would be even better.

  The entrance exam consisted of physical and academic tests that took three whole days, in the vast area occupied by the school, on the edge of the cliffs of La Perla, with the sea roaring at the foot of them. I passed the exams, and in March 1950, just a few days before my fourteenth birthday, I appeared at the Academy with a certain excitement over what I was going to find there, wondering if those months of being confined to the school grounds until the first leave wouldn’t be a big hardship. (Third-year cadets—those who had completed two years of secondary school—got to leave for the first time on the seventh of June, Flag Day, after having learned the rudiments of military life.)

  There were some three hundred of us perros—plebes in the third year of the class that would graduate three years later, divided into eleven or twelve sections, according to our height; I was among the tallest, so that I was placed in the second section. (In my fourth year, I would be transferred to the first one.) Three sections formed a company, under the command of a lieutenant and a sergeant major. The lieutenant of our company was named Olivera; our noncommissioned officer, Guardamino.

  Lieutenant Olivera made us get into formation, took us up to our dormitories, and assigned us our beds and lockers—they were bunk beds and I was assigned the top of the second one from the entrance. He made us change out of our civilian clothes into our everyday uniforms—a shirt and trousers of green twill, a field cap, and coffee-colored half boots—and then, lining us up in formation again in the courtyard, he gave us the basic instructions concerning proper respect, the way to salute, and the way to behave toward our superiors. And then everyone in our year was lined up in company formation so that the head of the academy, Colonel Marcial Romero Pardo, could welcome us. I am sure that he spoke of “the supreme values of the spirit,” a subject that continually cropped up in his speeches. Then we were taken to lunch, in the enormous pavilion on the other side of an esplanade covered with grass on which a vicuña was wandering about, and where we saw our superiors for the first time: the cadets of the fourth and fifth years. We all contemplated with curiosity and slight alarm the four-year cadets, since they would be the ones who would initiate us. We perros knew that the hazing was the bitter test that we had to go through. Now, once we’d finished this meal, the fourth-year cadets would take out on us what had been done to them, on a day like today, the year before.

  When lunch was over, officers and noncommissioned officers disappeared, and the fourth-year cadets flung themselves on us like a flock of ravens. We “whities” were a small minority in the vast ocean of Indians, mestizos, blacks, and mulattos, and aroused the inventiveness of our hazers. A group of cadets took me and a boy from a section of “shorties” to a fourth-year dormitory. They made us go through a “right angle” contest. We had to kick each other in the backside as we doubled over alternately; the one who kicked more slowly than the other was in turn kicked, hard, by the hazers. Afterward, they made us open our trousers fly and take out our penis and masturbate: the one who came first would be let go and the other would stay behind to make our torturers’ beds. But, however hard we tried, fear kept us from getting an erection, and finally, bored by our incompetence, they took us out to the soccer field. They asked me what sport I went in for: “Swimming, sir.” “Swim on your back from one end of the athletic field to the other, then, perro.”

  I still have a sinister memory of that hazing, a savage and irrational ceremony which, beneath the appearance of a virile game, of a rite of initiation into the rigors of military life, served to allow the resentments, envies, hatreds, and prejudices that we had inside us to turn, without inhibitions, into a sadomasochistic bash. On that very first day, in the hours that the hazing lasted—it went on during the days that followed, in a more moderate way—I discovered that the adventure at Leoncio Prado wasn’t going to be what, led astray by novels, I had imagined, but something more prosaic, and that I was going to detest boarding school and military life, with its mechanical hierarchies based on chronology, the authorized violence that they signified, and all the rites, symbols, rhetorical devices, and ceremonies that constitute it, and that we, young as we were—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old—only half understood and distorted by putting it at times to comic and at times to cruel and even monstrous uses.

  My two years at Leoncio Pra
do were quite hard and I spent a number of horrible days there, above all on weekends when I was being punished—the hours became immeasurably long, the minutes endless—but, looking back from a distance, I think that that couple of years were more beneficial than harmful to me. Although not for the reason that had led my father to enroll me there. On the contrary. During 1950 and 1951, shut up behind those bars corroded by the dampness of La Perla, on those gray days and nights filled with the gloomiest fog imaginable, I read and wrote as I had never done before and began to be (even though at the time I didn’t know it) a writer.

  Moreover, I owe to Leoncio Prado the discovery of what the country where I had been born was like: a society very different from that tiny one, marked off by the boundaries of the middle class, in which I had lived up until then. The Leoncio Prado Academy was one of the few institutions—perhaps the only one—that reproduced on a small scale the ethnic and regional diversity of Peru. Enrolled there were youngsters from the jungle and from the highlands, from every departamento, every race, and every economic stratum. As it was a state school, the fees for room, board, and tuition we paid were minimal; moreover, there was an ample system of scholarships—a hundred or so a year—that made the school accessible to boys from humble families, of peasant origin, or from marginal city neighborhoods and towns. A large part of the tremendous violence—what seemed to me tremendous but for other cadets less fortunate than I was their natural way of life—stemmed precisely from that mixture of races, regions, and economic levels of the cadets. The majority of us brought to this cloistered space the prejudices, complexes, animosities, and social and racial rancors that we had sucked in with our mother’s milk. All these found expression at Leoncio Prado in personal and official relations, and found ways of venting themselves in rites and activities, like the hazing or the military hierarchies among the students themselves, which legitimized the bullying and the abuse. The scale of values erected around the basic myths of machismo and virility served, moreover, as a moral coverup for that Darwinian philosophy or law of the jungle that ruled at the school. To be brave, that is to say, loco, was the supreme form of manliness, and to be a coward the most abject and base. Any boy who denounced a superior for the mistreatment of which he was a victim merited the generalized contempt of the cadets and exposed himself to reprisals. The lesson was soon learned. During the hazing, some fourth-year cadets made one of my section mates, named Valderrama, climb up to the top of a ladder and then moved it so as to make him tumble down. He had a bad fall and when the ladder itself fell it cut off one of his fingers against the edge of a washbasin. Valderrama never told on the guilty parties and we all respected him for it.