A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The municipal elections brought on the break between the factions of the left, held together up until then in a precarious coalition under the leadership of Alfonso Barrantes Lingán. This leadership had been disputed for some time by the most radical sectors of the United Left, who accused the former mayor of Lima of bossism, of having toned down his Marxism to the point of changing it into a social-democratic position and, even graver still, of having put up such a respectful opposition to Alan García’s administration that the two of them gave the appearance of being hand in glove.

  Despite inordinate efforts of the Communist Party to avoid the rupture, it took place nonetheless. The United Left presented as its candidate for the mayoralty of Lima a Catholic with leftist leanings, the sociologist and university professor Henry Pease García, who was also to be their candidate for the presidency of the Republic. The sector that supported Barrantes, for its part, under the label of Acuerdo Socialista (Socialist Alliance), put up another sociologist, Senator Enrique Bernales, as its candidate for the first vice presidency on the ticket with Barrantes.

  The second anniversary of Libertad was approaching—we had designated the rally in the Plaza San Martín on August 21, 1987, as the event that marked its beginning—and those of us on the political committee thought that this was a good chance to show that, unlike the Communists and Socialists, we had really managed to achieve unity.

  We had celebrated the first anniversary of Libertad on August 21, 1988, in the city of Tacna, with a demonstration on the Paseo Cívico. Until just a short while before the time announced for the rally, almost the only people about were a handful of curiosity seekers standing around by the rostrum. I was waiting in a nearby house that belonged to friends of my family, and a few minutes before 8 p.m., I went up to the roof to sneak a look around. On the platform was Pedro Cateriano, with his stentorian voice and assertive gestures, delivering his harangue to empty air. Or just about, since the Paseo Cívico could be seen to be deserted, while on the corners and the sidewalks leading to the Paseo, groups of bystanders were indifferently watching what was going on. But half an hour later, when the ceremony had already begun and we had started singing the de rigueur anthems, the people of Tacna began to congregate, and crowds of them continued to flock onto the Paseo until they filled several blocks. Finally, a crowd accompanied me through the streets and I had to speak again from the hotel balconies.

  To celebrate the second anniversary we chose the Amauta Coliseum in Lima, which Genaro Delgado Parker allowed us to use without charge, because it was a vast space—there was room for 18,000 people—and because we believed that it would be a good opportunity to put forward a serious explanation of the aim of the Democratic Front, by bringing together all our candidates for mayors and councilmen in the various districts of Lima. We also invited the principal leaders of AP, the PPC, SODE, and the UCI (a small group, headed by Francisco Diez Canseco, at that time a congressman, which was later to withdraw from the alliance).

  The program was in two parts. The first, made up of dances and songs, was entrusted to Luis Delgado Aparicio, who was, on the one hand, an attorney who specialized in labor questions and, on the other, a popular figure on radio and television thanks to his salsa programs, or, as he puts it in his inimitable style, programs of Afro-Latin-Caribbean-American music, as well as a famous professional dancer. The second part, the political one properly speaking, would consist of Miguel Cruchaga’s speech and mine.

  The group that we had named Movilización, the youth movement, the district committees, and Solidarity all made a great effort to fill the Amauta. The problem was transportation. The person responsible for it, Juan Checa, had hired a number of buses and trucks and given us the use, for nothing, of others that belonged to his company, but on the appointed day many of these vehicles failed to turn up at the meeting places agreed upon. Hence the men and women of Libertad in charge of mobilization found themselves, in many districts, with hundreds of people who had no way to get to the Coliseum. Charo Chocano, in Las Delicias de Villa, went out onto the highway and hired two buses that were passing by, and in Huaycán, the indefatigable Friedel Cillóniz and her helpers literally took a truck by storm and persuaded its driver to take them to the Amauta. But thousands of people were left hopping mad. Despite this, the stands of the Coliseum were full.

  I had been there since seven that night, all ready, in the car, accompanied by the security guards, driving round and round the Amauta. But, over the radio, those inside who were responsible for the ceremony, Chino Urbina and Alberto Massa, held me back, telling me that people were still coming in and that the emcees—Pedro Cateriano, Enrique Ghersi, and Felipe Leno—had to be given time to warm up the crowd. So half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half went by. To control our impatience, we drove all around Lima several times and, whenever we mentioned the Coliseum, the answer was the same: “Just a little while longer.”

  When, finally, they gave me the green light and I entered the Amauta, there was a contagious, festive, euphoric atmosphere, with pennants and placards of the various committees waving on the stands, and the supporters from each district competing by way of songs and repeated refrains. But nearly two hours had gone by since the time that had been set! Roxana Valdivieso was singing, on the rostrum, a theme song of the Movement. Just a short time before, Juan Incháustegui and Lourdes Flores had made a triumphal entry that they topped off by dancing a huaynito. And Lucho Delgado Aparicio’s show had long since ended. The daily papers and television channels hostile to Libertad were then enabled to create a scandal, because between the folklore numbers popular dancers in scanty costumes suddenly appeared, dancing a frenetic salsa. According to the press, the sight of those wildly wiggling hips, backsides, breasts, and thighs had caused many respectable members of Congress belonging to the PPC to feel embarrassed and their faces to turn beet-red, and someone said that Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy, the embodiment of probity, had been affronted by the performance. But Eduardo Orrego assured me afterwards that all that was false and that, as a matter of fact, Don Ernesto had contemplated the dancers with perfect stoicism. And it was obvious to me that Enrique Chirinos Soto was brimming over with pleasure at what he had seen.

  In any event, when I began to speak, after a Proustian introduction by Miguel Cruchaga (because, in accordance with his fondness for allegories, this time Miguel used Proust to construct one of them), it was about 10 p.m. I hadn’t taken five minutes developing the first subject—the changes in the national political panorama, in which, previously, the ruling ideas were those focused on state control, whereas now public debate was centered on a market economy, privatization, and popular capitalism—when I began noticing a stir in the stands. The spotlights blinded me and I couldn’t see what was happening, but it seemed to me that the stands were emptying. As a matter of fact, people were leaving in a stampede. Only the section that I was facing directly, the two or three hundred municipal candidates, and leaders of the Democratic Front remained in their seats until the end of my speech, which I brought to a hasty close, wondering what the devil was going on. The buses and trucks had been hired till 10 p.m. and the audience, especially the people from distant “young towns”—the shantytowns that had grown up on the outskirts of Lima—didn’t want to return home by walking five, ten, or twenty kilometers.

  In short, our inexperience and lack of coordination turned the festivities of the second anniversary of the Movement into a disaster as far as publicity was concerned. La República, La Crónica, El National, and other semiofficial government publications made particular mention of the half-empty stands of the Amauta as I was speaking and illustrated the news stories with the shapely backsides of Delgado Aparicio’s salsa dancers. In order to counteract the bad effect, Lucho Llosa produced in the days that followed a TV spot showing another aspect of the celebration: stands jammed full of people, and ancient Inca princesses dancing a stately huaynito.

  Seven

  Journalism and Bohemia

  The
three months that I worked at La Crónica, before my last year of secondary school, brought great upheavals in my life. While I was there, I learned what journalism actually was, and I became acquainted as well with a Lima that up until then had been unknown to me, and for the first and last time I lived a bohemian life. I hadn’t yet reached the age of sixteen—my sixteenth birthday wasn’t till the 28th of March of that year—but my wish to cease to be an adolescent, my impatience to reach adulthood, was fulfilled in that summer of 1952.

  I have recalled that adventure in my novel Conversation in The Cathedral, with the inevitable cosmetic changes and additions. The excitement and the churning stomach with which I went up the stairs of the very old two-story building on the Calle Pando where La Crónica is located, in order to present myself that morning in the office of the managing editor, Señor Valverde, a very kindly gentleman who passed on to me certain notions about journalism and announced to me that I would earn five hundred soles a month. That day or the next I was given a press card, with my photo and seals and signatures that said “journalist.”

  The administrative offices and then, through a courtyard with ornamental grilles and tile flooring, the print shop were on the ground floor. On the second floor were the editorial room for the morning paper, a small room where the evening edition was put out, and the living quarters of the managing editor, whose two good-looking daughters we sometimes watched, in admiring silence, as they passed through the corridor just outside the editorial room.

  The main editorial room was a vast space with some twenty desks, at the very back of which was the conductor who directed that orchestra: Gaston Aguirre Morales. The local news staff, the one for the international news, and the one for the crime page divided up the territory between them, separated like building lots by invisible frontiers that everyone respected (the staff that covered sports had its own office). Aguirre Morales—a man from Arequipa, tall, thin, likable, and extremely courteous—welcomed me, sat me down at an empty desk in front of a typewriter, and gave me my first assignment: writing up an item on the presentation of his credentials by the new Brazilian ambassador. And right there and then I received from his own lips my first lesson in modern journalism. I had to begin the news item with the lead, the main fact, summed up in a brief sentence, and develop it in the remainder of the news item in a direct and objective manner. “A reporter’s success lies in knowing how to find the lead, my friend.” When, in fear and trembling, I brought him the finished piece, he read it, struck out a number of useless words—“Conciseness, precision, total objectivity, my friend”—and sent it to the printers’. I must not have slept that night, waiting to see my very own writing in print. And the next morning, when I bought La Crónica and leafed through it, there was the box: “This morning the new Brazilian ambassador, Señor Don…presented his credentials.” I was now a journalist.

  Around five o’clock in the afternoon I would go to the editorial room to receive my assignments for the day and for the next morning: inaugurations, ceremonies, well-known public figures who were arriving or departing, parades, prizes, winners of lotteries or of the polla and the pollón—winning bets on horses that in those days amounted to very large sums—interviews with singers, circus managers, bullfighters, scholars, eccentrics, firemen, prophets, occultists, and all the activities, occupations, or human characters who for one reason or another deserved to be mentioned in the news. I had to go from one district of Lima to another, in a station wagon belonging to the paper, along with a photographer, sometimes the chief one himself, the great Ego Aguirre, if the subject warranted it. When I came back to write up the news items, the editorial room was just as it should have been. A thick cloud of smoke hovered above the desks and the typewriters were clacking away. It smelled of tobacco, ink, and paper. There was the sound of voices, of laughter, of the running footsteps of reporters bringing their copy to Aguirre Morales, who, red pencil in hand, read it, corrected it, and sent it down to the printers’.

  The arrival of the chief editor of the crime page, Becerrita, was the high point of each night. If he came in sober, he went, wordless and ill-tempered, through the editorial room to his desk, followed by his assistant, the pale and ramrod-straight Marcoz. Becerrita was a short, husky man, with his hair slicked down with brilliantine and the square and angry face of a bulldog, in which there stood out, as straight as if drawn with a ruler, a little hairline mustache, which looked as though it had been traced with a charcoal pencil. He had created the “red page”—the one reporting major crimes and felonies—one of the greatest attractions of La Crónica, and it sufficed to see him and hear him, with his vitriolic little eyes, grainy from lack of sleep, perpetually watchful, his shiny suits, pressed countless times, reeking of tobacco and sweat, with lapels full of grease spots, and the microscopic knot in his filthy tie, to surmise that Becerrita was a citizen of Hell, that the underworld haunts of the city held no secrets for him. If he came in drunk, his fierce mineral laugh preceded him, loud guffaws, resounding from the stairway, that shook the grimy windows and the paint-chipped walls of the editorial room. Milton would begin to tremble, for he was Becerrita’s favorite victim. Becerrita would go over to Milton’s desk to make fun of him, cracking jokes that made the reporters on the staff hold their sides laughing, and sometimes, aiming his “piece” at him—because he always went about armed, the better to resemble his caricatural image—chased him about among the desks, his pistol at the ready. On one of those occasions, to everyone’s terror, he accidentally got off a shot that ended up embedded in the spiderwebs on the ceiling of the editorial room.

  But, despite the bad times he gave us, neither Milton, nor Carlos Ney, nor I, nor any of the other reporters felt any animosity toward Becerrita. We all felt a sort of fascination with him, because he had created in the journalism of Lima a distinct genre (which, with time, was to degenerate into something unimaginable), and because, despite his binges and his ugly face, he was a man whom nightfall in Lima turned into a prince.

  Becerrita knew and frequented, in addition to the police stations, all the brothels in Lima, where he was feared and fawned upon because a scandalous news item in La Crónica meant a fine or having the place closed down. Sometimes he took Milton, Carlos, and me (we three became inseparable) with him, after the paper had been put to bed around midnight, to Nanette’s, on the Avenida Grau, or to the brothels in Huatica, or to the more elegant ones on the Avenida Colonial, and almost the moment we crossed the threshold, there was the madam, in person, and the bouncers on duty, welcoming him with kisses and slaps on the back. He never smiled or returned their greetings. He confined himself to growling, without taking his cigar stump out of his mouth: “Beer for the boys.”

  Then, installed at a little table in the bar, with all of us sitting around him, he would drink one beer after another, raising the cigar stump to his lips every once in a while, indifferent to the hubbub all around him, to the couples dancing, or to the fights started by certain belligerent patrons whom the bouncers shoved out into the street. Sometimes Becerrita would start recalling, in a gravel voice, anecdotes about his adventures as a police reporter. He had known and seen from close up the worst hoods, the most hardened criminals of Lima’s underworld, and remembered with pleasure their horrifying deeds, their rivalries, their knife fights, their heroic or ignoble deaths. Even though I felt a touch of the fear aroused by someone who has spent his years among the most pestilential low life, Becerrita dazzled me. He seemed to me to have stepped out of a disturbing novel about the lower depths. When it came time to pay the bill—on the rare occasions when he was charged anything—Becerrita used to grab his pistol and lay it on the table: “I’m the only one here who’s going to take out his wallet.”

  When, after I had worked at La Crónica for two or three weeks, Aguirre Morales asked me if I wanted to substitute for one of the crime page reporters who was sick, I gladly accepted. Although Becerrita was terrifying because of his fearful temper, the reporters who worked with him w
ere as devoted as dogs to him, and in the month that I worked under him I too came to feel proud of being part of his team. This consisted of three or four reporters, although sometimes it would have been more accurate to call them data gatherers, since a couple of them confined themselves to bringing us bare facts that Marcoz and I took charge of writing up. The most picturesque one of the bunch was a gaunt young man who appeared to have stepped out of a comic strip or a puppet show. I’ve forgotten his real name, but I remember the name he went by at the radio station—Paco Denegri—his wraith-like appearance, and the thick eyeglasses that enlarged his myopic eyes to a monstrous size. And his velvet voice as the male lead of a radio serial, an activity he engaged in at Radio Central during his hours off.

  Becerrita was a tireless worker, with an unbridled passion, a fixation on his job. Nothing in the world seemed to interest him but those bloody feasts of violence—lovers’ suicides, accounts settled by knife thrusts, rapes, deflorations, incest, filicides, holdups and fast getaways, arson, clandestine prostitution, corpses washed up by the sea or thrown off a cliff—that we, his peons, kept collecting night and day in our rounds of the police headquarters of the most ill-famed districts in Lima: La Victoria, El Porvenir, and Callao. He reviewed these happenings and a second was all it took for him to shuffle through them and identify the one that had the right amount of filth. “This one’s news.” His instructions were brief and categorical: “Interview this one, go and check that address, this one smells to me like a fake.” And when a reporter came back with the news item, written up according to his instructions, he always knew—his little eyes gleamed and his jaws hung open as he crossed out or added—how to make the spectacular, terrible, cruel, base, or devious feature or detail of what had happened stand out. Sometimes, after the beers at the brothel, he would still drop by the print shop of La Crónica to make sure that his page—a page that in reality was two or three pages and sometimes even more—had come out intact, with the amounts of blood and filth that he had specified.