A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  While—impelled by the spite toward which he was so easily inclined or for more practical reasons—de Soto turned out in Peru to be a sly and sneaky enemy of my candidacy, in the United States he showed, wherever and whenever he got the chance, the video of the rally in the Plaza San Martín as proof of his popularity.* But the person who in this barefaced way doubtless attracted more sympathy and support from liberal institutions and foundations in the United States for his Instituto Libertad y Democracia contrived, at the same time, to let slip out insinuations against the Democratic Front at the Department of State and various international agencies in the presence of individuals who sometimes came to me, all upset, to ask me what these Machiavellianisms meant. They simply meant that the person who had described the mercantilist system in Peru with such preciseness had ended up being its prototype. Those of us who aided and abetted him—and, in a manner of speaking, invented him—must admit frankly, without mincing words: we had not contributed to the cause of freedom or to that of Peru, but, rather, whetted the appetites of a homegrown Rastignac.

  But his swift passage through the world of ideas and liberal values left behind a good book. And also, to a certain extent, that group of young radicals who, at the first congress of Libertad, so heatedly defended the deletion of an adjective.

  The radicalism and the excitement of the young Turks headed by Ghersi—above all of the Jacobin Federico Salazar, always prompt to denounce any symptom of mercantilism or deviation tending toward state control—rather frightened Lucho Bustamante, a prudent man and, as the person responsible for the Plan for Governing, someone who was determined that our program should be realistic as well as radical (since liberal utopias also exist). Hence his insistence, with the backing of a number of the economists and professionals on his team, that the Movement should adopt as its own the formula that Ludwig Erhard (or rather, his adviser Alfred Müller-Armack) had used to label the economic policy which, after 1948, launched Germany’s amazing economic takeoff: the social market economy.

  My own inclination was to drop the adjective “social.” Not because I believe a market economy incompatible with any form of redistribution of wealth—a thesis to which no liberal would subscribe, although there are varying points of view on the scope that a policy of the redistribution of wealth should have in an open society—but because in Peru it is more closely associated with socialism than with the equality of opportunity that is a feature of liberal philosophy. My objection also had to do with conceptual clarity. The military dictatorship had applied the label “social” to everything that it collectivized and brought under state control and Alan García martyrized Peruvians by repeating it in every one of his speeches, explaining that he was nationalizing banking so that it would fulfill a “social function.” The word used in that odd sense cropped up so often in political discourse that it had become more of a populist catchword than a concept. (I have always felt affection toward those young extremists, even though every so often one of them accused me of heterodoxy as well and, with the passage of time, two of them—Ghibellini and Salazar—turned out to be rather contemptible. But during the period to which I am referring, they appeared to be generous and idealistic. And their incorruptibility and their intransigence, I told myself, would be useful when the day came to undertake the arduous task of making the country moral.)

  The congress did not come to any decision with regard to the adjective “social” and the debate remained an open-ended one, but the interchange marked the best intellectual moment of the meeting and served to set many members to thinking. The real conclusion came with the practical efforts of the two following months, in which Lucho Bustamante’s team drew up the most advanced liberal project thus far proposed in Peru, and none of the “young Turks” found anything in it to object to.

  To what point did we manage to make ideas put down roots among members of Libertad? To what degree did Peruvians who voted for me vote for liberal ideas? I don’t know. This is a doubt that I would like very much to clear up. In any event, the effort we made to give ideas a primordial role in the life of the Freedom Movement was a many-sided one. The national committee on basic principles and culture was established, which the congress chose Enrique Ghersi to head, together with a school for party leaders that was Miguel Cruchaga’s idea and enthusiastically conducted by Fernando Iwasaki and Carlos Zuzunaga.

  Shortly after the congress Raúl Ferrero Costa, who had been dean of the Bar Association, and a group of professionals and students associated with him joined Libertad. His handling of affairs as dean had been magnificent, and had been the occasion for his traveling extensively throughout Peru. When Víctor Guevara gave up his position as head of the national committee for organization, I asked Raúl to take his place, and despite the fact that he knew how difficult a post it was, he agreed. At that time, the secretary general, Miguel Cruchaga, aided by his wife Cecilia, had taken on an almost overwhelming task: recruiting and training the sixty thousand election supervisors we needed in order to have a representative at every single one of the tables for registering voters in the entire country. (The election supervisor is the sole guarantee against fraud when voters register or cast their ballots.) All the work of organizing was thus left in Ferrero’s hands.

  Raúl made a tremendous effort to improve the status of Libertad in the provinces. Aided by some twenty co-workers, he traveled tirelessly throughout the interior, setting up committees where none existed as yet and reorganizing the ones that did. The infrastructure of Libertad was expanding. On my travels I was impressed to see that in remote provinces in Cajamarca, Ancash, San Martín, or Apurímac I was received by organized groups of members of Libertad on the front of whose headquarters there could be made out, from a long way away, that red and black emblem of Libertad whose calligraphy bore a family resemblance to Poland’s Solidarno$$$$$$$$$$. (In 1981, when the repressive laws against the labor movement headed by Lech Walesa were made public, I had led, along with the journalist Luis Pásara, a protest demonstration, and I suppose that because of this precedent, many people believed that the similarity of the two symbols had been my idea. But in all truth, although the close resemblance struck me as a happy coincidence, I didn’t plan it, nor do I know to this day whether it was devised by Jorge Salmón, who was responsible for publicity for Libertad, or Miguel Cruchaga or Fernando de Szyszlo, who, in order to help us raise funds, had designed a splendid lithograph with the Libertad insignia.)

  We agreed to hold elections within the Movement before the national ones. This decision impressed many of our members as being an imprudent one, which was going to divert both our resources and our energies and serve as an excuse for squabbles inside the Movement, when what we ought to be doing was concentrate on fighting against our adversaries now that we were going into the final stretch of the campaign. I was one of those who defended the idea of these internal elections. It was my belief that they would serve to democratize many committees in the provinces, which thanks to these elections would free themselves of the entrenched local political bosses and emerge from them much stronger, with genuine representatives from the rank and file.

  But I would venture the guess that in two-thirds of the provinces the caciques managed to rig the election procedures and get themselves elected handily. The clever tactics they used were technically unobjectionable. They published or spread word of the time limits for the registration of candidates or the date of the election in such a way that it was only their partisans who found out about them, or else they had the list of members drawn up in such a way that their potential adversaries were not registered to vote or were recorded as having registered after the date that had been set as the limit to participate in the elections. The head of our national committee on electoral affairs, Alberto Massa—an irresistibly humorous member of the political committee whom all the other members could hardly wait to hear ask for the floor because his remarks were always sparklingly witty and made us roar with laughter—on whose head there had rained
down the condemnations, protests, and criticisms of the victims of such maneuvers, left us openmouthed with astonishment at the ruses and the cunning tricks that he had been learning of.

  We did what we could to undo the chicanery. We declared null and void the elections in those provinces where the number of voters had been suspiciously low, and passed judgment on the internecine accusations wherever it was possible to do so. But in other cases—the national elections were already upon us—we were obliged to resign ourselves to recognizing certain committees of questionable legitimacy in the interior of the country.

  In Lima it was different. The elections for the secretariat of the departamento, which Rafael Rey’s list was to win, were carefully planned and it was possible to avoid or to stop any dirty tricks in time. I made the rounds of the districts on election day, and it was exciting to see the long lines of members of the Freedom Movement waiting outside on the street to vote. But the one who had been Rey’s opposing candidate on our ticket—Enrique Fuster—could not bear having been defeated: he resigned from Libertad, attacked us in the government-controlled press and turned up a few months later as a candidate for a congressional seat on the list of a rival party.

  The new departmental committee in Lima went on expanding the work of organizing all through the capital and, aided by the Solidarity program, in the young towns as well, from which, in the last months of 1989 and the first of 1990, Patricia and I had received invitations nearly every day to inaugurate new committees. We went every time we could. At this point my obligations began at seven or eight in the morning and ended after midnight.

  In those inaugurations one rule was observed without exception: the more humble the neighborhood, the more elaborate the ceremony. Peru is an “old country,” as the novelist José María Arguedas reminded his readers, and nothing betrays how far back in time the Peruvian psyche goes as does the people’s love of ritual, form, ceremony. There was always a very colorful speakers’ platform, with flowers, little flags, noisemakers, paper garlands hanging from the walls and ceilings, and a table with things to eat and drink after the official ceremony. There was invariably a group of musicians and sometimes folk dancers, from the mountains and the coast. The parish priest never failed to show up, to sprinkle holy water about and bless the local headquarters (which might well be a crude structure made of reeds and rush matting in the middle of nowhere) and a crowd dressed in vivid colors, wearing what were obviously their very best clothes, as for a wedding or a baptism. The national anthem had to be sung at the beginning and the theme song of Libertad at the end. And in between the crowd had to listen to a great many speeches. For every last member of the directorate—the district secretary general, along with the heads of the district committees on basic principles and culture, on women’s initiatives, on youth programs, on voting registration, on social issues, et cetera, et cetera—had to speak, so that no one would feel left out. The ceremony went on and on—seemingly forever. And afterward a document in baroque legalese, complete with a great many seals, had to be signed, bearing witness to the fact that the ceremony had taken place, and anointing and sanctifying it. And then came the show, folk music and dances, huaynitos from the high country, marineras from Trujillo, black dances from Chincha, pasillos from Piura. Though I begged, ordered, pleaded—explaining that with such grand and glorious activities the whole campaign schedule went to hell—I very seldom managed to get them to make these inaugurations any shorter, or to beg off from the picture taking and the autograph sessions, or of course to get out of being the target of handfuls of pica-pica, a demoniacal powder that worked its way all over my body and into my most hidden recesses and made me itch like crazy. Despite all that, it was hard not to be won over by the extraordinary warmth and the unrestrained emotionalism of these popular sectors, so different in that respect from middle- and upper-class Peruvians, inhibited and emotionally undemonstrative.

  Patricia, whom to my surprise I had already seen giving interviews on television—something she had always refused to do before—and delivering speeches in the young towns, used to ask me, when she saw me come back from these inaugurations covered from head to foot with confetti: “Do you still remember that once upon a time you were a writer?”

  Nine

  Uncle Lucho

  If, of the fifty-five years that I have lived, I were allowed to relive just one, I would choose the one I spent in Piura, at Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s, doing my final year of secondary studies at the Colegio San Miguel and working at La Industria. Everything that happened to me there, between April and December 1952, kept me in a state of intellectual enthusiasm and joie de vivre that I have always recalled with nostalgia. Of all those things, the main one was Uncle Lucho.

  He was the oldest of my uncles, the one who, after Grandfather Pedro, had been the head of the Llosa tribe, the one to whom everybody went for help and the one whom I had secretly been fondest of, ever since I possessed the faculty of reason, there, in Cochabamba, when he made me the happiest creature in the world by taking me to swimming pools where I learned to swim.

  The family was proud of Uncle Lucho. My grandparents and Auntie Mamaé told how, in Arequipa, he had won the prize for excellence, every year, at the Jesuit school, and Granny dug up his report cards to show us the outstanding grades he received when he graduated. But Uncle Lucho hadn’t been able to pursue the career in which, with his talent, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would have achieved all sorts of triumphs, because his being such a good-looking young man and being such a success with the ladies was his downfall. When he was still a youth, about to enter the university, he got one of his girl cousins pregnant, and the scandal, in serene and straitlaced Arequipa, forced him to go off to Lima until the family calmed down. The mere fact of his return caused another scandal, when, while still scarcely past adolescence, he married Mary, a woman from Arequipa twenty years older than he was. The couple had to leave the horror-stricken city and go off to Chile, where Uncle Lucho opened a bookstore and went on with his adventures as a Don Juan, which finally ruined his precocious marriage.

  Once separated from his wife, he journeyed to Cochabamba, to his grandparents’. Among my early memories are those of his handsome presence—like a movie actor’s—and of the jokes and anecdotes that were told at the big family dinner table on Sundays concerning the conquests and gallantries of Uncle Lucho, who, from that time on, helped me to do my homework and gave me extra classes in math. Then he left to work in Santa Cruz, first with my grandfather on the Saipina hacienda and then on his own as the representative for various firms and products, among them Pommery, the champagne. Santa Cruz has the reputation of being the place in Bolivia with the prettiest women, and Uncle Lucho always said that he spent all the money he made in his business dealings there on Pommery champagne, which he sold to himself so as to court the beauties of Santa Cruz. He often came to Cochabamba and his arrivals brought a great tidal wave of energy into the house on Ladislao Cabrera. Of all the comings and goings in that family, I was most delighted by his visits, because even though I loved all my uncles dearly, Uncle Lucho was the one who seemed to me to be my real papa.

  He finally settled down and married Aunt Olga. They went off to live in Santa Cruz, where legend has it that one of Uncle Lucho’s spiteful sweethearts from the town, a beautiful woman also named Olga, came on horseback one afternoon to shoot five bullets at Aunt Olga’s windows for having monopolized—in theory at least—such a choice catch. My predilection for Uncle Lucho was owed not only to how affectionate he was with me, but also to the aura of adventure, of life in perpetual renewal, that surrounded him. Ever since then I have felt a fascination for people who appear to have stepped out of novels, the ones who have made a reality of Chocano’s line of verse: “I want my life to be a torrential stream…”

  Uncle Lucho spent his life changing jobs, trying his hand at all sorts of businesses, always unsatisfied with what he was doing, and although most of the time what he tried turned out
badly, there is no doubt that he was never bored. The last year we were in Bolivia, he was smuggling rubber into Argentina. It was an undertaking that the Bolivian government, outwardly, tried to wipe out but secretly encouraged, since it was a good source of foreign currency for the country. Argentina, the victim of an international embargo because of its favorable stance toward the Axis during the war, paid a price equal to its weight in gold for this product from the Amazon jungles—whether India or gum rubber. I remember having gone with Uncle Lucho to some warehouses in Cochabamba where the rubber, before being hidden in the trucks that would take it to the border, had to be sprinkled with talcum powder to mask its odor, and having felt a sinful excitement when I too was allowed to throw a few handfuls of talcum onto the forbidden product. Shortly before the end of the war, one of Uncle Lucho’s convoys was confiscated at the border, and he and his partners lost their shirts. Just in time for him and Aunt Olga—and their two little daughters, Wanda and Patricia—to come settle in Piura with my grandparents.

  Once arrived there, Uncle Lucho had worked for several years for the Romero Company, in a car distributorship, but in 1952, when I went to live with him, he was a farmer. He had rented the San José rural holding, on the banks of the Chira River, on which he grew cotton. San José was between Paita and Sullana, some two hours’ journey from Piura by car, and I often went out there with him, in the two or three trips a week that he made, in a rickety black truck, to oversee the irrigation, the spraying of pesticides, or the clearing of the land. As he spoke with the farmhands, I rode horseback, swam in the irrigation ditch, and invented stories about earth-shaking passions between young landowners and peasant girls who picked cotton. (I remember having written a long story of this sort to which I gave the elegantly euphuistic title “La zagala” [“The Shepherdess”].)