A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I didn’t know any Peruvian writers, except dead ones or ones I knew only by name. One of these latter, who had published poems and written works for the theater, passed through Piura around that time: Sebastián Salazar Bondy. He was the literary adviser of Pedro López Lagar’s Argentine company, which had a brief run at the Teatro Variedades (it put on a work by Unamuno and another by Jacinto Grau, if memory serves me). At both performances I kept fighting against my shyness so as to approach Sebastián, whose tall, slender silhouette I saw strolling up and down the aisles of the theater. I wanted to talk to him about my vocation, to ask him for advice, or merely to have concrete verification that a Peruvian could manage to become a writer. But I couldn’t work up my nerve, and years later, when we had become friends and I told him about my hesitation, Sebastián couldn’t believe it.

  I often went with my Uncle Lucho on trips to the interior of the departamento and one time to Tumbes, where he was exploring a business deal having to do with fish. We went to Sullana, Paita, Talara, Sechura, and also to the provinces in the highlands of Piura, such as Ayabaca and Huancabamba, but the landscape that lingered in my memory and conditioned, I feel, my relationship with nature was that Piuran desert that has nothing monotonous about it, that changes with the sun and with the wind, and in which, because of the vast horizon and the clear blue sky, one always has the sensation that, just on the other side of one sand dune or another, the sea will suddenly appear, with its silvery glints and its foamy waves.

  Every time we went out of town in the creaking black station wagon and that nearly endless white or gray expanse stretched out before us, undulating, burning-hot, interrupted every so often by patches of mesquite, by little huts made of wild reeds and clay, and traversed by mysterious flocks of goats that seemed to be lost in the immensity that surrounded them, over which lizards suddenly zigzagged or iguanas toasted themselves in the sun, motionless and disquieting, I felt great excitement, a seething impulse. That vast space, that boundless horizon—every so often the lower ranges of the Andes appeared, like the shadows of giants—filled my head with adventurous ideas, with epic tales, and the number of stories and poems I planned to write using this setting, peopling it, was endless. When in 1958 I left for Europe, where I was to remain for many years, that landscape was one of the most frequently recurring images I preserved of Peru, and also the one that used to make me feel the most homesick.

  When the semester was already well along, one fine day Dr. Marroquín announced to those of us in our last year that this time final exams would not be given in accordance with a preestablished schedule, but rather without prior notice. The reason for this experimental procedure was so as to be able to evaluate the student’s knowledge with greater accuracy. Examinations announced beforehand, for which the students prepared by memorizing the material of the course in question the night before, gave an imprecise idea of what they had assimilated.

  The whole class panicked. The fact that a student prepared for a chemistry exam could go to school only to be tested in geometry or logic left us with our hair standing on end. We began to imagine a cataract of classes that we’d flunk. And in our last year at school!

  Javier Silva and I incited our classmates to rebel against the experiment (long afterward I found out that that project had been the subject of Dr. Marroquín’s doctoral dissertation). We held meetings and an assembly in which a committee was named, with me as president, to speak with Dr. Marroquín. He received us in his office and politely listened to me ask him to post the examination schedules. But he told us that his decision was irrevocable.

  We then planned a strike. We would refuse to go to classes until the measure was revoked. There were nights when, beside ourselves with overexcitement, we discussed the details of the operation with Javier and other classmates. On the morning agreed on, when the hour for classes to begin came round, we retreated to the Eguiguren embankment. But there, several boys, scared to death—in those days, a student strike was unheard of—began to murmur that they might expel us and that it would be better to go back and attend classes. The argument turned into a bitter one, and finally one group refused to go on with the strike. Demoralized by this desertion, the rest of us agreed to return for afternoon classes. When we went back inside the school, the head proctor took me to the principal’s office. Dr. Marroquín’s voice trembled as he told me that, as the one responsible for what had happened, I deserved, ipso facto, to be expelled from San Miguel. But instead, in order not to ruin my future, he would expel me only for seven days. And that I should tell Agricultural Engineer Llosa (he called Uncle Lucho that because he often saw him in the riding boots he wore when he went out to his farm) to come have a talk with him. Uncle Lucho had to listen to Dr. Marroquín’s complaints.

  My temporary expulsion caused something of a stir and even Don Jorge Checa, the prefect, dropped by the house to offer to act as intermediary so that the principal would reverse his decision. I don’t remember if he shortened my expulsion or whether I was expelled for the entire week, but, once the punishment was over, I felt like Jan Valtin after he had survived the Nazis’ prisons.

  I mention the episode of the abortive strike because it was to become the subject of my first published short story, “Los jefes” (“The Leaders”), and because in it the first glimpses of a burgeoning concern on my part could be discerned. I don’t believe I had thought much about politics before that year in Piura. I remember that when I was working as a messenger at International News Service, I was indignant when the editors received a warning that all information that arrived concerning Peru had to be discussed with the chief administrator of the Ministry of the Interior before being sent on to La Crónica. But even when I was working at the newspaper as a reporter, I didn’t think about the fact that we were living under a military dictatorship, which had forbidden political parties and exiled many Apristas, as well as the former president, Bustamante y Rivero, and a number of his collaborators.

  In that year in Piura, politics entered my life at a gallop and with the idealism and confusion with which it usually bursts upon a young man. Since what I read, in utter disorder, left me with more questions than answers, I pestered Uncle Lucho, and he explained to me what socialism, Communism, Aprism, Urrism, fascism were, and patiently listened to my revolutionary pronouncements. What did they consist of? In my becoming aware that Peru was a country of contrasts, of millions of poor people and barely a handful of Peruvians who had a comfortable, decent standard of living, and that the poor—Indians, mestizos, and blacks—were, in addition to being exploited, looked down on by the rich, a large part of whom were whites. And in my very keen feeling that that injustice had to change and that this change would come about through what was known as the left, socialism, revolution. From those last months in Piura on, I began to think, in secret, that at the university I would try to contact those who were revolutionaries and be one of them. And I also decided that I would take the entrance exams for the University of San Marcos and not for Católica, a university for well-off kids, “whities,” and reactionaries. I would go to the national one, the one for mestizos, atheists, and Communists. Uncle Lucho wrote to a relative and a friend of his since childhood, a professor of literature at San Marcos—Augusto Tamayo Vargas—telling him about my plans. And Augusto wrote me a few encouraging lines, telling me that at San Marcos I would find fertile ground for my concerns.

  I arrived at the final examinations with a certain anxiety, because of that strike, thinking that the school might take reprisals. But I passed all of them. The last two weeks were frantic ones. I stayed up all night, going over the year’s notes and outlines, with Javier Silva, the Artadis, the Temple twins, and often, with as much irresponsibility as ignorance, we took amphetamines so as to stay awake. Amphetamines were sold at the pharmacy without a prescription, and nobody in my circle of friends realized that they were a drug. The artificial lucidity and nervous tension left me feeling weak and depressed the next day.

  After t
he final exam, I had one of those literary encounters that, I suspect, have had a prolonged effect on my life. I came back home around noon, happy at having now left the school behind me, physically exhausted by the many nights in a row that I had forced myself to stay awake, determined to sleep for many long hours. And, already in bed, I picked up one of the books that belonged to Uncle Lucho, a big fat one whose title by itself didn’t seem particularly striking: The Brothers Karamazov. I read it from cover to cover as fast as I could turn the pages, in a hypnotic state, getting up out of bed every so often like an automaton, not knowing who or where I was, until Aunt Olga came bustling in to remind me that I had to have lunch, and dinner, and breakfast. Between Dostoevsky’s magic and the paroxysmal power of his story, with its hallucinatory characters, and my overwrought nervous state brought on by the sleepless nights and the amphetamines of the two weeks of exams, that uninterrupted reading jag of almost twenty-four hours was a real trip, in the sense that that benign word would take on in the 1960s, with the drug culture and the hippie revolution. I have since reread The Brothers Karamazov, appreciating it better, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in its infinite complexities, but without living it as intensely as I did on that day and that night in December, when I ended my life as a schoolboy with this tremendous novelistic crowning touch.

  I stayed in Piura for a few weeks more, after the exams. Uncle Jorge was to drive out to the San Jacinto hacienda, near Chimbote, where Uncle Pedro was the doctor, and Uncle Lucho agreed to go out there to join them, so that the brothers could see each other, and the plans were that I would go back to Lima in my Uncle Jorge’s car. To save me time in preparing for my enrollment at San Marcos, Grandpa had sent to me in Piura a guide for students preparing for the entrance examinations, the cuestionarios desarrollados—“models of ideal answers”—and I spent the mornings before my work began at La Industria going over the questions and the model answers.

  I had high hopes at the prospect of entering the university and beginning adult life, but I felt sad at leaving Piura and Uncle Lucho. The help he gave me that year, during the stage that lies on the borderline between childhood and young adulthood, is one of the best things that ever happened to me. If the expression means anything, I was happy during that year, as I had never been in Lima in any of the previous years, although there had been splendid moments in the course of them. There in Piura, between April and December of 1952, with Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, I had enjoyed peace of mind, a way of life without chronic fear, without hiding what I thought, wanted, and dreamed, and this helped me organize my life in a way that harmonized my aptitudes and ineptitudes with my vocation. From Piura, during all of the following year, Uncle Lucho was to continue to help me with his advice and his encouragement, in long replies to the letters I wrote to him.

  Perhaps for that reason, but not for that reason alone, Piura came to mean a great deal to me. Adding together the two times that I lived there, they amount to less than two years, and yet that place is more immediately real in what I have written than anywhere else in the world. Those novels, short stories and a play set in Piura do not exhaust these images of that region’s people and landscapes that still hover round about me, battling to be turned into works of fiction. The fact that it was in Piura that I had the joy of seeing a work I’d written presented on the stage of a theater and that I made such fast friends there doesn’t explain everything, because reason never can explain feelings, and the tie that one forms with a city is of the same sort as the one that suddenly binds one to a woman, a real love affair, with deep and mysterious roots. The fact is that, even if after those last days in 1952 I never lived in Piura again—though I visited it, very sporadically—in a manner of speaking I went on living there, taking the city with me wherever I went, all over the world, hearing Piurans speaking in that lilting, drawling way of theirs, with their typical guás and churres tacked on to the end of words and their supersuperlatives—lindisisíma, carisisíma, borrachisísimo—contemplating their languorous desert landscapes and sometimes feeling on their skin the searing language of its sun.

  At the time of the battle against the nationalization of the banks, in 1987, one of the three protest demonstrations we staged was in Piura, and Piura was the first city I went to on campaign, after the launching of my candidacy in Arequipa, on June 4, 1989. Piura was the departamento where I visited the most provinces and districts and to which I returned most often during the campaign. I am certain that my subconscious predilection for Piurans and for what was Piuran played a part in that. And, doubtless, for that very reason I was to experience such disappointment, in June of 1990, on discovering that the voters in Piura were not attuned to my feelings, since they voted by a large majority for my opponent in the final round on June 10,* despite the fact that Fujimori had made hardly more than a furtive visit to the city in the course of his campaign.

  The trip to go meet Uncle Jorge was postponed several times, until finally we took to the road, at the end of December, very early in the morning. Our journey was marked by all sorts of mishaps—having to change a tire on the highway and confronting problems with the motor of the station wagon, which overheated. The meeting with the uncles coming from Lima took place in Chimbote, at that time still a quiet village of fishermen, with the very well-run Hotel de Turistas on the shores of a beach with crystal-clear water. We had a dinner with the whole family—Uncle Jorge’s wife, Aunt Gaby, and Uncle Pedro were there—and the next day, early in the morning, I said goodbye to Uncle Lucho, who was going back to Piura. When I gave him a hug, I burst into tears.

  Ten

  Public Life

  Ever since the rally in the Plaza San Martín, my life had ceased to be private. Never again, until I left Peru after the second round of voting for the presidency, in June 1990, did I enjoy that privacy that I had always guarded so jealously (to the point of remarking that what attracted me about England was the fact that since nobody there ever picked a quarrel with anybody else, people turned into ghosts). Ever since that rally, at any hour of the day or night, there were people at my house, holding meetings, conducting interviews, organizing something or other, or else standing in line to talk with me, with Patricia, or with Álvaro. Reception rooms, hallways, stairways were always occupied by men and women whom I’d often never met and whose reason for being there was utterly unknown to me, reminding me of a line from a poem by Carlos Germán Belli: “This is not your house, you’re a man of the wilds.”

  Since María del Carmen, my secretary, soon found herself swamped with work, others came to give her a hand, first Silvana, then Rosi and Lucía and later on two volunteers, Anita and Elena, and a room next to my study had to be built to lodge that woman’s army and make room for paraphernalia that I (who have always written by hand) saw, as if in a dream, being brought into the house, being installed and beginning to work all around me: computers, faxes, photocopy machines, intercoms, typewriters, new telephone lines, rows of filing cabinets. That office, next to the library and a few steps away from our bedroom, operated from early in the morning till late at night, and till dawn in the weeks immediately preceding the election, so that I came to feel that everything about my life, including sleeping and even more intimate matters, had become public.

  During the campaign against nationalization we had two bodyguards inside the house, till the day when, sick and tired of running at every turn into armed men with pistols that terrified my mother and Aunt Olga—who were both living with us then—Patricia decided that the security unit would stay outside the house.

  The story of the bodyguards included a comic chapter on the night of the Plaza San Martín. With the sudden increase in terrorism and crime—kidnapping had become a flourishing industry—there began to be more and more private surveillance and protection agencies in Peru. One of them, known as “the Israelis,” since its owners or directors came from Israel, was in charge of protecting Hernando de Soto. And he arranged, along with Miguel Cruchaga, to have “the Israelis” guard me at
that time. Manuel and Alberto, two ex-Marines, came to my house. They accompanied me to the Plaza San Martín and stood at the foot of the speakers’ platform on August 21. When I finished speaking, I invited the crowd to go with me to the Palace of Justice to hand over to the AP and the PPC members of Congress the list of signatures against nationalization. During the march, Manuel disappeared, swallowed up by the crowd. But Alberto stuck to me like glue amid all the chaos. A station wagon belonging to “the Israelis” was to pick me up on the steps of the neoclassic white building on the Paseo de la República. With Alberto there beside me as always, like my shadow, and the two of us nearly crushed to a pulp by the demonstrators, we went down the stairs. All of a sudden, a black car with the doors open appeared out of nowhere. I was lifted off my feet, shoved inside, and found myself surrounded by armed strangers. I took it for granted that they were “the Israelis.” But then I heard Alberto shouting: “It’s not them, it’s not them!” and saw him struggling. He managed to dive into the car just as it was taking off and landed like a dead weight on top of me and the other occupants. “Is this a kidnapping?” I asked, half jokingly and half seriously. “Our job is to look after you,” the bruiser who was driving answered. And immediately thereafter, he spoke a phrase straight out of a movie into the hand microphone he was holding: “The Jaguar is safe and we’re going to the moon. Over.”

  It was Óscar Balbi, the head agent of Prosegur, a company that was a competitor of “the Israelis.” My friends Pipo Thorndike and Roberto Dañino had arranged for Prosegur to provide for my security that night, but had forgotten to tell me. They had spoken with Jorge Vega, the chairman of the board of directors of Prosegur, and the entrepreneur Luis Woolcot had paid the expenses (I learned this two years afterward).