A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  A while later, and through arrangements made by Juan Jochamowitz, Prosegur decided to take over the responsibility for the security of my house and my family for the three years of the campaign, without ever asking us for a fee (as a result, the government canceled the contracts it had with Prosegur to guard state enterprises). Óscar Balbi organized the security for all my trips and for the rallies of the Democratic Front and was invariably at my side in the planes, helicopters, trucks, light vans, motorboats, and on the horses that I used in those years to make two complete swings around the whole of Peru. Only once did I see a situation get the better of him: in the late afternoon of September 21, 1988, in the little rural community of Acchupata, in Cajamarca, in the Cumbe mountain range, where the 14,500-foot altitude made him fall off his horse and we had to resuscitate him by giving him oxygen.

  I am grateful to him and to all his companions, because they lent me services that there would have been no way to pay for—and ones that are indispensable in a country where political violence has reached the extremes that it has in Peru. But I must say that living under permanent protection is like living in prison, a nightmare for anyone who enjoys his freedom as much as I do.

  I could no longer do what I have always liked doing, ever since I was a youngster, in the afternoon after finishing writing: wander about through different parts of town, explore the streets, slip into matinees at those neighborhood movie houses so old they creak and where the fleas eventually drive a person out, climb into jitneys and public buses, with no fixed goal, so as to come to know, little by little, the innermost parts and the people of that heterogeneous labyrinth, so full of contrasts, that is Lima. In recent years I had become known—more for a television program that I put on than for my books—so that it was no longer as easy for me to amble about without attracting attention. But from August 1987 on it was impossible for me to go anywhere without being immediately surrounded by people and applauded or booed. And going through life followed by reporters and in the middle of a ring of bodyguards—at first there were two of them, then four, and finally fifteen or so in the last months—was a spectacle somewhere between a clown act and an annoyance that took away all my pleasure. It is true that my killing schedules left me practically no time for anything unrelated to politics, but even so, in my rare free moments it was unthinkable, for example, for me to go into a bookstore—where I was so besieged I couldn’t do what a person does in such places: browse about among the shelves, leaf through books, turn everything topsy-turvy in the hope of coming across some superb unexpected find—or to a theater, where my appearance gave rise to demonstrations, as happened at a recital by Alicia Maguiña, at the Teatro Municipal, when the audience, on seeing me come in with Patricia, divided into adherents who applauded and adversaries who jeered. In order for me to see a play, José Sanchís Sinisterra’s Ay, Carmela, without incident, friends from the Ensayo group seated me, all by myself, in the balcony of the Teatro Británico. I mention these performances because, as I remember, they were the only ones I attended during those years. And as for the movies, something that I’m as fond of as I am of books and the theater, I went to two or three of them at most, and always more or less stealthily (entering after the film had begun and leaving before it was over). The last time—it was at the Cine San Antonio, in Miraflores—Óscar Balbi came to my seat halfway through the movie to get me because they had just thrown a bomb at one of the local headquarters of Libertad and left a watchman with a bullet wound. I went to soccer games two or three times and to a volleyball match too, as well as to bullfights, but these were appearances that were decided on by the campaign directors of the Democratic Front, for the obligatory sessions of “mingling with the crowd.”

  The diversions, then, that Patricia and I could allow ourselves consisted of going to the houses of friends for dinner and every once in a while to a restaurant, though we were well aware that this latter would make us feel spied on or like performers in a stage show. I often thought, with shivers running up and down my spine: “I’ve lost my freedom.” If I were president, it would be like that for five more years. And I remember the sense of amazement and the happiness that came over me on June 14, 1990, when, after all that was over, I landed in Paris and even before unpacking any of the suitcases went for a walk down the Boulevard St.-Germain, feeling like an anonymous passerby once again, without escorts, without police details, without being recognized (or nearly so, since all of a sudden, as if by spontaneous generation, there appeared in front of me once more, blocking my way, the ubiquitous, omniscient Juan Cruz, of El País, to whom I found it impossible to deny an interview).

  Once my political life began, I made a decision: “I’m not going to stop reading or writing for at least a couple of hours every day. Not even if I’m president.” It was only partially a selfish decision. It was also dictated by the conviction that what I wanted to do, as a candidate and as head of the government, I would do better if I kept intact a private, personal space, walled in to keep out politics, a space consisting of ideas, reflections, dreams, and intellectual work.

  I kept this promise I’d made to myself only insofar as reading was concerned, although not always the minimum of two hours a day that I’d set myself. As for writing, it was impossible for me. Writing fiction, that is to say. It wasn’t only the lack of time. It was impossible for me to concentrate, to give myself over to the play of imagination, to attain that state of breaking completely away from and suspending everything around me, which is what is so marvelous about writing novels and works for the theater. Preoccupations of the moment, far removed from the realm of pure literature, kept interfering, and there was no way of escaping from the exhausting march of events. Moreover, I never managed to get used to the idea that I was alone, even though it was very early in the morning and the secretaries hadn’t come in yet. It was as if my beloved demons had fled from my study, resentful at my lack of solitude during the rest of the day. It distressed me, and I gave up trying. In those three years, I wrote only a light erotic divertissement—Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother)—along with speeches, articles, brief political essays, and a number of forewords for a collection of modern novels published under the Círculo de Lectores imprint.

  Having a schedule that permitted so little time for reading made me very exacting: I couldn’t offer myself the luxury of reading as anarchically as I have always been in the habit of doing, and I read only books that I knew were going to hypnotize me. And so I reread certain novels very close to my heart, among them Malraux’s La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate), Melville’s Moby Dick, Faulkner’s Light in August, and Borges’s short stories. A bit unnerved at discovering how little intellect—how little intelligence—is involved in the daily round of political tasks, I also made myself read difficult works that forced me to think while I read and to take notes. Ever since The Open Society and Its Enemies fell into my hands in 1980, I had promised myself to study Karl Popper. I did so in these three years, every day, early in the morning, before going out for my daily run, when often it was just barely daylight and the quiet of the house reminded me of the prepolitical period of my life.

  And at night, before going to sleep, I read poetry—always the classics of the Spanish Golden Age, and usually Góngora. Each time it was a purifying bath, if only for half an hour, to get away from arguments, plots, intrigues, invectives, and be the guest of a perfect world, freed of all contemporaneity, resplendently harmonious, inhabited by all the nymphs and literary villains anyone could wish for and by mythological monsters, who moved about in landscapes refined to quintessences, amid references to Greek and Roman fictions, subtle music, and pure, clean architecture. I had read Góngora since my university years, with rather distant admiration, because his very perfection struck me as just a touch inhuman and his world too cerebral and chimerical. But between 1987 and 1990 how grateful I was to him for being all of that, for having built that baroque enclave outside of time, suspended in the most illustrious heig
hts of intellect and sensibility, emancipated from the ugly, the mean and petty, the mediocre, from all that sordid warp and woof of which daily life is woven for the majority of mortals.

  Between the first and the second electoral round—between April 8 and June 10, 1990—I was unable to do my studious hour or hour and a half of reading in the mornings, even though I sat down in my study with a copy of Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations or Objective Knowledge in my hands. My head was too immersed in the problems, in the tremendous tension of each day, in the news of attempts on people’s lives and of murders—for over a hundred persons with ties to the Democratic Front, district leaders, candidates for national or regional offices, or sympathizers, were assassinated in those two months, humble people, beings no different from others who all over the world are the privileged victims of political terrorism (and also of counterterrorism)—and I had to give up. But not a single day, not even the day of the election, went by without my reading a sonnet of Góngora’s, or a strophe of his Polifemo or his Soledades or one or another of his ballads or rondelets, and through these verses to feel that, if only for a few minutes, my life became purer. May these present lines stand as evidence of my gratitude toward the great man of Córdoba.

  I had thought I knew Peru well, since I had made any number of trips to the interior, beginning when I was still a small boy, yet my constant travels over those three years revealed to me a profound aspect of my country, or rather, the many aspects, the many faces that constitute it, its impressive geographical, social, and ethnic diversity, the complexity of its problems, its tremendous contrasts, and the shocking levels of poverty and helplessness in which the majority of Peruvians lived.

  Peru is not one country, but several, living together in mutual mistrust and ignorance, in resentment and prejudice, and in a maelstrom of violences. Violences in the plural, that of political terror and that of the drug traffic; that of common crime, which, with the country’s impoverishment and the collapse of the (limited) rule of law was making daily life more and more barbarous; and then too, of course, the so-called structural violence: discrimination, the lack of opportunity, unemployment, and the starvation wages of vast sectors of the population.

  I knew all this; I had heard it and read it and seen it, from a distance and in a few quick glances, the way we Peruvians who have the good fortune to belong to the tiny privileged segment that surveys call Sector A see the rest of our compatriots. But between 1987 and 1990 I came to know all that at close range, had it at my fingertips almost every day, and to a certain degree I can say that I lived it. The Peru of my childhood was a poor and backward country: in the last decades, mainly since the beginning of Velasco’s dictatorship and in particular during Alan García’s presidency, it had become poorer still and in many regions wretchedly poverty-stricken, a country that was going back to inhuman patterns of existence. The famous “lost decade” for Latin America—lost by the populist policies of domestic development, government control, and economic nationalism recommended by the Economic Commission for Latin America, imbued with the economic philosophy of its president, Raúl Prebisch—was particularly tragic for Peru, since our governments went much further than others when it came to “defending itself” against foreign investments and sacrificing the creation of wealth to its redistribution.*

  An administrative district I knew well, in earlier days, was the departamento of Piura. And today I couldn’t believe my eyes. The little towns of the province of Sullana—San Jacinto, Marcavelica, Salitral—or of Paita—Amotape, Arenal, and Tamarindo—not to mention those in the mountain country of Huancabamba and Ayabaca, or those in the desert—Catacaos, La Unión, La Arena, Sechura—seemed to have died a living death, to be languishing in hopeless apathy. It is admittedly true that, in my memory, the dwellings were as crude as they are today, made of clay and wild cane, and that people went barefoot and groused about the lack of roads, of medical dispensaries, of schools, of water, of electricity. But in these poor small towns of my childhood in Piura there was a powerful vitality, a visible light-heartedness and a hope that now seemed to have died out altogether. They had grown a good deal—some of them had tripled in size, they were full to overflowing with kids and with people without jobs, and an air of decay and decrepitude, if not of total despair, appeared to be swallowing them up. In my meetings with local townspeople, the same chorus was repeated over and over: “We’re dying of starvation. There are no jobs.”

  The case of Piura is a good illustration of that phrase by the naturalist Antonio Raimondi, who, in the nineteenth century, defined Peru as “a beggar sitting on a bench made of gold.” And also a good example of how a country chooses underdevelopment. The ocean off the coast of Piura has a wealth of fish that would suffice to give work to all the men in Piura. There is oil offshore, and in the desert the immense phosphate mines of Bayóvar that have not yet been worked. And the soil of Piura is very fertile and produces abundant crops, as shown in the past by its landed estates that grew cotton, rice, and fruit and were among the best-cultivated haciendas in Peru. Why should a departamento with resources such as that die of starvation and lack of jobs?

  General Velasco confiscated those large landed estates from which, indeed, the workers received a very small percentage of the profits, and turned them into cooperatives and enterprises of so-called social property, in which, in theory, the peasants replaced the former owners. In practice, the new owners were the boards of directors of these socialized enterprises, who bent their every effort to exploiting the peasants, as much as or more than the peasants’ old bosses ever had. With an aggravating circumstance. The former owners knew how to work their lands, replaced worn-out machinery, reinvested. The heads of the cooperatives and social property enterprises devoted their efforts to administering them politically, and in many cases their one concern was to plunder them. The result was that soon there were no profits to share.*

  When I began my campaign, all the farm cooperatives in Piura except one were technically bankrupt. But a social property enterprise never goes broke. The state releases it each year from the debts it has contracted with the Banco Agrario (in other words, it passes the losses on to the taxpayers), and President Alan García was in the habit of turning these releases from debt into public ceremonies, with glowing revolutionary rhetoric. This explained why rural Piura had grown poorer by the year ever since the agrarian reform that had been put into effect in order that, according to Velasco’s oft-repeated slogan, “the owner will no longer feed on the poverty of the peasants.” The owners had disappeared, but the peasants were eating less than they had before. The only beneficiaries had been the petty bureaucrats catapulted to the head of these enterprises through political power, boards of directors against whom, in our meetings, members of cooperatives continually came up with the same accusations.

  As for the commercial fishing industry, what had happened was even more self-destructive. In the 1950s, thanks to the vision of a handful of entrepreneurs—of one from Tacna in particular, Luis Banchero Rossi—a pioneer industry sprang up on the Peruvian coast: the manufacture of fish meal. In a few years Peru became the number-one producer in the world. This created thousands of jobs, dozens of factories, turned the little port of Chimbote into a large commercial and industrial center, and developed commercial fishing to the point that Peru, in the 1970s, became a country with a larger fishing industry than Japan.

  In 1972 Velasco’s military dictatorship nationalized all the fisheries and made of them a gigantic conglomerate, Pesca Perú, which he put into the hands of a bureaucracy. The result: the ruin of the industry. When I began my travels around the country in 1987, the situation of that mammoth, Pesca Perú, was critical. Many fish meal factories had been closed—in La Libertad, in Chimbote, in Lima, in Ica, in Arequipa—and innumerable boats belonging to the conglomerate were rotting in the harbors, without the spare parts or replacements that would enable them to go out to sea to fish. This was one of the public sectors that drained off the m
ost state subsidies, and was therefore one of the major causes of the nation’s impoverishment. (A moving episode of my campaign was the surprising decision, in October 1988, of the inhabitants of a little town on the coast of Arequipa, Atico, to gather in a body, with their mayor at the head, to plead for the privatization of the fish meal factory which, in days gone by, had been the principal source of employment in the town. It had now been closed. The moment I heard the news, I flew there in a very small plane that made a bumpy landing on the beach at Atico, so as to show the townspeople that my sympathies lay with them and to explain to them why we proposed to return to private ownership not only “their” factory but all the public enterprises in the country.)

  The fishing and fish meal manufacturing disaster had hit Piura hard. I was really taken aback when I saw the coast of Sechura overcome by inertia. I remembered the harbor bustling with fishing smacks and small seagoing boats and the streets jammed with camareros—refrigerator trucks—that had crossed the vast desert to go all the way up there to buy little anchovies and other fish needed to keep the factories of Chimbote and other ports in Peru working.

  And as for the oil in the marine deposit off Piura and the phosphates of Sechura, there they were, with people hoping that someday the capital and the technology needed to exploit them might come to Peru. During his first year in office, Alan García had nationalized the Belco Oil Company, an American concern that operated offshore on the northern coast. Since then the country had been involved in international litigation with the company. This, on top of the declaration of war of the Aprista government against the International Monetary Fund and the entire world financial system, its hostile policy toward foreign investments, and the growing insecurity in Peru because of terrorist activities, had made the country a plague-ridden nation: nobody extended credit to it, nobody invested in it. After being an exporter of petroleum, Peru in these years became an importer. That was why the Piura region had that heartbreaking look of desolation. And it was a symbol of what had been happening all over Peru for the past thirty years.