A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  A cheerful and pleasant note during the second round of campaigning—sunbeams amid a sky almost always covered with dark clouds or jarred by thunder and rent by lightning—was provided by popular celebrities from the world of radio, TV, and sports who, in the last weeks, came out in favor of my candidacy, and accompanied me on my visits to the squatter settlements of the young towns and the popular districts of Lima, where their presence gave rise to touching scenes. The famous women’s volleyball team selected to represent Peru, which won the world semifinals—Cecilia Tait, Lucha Fuentes, and Irma Cordero in particular—couldn’t get out of giving demonstrations with the volleyball in each place we visited, and Gisela Valcárcel’s admirers besieged her to the point that our bodyguards had to rush to her rescue. From May 10 on, when the soccer star Teófilo Cubillas came to Barranco to offer me his public support, until the eve of the election, this was my routine each morning: receiving delegations of singers, composers, sports stars, actors, comedians, commentators, folklorists, ballerinas, whom, after a brief chat, I accompanied to the front door opening onto the street, where, before the press, they urged their colleagues to vote for me. Lucho Llosa was the one who had the idea of making these shows of support public and the one who thought up and orchestrated the first of them; others then sprang up spontaneously, and there were so many of them that I found myself obliged, for lack of time, to receive only those that could have a contagious effect on the voters.

  The great majority of these shows of support had no ulterior motives, since they happened when, unlike what had gone on before the first round, I wasn’t leading in the opinion surveys and sheer logic indicated that I was going to lose the second round. Those who decided to take that step knew that they risked reprisals in their occupations and in their professional future, since in Peru those who assume power usually tend to be resentful and for their revenge count on the far-reaching hand of the state, which Octavio Paz has rightfully called “the philanthropic ogre”—incapable of providing help to the victims of an earthquake but quite capable of enriching its friends and impoverishing its adversaries.

  But not all those professions of support were as honestly motivated as those of a Cecilia Tait or a Gisela Valcárcel. There were others who tried to turn a profit out of their public backing of me, and I fear that, in more than one case, money was involved, despite my having asked those who were financially responsible for the campaign not to spend any funds for that purpose.

  One of the most popular TV emcees, Augusto Ferrando, publicly invited me, on one of his series of programs called “Trampolín a la fama”—“Trampoline to Fame”—to join forces and take a gift of food supplies to the prisoners of Lurigancho, who had written him protesting the inhuman conditions of existence in this penitentiary. I agreed to do so, and the PAS readied a truckful of provisions that we took to Lurigancho on May 29, early in the afternoon. I had a gloomy memory of a visit to this prison that I had made several years before,* but now conditions appeared to have become even worse, since in this penitentiary built to hold 1,500 prisoners there were now around 6,000, and among them a fair number accused of terrorism. The visit was therefore frenzied, no more and no less so than society on the outside; the prison was divided between Fujimoristas and Vargasllosistas, who, during the hour that Ferrando and I were there, as the food supplies were being unloaded, insulted each other and tried to drown each other out by shouting refrains and slogans at the top of their lungs. The prison authorities had allowed supporters of the Front to approach the courtyard, which we entered, while our adversaries stayed on the rooftops and against the walls of the prison wings, waving banners and insulting placards. As I spoke, aided by a loudspeaker, I saw the Civil Guards, with their rifles at the ready, aimed at the Fujimoristas on the rooftops, in case there were any shots fired from there or stones thrown our way. Ferrando, who had worn an old watch in case anyone tried to steal it, felt frustrated when none of the Vargasllosistas with whom we mingled tried their luck, and he ended up giving it to the last prisoner who gave him a friendly embrace.

  Augusto Ferrando came to see me one night, shortly after that visit to the prison, to tell me that he was prepared, on his program, which had millions of TV viewers in the young towns, to announce that he would leave television and Peru if I didn’t win the election. He was certain that, with a threat like that, countless humble Peruvians, for whom “Trampolín a la fama” was manna from heaven each Saturday, would make me the winner. I gave him my heartfelt thanks, of course, but I remained silent when, in a very vague way, he led me to understand that, by doing a thing like that, he would find himself in a very vulnerable position in the future. When Augusto left, I earnestly entreated Pipo Thorndike not to come to any agreement, for any reason, with the famous TV emcee that might involve any sort of economic reward. And I hope he paid attention to me. The fact is that, on the next Saturday, or the one after that, Ferrando announced, as a matter of fact, that he would end his weekly program and leave Peru if I lost the election. (After June 10, he was as good as his word and moved to Miami. But with his audience clamoring for him, he came back and resumed “Trampolín a la fama,” a turn of events that made me happy: I would not have liked to be the cause of the disappearance of such a popular program.)

  The declarations of popular support that most impressed me were the ones of two persons unknown to the general public, who had both suffered a personal tragedy and who, by publicly lending me their support, placed their peace of mind and even their lives in danger: Cecilia Martínez de Franco, the widow of the Aprista martyr Rodrigo Franco, and Alicia de Sedano, the widow of Jorge Sedano, one of the journalists murdered in Uchuraccay.

  When my secretaries told me that the widow of Rodrigo Franco had asked for a meeting with me in order to offer me her support, I was dumbfounded. Her husband, a young Aprista leader on very intimate terms with Alan García, had occupied highly important posts within the administration, and when he was murdered by a terrorist commando unit, on August 29, 1987, he was president of ENCI (Empresa Nacional de Comercialización de Insumos: National Enterprise for the Commercialization of Raw Materials), one of the large state corporations. His murder greatly upset the country, because of the cruelty with which it was carried out—his wife and a little son of his very nearly died in the fierce hail of bullets that raked his little house in Naña—and because of the personal qualities of the victim, who, despite being a party politician, was universally respected. I didn’t know him, but I knew about him, through a leader of Libertad, Rafael Rey, a friend and companion of his in Opus Dei. As though his tragic death had not been enough, after his death Rodrigo Franco was subjected to the ignominy of having his name adopted by a paramilitary force of the Aprista administration, which committed numerous murders and attacks against persons and local headquarters of the extreme left, claiming responsibility in the name of the Rodrigo Franco Commando Unit.

  On the morning of June 5, Cecilia Martínez de Franco came to see me. I had not met her before either, and I needed only to see her to be aware of the tremendous pressures that she must have had to overcome in order to take that step. Her own family had tried to dissuade her, warning her of what she was exposing herself to. But, making great efforts to control her emotion, she told me that she believed it to be her duty to make such a public statement, since she was certain that, in the present circumstances, that was what her husband would have done. She asked me to summon the press. With great composure, she made her declaration of support for me to the horde of reporters and cameramen who filled the living room; it predictably brought her threats of death, calumny in the press under government control, and even personal insults from President García, who called her a “dealer in corpses.” Despite all this, two days later, on one of César Hildebrandt’s programs, with a dignity that, for a few moments, seemed suddenly to ennoble the regrettable farce that the campaign had turned into, she explained her gesture once again, and again asked the Peruvian people to vote for me.

  Alicia
Sedano’s public declaration of support for me took place on June 8, two days before the election, without prior announcement. Her unexpected arrival at my house, with two of her children, took both the journalists and me by surprise, inasmuch as since the tragedy of January 1983, when her husband, the photographer for La República, Jorge Sedano, was murdered with seven other of his colleagues by a mob of communal landholders in Ica, in the highlands of Huanta, in a place called Uchuraccay, like all the widows or parents of the victims she had frequently been exploited by the leftist press to attack me, accusing me of having deliberately falsified the facts, in the report of the investigating commission of which I was a part, so as to exonerate the armed forces from being in any way responsible for the crime. The indescribable levels of fraud and filth reached by that long campaign, in the writings of Mirko Lauer, Guillermo Thorndike, and other professional purveyors of intellectual trash, were what had convinced Patricia of how useless political commitment was, in a country like ours, and the reason why she had tried to dissuade me from mounting the speakers’ platform on the night of August 21, 1987, in the Plaza San Martín. The “widows of the martyrs of Uchuraccay” had signed public letters against me, had appeared, always dressed from head to foot in black, at all the demonstrations of the United Left, had been unmercifully exploited by the Communist press, and, during the campaign for the second round, had been made the most of to further his campaign by Fujimori, who seated them in the first row at the Civic Center on the night of our “debate.”

  What had caused Sedano’s widow to change her mind and back my candidacy? The fact that she suddenly felt revolted by the way she had been used by the real dealers in corpses. That was what she told me, in front of Patricia and her children, weeping, her voice trembling with indignation. The night of the debate at the Civic Center had been the last straw, for, in addition to demanding that they be present, they had obliged her and the other widows and relatives of the eight journalists to dress all in black so that the press would find their appearance more striking. I didn’t ask her about the names or the faces of the “they” to whom she had referred, but I could well imagine who they were. I thanked her for her gesture and her support and took advantage of the occasion to tell her that, if I had reached the situation in which I now found myself, fighting to be elected to the presidency of Peru, something that had never before been an ambition of mine, it had been, in large part, because of the tremendous experience represented in my life by that tragedy of which Jorge Sedano (one of the two journalists killed in Uchuraccay whom I had known personally) had been a victim. While investigating it, so that the truth would come out, amid all the deception and lying that surrounded what had happened in those mountain fastnesses of Ayacucho, I had been able to see from close up—to hear and touch, literally—the depths of violence and injustice in Peru, the savagery amid which so many Peruvians lived their lives, and that had convinced me of the need to do something concrete and urgent so that our unfortunate country would change direction at last.

  I passed the eve of election day at home, packing suitcases, since we had tickets to fly to France on Wednesday. I had promised Bernard Pivot to appear on his program “Apostrophes”—the next to the last in a series that had appeared on French TV for fifteen years—and was determined to keep that promise whether I won or lost the election. I was quite certain that the latter would be the case and that, therefore, this trip abroad would be a long one, so I spent several hours selecting the papers and file cards I needed in order to work in the future, a long way away from Peru. I felt completely exhausted, but at the same time happy that everything was nearly over. That afternoon, Freddy, Mark Malloch Brown, and Álvaro brought me the last-minute opinion surveys, from various agencies, and they all agreed that Fujimori and I were so evenly matched that either of the two of us could win. That evening Patricia, Lucho and Roxana, and Álvaro and his girlfriend and I went out to eat at a Miraflores restaurant, and the people at the other tables were uncommonly discreet all evening long, forbearing to engage in the usual demonstrations. It was as if they too had been overcome with fatigue and were anxious for the seemingly endless campaign to be over and done with.

  On the morning of June 10, I went once again with my family to vote in Barranco, very early in the morning, and then I received a mission of foreign observers come to act as witnesses of the election procedures. We had decided that this time, instead of meeting the press at a hotel as I had done after the first round, I would go, as soon as the results were in, to the headquarters of Libertad. Shortly before noon, the results of the absentee balloting in European and Asian countries began to come in, on a computer set up in my study. I had won in all of them—even in Japan—with the one exception of France, where Fujimori had obtained a slight advantage. In my room, I was watching on television the last or the next to the last of the soccer matches for the world championship, when around one in the afternoon Mark and Freddy arrived with the first projections of the vote in Peru. The surveys had been wrong again, for Fujimori was ten points ahead of me throughout the country, with the exception of Loreto. This difference had increased when the first results were announced on television, at three that afternoon, and some days later the official computation count, by the National Election Board, would certify that he had won by 23 points (57 percent to my 34 percent).

  At five in the afternoon I went to the headquarters of Libertad, at whose doors a great crowd of downhearted supporters had gathered together. I conceded that I had lost, congratulated the winner, and thanked the activists of Libertad. There were people who were openly shedding tears, and as we shook hands or embraced, a number of men and women friends of Libertad made a superhuman effort to hold back their tears. When I embraced Miguel Cruchaga, I saw that he was so moved he could barely speak. From there I went to the Hotel Crillón, accompanied by Álvaro, to greet my adversary. I was surprised at how small the demonstration by his partisans was, a thin crowd of rather apathetic people, who came to life only when they recognized me, some of them shouting, “Get out of here, gringo!” I wished Fujimori luck and went back home, where, for many hours, a parade of friends and leaders of all the political forces of the Front came by. Outside in the street, young people staging a spontaneous demonstration stayed until midnight, singing refrains in chorus. They came back the next afternoon and the one after that and stayed till far into the night, even after we had turned out all the lights in the house.

  But only a very small group of friends of Libertad and of Solidarity found out the hour of our departure and came to the plane in which Patricia and I were embarking for Europe, on the morning of June 13, 1990. When the plane took off and the infallible clouds of Lima blotted the city from sight and we were surrounded only by blue sky, the thought crossed my mind that this departure resembled the one in 1958, which had so clearly marked the end of one stage of my life and the beginning of another, in which literature came to occupy the central place.

  Colophon

  A large part of this book was written in Berlin, where, thanks to the generosity of Dr. Wolf Lepenies, I spent a year as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg. It was a salutary contrast with the preceding years to devote my entire time to reading, writing, conversing with my colleagues at the Kolleg, and struggling with the hieroglyphic syntax of German.

  Early in the morning on April 6, 1992, I was awakened by a phone call from Lima. It was from Luis Bustamante Belaunde and Miguel Vega Alvear, who, at the second congress of Libertad, in August 1991, had taken my place as president and Miguel Cruchaga’s as secretary general. Alberto Fujimori had just announced on television, to everyone’s surprise, his decision to close Congress, the lower courts, the Tribunal for Constitutional Rights, and the National Judicial Council, to suspend the Constitution, and to govern by decrees. The armed forces immediately supported these measures.

  In this way, the democratic system reestablished in Peru in 1980, after twelve years of military dictatorship, had its very foundations destroyed yet aga
in, by someone whom, two years before, the Peruvian people had elected president and who, on July 28, 1990, on taking office, had sworn to respect the Constitution and the rule of law.

  The twenty months of Fujimori’s administration were very different from what his improvisation and his conduct during the campaign had made Peruvians fearful of. Once elected, he soon divested himself of the economic advisers whom, between the first and second rounds of voting, he had recruited within the precincts of the moderate left, and sought new collaborators within the sectors of entrepreneurs and the right. The portfolio of minister of finance was entrusted to a turncoat from Popular Action—Juan Carlos Hurtado Miller—and advisers and collaborators of mine in the Democratic Front were placed in important public offices. The man who had made of the rejection of the economic shock treatment his warhorse in the electoral battle inaugurated his government with a monumental decontrol of prices, while at the same time reducing at one stroke import tariffs and public expenditures. This process would then be accelerated by Hurtado Miller’s successor, Carlos Boloña, who imposed on the country’s political economy a clearly anti-populist, pro-private enterprise, pro-foreign investment, and pro-market bias, and initiated a program of privatizations and a reduction in the state bureaucracy. All this with the approval of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with whom the government began to negotiate the return of Peru to the international community, renegotiating the payment of its debts and their financing.