A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (4 page)

The mortal enemies of the Apristas were the Urristas of the Unión Revolucionaria (the Revolutionary Union), headed by the Piuran Luis A. Florez, whose bastion was the district of La Mangachería, celebrated for its
chicherías
, which sold the cheap fermented
chicha
that is the drink of the poor, along with its
picanterías
, where highly spiced dishes were served, and its music. Legend had it that General Sánchez Cerro—the dictator who was the founder of the UR, the Unión Revolucionaria, and who was murdered by an Aprista on April 30, 1933—had been born in La Mangachería and because of that all the people of the district were Urristas, and all the huts made of adobe and wild cane in this district of dirt streets and
churres
and
piajenos
(the words for children and donkeys in Piuran slang) displayed on their walls a faded image of Sánchez Cerro. Besides the urristas, there were the Socialists, whose leader, Luciano Castillo, was also a Piuran. The street fights between Apristas, Urristas, and Socialists were frequent, and I was aware of it because in those days—when a street demonstration often turned into fisticuffs—I wasn’t allowed to go out of the house and more police came to guard the prefecture, which at times did not prevent the Aprista hoodlums, once their demonstration was over, to creep as close as they could to throw stones at our windows.

I felt very proud to be the grandson of somebody so important: the prefect. I went with Grandpa to certain public functions—inaugurations, the parade on national holidays, ceremonies at the Grau barracks—and was puffed up with pride when I saw him presiding over the meetings, receiving the salutes of the military, or delivering speeches. With all the lunches and public ceremonies he had to attend, Grandfather Pedro had found an excuse for the avocation he had always had and which he encouraged in his oldest grandson: composing poems. He did so with the greatest of ease, on the slightest pretext, and when it came his turn to speak, at banquets and official functions, he often read verses written for the occasion.

Only thirty or forty years later did I learn about the two things that were to decide my future life and that occurred in that year of 1946. The first of them was a letter that my mother received one day from Orieli, my father’s sister-in-law. She had read in the newspapers that my grandfather was prefect of Piura and presumed that Dorita was with him. What had her life been like? Had she remarried? And how was Ernesto’s young son? She had written the letter following instructions from my father, who, driving in his car to his office, had heard on the radio news of the appointment of Don Pedro J. Llosa Bustamante as prefect of Piura.

The second was a trip of a few weeks that my mama had made to Lima, in August, for a minor operation. She telephoned Orieli, who invited her to come have tea with her. On entering the little house in Magdalena del Mar where Orieli and Uncle César lived, she spied my father, in the living room. She fell into a faint. They had to pick her up off the floor, stretch her out in an armchair, bring her to with smelling salts. Seeing him for a moment was enough for those five and a half hellish months of her marriage and her abandonment and the eleven years of silence on the part of Ernesto J. Vargas to be erased from her memory.

No one in the family learned about that meeting or about the secret reconciliation or the epistolary conspiracy that went on for several months, setting up the ambush that had already begun to take place that afternoon, on the Eguiguren embankment, beneath the bright sun of early summer. Why didn’t my mother tell her parents and her brothers that she had seen my father? Why didn’t she tell them what she was going to do? Was it because she knew that they would have tried to dissuade her and would have predicted what awaited her?

Gamboling about with happiness, believing and not believing what I had just heard, I hardly listened to my mother as we headed for the Hotel de Turistas, while she repeated to me that if we ran into my grandparents, or Auntie Mamaé or Uncle Lucho or Aunt Olga, I was not to say a word about what she had just revealed to me. In my excitement, it never entered my mind to ask her the reason for all the mystery, why it had to be kept a secret that my papa was alive and had come to Piura and that within a few minutes I was going to meet him. What would he be like? What would he be like?

We went inside the Hotel de Turistas and, the moment we crossed the threshold of a little reception room that was on the left, a man dressed in a beige suit and wearing a green tie with little white raised dots got up out of his chair and came toward us. “Is this my son?” I heard him say. He leaned down, put his arms around me, and kissed me. I was disconcerted and didn’t know what to do. My face was frozen in a false smile. My consternation was due to the difference between this flesh-and-blood papa, gray at the temples and with such sparse hair, and the handsome young man in a merchant marine uniform whose photo was standing on my night table. I had something of the feeling that it was a con game: this papa didn’t look like the one I had thought was dead.

But I didn’t have time to think about that, for the man was saying that we should come have a ride around Piura in his car. He spoke to my mama with a familiarity that I didn’t much care for and that made me just a little jealous. We went out onto the main square, full of scorching sunlight and people as it was on Sundays, when there were open-air band concerts, and climbed into a blue Ford, with him and my mother in the front seat and me in the back. As we were leaving, a classmate of mine, Espinoza, slender and swarthy-skinned, came by on the sidewalk and was sauntering over to the car in his easygoing way when the car took off and all the two of us could do was wave goodbye to each other.

We drove around the downtown area for a while and all of a sudden the man who was my papa said that we should go see the countryside, the outskirts of town. Why didn’t we go out to Kilometer 50, where there was that little place where we could have a cold drink? I knew that highway marker very well. It was a long-standing custom for us to escort travelers headed for Lima that far, as we had done during the national holidays, when Uncle Jorge, Aunt Gaby, Aunt Laura, and my cousins Nancy and Gladys (and their newborn baby sister, Lucy) had come and spent a few days’ vacation. (Getting together with my cousins once again had been great fun and we had once more played together a lot, although aware, this time, that I was a little boy and they were little girls, and that it was unthinkable, for example, to do things that we had done together back in Bolivia, like sleeping and taking baths together.) The dunes that surround Piura, with their stretches of quicksand, their clumps of carob trees, and their herds of goats, and the mirages of ponds and springs that can be glimpsed there in the afternoons when the red ball of the sun on the horizon tinges the white and gold sands with a light the color of blood, make up a landscape that always impressed me, and that I have never tired of looking at. When I contemplated it, my imagination would run away with me. It was the ideal setting for epic deeds, by cavalrymen and adventurers, by princes who rescued damsels held prisoner or by brave men who fought like lions and routed evildoers. Every time we went along this highway on an outing or to bid someone goodbye, I allowed my imagination to take wing as that burning-hot, deserted landscape went past through the window alongside me. But I am certain that this time I didn’t see anything of what was going on outside the car, on tenterhooks as I was, with all my senses on the alert for what that man and my mama were saying, sotto voce at times, exchanging glances that infuriated me. What were they hinting at to each other underneath what I could hear? They were talking something over and pretending not to be. But I was well aware of that, because I was far from being a dummy. What was it that I was aware of? What were they hiding from me?

And on arriving at Kilometer 50, after having cold drinks, the man who was my papa said that, now that we had gone that far, why not go on to Chiclayo? Was I acquainted with Chiclayo? No, I wasn’t. Well then, let’s go to Chiclayo, so that Marito can get to know the city of rice with duck.

I grew more and more ill at ease and spent the four or five hours’ journey along that unpaved stretch of road, full of ruts and potholes and long lines of trucks on the steep grade up to Olmos, with my mind filled with suspicions, convinced that the whole scheme had been worked out long before, behind my back, with my mama’s complicity. They were trying to trick me as though I were a little kid, when I realized very clearly that I was being deceived. When it got dark, I stretched out on the back seat, pretending to be asleep. But I was wide awake, my head and my soul focused on what they were whispering.

At one moment during the night, I protested: “Grandma and Grandpa are going to be scared when they see that we haven’t come back, Mama.”

“We’ll call them from Chiclayo,” the man who was my papa volunteered.

We arrived at Chiclayo just at first light and there was nothing to eat at the hotel, but I didn’t care, because I wasn’t hungry. They were, though, and bought crackers, which I didn’t touch. They left me in a room by myself and locked themselves in the one next door. I spent what was left of that night with my eyes open and my heart pounding with fear, trying to hear a voice, a sound from the adjoining room, dying with jealousy, feeling that I was the victim of a monstrous act of betrayal. At times I found myself retching in disgust, overcome by an infinite loathing, imagining that my mama might be in there doing those filthy things with that stranger that men and women did together to have children.

In the morning after breakfast, as soon as we got into the blue Ford, he said what I knew very well he was going to say:

“We’re going to Lima, Mario.”

“And what are my grandparents going to say?” I stammered. “Mamaé, Uncle Lucho.”

“What are they going to say?” he answered. “Shouldn’t a son be with his father? Shouldn’t he live with his father? What do you think? How does that strike you?”

He said this in a quiet voice that I heard him use for the first time, with a cutting tone, emphasizing every syllable, which was soon to instill more fear in me than the sermons on hell given us by Brother Agustín when he was preparing us for first communion, there in Cochabamba.

At the end of July 1987, I found myself in the far north of Peru, on a half-deserted beach, where, years before, a young man from Piura and his wife had built several bungalows with the idea of renting them to tourists. Isolated, rustic, squeezed in between empty stretches of sand, rock cliffs, and the foamy waves of the Pacific, Punta Sal is one of the most beautiful sites in Peru. It has the air of a place outside time and history with its flocks of seabirds—gannets, pelicans, gulls, cormorants, little ducks, and albatrosses, which the locals call
tijeretas—
parading in orderly formations from the bright dawns to the blood-red twilights. The fishermen of this remote stretch of the Peruvian coast use rafts still made in exactly the same way as in pre-Hispanic times, simple and light: two or three tree trunks tied together and a pole that serves as both an oar and a rudder, with which the fisherman propels the craft along in sweeping gyres, as if tracing circles in the water. The sight of those rafts had greatly impressed me the first time I visited Punta Sal, since no doubt they were craft identical to the raft from Tumbes that, according to the chronicles of the Conquest, was found by Francisco Pizarro and his comrades, four centuries ago and not far from here, and taken to be the first concrete proof that the stories of a golden empire that had made them venture forth from Panama to these shores were a reality.

I was in Punta Sal with Patricia and my children, to spend the national holiday week there, far from winter in Lima. We had returned to Peru not long before from London, where, for some time now, we were in the habit of spending three months or so every year, and I had intended to take advantage of the stay in Punta Sal to correct the proofs of my latest novel,
El hablador
(
The Storyteller
), between dips in the ocean and to practice, from morning to night, the solitary vice: reading, constantly reading.

I had turned fifty-one in March. Everything seemed to indicate that my life, an unsettled one since the day I was born, would go by more calmly from now on: spent between Lima and London, and devoted exclusively to writing, with a stint of university teaching every so often somewhere in the United States. Now and again I scribble in my memo books a few work plans for the immediate future, ones that I never carry out altogether. When I reached fifty, I had dreamed up the following five-year plan:

1) A play about a little old Quixote-like man who, in the Lima of the 1950s, embarks on a crusade to save the city’s colonial-era balconies threatened with demolition.

2) A novel, something between a detective story and a fictional fantasy, about cataclysms, human sacrifices, and political crimes in a village in the Andes.

3) An essay on the gestation of Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
.

4) A comedy about a businessman who, in a suite in the Savoy Hotel in London, meets his best friend from his school days, whom he has thought dead, but who has now turned into a good-looking woman, thanks to hormones and surgery; and

5) A historical novel inspired by Flora Tristan, the Franco-Peruvian revolutionary, ideologist, and feminist, who lived in the first third of the nineteeth century.

In the same memorandum book I had also jotted down, as less urgent projects, learning that devilishly difficult language, German; living for a while in Berlin; trying yet again to get through books that had always defeated me—such as
Finnegans Wake
and
The Death of Virgil
; going down the Amazon from Pucallpa to Belém do Pará in Brazil; and bringing out a revised edition of all my novels. Other vague projects of a less publishable nature also figured on the list. The one thing that wasn’t even hinted at anywhere in these notes was the activity that, through the caprice of the wheel of fortune, was about to monopolize my life for the next three years: politics.

I didn’t have the least inkling that that would be so, on that 28th of July, at noon, when we prepared to listen, on my friend Freddy Cooper’s little portable radio, to the speech that the president of the Republic delivers in person to Congress on the national holiday. Alan García had been in office for two years and was still very popular. To me, his politics seemed like a time bomb. Populism had been a catastrophic failure in Allende’s Chile and in Siles Suazo’s Bolivia. Why would it go over well in Peru? Subsidizing consumption, in a country like Peru that depends on imports for a large share of its food and its industrial components, brings with it a deceptive bonanza that lasts only as long as the country has reserves of foreign currency available to allow the flow of incoming goods to be maintained. This was how things had gone so far, thanks to a massive expenditure of foreign currency reserves, which had increased owing to the government’s decision to spend only 10 percent of the money earned by exports in servicing the country’s foreign debt. But this policy was beginning to give signs of having been run into the ground. The country’s reserves were being depleted; because of its confrontation with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—the bêtes noires of the speeches delivered by President García—Peru had seen all the doors of the international financial system slam shut; the printing of paper money with no backing so as to cover the fiscal deficit was making inflation worse; the dollar, maintained at an artificially low price, was increasingly discouraging exports on the one hand and encouraging speculation on the other: the best deal for a businessman was to get an import license that allowed him to pay for what he ordered from abroad with cheap dollars (there were any number of rates of exchange for the dollar, depending on the “social necessity” of the product). The traffickers in contraband goods saw to it that the products thus imported—sugar, rice, medicine—passed through Peru as fast as if over hot coals and went on to Colombia, Chile, or Ecuador, where their prices were not controlled. The system had enriched a handful of people but had plunged the rest of the country’s population into poverty that was increasing by the day.

The president did not appear worried. Or so it seemed to me at least, a few days earlier, during the only interview I had with him while he was in power. When I arrived from London, at the end of June, he sent one of his aides-de-camp to welcome me back, and as protocol required, I went to the Presidential Palace to thank him for the courtesy. He received me personally and we talked together for about an hour and a half. Standing in front of a blackboard, he explained to me his goals for the current year and showed me a handmade bazooka, put together by Sendero Luminoso—Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla movement—with which terrorists had fired a projectile on the palace from Rímac. He was young, self-assured, and likable. I had seen him only once before, during the election campaign, at the home of a mutual friend—Manuel Checa Solari, the auctioneer and art collector—who was bent on our having lunch together. The impression García gave me then was that of a young man of limitless ambition capable of anything if it would bring him to power. For that reason, a few days after that first meeting, I said on two television interviews conducted by the journalists Jaime Bayly and César Hildebrandt that I would vote not for him but for the candidate of the PPC (the Partido Popular Cristiano: the Christian Popular Party), Luis Bedoya Reyes. Despite that fact, and despite an open letter that I wrote to him when he had been in power for exactly a year, condemning him for the massacre of the rioters in the Lima prisons in June of 1986,
^*
he did not seem to bear me any ill will that morning at the Presidential Palace, for his attitude toward me was warm and friendly. At the beginning of his term in office he had sent word to me to ask if I would accept the ambassadorship to Spain, and now, even though he knew how critical I was of his policies, the conversation could not have been more cordial. I remember having said to him, jokingly, that it was a shame that having had the chance to be the Felipe González of Peru he was determined to be our Salvador Allende, or, worse still, our Fidel Castro. Wasn’t the world headed in other directions?

Naturally, among all the things I heard from him that morning concerning his immediate political plans, the most important subject of all didn’t come up—a measure that at the time he had already cooked up with a group of intimates, and that Peruvians first heard of by way of that speech on the 28th that Freddy and I heard, with García’s voice broken and crackling on that ancient radio beneath the burning-hot sun of Punta Sal: his decision to “nationalize and bring under government control” all banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions in Peru.

“Eighteen years ago I learned in the daily papers that Velasco had taken my country estate away from me,” a gentleman already well along in years, in a bathing suit and with an artificial hand hidden by a leather glove, exclaimed. “And now, from this little radio I learn that Alan García has just taken my insurance company away from me. That’s quite something, wouldn’t you say, my friend?”

He rose to his feet and dived into the ocean. Not all the vacationers in Punta Sal took the news in the same debonair spirit. They were professionals, executives, and a few businessmen associated with the threatened companies, and to one degree or another they were aware that the measure was going to go against their interests. They all remembered the years of the dictatorship (1968–80) and the massive nationalizations—at the beginning of Velasco’s regime there had been seven public enterprises and at the end of it close to two hundred—which had turned the poor country that Peru was then into the poverty-stricken one it is today. At dinner that night in Punta Sal, a lady at the next table was lamenting her fate: her husband, one of the many Peruvians who had emigrated, had just left a good position in Venezuela to come back to Lima—to take over the management of a bank! Would the family have to take to the world’s highways and byways yet again in search of work?

It was not difficult to imagine what was going to happen. The owners would be paid in worthless bonds, as had happened to those whose holdings had been expropriated in the days of the military dictatorship. But those proprietors would suffer less than the rest of the Peruvians. They were quite well off and, ever since General Velasco’s plundering had begun, many had taken precautions by sending their money abroad. It was those who had no protection at all—workers and employees in banks, insurance agencies, and financial firms—who would become part of the public sector. Those thousands of families did not have accounts abroad, and no way to head off the people of the party in power, who would march in and take possession of the prey they coveted. From now on, the latter were the ones who would occupy the key posts, political influence would be the determining factor when it came to promotions and being named to important posts, and in no time the same corruption would take over in these companies as in the rest of the public sector.

“Once more in its history Peru has taken yet another step backward toward barbarism,” I remember saying to Patricia the next morning, as we were going for a run along the beach toward the little village of Punta Sal, escorted by a flock of gannets. The nationalizations that had been announced would bring more poverty, discouragement, parasitism, and bribery to Peruvian life. And furthermore, in either the long run or the short, they would fatally damage the democratic system that Peru had recovered in 1980, after twelve years under military rule.

“Why all the fuss,” I have often been asked, “over a few nationalizations? President Mitterrand nationalized the banks, and even though the measure was a failure and the Socialists had to reverse course, was French democracy ever endangered?” People who follow that line of argument have no understanding that one of the characteristics of underdevelopment is the total identity of the government and the state. In France, Sweden, or England, a public enterprise maintains a certain autonomy in relation to those who hold political power: it belongs to the state; and its administration, its personnel, and its functioning are more or less safe from the abuse of governmental power. But in an underdeveloped country, exactly as in a totalitarian one, the government
is
the state and those in power oversee it as though it were their own private property, or, rather, their spoils. Public enterprises are useful for providing cushy jobs for the protégés of those in power, for feeding the people under their patronage, and for making shady deals. Such enterprises soon turn into bureaucratic swarms paralyzed by the corruption and inefficiency introduced into them by politics. There is no danger that they will go broke; almost always they are monopolies protected against competition and their life is guaranteed indefinitely thanks to subsidies, that is to say, the taxpayer’s money.
^*
Peruvians have seen this process repeated, ever since the days of the “socialist, libertarian, and participatory revolution” of General Velasco, in all the nationalized companies—petroleum, electricity, mines, sugar refineries, et cetera—and now, as in a recurrent nightmare, the whole story was going to be repeated with the banks, insurance companies, and financial firms that Alan García’s democratic socialism was getting ready to gobble up.

Moreover, the nationalization of the financial system involved an aggravating political factor. It was about to place absolute control over all credit in the hands of an ambitious leader capable of lying without the least scruple—not very long before, in late November 1984, Velasco had given his word, at CADE, the Conferencia Anual de Ejecutivos, that he would never nationalize the banks. Once he had taken them over, all the business enterprises in the country, beginning with the radio stations, the television networks, and the press, would be at the mercy of the government. There was no need to be possessed of the gift of prophecy to realize that in the future funds for the news media would have their price: subservience. General Velasco had placed the daily papers and television channels under state control so as to wrest them away “from the oligarchy” and place them in the hands “of the organized people.” Through this, during the dictatorship, the communications media in Peru fell to levels of indescribable servility and contemptibility. Being more clever, Alan García was going to obtain total control of information through credits and publicity, in the meanwhile maintaining the appearance, in the Mexican fashion, that the media were independent.