A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (44 page)

But among the adversaries too there were a number of intellectuals whose conduct attracted my attention, because, for the reasons that I have already mentioned, I didn’t expect from them the propriety with which they acted, even in the most heated moments of the political debate. That was the case with Henry Pease García. A university professor, a sociologist, the director for a time of a well-known institute of social investigation, DESCO—financed by the German Social Democratic Party—Henry Pease was, with Alfonso Barrantes, representative mayor of Lima, and a close collaborator of the latter before the break that brought them both face to face as leaders of the two factions of the left in the battle for the presidency. Pease’s conduct, as head of the most radical sector, in which, in point of fact, cut-rate intellectuals abounded, was exemplary. He made every effort to wage a campaign of ideas, promoting his program without ever having recourse to personal attacks or underhanded maneuvers, and acted at all times with a logical consistency and sobriety that was in sharp contrast to that of some of his followers. His personal life, moreover, had always likewise struck me as being consistent with what he wrote and defended as a public figure. This was a decisive reason for my accompanying him on the Peace March.

After this march, all of the public’s attention and my own activity were focused on the municipal campaign. At the end of the week that followed the Peace March—on November 4 and 5—with Juan Incháustegui and Lourdes Flores I made the rounds of the shantytowns of Canto Chico, María Auxiliadora, San Hilarión, Huáscar, as well as many others in Chosica and Chaclacayo. And the following week I toured various
departamentos
of the interior—Arequipa, Moquegua, Tacna, and Piura—participating in dozens of rallies, motorcades, interviews, marches, in favor of the candidates of the Democratic Front. In those final days of the municipal campaign, the internal tensions between the forces of the alliance seemed to disappear and we managed to present an image of understanding and union, which paved the way for a favorable result for our first ordeal by electoral fire, on November 12.

However, the municipal elections were not the overwhelming victory for us that the opinion polls had predicted. The Front won more than half the districts of the country, but this majority was clouded by the defeats suffered in key cities, such as Arequipa, where Luis Cáceres Velázquez, of the Frenatraca (Frente Nacional de Trabajadores y Campesinos: National Front of Workers and Peasants) was reelected; Cuzco, where the former leftist mayor, Daniel Estrada, won by a wide margin; Tacna, where Tito Chocano, a former member of the Christian Popular Party, came in first; and above all Lima, where Ricardo Belmont managed to win more than 45 percent of the vote, against the 27 percent for Incháustegui.
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Once the results were known, on the same night as the balloting, I went with Incháustegui to the Hotel Riviera, on the Avenida Wilson, which had been turned into the general headquarters of the OBRAS movement, to congratulate Belmont, and posed in front of the battery of photographers and television cameramen who filled the place to overflowing, between Belmont and Incháustegui, lifting up the arms of both of them to suggest subliminally that, in some way, the victory of the independent was also mine and that the defeat of Incháustegui had done me no harm. Álvaro did what he could to see that this image was widely publicized in the press and on television.

In my statements, I made prodigious efforts to emphasize the “overwhelming victory” of the Democratic Front, which had won thirty district mayoralties of greater Lima (against seven for the United Left, two from lists of independents, one for the Socialist Alliance and not a single one for the APRA).

But in private, the results of the municipal elections left us very worried: there was a coolness, bordering on antipathy, on the part of large popular sectors toward the established political forces, whether of the left or of the right, and a proclivity toward placing their trust and hopes in anyone representing something different from the establishment. There was no other explanation for the unusually heavy vote for Belmont, someone whose principal merit—aside from his popularity as a radio and television emcee—appeared to be that he was not a politician, that he came from outside politics. More serious still, the final opinion poll indicated that, although on a national scale those intending to vote for me were still hovering around 45 percent, there was a growing tendency, in the least privileged sectors, to see me as belonging to the unpopular political class.

I was aware of the need to do something to correct that image. But I still thought that the best way to do so would be by presenting my program for governing the country to the Peruvian people. This program would demonstrate that my candidacy represented a radical break with traditional politics. The campaign was almost over and we would very soon have a chance to explain what this program was: at the meeting of CADE (the Annual Conference of Executives).

Getting a little ahead of myself, I should like to note that Ricardo Belmont Cassinelli’s winning of the office of mayor of Lima refuted those who, after June 10, interpreted my defeat in exclusively racial terms. If it were true, as any number of commentators have said, including Mark Malloch Brown,
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that it was hatred of the whites and a sort of racial solidarity that led large popular sectors to vote for the “little Chinaman,” since they were under the impression—as Fujimori persistently suggested in the course of his campaign during the second round—that the “yellow man” was closer to the Indian, the mestizo, and the black than to the “white man” (traditionally associated with the man enjoying privileges and the exploiter), then how were you to explain the resounding victory of that ginger-haired gringo with light green eyes, “Red” Belmont, whom, as he himself had predicted, the voters of sectors C and D, which included the immense majority of the mestizos, Indians, and blacks of Lima, voted into office by a landslide?

I do not deny that the racial factor—the obscure resentments and profound complexes associated with this subject exist in Peru, of course, and all the ethnic groups of the national mosaic are victims of it and responsible for it—played a role in the campaign. It did indeed, despite my efforts to avoid it or, once it was already there, to bring it out into the open. But the decisive factor in the election was not skin color—neither mine nor Fujimori’s—but a sum total of reasons, of which racial prejudice was only one component.

At the end of May 1955, Julia, a younger sister of Aunt Olga’s, arrived in Lima to spend a few weeks’ vacation. She had been divorced not long before from her Bolivian husband, with whom she had lived for several years on a hacienda in the Altiplano; since their separation, she had been living in La Paz, with a woman friend from Santa Cruz.

I had known Julia in my childhood in Cochabamba. She was a friend of my mother’s and often came to the house on Ladislao Cabrera; once, she lent me a romantic novel in two volumes—E. M. Hull’s
The Sheik
and
Son of the Sheik—
which delighted me. I remember the tall and graceful figure of that friend whom my mother and my aunts and uncles called “the little Chilean” (because, although she lived in Bolivia, she had been born in Chile, as had Aunt Olga) dancing very vivaciously at Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby’s wedding celebration, a dance that my cousins Nancy and Gladys and I spied on from a stairway until the wee hours of the night.

Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga lived in an apartment on the Avenida Armendáriz, in Miraflores, very near Quebrada, and from the windows of the living room on the second floor you could catch a glimpse of the Jesuit seminary. I used to go to their house to have lunch or dinner very often, and I remember having happened to come by one noon, on leaving the university, just after Julia had arrived and was still unpacking. I recognized her hoarse voice and her hearty laugh, her slender, long-legged silhouette. She made a few joking remarks as she greeted me—“What! You’re Dorita’s little boy, that crybaby from Cochabamba?” She asked me what I was doing these days and was surprised when Uncle Lucho told her that besides being a student working toward a degree in Letters and Law, I wrote for newspapers and magazines and had even won a literary prize. “So how old are you now?” “Nineteen.” She was thirty-two, but didn’t show her age because she looked young and pretty. When we said goodbye to each other, she said to me that if my
pololas—
my sweethearts—would let me, I should go to the movies with her some night. And that, of course, she’d be the one who paid for the tickets.

The truth was that I hadn’t had a sweetheart for quite some time. Except for my platonic attachment to Lea, in recent years my life had been devoted to writing, reading, studying, and being active in politics. And my relationship with women had been friendly or as a fellow militant, not sentimental. I hadn’t set foot in a brothel again since Piura, or had even one love affair. And I don’t think that that austerity had weighed too heavily on me.

I am positive, though, that on this first meeting, I didn’t fall in love with Julia, nor did I think very much about her after we said goodbye to each other, nor, probably, after the two or three times that I saw her next, always at Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga’s house. I’m sure of it because of something that happened a short while later. One night, after several hours at one of those conspiratorial meetings that we frequently held at Luis Jaime Cisneros’s, on coming back to the townhouse on the Calle Porta I found a note from my grandfather on my bed: “Your Uncle Lucho says you’re a cad, who agreed to go to the movies with Julita and never showed up.” And as a matter of fact, I had completely forgotten about it.

The next day I raced to a florist’s shop on the Avenida Larco and sent Julia a bunch of red roses with a card that said: “Humble apologies.” When I went to apologize in person that afternoon, after working at Dr. Porras’s, Julia did not hold my having forgotten against me and teased me a lot about the red roses.

That same day, or very soon afterward, we began going to the movies together, to the evening performance. We almost always went on foot, often to the Barranco, crossing the Quebrada de Armendáriz and walking through the little zoo that existed in those days around the lagoon. Or to the Leuro, in Benavides, and sometimes even as far as the Colina, which meant nearly an hour’s walk. We always got into an argument because I wouldn’t let her pay for the tickets. We saw Mexican melodramas, American comedies, Westerns, and gangster movies. We talked about lots of things and I began to tell her how I wanted to be a writer and how, as soon as I could, I was going off to live in Paris. She no longer treated me like a little kid, but it doubtless never entered her head that I might someday become something more than the one who took her to the movies on nights when she was free.

Because, shortly after she arrived, pesky suitors started buzzing around Julia. Among them, Uncle Jorge. He had separated from Aunt Gaby, who went off to Bolivia with their two children. The divorce, which made me very sad, was the culmination of a period of dissipation and scandalous skirt-chasing on the part of the youngest of my uncles. He had become very well off after his return to Peru, when he had begun as a low-level employee with the Wiese organization. One day, after having been promoted to the position of manager of a construction company, he disappeared. And the next morning, on the society page of
El Comercio
, his name turned up among the first-class passengers on the
Reina del Mar
, which was sailing for Europe. Coupled with his name was that of a Spanish lady with whom he had been having a not at all secret love affair.

It was a great scandal in the family and gave Granny Carmen many a crying spell. Aunt Gaby left for Bolivia and Uncle Jorge stayed for several months in Europe, living like a king and squandering money he didn’t have. Finally, he was left high and dry, in Madrid, unable to pay for his return passage. Uncle Lucho had to perform miracles to get him back to Peru. He returned with no job, no money, and no family, but still possessed of his drive and his skill, which, along with his likable nature, permitted him to get on his feet again. That was the point at which Julia arrived in Lima. He was one of the beaux who invited her out. But Aunt Olga, who was inflexible when it came to matters of manners and morals, forbade Uncle Jorge to date her sister Julia, because he was a scatterbrain and a carouser, and she subjected her sister to such close watch that it made Julia almost die laughing. “I’ve gone back to the days of having a chaperone and having to ask permission to go out,” she told me. And she also told me that Aunt Olga breathed freely when, instead of accepting invitations from her pesky suitors, she went to the movies with Marito.

Since I was already in the habit of dropping by their house all the time, and Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga often were going out somewhere, they used to take me with them and circumstances turned me into Julita’s partner. Uncle Lucho was a devotee of horse racing and sometimes we went to the racetrack, and the four of us celebrated Aunt Olga’s birthday, on June 16, at the Bolívar grill, where one could dine and dance. During one of the pieces that we were dancing to, I kissed Julia on the cheek, and when she drew her face back to look at me, I kissed her again, on the lips this time. She didn’t say anything to me but a look of stupefaction crossed her face, as though she’d seen a ghost. Later, as we were going back to Miraflores in Uncle Lucho’s car, I held her hand in the dark and she didn’t draw it away.

I went to see her the next day—we had agreed to go to the movies—and as chance would have it, nobody else was in the house. She received me, intrigued and at the same time tempted to laugh, looking at me as though it weren’t me and I couldn’t possibly have kissed her. In the living room, she said to me jokingly: “I don’t dare offer you a Coca-Cola. Would you like a whisky?”

I told her that I was in love with her and would let her do anything she pleased, except to treat me ever again like a little kid. She told me that she’d done many mad things in her life, but that this was one she wasn’t going to do. Fall in love with Lucho’s nephew—with Dorita’s son, no less! She wasn’t a woman who seduced minors, after all. Then we kissed each other and went to the evening showing at the Cine Barranco, sitting in the last row of the orchestra, where we went on kissing each other from the beginning of the movie to the end.

An exciting period of secret rendezvous began, at different hours of the day, in little coffeehouses downtown or at neighborhood movie theaters, where we talked in whispers or remained silent for long intervals, holding hands and constantly worrying that a member of the family might suddenly turn up. The secrecy and having to dissemble in front of Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga or the other relatives seasoned our love with a piquant pinch of risk and adventure that to an incorrigible sentimentalist like me made it all the more intense.

The first person to whom I revealed, in confidence, what was happening was the inseparable Javier Silva, my friend since we were young boys. He had always been my confidant in affairs of the heart and I his. He was permanently enamored of my cousin Nancy, whom he showered with invitations and presents, and she, as beautiful as she was flirtatious, played with him like a cat with a mouse. My friend till death, Javier racked his brain to make my amorous interludes with Julia easier to arrange, organizing evenings at the movies and the theater, occasions on which, moreover, Nancy always accompanied us. On one such evening we went to the Teatro Segura, to see Molière’s
L’Avare
, put on by Lucho Córdoba, and Javier, who could never get the better of his ostentatiousness, paid for a box, so that nobody who was in the theater could fail to see us.

Did the family suspect anything? Not yet. Their suspicions were aroused during a weekend outing at the end of June, at the Paramonga sugar plantation, where we went to visit Uncle Pedro. There was a party there, for some reason or other, and we all went out together in a motorcade: Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, Uncle Jorge, perhaps Uncle Juan and Aunt Laura too, though I’m not certain, and Julia and I. Uncle Pedro and Aunt Rosi put us up as best they could, in their house and in the guest house at the hacienda, and we spent several very enjoyable days, with walks through the cane fields, having a look at the sugar mills and refining equipment, and on Saturday night at the party, which lasted till breakfast time. While at the hacienda, Julia and I cast prudence to the winds and exchanged glances and whispers or danced in a way that aroused suspicion. I remember Uncle Jorge suddenly bursting into a little reception room where Julia and I had sat down to talk together, and on seeing us there, he raised his glass and cried: “Long live the fiancés!” The three of us laughed, but an electric current passed through the room. I felt uncomfortable and it seemed to me that Uncle Jorge had also become very uncomfortable. From that moment on I was certain that something was going to happen.

In Lima, we went on seeing each other in secret during the day, in coffeehouses downtown where we always felt on edge, and going to the movies at night. But Julia suspected that her sister and her brother-in-law smelled a rat, from the way they looked at her, especially when I came to get her to go to the movies. Or was all of that paranoia on our part, the result of our uneasy consciences?

No, it wasn’t. I discovered that by chance one night when on the spur of the moment I decided to drop in at Uncle Juan and Aunt Lala’s on Diego Ferré. From the street I saw the living room lights all on, and through the curtains, the whole family gathered together. All the aunts and uncles, but not my mother. I immediately presumed that Julia and I were the reason for this secret meeting. I went into the house, and when I appeared in the living room, they hurriedly dropped whatever subject it was that they had been talking about. Later on, my cousin Nancy, very frightened, confirmed that her parents had devoured her with questions so as to get her to tell them whether “Marito and Julita were in love.” It alarmed them that “the beanpole” could be having a love affair with a divorcée, a woman thirteen years older than he was, and they had summoned the tribe together to see what ought to be done.

I immediately foresaw what would happen. Aunt Olga would send her sister back to Bolivia and tell my parents, so that they would remind me that I was still legally a minor. (In those days one reached one’s majority at the age of twenty-one.) That same night I went to get Julia, on the pretext that we were going to the movies, and asked her to marry me.

We had been walking along the sea walls of Miraflores, between the Quebrada de Armendáriz and the Salazar gardens, which were always deserted at that hour. At the bottom of the cliff, the sea roared, and we walked along very slowly, in the damp darkness, hand in hand, stopping with every step to kiss each other. Julia started by telling me just what I expected she would: that this was madness, that I was still just a brat and she a grownup woman, that I hadn’t yet finished my studies at the university or begun to live, that I didn’t even have a real full-time job or a cent to my name and that, under those circumstances, marrying me was a crazy idea that no woman who had an ounce of sense would go along with. But that she loved me and that if I were that mad, she was too. And that we should get married right away so they wouldn’t separate us.

We agreed to see each other as little as possible, as meanwhile I made arrangements for our elopement. I set to work the next morning, without hesitating for a moment as to what I was about to do, and without stopping to think about what we’d do once we had the marriage certificate in hand. I went to wake up Javier, who was now living just a few blocks from my house, in a boardinghouse on the corner of Porta and 28 de Julio. I told him the news and after the de rigueur question—wasn’t this an utterly insane thing to do?—he asked me how he could help me. We had to get hold of a mayor, in a town not very far from Lima, who would agree to marry us despite my not being of age yet. Where? Who? I then remembered my university buddy and fellow Christian Democrat militant Guillermo Carrillo Marchand. He was from Chincha and spent every weekend there, with his family. I went to talk to him and he assured me that there would be no problems, since the mayor of Chincha was a friend of his; but he preferred to make inquiries first, so we’d know for certain before going there. A few days later he went to Chincha and came back very optimistic. The marriage ceremony would be performed by the mayor himself, who was delighted by the idea of the elopement. Guillermo brought me the list of papers that were required: certificates, photographs, requests on officially stamped paper. Since it was my mother who kept my birth certificate for me and it wasn’t prudent to ask her for it, I asked my friend Rosita Corpancho, the secretary of the Faculty at San Marcos, to help me out, and she let me remove the pertinent part of my university record so as to have it photocopied and notarized. Julia had her papers with her in her handbag.