A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (57 page)

In that northern
departamento
, an Aprista cradle and bulwark, the most important and most numerous cooperatives on the coast, such as Casagrande and Cartavio, are located, and I was determined to visit them. In Casagrande, although the counterdemonstration of “buffaloes” made an infernal racket—they were posted on the rooftops and in the narrow streets leading to the main square—the former Aprista senator Torres Vallejo and I were able to deliver our talks from the bed of a truck, and even take a turn on foot about the place, before leaving. But in Cartavio they had set up an ambush for us. The rally, attended by a fair number of people, took place without incident. Once it was over, as the motorcade was getting ready to leave, we were attacked by a horde armed with stones and knives and some with pistols, who hurled all sorts of things at us, even tires that they had set on fire. I was already in the supposedly armored van, one of whose windowpanes disintegrated from the stones being thrown at us, and despite the moments of chaos, I managed to grab the hand of one of my bodyguards when I noticed that, out of fear or rage, he was about to shoot point-blank at the attackers, headed by two Aprista leaders of the region: Benito Dioces Briceño and Silverio Silva. Four cars in our motorcade were smashed to pieces and burned, and among the injured was the English journalist Kevin Rafferty, who followed me all through the North and who, they told me, remained imperturbably calm as the blood streamed down his face. A similar cool-headedness was shown by my brother-in-law, who always stayed behind until the very end to make sure that the camera crews and sound technicians were protected, and Manolo Moreyra, the leader of SODE, who, in one of his usual streaks of inattention to what was going on, had stayed behind to inspect the place when the rally had already broken up. The attack did not give them time to reach their cars. So they then mingled with the assailants, who fortunately did not recognize them. Both of them escaped being thoroughly beaten up. The episode gave rise to many protests and President García made things worse by saying over television that there was no reason to make such a fuss “over a few little stones that landed on Vargas Llosa.”

In point of fact, the stones were a secondary aspect of the “dirty war” against me prepared by García and his followers for this last stage. The essential part would be the maneuvers to discredit me, to which, from January on, the entire administration appeared to devote itself, under the baton of the minister of finance. They would gradually increase in number and intensity until the elections. It would be an almost infinite task to enumerate all of them, but it is worth giving an account of the most notorious ones, since they prove to what abysses of filth, and at times, of unintended humor, their backers reduced the electoral process.

On January 28, 1990, the minister of finance, César Vásquez Bazán—the most incompetent of the nobodies to whom Alan García gave that portfolio during his term in office—went on television, on the Channel 5 program “Panorama,” to defy me to produce my annual sworn income tax returns since 1984 to prove that I had paid my taxes. And the following day a senator of the United Left, Javier Diez Canseco, showed those returns on television, assuring his audience that the figures that appeared on them were questionable “except for his income from author’s royalties.” He stated that I had undervalued my house in Barranco so as to get around paying the required amount of property tax on it.

There thus began a campaign which was to broaden by the day and on which two so-called adversaries—the Aprista administration and the extreme left represented by the PUM (the Unified Mariateguist Party)—collaborated to show the country that for the last five years I had filed false returns to avoid paying all the taxes I owed. I remember the insuperable feeling of disgust that came over me the few times I managed to see Vásquez Bazán (today a fugitive from Peruvian justice) on television screens, supposedly documenting this lie. Although it was sheer humbug from beginning to end, the massive synchronized propaganda that accompanied it for several long months, and the use of state agencies to distort the truth, were such that they managed to give this falsehood a sort of reality and a main role in the final round of the elections.

It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a writer to avoid paying taxes on the author’s royalties he has received. These are deducted from the profit made from his books by the publisher himself, in the country where his books are published. It is rare for a Peruvian to live on his author’s royalties, and therefore I had held consultations about my particular case, for many years before the election campaign, with one of the most outstanding tax lawyers in the country, a close friend of mine: Roberto Dañino. He—or, rather, his staff, and, above all, Dr. Julio Gallo—had for some time taken care of my sworn declarations. And, knowing very well that should I one day enter politics, everything about my life would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb in search of my vulnerable points, I had been particularly scrupulous about my annual income tax returns.

My books were not published in Peru and my taxes on the royalties they earned me were therefore paid in the countries where they were published and translated. Peruvian laws allow the sums paid by a Peruvian taxpayer on income earned abroad to be deducted from taxes owed in Peru. But, instead of going through this procedure, in Peru—where I earned no taxable income—I took advantage of a law exempting from taxation works considered to be of artistic value, a law that had been introduced in Congress by the APRA in 1965,
^*
and approved by the congressional majority made up of members of the alliance between the APRA and Odría’s supporters. (I will mention, in parentheses, that my program for governing contemplated the elimination of
all
tax exemptions, beginning with this very one.) In order for my books to be included within that category, I had to follow for each one of them a procedure before the National Institute of Culture and the Ministry of Education, which, eventually, handed down the applicable decision. Alan García’s Aprista administration had done this with my last three books. Where, then, did my supposed tax evasion lie?

Surrounded by journalists and cameramen, an Aprista attorney, Luis Alberto Salgado, hastened to the main offices of the National Tax Authority to ask that a tax hearing be opened to determine the amount of taxes I had cheated the Peruvian state out of. Obediently, the tax authorities opened not just one hearing but several dozen. In that way, there was always some sort of trouble brewing for me. Each of the items questioned by the Supervisory Board, which constitute supposedly private information, reached the Aprista and Communist press before they reached me and were publicized in the most scandalous way, so as to give the impression that I had already been found guilty and that my house in Barranco would very soon be seized.

Each item questioned—I repeat that there were several dozen of them—required an enormous amount of work by the secretaries, in order to hunt up documented justification for them, and the cost of transportation for this or that trip that I made to this or that university, to give this or that lecture, and letters and telexes to these universities to have them confirm that I had been paid the $1,000 or $1,500 recorded on my tax return for that year. The law firm to which Roberto Dañino belongs hadn’t yet completed the dossier in answer to one questioned item when it received another one, or several at the same time, with the most outlandish requests for information and proof with regard to my travels, my lectures, my articles of the last five years, to verify that I hadn’t concealed a single source of income. They were all answered to the tax authorities’ complete satisfaction, with no proof whatsoever of a single irregularity on my part.

How much work did it represent for those in Roberto Dañino’s law firm to help me confront that flood of investigations by the tax authorities ordered by President García as part of the dirty campaign against me? If they had charged me legal fees, I probably wouldn’t have been able to pay them, for another of the consequences of those three years of immersion in active politics was the fact that my income dwindled away to almost nothing and I had to live on my savings. But Bobby and his colleagues refused any honorarium whatsoever for the effort that they had had to expend to show that I had not violated that “legality” that the Aprista administration used so shamelessly.

One day, Óscar Balbi brought me a recording of a telephone conversation between the editor-in-chief of
Página Libre
, Guillermo Thorndike, and the tax commissioner, in which the two of them discussed the next steps to take in the campaign with regard to my tax returns, because each step in those proceedings against me was planned in accordance with a strategy for getting the most publicity possible from the scandal sheets. Huge headlines announced that the tax investigators had left for Europe because the authorities had been informed that I was the principal stockholder in Seix Barral, the major Barcelona publishing house, the owner of the Carmen Balcells Literary Agency in the same city, and of real estate in Barcelona and on the Costa Azul. And one morning, when I was going from one meeting to another, in different rooms in the house, I saw my mother and my mother-in-law, leaning over the radio, listening to an announcer on Radio Nacional reporting that officials of the judiciary were on their way to Barranco to carry out the seizure of my house and of everything in it, as surety against the sum I owed the government for fraud, as had already been announced.

The leaders of the extreme left were diligent collaborators with the government in this campaign, in particular Senator Diez Canseco, who kept waving about on the little screen my sworn income tax returns, passed on to him by the APRA, as evidence against me. And one day I heard over the radio Ricardo Letts, another leader of the PUM, call me a thief. Up until then Letts, whom I have known for many years, and with whom I had maintained a firm friendship all that time despite our ideological differences, hadn’t struck me as being capable of slandering a friend in the belief that it would gain him political benefits. But at this point in the campaign I already knew that, in Peru, there are few politicians whom politics, that Circe, doesn’t turn into pigs.

The tax affair was just one of several maneuvers to discredit me which the García administration used in its attempt to prevent what at this juncture still appeared to be an overwhelming victory by the Democratic Front.
^*
One of them made me out to be a pervert and a pornographer, as was proved by my novel
Elogio de la madrastra
(
In Praise of the Stepmother
), which was read in its entirety during peak listening hours, at the rate of a chapter a day, on Channel 7, which was controlled by the state. In a dramatic voice, the woman announcer who introduced each episode warned housewives and mothers to keep their children away from the TV set because they were going to hear nefarious things. But the people had the right to know everything about the person who aspired to preside over the country’s destiny. Another announcer, a man this time, then proceeded to read the chapter, in melodramatic tones when there was an erotic passage. Afterward, a round table was held, in which Aprista psychologists, sexologists, and sociologists analyzed me. I was leading such a hectic life that I was unable, naturally, to allow myself the luxury of seeing those programs, but on one occasion I managed to watch part of one of them and was so amused that I remained glued to the TV set, listening to the Aprista general Germán Parra elaborate on the following thought: “According to Freud, Doctor Vargas Llosa ought to be under treatment for a mental disorder.”

Another of the APRA’s warhorses was my “atheism.” “Peruvian! Do you want an atheist in the office of president of Peru?” was the question put to viewers in a televised spot in which there appeared a semi-monstrous face—mine—that looked like the incarnation and the prelude of every sort of iniquity. The “hate office” researchers found, in an article of mine on
huachafería—
a form of bad taste that is a national propensity—entitled “A Bit of Bubbly, Old Buddy?” a mocking phrase referring to the procession of the Lord of Miracles. Alan García, who, in order to show the Peruvian people how devout he was, dressed in purple in October and helped carry the platform of the Lord of Miracles on his shoulders with the expression of a contrite sinner on his face, hastened to declare to the press that I had gravely offended the Church and the most heartfelt act of devotion of the Peruvian people.
^*
The strongest of García’s supporters joined in the chorus, and for several days people were treated to the spectacle, in newspapers, over the radio, and on TV, of high Aprista officials and members of Congress suddenly converted into crusaders for the faith, making amends to the Lord of Miracles. I remember the fiery Mercedes Cabanillas, her face trembling with indignation, talking like a Joan of Arc prepared to go to the stake in defense of her religion. (It was amusing that all of this should be staged under the auspices of the party founded by Haya de la Torre, who had begun his political career, in May 1923, opposing the dedication of Lima to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and who was accused, for a good part of his life, of being an enemy of the Church, an atheist, and a Freemason.)

I was overcome with a curious sensation in the face of these mudslinging capers. I don’t know if it was exhaustion brought on by the tremendous mental and physical effort required day after day to get through meetings, trips, rallies, interviews, and arguments, or whether I had developed a psychological defense mechanism, but I noted all that as though the person being invented by the negative campaign which was increasingly replacing any kind of rational debate were someone other than myself. But in the face of these extremes reminiscent of a one-act farce and the many violences of the electoral process, I began to be assailed by the thought that I had made a great mistake by focusing my strategy on telling the truth and outlining a program of reforms. Because ideas, intelligence, consistency, and above all decency seemed to have less place in the campaign with each passing day.