A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (63 page)

I asked him to locate our representative at the National Board of Elections, and when Enrique Elías Laroza came up to the nineteenth floor, I asked him if it were legally possible for one of the two candidates who had been finalists in the first round to give up competing in the second one, handing over the presidency to the other candidate once and for all. He assured me emphatically that this was possible.
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And still he egged me on: “Sure, offer Fujimori one or two ministries and let him give up the second round.” But what I was thinking of offering my rival was something more appetizing than a few ministerial portfolios: the presidential flag, in exchange for adopting key points of our economic program and getting himself teams capable of putting it into practice. My fear, from that moment on, was that, through an intermediary, Alan García and the APRA would go on governing Peru and the disaster of the last five years would continue, until Peruvian society broke down completely.

From that second projection on, I never had the slightest doubt about the outcome nor did I have the slightest illusion as to my chances of winning in the second round. In the previous months and years I had been able to feel physically the hatred borne me by the Apristas and the Communists, who found that my sudden appearance in Peruvian political life, defending liberal theses, filling public squares, mobilizing middle classes which they had previously kept constantly intimidated or bewildered, preventing the nationalization of the financial system, and demanding things that they had turned into taboos—“formal” democracy, private property and enterprise, capitalism, a market economy—had ruined what they took to be their unassailable monopoly of political power and of the future of Peru. The sensation, supported by opinion polls for almost three years, that there was no legal way of stopping that intruder who was bringing the “right” back to life, who would come to power with the enthusiastic backing of millions upon millions, had rendered their enmity even more poisonous, and with their ill-will further exacerbated by the intrigues orchestrated from the Presidential Palace by Alan García, their rancor toward me had been increased to the point of insanity. The appearance of Fujimori at the last minute was a gift of the gods for the APRA and the left, and it was obvious that both would devote themselves body and soul to working for his victory, without stopping for one minute to think of how dangerous it was to bring to power someone so ill-prepared to exercise it. Common sense, reason, are exotic flowers in Peruvian political life and I am sure that, even if they had known that, twenty months after he was elected, Fujimori was going to put an end to democracy, close down Congress, proclaim himself dictator, and begin to repress Apristas and Communists, they would have voted for him just the same, in order to keep a person whom they called enemy number one from taking office as president.

I reflected on all this after talking with Elías Laroza and, as the polling places closed and the television networks began broadcasting the first projections of the results, before I knew that they were still worse than what we had had hints of: between 28 and 29 percent for me and Fujimori a bare five points behind me with 24 percent. The APRA and the United Left won, between them, a third of the votes.

I mulled over in my mind what I ought to do. Negotiating with Fujimori as soon as possible, handing the presidency over to him there and then in return for his consenting to economic reform: putting an end to inflation, lowering tariffs, opening up the economy to competition, renegotiating with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to allow Peru to participate once again in the global financial system, and perhaps the privatization of certain public enterprises. We had the technical experts and the key personnel he lacked to put those measures into effect. My principal argument would be: “More than 50 percent of Peruvians have voted for a change. It is clear that there is not a majority in favor of the radical change that I am proposing; the results show a majority inclined toward moderate, gradual change—for that government by consensus which I have always said would be tantamount to paralysis and inconsistent with our principles. It is crystal clear that I am not the right person to carry out this policy. But it would be a mockery of the decision of the majority for Cambio 90 to serve for one purpose only—to allow the APRA to continue to govern Peru—when it is also obvious that only some 19 percent of Peruvians want to go on exactly as before.”

At 6:30 p.m. I went down to the second floor to talk to the press. The atmosphere in the hotel was funereal. In the corridors, on the stairs, in the elevators, all that I saw were long faces, eyes brimming with tears, expressions of indescribable surprise, and a few, also, of utter rage. The conference room was jam-packed with journalists, cameras, and spotlights, and people from the Democratic Front who even in their dejection marshaled the strength to applaud me. When I could finally speak, I thanked the voters for my “victory” and congratulated Fujimori for the high percentage of votes he had received. I said that the results indicated a clear-cut decision in favor of change on the part of the majority of Peruvians, and that therefore it should be possible to spare the country the risks and tensions of a second round of voting and negotiate a formula that would give rise once and for all to an administration that would put its shoulder to the wheel.

At that point, Miguel Vega interrupted me to whisper in my ear that Fujimori had turned up at the hotel. Could he come in? I said yes, and suddenly there he was on the platform alongside me. He was shorter than he looked in photographs of him and Japanese through and through, down to his slight Japanese accent in Spanish. I learned afterward that, when he appeared at the door of the Sheraton, a group of supporters of the Front had tried to attack him, but that another group had held them back and helped his bodyguards protect him and escort him to the auditorium. We gave each other a friendly embrace for the photographers and I told him that we must talk together, the very next morning.

The nineteenth floor had filled with friends and supporters who, once they had learned the results, had rushed to the hotel and overflowed the security barrier set up to isolate me. The suite had the air of a wake and, at times, of a madhouse. People’s faces reflected surprise, consternation, and great bitterness over the unforeseen results. The radio and television stations had begun to broadcast rumors that I was going to give up my candidacy, and the leaders of the APRA and the United Left were beginning to hint that in the runoff round they would throw their support to Fujimori’s “popular candidacy.” The owners of
El Comercio
, Alejandro and Aurelio Miró Quesada, the first to arrive, were adamant, insisting that there was no reason whatsoever for me to refuse to run in a second round since I still had every possibility of winning. Shortly thereafter, Belaunde Terry and Violeta arrived, and Lucho and Laura Bedoya and campaign directors of the Front. I stayed there until almost ten that night, saying and hearing the conventional things with which my friends, relatives, supporters, and I tried to hide the disappointment we felt.

As we left the Sheraton, Patricia firmly insisted that I get out of the car and say a few words to several hundred young people of Libertad who had been there since dusk, shouting slogans in chorus and singing. I recognized Johnny Palacios and Felipe Leno, the fervent secretary general of the young people’s section of Libertad, who had been at my side on all the speakers’ platforms everywhere in Peru, raising rallies to a fever pitch with his thundering voice. His eyes were damp, but he forced himself to smile. And on reaching home, despite its being almost midnight, I found myself again in the midst of a crowd of young people who had surrounded the house, whom I felt it my duty to thank for their loyalty.

When I was alone at last with Patricia and the children, dawn was breaking. Nonetheless, before going to bed, I made a first draft of the letter explaining to Peruvians why I would give up running for the presidency in the second round and urging those who had voted for the Front to support Fujimori’s administration. I was hoping to show it to my opponent the following day as an enticement that would encourage him to accept an agreement that would allow certain points of the program to “change Peru, in freedom” to be saved.

One day in September or October 1957, Luis Loayza brought me a piece of unbelievable news: a short story contest, organized by a French magazine, the prize for which was—a two-week trip to Paris!

La Revue Française
, a deluxe publication devoted to art and edited by Monsieur Prouverelle, was bringing out a series of issues, each of which was a monograph on a different country. The short story contest, with its coveted prize, was a feature of that series of monographs. An opportunity like that catapulted me to my typewriter, as was the case with every living Peruvian who knew how to write, and that was how I came to pen “El desafío” (“The Challenge”), a story about an old man who sees his son die in a knife duel, in the dry riverbed of the Piura, that is included in my first book,
Los jefes
, a collection of short stories published in 1959. (In English, the book’s title is
The Cubs and Other Stories
.) I entered the short story in the contest, the winner of which was to be decided by a jury headed by Jorge Basadre and on which there were critics and writers—Héctor Velarde, Luis Jaime Cisneros, André Coyné, and Sebastián Salazar Bondy—and tried to think of something else, so that the disappointment wouldn’t be as great if anyone else turned out to be the winner. Some weeks later, one afternoon when I was beginning to prepare the 6 p.m. news bulletin, Luis Loayza appeared in the doorway of my shack at Radio Panamericana, elated: “You’re going to France!” He was as overjoyed as though he’d won the prize himself.

I doubt whether, either before or since then, any piece of news has excited me as much as that one. I was going to set foot in the city I’d dreamed of, in the mythical country where the writers I most admired had been born. “I’m going to meet Sartre, I’m going to shake hands with Sartre,” I kept repeating that night to Julia and to Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, with whom Julia and I went out to celebrate the occasion. I was so overexcited I must not have slept a wink all night, bouncing in the bed out of sheer joy.

The official announcement of the winner of the prize took place at the Alliance Française and my beloved French teacher, Madame del Solar, was also there, very pleased that her former pupil had won the contest sponsored by
La Revue Française
. I met Monsieur Prouverelle, and we came to an agreement whereby I would take the trip after the final examinations at the university and the year-end holidays. These last days of 1957 were hectic ones, in which there were interviews of me published in the newspapers and my friends came by to congratulate me. Dr. Porras organized a chocolate party to celebrate my winning the prize.

I went to thank the members of the jury one by one, and that was how I met Jorge Basadre, the last great nonprovincial intellectual figure that Peru has produced. I had never spoken with him before. He was less given to recounting anecdotes and less scintillating than Porras Barrenechea, but much more interested in ideas, doctrines, and philosophy than Porras was, with a vast literary culture and a broad view of Peru’s historical problems. The neatness and the discreet elegance of his home seemed to be a reflection of the organized intelligence of the historian, his mental clarity. He lacked vanity and did not make the slightest effort to show off his brilliance; he was earnest and formal, but very levelheaded. I spent two hours with him, listening to him talk about the great novels that had moved him deeply, and he spoke of Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
in such a way that, when I left his house in San Isidro, I hurried to a bookstore to buy it. Sebastián Salazar Bondy, who had been in France for a few months not long before, said to me, enviously: “The best thing that can happen to anyone in the world is happening to you: going to Paris!” He drew up a list for me of indispensable things to do and see in the capital of France.

André Coyné translated
El desafío
into French, but it was Georgette Vallejo who revised the translation and polished it, working with me. I knew César Vallejo’s widow because she often used to come to visit Porras, but it was only in those days when I was helping her with the translation, in her apartment in the Calle Dos de Mayo, that we became friends. She could be a fascinating person when she told anecdotes about famous writers she had known, although her stories were always weighted down by a secret passion. All Vallejo scholars habitually turned into her mortal enemies. She detested them, as though by coming to be on close terms with Vallejo they took something away from her. She was as thin and wiry as a fakir and had an awesome temper. At a famous lecture at San Marcos, in which the subtle poet Gerardo Diego recounted as a mild joke how Vallejo had died owing him a few pesetas, the shadow of the illustrious widow rose to her feet in the auditorium and coins sailed over the audience’s heads toward the lecturer, as the air was deafened by the exclamation: “Vallejo always paid his debts, you wretch!” Neruda, who detested her as much as she detested him, swore that Vallejo was so afraid of Georgette that he used to make his escape over the rooftops or through the windows of their Paris apartment so as to be alone with his friends. Georgette lived in near penury in the days when I first knew her, giving private French classes, and cultivated her neuroses without the least embarrassment. She put out little spoonfuls of sugar for the ants in her apartment, she never took off the black turban she was invariably wearing every time I saw her, in dramatic accents she lamented the fate of the ducks doomed to decapitation at a Chinese restaurant next to the building where she lived, and she fought tooth and nail—by means of devastatingly cruel open letters—with all the publishers who had brought out or tried to bring out Vallejo’s poetry. She lived extremely frugally, and I remember how one time, when Julia and I invited her to have lunch with us at La Pizzería on the Diagonal, she scolded us, with tears in her eyes, for having left food on our plates when there were so many hungry people in the world. Though her behavior was outrageous, she was generous: she was eager to help Communist poets who had financial or political problems, and on occasion, in times of repression, she hid them in her apartment. Being friends with her was arduous, like walking across burning coals, since the most trivial and unexpected thing might offend her and unleash one of her fits of fury. Despite this, she became a very good friend of ours and we used to go fetch her, bring her to our place, and sometimes take her out on Saturdays. Then, when I went off to live in Europe, she made me run errands for her—collect royalties owed her, mail her certain homeopathic medicines from a pharmacy at the Carrefour de l’Odéon, of which she had been a customer ever since the days of her youth—until, because of one of these errands, we too had a quarrel by letter. And even though we made up later on, we no longer saw each other very often. The last time I spoke with her, in Mejía Baca’s bookstore, shortly before the beginning of that terrible last stage of her life that was to keep her in a clinic for years, turned into a vegetable, I asked her how things were going with her: “How do you expect they’re going for a woman in this country where every day people are more evil, uglier, and crueler?” she answered, rasping her
r
’s with obvious delight.

At Radio Panamericana they gave me a month’s vacation, and Uncle Lucho secured me a loan of a thousand dollars from his bank, so as to enable me to stay in Paris, at my own expense, for two additional weeks. Uncle Jorge dug up an old gray overcoat which he’d kept around since the days of his youth and which the moths in Lima hadn’t done too much damage to, and one morning in January 1958 I started out on the great adventure. Besides Julia, Uncle Lucho, Abelardo and Pupi, and Luis Loayza came to the airport to say goodbye to me. With great self-importance, I took along in my suitcase several copies of the very first issue of
Literatura
, just off the presses, so as to acquaint French writers with our review.

I have made many journeys in my life and have forgotten almost all of them, but I remember that two-day Avianca flight with a wealth of details, such as the magical thought that never left me: “I’m going to get to know Paris.” There was a Peruvian medical student who was going back to Madrid on the plane, and two young Colombian girls, who had come aboard at the stop in Barranquilla, whom the two of us photographed each other with in the Azores. (A year later, in a bar in Madrid, the Peruvian Lucho Garrido Lecca showed that photo to Julia, sparking a monumental jealous scene.) The plane remained for hours at each stopover—Bogotá, Barranquilla, the Azores, Lisbon—and finally, early in the morning on a rainy winter day, it arrived at Orly, in those days a smaller and more modest airport than the one in Lima. And waiting there was Monsieur Prouverelle, yawning.

As his Dauphine went up the Champs-Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe, it all seemed like a miracle to me. A cold dawn was breaking and there were no cars or pedestrians on the great broad avenue, but how imposing everything looked, how harmonious the façades and the show windows were, how majestic and magnificent the Arc de Triomphe. Monsieur Prouverelle drove around the Étoile so that I could enjoy the view before taking me to the Hôtel Napoléon on the Avenue de Friedland, where I would spend the two weeks of my prize. It was a luxurious hotel and Lucho Loayza was later to say that I described my entrance into the Napoléon the way the “savages” whom Columbus brought to Spain described their entrance into the court of Castile and Aragon.

During that month in Paris I lived a life that was to have nothing to do with the one I would lead during my stay of almost seven years in France later on, when I was almost always confined to the world of the
rive gauche
. In those four weeks at the beginning of 1958, on the other hand, I was a resident of the eighth arrondissement, on the
rive droite
, and to all appearances, anyone would have taken me for a South American dandy come to Paris to have myself a fling. In the Hôtel Napoléon I was given a room with a little balcony overlooking the street, from which I could glimpse the Arc de Triomphe. Across from my room someone who had also won a prize was staying: Miss France 1958, part of whose prize also consisted of a stay at the Napoléon. Her name was Annie Simplon and she was a girl with golden tresses and a wasp waist, to whom the manager of the hotel, Monsieur Makovsky, introduced me and with whom he invited me to dine and dance one night in a fashionable nightclub, L’Éléphant Blanc. Nice Annie Simplon took me on a tour of Paris in the Dauphine that she’d won along with her kingdom and my ears still ache from the bursts of laughter I sent her into, on the afternoon of that outing, with the French that I thought I’d learned not only to read but to speak.

The Hôtel Napoléon had a restaurant, Chez Pescadou, whose elegance intimidated me so much that I crossed it on tiptoe. My French did not allow me to decipher all the exquisite names of the dishes on the menu, and perturbed by the presence of that maître d’hôtel, who looked like a royal chamberlain in ceremonial dress standing alongside me, I chose them at random, pointing with my finger. And so I was surprised at lunch one day to find that I had been brought a little fishing net. I had ordered a trout and had to go get it myself, out of a tank in one corner of the restaurant. “This is Proust’s world,” I thought, bowled over, despite the fact that at the time I hadn’t yet read even one line of
Remembrance of Things Past
.

On the morning after my arrival, almost the minute I woke up, around noon, I went out for a stroll along the Champs-Élysées. It was now crowded with people and vehicles and, behind the glass partitions, the terraces of the bistros were jam-packed with men and women, smoking, talking together. Everything looked beautiful, incomparable, dazzling to me. I was nothing but a
métèque
, a cheeky spic. I felt that this was my city: I would live here, write here, put down roots here and stay forever. In those days, Syrians and Lebanese prowled the streets of the center of the city, buying and selling dollars—the inevitable result of currency controls—and I didn’t understand what those characters who approached me every so often, with furtive gestures, were offering me, until finally one of them, who spoke a sort of Spanuguese, explained to me what he was after. He changed some dollars for me, at a better rate than the one I got at the bank, and I made the mistake of telling him what hotel I was staying at. Later on, he phoned me several times, offering me diversions of all sorts, with “
mushashas muito bonitas
”—his Spanuguese for “very pretty girls.”

Monsieur Prouverelle had prepared a program for me, which included a visit to the Hôtel de Ville, where they gave me a citation. We were accompanied by the Peruvian cultural attaché, an elderly gentleman who a while later would attain a moment of fame at a general conference of UNESCO during which he gave a speech attacking Picasso—making it clear that his criticisms were “of a painter by a painter,” since he himself turned out landscape paintings in his time off from his diplomatic duties. He had become so refined (or was so absent-minded) that he kissed the hands of all the women doorkeepers at the Hôtel de Ville, to the astonishment of Monsieur Prouverelle, who asked me if this was a Peruvian custom. Our cultural attaché had lived in Europe for an eternity and the Peru of his memories was already long dead and gone, or had perhaps never existed. I remember how surprised I was, on the afternoon I met him—we had gone to have coffee together, after the visit to the Hôtel de Ville, at a bistro near the Châtelet—when I heard him say: “People in Lima are so frivolous, strolling up and down the Paseo Colón every Sunday.” When were Limeños in the habit of going for Sunday strolls along that run-down Paseo in the downtown area of the city? Thirty or forty years before, no doubt. But, in all truth, that gentleman could have been a thousand years old.

Monsieur Prouverelle got
Le Figaro
to interview me and gave a cocktail party in my honor at the Hôtel Napoléon, at which he presented the issue of
La Revue Française
in which my short story appeared. He was, as he put it, “
un chauvin raisonné
”—a reasonable chauvinist—and he was amused and delighted by my unbridled enthusiasm for everything I saw round about me and my fascination for French books and authors. He was amazed that I went all about Paris continually associating its monuments, streets, and various sites with novels and poems that I knew by heart.