A Fish in the Water: A Memoir Page 5

  Alan García, nervous over the protest moves, decided to “bring the masses out into the streets.” He traveled through the north of the country, the traditional citadel of the APRA party, vituperating imperialism and bankers and voicing threats against those of us who were protesting. His party, a revolutionary one half a century before, had little by little, over the course of the years, turned into a bureaucratic and opportunistic party, and followed his lead with obvious reluctance. It had first attained power in 1985, after it had been in existence for sixty years, with a very clever electoral campaign, presenting a moderate social-democratic image, and the majority of the party leaders seemed to be quite satisfied to be enjoying the prerogatives of power. The business of going about making a revolution at this point seemed to set about as well with many Apristas as a kick in the belly. But the APRA, whose doctrine of state control is socialist, owes its hierarchical structure to fascism—its founder, Haya de la Torre, called the Jefe Máximo, the Maximum Leader, had imitated the organization, the stage effects, and the shortcut methods of Italian fascism—and for the sake of discipline, although without a great deal of enthusiasm, followed Alan García when he called for revolutionary mobilizations. Those, on the other hand, who supported him with sincere and irrepressible enthusiasm were the Socialists and Communists of the coalition of the IU (Izquierda Unida: United Left). Whether moderates or extremists, they could not believe their eyes. The APRA, their old enemy, was putting their very own program into effect. Were the good old days of General Velasco, when they had very nearly managed to seize power, being brought back to life, then? Socialists and Communists immediately adopted as their own the fight for nationalization. Their leader at the time, Alfonso Barrantes, appeared on television to read a speech in favor of the nationalization law, and the senators and representatives of the United Left became its most unyielding defenders in Congress.

  Felipe Thorndike and Freddy Cooper turned up at my house one night at the beginning of the second week in August, all excited and in a conspiratorial mood. They had had meetings with groups of independents and had come to propose to me that we call for a public demonstration, at which I would be the main speaker. The idea was to show that if the Apristas and the Communists could take to the streets in defense of statism, we could too, to impugn their policy in the name of freedom. I accepted their proposal, and that night I had the first of a series of arguments with Patricia that were to go on for a year.

  “If you go up onto that platform you’ll end up going into politics, and literature can go to hell. And your family along with it. Can it be that you don’t know what it means to go into politics in this country?”

  “I headed the protest against nationalization. I can’t back down now. It’s just one demonstration, just one speech. That doesn’t mean devoting one’s life to politics!”

  “Then there’ll be another and another and you’ll end up being a candidate for president. Are you going to leave your books, the quiet, comfortable life you’re living now, to go into politics in Peru? Don’t you know how they’re going to pay you back? Have you forgotten Uchuraccay?”*

  “I’m not going to go into politics or give up literature or be a candidate for any office. I’m going to speak at this one demonstration so that it will at least be clear to everyone that not all of us Peruvians are letting ourselves be taken in by Señor Alan García.”

  “Don’t you know what kind of thugs you’re picking as enemies? I’ve noticed you don’t answer the phone anymore.”

  Because, ever since the day our manifesto came out, the anonymous calls had started. They came in the daytime or at night. In order to be able to get some sleep we had to disconnect the phone. The voices sounded like different ones each time, so that I came to think that every Aprista’s idea of fun, once he had a drink under his belt, was to call my house to threaten us. These calls went on for almost the entire three years this account covers. They finally became a part of the family routine. When the calls stopped, a sort of vacuum, a nostalgia even, lingered on in the house.

  The demonstration—we called it A Meeting for Freedom—was set for August 21 in the classic place for rallies in Lima: the Plaza San Martín. The organizing of it was in the hands of independents who had never been political militants or had any experience in this sort of contention, people like the university professor Luis Bustamante Belaunde or the business leader Miguel Vega Alvear, with whom we were to become fast friends. Among the political novices that all of us were, the exception perhaps was Miguel Cruchaga, Belaunde Terry’s nephew, who as a young man had been a member of the AP (Acción Popular: Popular Action) party. But he had kept his distance from active militancy for some time. My friendship with the tall, gentlemanly, grave Miguel was of long standing, but it had become a very intimate one after my return to Peru, after nearly sixteen years in Europe, in 1974, on the eve of the capture of the news media by the dictatorship. We always used to talk politics whenever we were together, and each time, somewhat cast over with sickly melancholy, we wondered why everything in Peru always tended to get worse, why we were wasting opportunities and persisting so perversely toward working for our ruin and our downfall. And each time, too, in a very vague way, we outlined projects to do something, at some time or other. That intellectual game took on, all of a sudden, in the fever and boiling fury of those August days, a disconcerting reality. Because of this background and because of his enthusiasm, Miguel took on the job of coordinating the arrangements for the protest rally. These were intense and exhausting days which, from a distance, seem to me to be the most generously motivated and the most exciting ones of those years. I had asked the shareholders of the threatened companies and the opposition parties—Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party—to remain on the sidelines, so as to make the event clearly a matter of principle, of Peruvians who were not taking to the streets to defend personal or political interests but to defend values that seemed to us to be endangered by nationalization.

  So many people mobilized to help us—collecting money, printing pamphlets and placards, preparing pennants, lending their homes for meetings, offering transportation for the demonstrators, and going out to paint slogans and drive through the streets in vehicles with loudspeakers—that from the very beginning I had the premonition that the Meeting for Freedom would be a success. Since my place was a madhouse, on the evening of August 21 I hid out for a few hours at the home of Carlos and Maggie Ferreyros, two friends, to prepare the first political speech of my life. (Carlos was kidnapped shortly thereafter, by the MRTA [Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru: Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement] and held in captivity for six months, in a tiny cellar without ventilation.)

  But, despite the favorable signs, not even the most optimistic person among us could have predicted the extraordinary number of people who packed the Plaza San Martin elbow to elbow that night and overflowed the neighboring streets. When I went up onto the speakers’ platform I felt a mixture of boundless joy and terror: tens of thousands of people—130,000, according to the review Sí*—were waving flags and singing out in chorus at the top of their lungs the “Hymn to Freedom,” the words and music of which had been written for the occasion by Augusto Polo Campos, a very popular composer. Something must have changed in Peru when a crowd like that fervently applauded on hearing me say that economic freedom was inseparable from political freedom, that private property and a market economy were the only guarantee of development, and that we Peruvians would not allow our democratic system to be “Mexicanized” or the APRA to be turned into the Trojan Horse of Communism in Peru.

  The story has it that that night, on seeing on the little TV screen the magnitude of the Meeting for Freedom, Alan García, in a fit of rage, smashed the set to smithereens. What is certain is that the immense demonstration had enormous consequences. It was a decisive factor in making it evident that the nationalization law, though already passed in Congress, could never be put into effect, and the law was later annulled. It was a death
blow to Alan García’s ambition to stay in office for an unlimited time. It opened the doors of Peruvian political life to liberal thought that up until then had lacked a public presence, since all of our modern history had been, practically speaking, a monopoly of the ideological populism of conservatives and socialists of various tendencies. It gave the initiative back to the opposition parties, Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party, which, following their defeat in 1985, had appeared to be invisible, and laid the foundations for what would become the Frente Democrático (Democratic Front)* and, as Patricia feared, for my candidacy for the presidency.

  Buoyed up by our success in the Plaza San Martín, we immediately organized two other meetings, in Arequipa, on August 26, and in Piura, on September 2. Both of them were also attended by thousands. In Arequipa there was violence; we were attacked by Aprista counterdemonstrators—the famous buffaloes or bullies and armed hoodlums of the party—and by a Maoist faction of the United Left, the Patria Roja (Red Fatherland). They set off explosives and, armed with clubs, stones, and stink bombs, attacked just as I was beginning to speak, so as to start a stampede. The young people in charge of maintaining order on the outer edge of the Plaza, organized by Fernando Cháves Belaunde, resisted the attack, but several of them were injured. “You see? You see?” Patricia grumbled; she and María Amelia, Freddy Cooper’s wife, had been obliged to dive underneath a policeman’s riot shield that night in order to escape a hail of bottles. “What I predicted has already started happening.” But the truth of the matter was that, despite her opposition in principle, she too worked morning and night organizing the meetings and was in the front row at all three of them.

  It was the country’s middle classes who filled those three plazas. Not the rich, since in the indescribably wretched country that bad governments have turned Peru into there would not be enough of them to fill a theater and perhaps not even a living room. And not the poor, the peasants or the inhabitants of the shantytowns that were euphemistically called “young towns,” who listened to the debate pitting state ownership against a market economy, collectivism against free enterprise, from afar, as if it were no concern of theirs. These middle classes—office workers, professionals, technicians, tradesmen, state employees, housewives, students—had seen their lot worsen by the day. For three decades they had watched their standard of living decline and their hopes come to nothing under each succeeding government. Under the first administration of Belaunde Terry (1963–68), whose reformism had aroused great expectations. Under the military dictatorship and its repressive socialist policy, which had impoverished, ravished, and corrupted Peruvian society as no other previous government ever had. Under the second administration of Belaunde Terry, who had won by an overwhelming majority, and who did not remedy a single one of the disasters of the previous regime and left behind him an overt inflationary process. And under Alan García, who—in those days this was barely beginning to be perceived—would beat all records in the history of Peru for inefficient administration, bequeathing to his successor, in 1990, a country in ruins, in which real salaries had been reduced by half, paychecks by a third, and in which national production had fallen to the levels of thirty years before. Stunned, lurching in bewilderment from the political right to the left, overcome by fear and at times by desperation, these middle classes had rarely mobilized in Peru outside of election campaign periods. But they had done so this time, nonetheless, with an instinctive certainty that if the nationalization of banks, insurance companies, and financial firms came about, the situation would be worse still and Peru would be even farther away from being that decent, reliable country, with jobs and opportunities, that they longed for.

  The recurrent theme of my three speeches had been that the way out of poverty does not lie in redistributing the little wealth that exists but in creating more. And in order to do that markets must be opened up, competition and individual initiative encouraged, private property not be fought against but extended to the greatest number, our economy and our psychology taken out of the grip of the state, and the handout mentality that expects everything from the state replaced by a modern outlook that entrusts the responsibility for economic life to civil society and the market.

  “I see it but I don’t believe it,” my friend Felipe Thorndike said to me. “You talk about private property and popular capitalism, and instead of lynching you they applaud you. What’s happening in Peru?”

  That is how the story of my candidacy began. From that time on, whenever I’ve been asked why I was ready to give up my vocation as a writer and enter politics I’ve answered: “For a moral reason. Because circumstances placed me in a position of leadership at a critical moment in the life of my country. Because it appeared that the opportunity was at hand to accomplish, with the support of a majority of Peruvians, the liberal reforms which, ever since the early 1970s, I had been defending in articles and polemical exchanges as being necessary in order to save Peru.”

  But someone who knows me as well as I know myself, or perhaps even better, Patricia, doesn’t see it that way. “The moral obligation wasn’t the decisive factor,” she says. “It was the adventure, the illusion of living an experience full of excitement and risk. Of writing the great novel in real life.”

  This may well hit the nail on the head. It is true that if the presidency of Peru had not been, as I said jokingly to a journalist, “the most dangerous job in the world,” I might never have been a candidate. If the decadence, the impoverishment, the terrorism, and the multiple crises of Peruvian society had not made it an almost impossible challenge to govern such a country, it would never have entered my head to accept such a task. I have always believed that writing novels has been, in my case, a way of living the many lives—the many adventures—that I would like to have had myself and therefore I can’t discard the possibility that, in those dark depths where the most secret motivations of our acts are plotted, it was the temptation of adventure, rather than some sort of altruism, that induced me to enter professional politics.

  But if it is true that the temptation of adventure played a role, so did another one, either major or minor, which, in an attempt to be as far from grandiloquent as possible, I shall call a moral commitment.

  I shall try to explain something that is not easy to put into words without lapsing into platitudes or into sentimental simplemindedness. Although I was born in Peru (“through an accident of geography,” as the head of the Peruvian Army, General Nicolás de Bari Hermoza, put it, thinking that he was insulting me),* my vocation is that of a cosmopolitan and an expatriate who has always detested nationalism, which strikes me as one of the human aberrations that has made the most blood flow, and I also know that patriotism, as Dr. Johnson said, can be the last refuge of a scoundrel. I have lived a good part of my life abroad and I have never felt like a total stranger anywhere. Despite this, the relations I have with the country where I was born are more intimate and long-lasting than those I have with any other, including the ones in which I have come to feel completely at home: England, France, or Spain. I don’t know why this is, but in any case it is not on account of a question of principle. But what happens in Peru affects me more—makes me happier or irritates me more—than what happens elsewhere, and in a way that I would be unable to justify rationally, I feel that between me and Peruvians of any race, language, and social status, for better or for worse—especially for worse—there is something that ties me to them in a seemingly invincible way. I don’t know whether this is related to the stormy past that is our heritage, to the violent and miserable present of our country, to its uncertain future, or to the crucial experiences of my adolescence in Piura and Lima, or, simply, to my childhood, there in Bolivia, where, as tends to happen to expatriates, in my grandparents’ and my mother’s household, we lived Peru, the fact of being Peruvian, as the most precious gift ever bestowed on our family.

  Perhaps saying that I love my country is not true. I often loathe it, and hundreds of times since I was young
I have promised myself to live a long way from Peru forever and not write anything more about it and forget its aberrations. But the fact is that it is continually on my mind, and whether I am living in it or residing abroad as an expatriate, to me it is a constant torment. I cannot free myself from it; when it doesn’t exasperate me, it saddens me, and often both at once. It has grieved me most of all ever since I have had ample evidence that it manages to interest the rest of the world only because of its natural cataclysms, its record rates of inflation, the activities of its drug traffickers, its terrorist massacres, or the villainies of those who govern it. And to know that it is spoken of, outside its borders, when it is spoken of at all, as a horrible, caricatural country that is dying by the inch because of the inability of Peruvians to govern themselves with a minimum of common sense. I remember having thought, when I read George Orwell’s essay “The Lion and the Unicorn,” in which he says that England is a good country of good folk with “the wrong people in control,” how well that definition applied to Peru. For among us are decent people capable of accomplishing, for example, what the Spaniards have in Spain in the last ten years; but such people have rarely gone into politics, an area that in Peru has almost always been in dishonest and mediocre hands.