A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Uncle Pedro, Uncle Juan, and Uncle Jorge went to his office. I never knew how the conversation went. But I can imagine what they told him. That if I went on working at La Crónica I would never finish high school or study for a career. And that, to have any sort of future, I must leave that night job immediately.

  A few days after I got out of the hospital and went back to work, I entered the editorial room at La Crónica one afternoon, and Señor Aguirre Morales remarked to me in a friendly way: “What a shame that you’re leaving us, my good friend. We’re going to miss you; we already feel that you’re one of the family.” That was how I learned that my father had just quit my job for me.

  I went to his office and had only to take one look at his face—that of critical moments: more or less livid, with lips that were a little dry and slightly parted, and a fixed stare, with that little yellow glint deep down in the pupils—to know what was coming. Without informing me of my uncles’ visit, he began to read me the riot act, telling me that, instead of taking a job at La Crónica to work as a responsible employee, I had come there to wallow in vice and become a degenerate. He was bellowing with rage and I was sure he was about to beat me. But he didn’t hit me. He confined himself to giving me a few days’ time to show him the registration certificate from the school in which I was going to finish my last year of secondary school. And, naturally, I wasn’t to get any bright ideas such as claiming that there was no vacancy for me in any state school.

  And so, overnight, I went from a frequenter of saloons and dens of iniquity to a forlorn scholar in search of classrooms in which to finish high school. I had lost too much time. It was now the end of March and in none of the schools that I made the rounds of was there a vacancy. And then I had one of the best ideas in my life. I went to the main telephone office and called my Uncle Lucho, in Piura. I told him what was going on. Uncle Lucho, who, ever since I was a small boy, had been solving the family’s problems, solved this one as well. He knew the head of the San Miguel state school, near his house, and would go have a word with him immediately. Two hours later, he called me back at the main telephone office to tell me that I had already been enrolled, that classes began on such and such a day, that Aunt Olga was happy that I was coming to live with them. Did I need money for a ticket to Piura?

  I presented myself at my father’s, swallowing hard, convinced that he would shout abuse at me and refuse to let me go to Piura. But, on the contrary, it struck him as a very good idea, and he even allowed himself to tell me something that whetted my appetite: “I can already see you working as a journalist in Piura at the same time that you’re studying. Don’t ever try to pull my leg.”

  So why not? Why not work on some newspaper in Piura at the same time that I was finishing school? I asked my friends on La Crónica, and the kindly headline writer, Alfonso Delboy, who knew the owner of La Industria, wrote a letter of recommendation to him for me. And Aguirre Morales another.

  The last farewell was said as we celebrated my birthday, on the 28th of March 1952, over beers with Carlitos Ney, Milton von Hesse, and Norwin Sánchez Geny, in a restaurant on the Calle Capón, Lima’s Chinatown. It was a gloomy farewell, because they were friends I had come to appreciate and perhaps because I had an intuition that I would never again share with them those feverish experiences with which I had brought my early youth to an end. And so it turned out. The following year, when I came back to Lima, I didn’t hang out with them again or frequent the same places, which my memory would nonetheless preserve, with a bittersweet taste, and which I tried to recreate long afterwards with retouches dreamed up by my imagination, in Conversation in The Cathedral.

  With my last paycheck from La Crónica I bought a ticket to Piura at the Cruz de Chalpón bus company. And my mama, her eyes filled with tears, packed my suitcase, in which I put all the books I owned and the manuscript of my little play.

  I spent the twenty-four hours of the trip, through the endless deserts of the northern coast, in a rattletrap bus, torn between opposed feelings: a bit sad at having left that adventurous and somewhat literary job at La Crónica and the good friends it had brought me, but happy at the same time at the prospect of seeing my Uncle Lucho again, and curious and excited, imagining what this second stay in remote Piura would be like.

  Eight

  The Freedom Movement

  The Freedom Movement was organized in a painter’s studio. At the end of September 1987, those of us who had planned the Meetings for Freedom were summoned to Fernando de Szyszlo’s by Freddy Cooper. There, amid half-finished paintings and masks and pre-Hispanic feather cloaks, we exchanged ideas about the future. The success of the fight against Alan García’s attempt to nationalize the banks had filled us with enthusiasm and hope. Peru was changing, then. Should we return to our usual occupations, telling ourselves that our task was fulfilled, or was it worth our while to make this nascent organization a permanent one, with an eye to the coming elections?

  The dozen friends gathered together there agreed to continue our political activity. We would create something of broader scope and more flexible than a political party, a movement, to be known as the Movimiento Libertad, that would bring together those independents who had mobilized against state control and put down roots in the popular sectors, in particular among the tradesmen and small businessmen working within the so-called informal or parallel economy, a form of popular black market capitalism. They were an example of the fact that, despite the triumph of the ideology of state control among the elite of the country, an instinct for free enterprise existed among the Peruvian people. At the same time that it was attempting to organize these sectors, Libertad would draw up a thoroughgoing reform program and modernize Peru’s political culture, opposing both socialist collectivism and mercantilist capitalism by putting forward a liberal policy.

  Of the goals we set ourselves in that hours-long conversation under the bewitching spell of Szyszlo’s paintings, the only one we completely achieved was the program. The Plan for Governing that the team headed by Luis Bustamante Belaunde had been doing the preliminary work on was what we came up with that morning: a realistic program for putting an end to privileges, government handouts, protectionism, and state control, opening up the country to the world and creating a free society in which everyone would have access to the market and live under the protection of the law. This Plan for Governing, full of ideas, with a firm determination to take advantage of the opportunities of our time so that Peruvians of every estate could attain a decent life, is one of the things that make me proud of those three years. The serious commitment to the work at hand on the part of Lucho Bustamante, of Raúl Salazar (who, despite the fact that he belonged to SODE and not to Libertad, was the head of the economics team of the Democratic Front), and of the dozens of men and women who, along with them, devoted countless days and nights to drafting the first rough outline for a new country, was a marvelous source of encouragement for me. Each time I attended the meetings of the executive committee for the Plan for Governing, or one of the specialized committees, even the most technical ones—such as those on reform in the mining sector, customs, the port authority, administration, or the judicial system—politics ceased to be that frantic, inane, and often sordid activity that took up most of my time and became instead a task requiring intellect, technical knowledge, the comparing of ideas, imagination, idealism, generosity.

  Of all the social groups that we did our best to attract to the Freedom Movement, the one we had the most success with was the one which produced those engineers, architects, attorneys, physicians, entrepreneurs, economists who made up the committees of the Plan for Governing. Most of them had never been in politics before and had no intention of being politically active in the future. They loved their professions and wanted only to be able to practice them successfully, in a Peru different from the one that they could see falling apart before their eyes. Though they were hesitant at first, we eventually managed to persuade them that only with the cooperation of pe
ople like themselves could we make Peruvian politics more decent and more effective.

  Between that meeting in Szyszlo’s studio and March 15, 1988, when we opened the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, in Magdalena del Mar, there intervened five months of exhausting efforts to attract supporters. We worked long and hard, but unsystematically, feeling our way. Nobody in the original group had any experience as an activist or a gift for organization. And I to an even lesser degree than my friends. Having spent my life in a study, making up stories, was not the best possible preparation for founding a political movement. And my right arm in this task, a faithful and beloved friend, Miguel Cruchaga, the first secretary general of Libertad, who had lived shut up in his architect’s studio and was most unsociable, was in no position to make up for my ineffectiveness. But not for lack of dedication: he was the first, in a gesture that deserves to be called heroic, to give up his profession in order to devote himself full time to the Movement. Later others would do the same, making out as best they could or living in near poverty, with only the small amount of financial help that Libertad managed to give them. From public squares, we moved on to private houses in those last months of 1987 and the early ones of 1988. Friends or sympathizers invited young people of their neighborhoods in and Miguel Cruchaga and I talked to them, answered their questions, and provoked discussions that went on till late at night. One of those meetings took place at the home of Gladys and Carlos Urbina, who would later be great guiding spirits of the mobilization campaign. And another one at the home of Bertha Vega Alvear, who, with a group of women, would found, shortly thereafter, Acción Solidaria, the Solidarity program sponsored by Libertad.

  It was also one of our goals to recover—to bring back to life—those intellectuals, journalists, or politicians who, in the past, had defended liberal positions, arguing against socialists and populists and countering, by promoting the theory of the free market, the tide of paternalism and protectionism that had submerged Peru. In order to attain that goal we organized the Jornadas por la Libertad: Freedom Days. They lasted from nine in the morning till nine at night. There were talks whose purpose was to show, with statistics, how greatly the various nationalizations had impoverished the country and increased discrimination and injustice, and how the policy of government intervention, besides destroying industry, went against the interests of consumers and favored small-scale mafias which the system of quotas and preferential dollar exchange rates enriched without their having to compete or to serve the public. And there were talks devoted to explaining the “informal economy” as an answer on the part of the poor to the discrimination of which they were the object, since proper legal licensing for even the smallest enterprise or business activity was expensive and selective, available only to those who had money or political pull. And to defending those itinerant peddlers, artisans, tradesmen, and small-scale businessmen, of modest origins, working as informales, who in many fields—transportation and housing in particular—had proved to be more efficient than the state and sometimes even more so than the large-scale, full-time entrepreneurs who were legally licensed.

  During the Freedom Days, the criticism of socialism and mercantilist capitalism endeavored to point out the deep-seated identity of two systems which, beneath their divergences, were related by virtue of the predominant role played in both by the state, the “planner” of economic activity and the dispenser of privileges. A recurrent theme was the necessity of reforming that state—by strengthening it, by streamlining and paring away its excesses, by opening it up to technology, and by making it moral—as a fundamental requirement for development.

  There was always a talk too on those countries of the Third World to which market-oriented policies and the promotion of exports and of private enterprise had brought rapid growth, countries such as the four “Asian dragons”—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore—or Chile. In all those countries, the more or less liberal economic reforms were in flagrant contradiction to the repressive and dictatorial activity of their governments, and in the course of the Freedom Days we did our best to show that this contradiction was neither acceptable nor necessary. Freedom had to be understood as something indivisible, politically and economically. The Freedom Movement must win an electoral mandate for these ideas that would allow us to concretize them in a democratic civilian regime. A great liberal reform was possible under democratic rule, provided that a clear majority voted for it. To achieve this, it was indispensable to be open and aboveboard, explaining in detail what we wanted to do and the price that it would exact.

  We held the first Freedom Day in the Hotel Crillón, in Lima, on February 6, 1988; the second, devoted to agrarian subjects, at the San José hacienda in Chincha on February 18; on February 26, in Arequipa; a Young People’s Day, in Lima, on March 5; on March 12, a day in the young town of Huáscar, on the informal economy; and on March 14, a Women’s Day, in which there participated for the first time an economist who became yet another of the leaders of Libertad: Beatriz Merino.

  During these Freedom Days we managed to line up hundreds of supporters, but their greatest importance lay in the field of ideas. For many of those who attended them it was unheard of for a political organization in Peru to speak out, in the most straightforward terms, in favor of a free market, to defend capitalism as more efficient and fairer than socialism and as the only system capable of safeguarding people’s freedoms, to see in private enterprise the driving force of development and call for a “culture based on success” instead of on resentment and the state handouts advocated by Marxists and conservatives alike, even though their rhetoric was different. The word capitalism had come to be taboo, except to denigrate it. (I received strong recommendations from leaders of AP and the PPC never to use it in speeches.)

  Those who attended the Freedom Days were divided into study and discussion groups of eight or ten, and then, once the explanatory talks had been given, we held a general meeting. When it was over, Miguel Cruchaga, who was the one who worked out the format of the Freedom Days, gave me an enthusiastic introduction and I spoke, and we ended the Jornada by singing that song composed for the demonstration in the Plaza San Martín which had become the theme song of Libertad.

  The distinction between “movement” and “party” that had taken up a great deal of our time in Szyszlo’s studio turned out to be too subtle for our political habits. For despite its name, the Movimiento Libertad functioned from the start as something indistinguishable from a party. The vast majority of its members took it to be one and there was no way to disabuse them of this notion. Laughable situations came up, indicative of customs deeply rooted in the national psychology, owing to the tradition of clientelismo—party patronage. Since the mere idea of the carnet—the individual membership book carried by party members—was associated with this system, which both the AP and the APRA administrations had put into practice, giving their own adherents (who could show their carnets) preference when it came to government jobs and favors, we decided that the Movement would not have carnets. Recording one’s name on a list written down on a plain sheet of paper was all that would be required to sign up as a member. It was impossible to get this idea across in the popular sectors, where the members of Libertad felt that their status was inferior to that of the Apristas, the Communists, the socialists, and so on, who were able to show off impressive-looking carnets full of seals and little flags. The pressure put on those of us on the executive committee to give out carnets—brought to bear by the section for young people, by Mobilization, by Solidarity, and by the committees in the provinces and the departamentos—was impossible to turn aside. We explained over and over again that we wanted to be different from other parties, that if we came to power we wanted to keep a Freedom Movement carnet from being used in the future as a symbol for abuses, but it was no use. Then I suddenly discovered that our committees in certain city districts and towns had begun to give out carnets, loaded with more and more signatures and bright-colored emblems, and some
of them even bearing my photograph. Considerations of principle collided with the argument of activists: “If they aren’t given a carnet, they won’t sign up.” So at the end of the campaign there was not just one Movimiento Libertad carnet but a whole heterogeneous collection of them, invented by various local headquarters to suit themselves.

  The philosopher Francisco Miró Quesada, an old friend, who came to visit me every so often or wrote me long letters to offer me political suggestions, had been a member of Popular Action at one time. His experiences had led him to the depressing conclusion that in Peru it was highly unrealistic to give a political party a democratic structure. “Whether rightist or leftist, our parties fill up with scoundrels,” he sighed. Libertad did not fill up with scoundrels, since, to our great good fortune, those persons whom we caught doing something dishonest—invariably something involving money—and whom we were obliged to ask to leave the Movement, were scarcely more than a handful in a group that, shortly before the first round of voting, had over a hundred thousand members. But it never became the modern, popular, democratic institution that I had dreamed of. From the very start it contracted the vices of Peruvian political parties: bossism, cliques, factionalism. There were groups that took over committees and encysted themselves in them, allowing no one else to participate. Or groups were paralyzed by internal squabbles over trivial matters, which drove away valuable people, who, although they sympathized with our ideas, did not care to waste their time in intrigues and petty rivalries.