A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Unlike South Korea, whose development, no less impressive than Taiwan’s, had had as a driving force seven enormous conglomerates, in Taiwan businesses of small and medium size, working at a very high technological level, had multiplied: in 1990 80 percent of its factories, the majority of them oriented toward exports and highly competitive, had less than twenty workers. This was a model that suited us. Officials and businessmen in Taiwan spared no effort to satisfy my curiosity and arranged a program of visits for me which, although it was a killing one, turned out to be very instructive. I remember in particular the impression of science fiction conveyed to me by the scientific industrial park of Hsin Chu, where the world’s large corporations were invited to experiment with products and technologies for the future. In Taiwan I received the firmest promises of aid should the Democratic Front assume power.

  Naturally, there was a political interest behind this. Peru broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan in order to recognize the People’s Republic of China, in the days of Velasco’s dictatorship. Since that time, succeeding Peruvian administrations had reduced the country’s commercial contacts and exchanges with Taiwan; under Alan García, they had dwindled to nothing. In order to maintain a presence in Peru, Taiwan still had a commercial office in Lima, the manager of which was the semiofficial representative of his government. But he was not even authorized to give out visas. Although in none of the interviews of me was I asked any concrete questions, I volunteered to government authorities the information that my administration would engage in consular and commercial relations, as other countries had done, without breaking off diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.

  As I had done with Mrs. Thatcher and with Felipe González, prime ministers of countries with problems of the same sort, I asked government leaders in Taiwan for advice concerning antiterrorist activities. Like the others, they too promised to advise me. And they immediately made me an offer to set up two scholarships, for a short eight-week course in antisubversive strategy. The Freedom Movement sent Henry Bullard, a jurist who was a member of the Democratic Front’s committee on civil peace and human rights, and another person, as enigmatic as he was efficient, about whom I never managed to find out very much, except that he was a karate black belt and a Nisei: Professor Oshiro. He was the trainer and technical director of the security personnel of Prosegur, and the person who replaced Óscar Balbi—or reinforced him—following me around like a shadow at rallies and on my trips around the country. Of an indefinable age—between forty and forty-five, perhaps—and slender and strong as a rock, invariably wearing a light sport shirt, his serene and peaceable air made me trust him. Professor Oshiro never opened his mouth, except to utter a few incomprehensible murmurs, and nothing appeared to irritate him or bring him out of his meditative mood: neither the attacks of the Aprista “buffaloes” at demonstrations nor the storms that, all of a sudden, would make the small plane in which we were flying shudder violently. But if need be, his reactions were extraordinarily fast. Like the time, in Puno, during the festivities to celebrate Candlemas. We had entered the stadium, where a performance of folk dances was being given, and were greeted by a hail of stones, thrown from one of the boxes. Before the thought of raising my arms to protect myself had even crossed my mind, Professor Oshiro had already spread out his big leather coat, like an umbrella—one against showers of stones—over me and stopped, or at least deadened, their impact. The antisubversive course in Taiwan did not greatly impress him, but he took the trouble to present me with a report on everything he had heard and learned in it.

  Since the trip through Asia was political, and with an overloaded agenda, I had hardly any time in those weeks for cultural activities or for seeing writers. With two exceptions. In Taipei I had lunch with the leaders of the local PEN club and was able to have a brief conversation with the magnificent Nancy Ying, of whom I had become a very good friend when I was the international president of that organization. And, in Seoul, the Korean PEN center gave a reception for me, to which it invited those who had accompanied me on the tour. It was presided over by an imposing figure, dressed in a very beautiful silk kimono with a flower print and carrying painted paper fans. The banker and industrialist Gonzalo de la Puente, making a bow worthy of a Renaissance courtier, leaned over to kiss the figure’s hand: “Chère madame…” We discreetly informed him that the person was a cher monsieur, a venerable poet, and apparently a very popular one.

  Just after my return to Lima I gave a press conference reporting on my trip and the good prospects for the development of Peru’s economic relations with the countries of the Pacific Rim. The tour received good reviews from the media. There seemed to be a unanimous feeling in favor of Peru’s improving its interchanges with countries possessing enormous excess financial funds available for industrial investment. Wasn’t it absurd not to have taken advantage of this opportunity which our neighbor, Chile, was already making such good use of?

  Worried by the polls’ prediction of a crushing victory for the Democratic Front, on November 27, 1989, Alan García broke what, by a provision of the Constitution and by custom, should be the president’s attitude during the electoral process: a genuine or a feigned neutrality. And at a press conference, he appeared on the TV screens to say that if nobody “stands up to him” (by “him” meaning me), he would do so. By refuting, for example, the figures that I had given regarding the number of public employees in Peru. According to him, there were only 507,000 people on the state payrolls. This was a subject of capital importance for us, and we had investigated it as thoroughly as was possible. Several times I had attended meetings of our committee on a national system of budget control, and the person who headed it, Dr. María Reynafarje, had given us a very interesting description of the underhanded tricks and crooked dealings which successive administrations had used to swell the number of employees in public enterprises. Alan García had exaggerated this practice to the point of perversion. The Peruvian Institute of Social Security, for instance, had a system of contracts with supposed firms employing security guards, and funds whose existence was kept as closely guarded as though they were a sort of military secret—a dodge that allowed the government to pay the salaries of hundreds of thugs and gunmen who belonged to its paramilitary groups. It was not hard for me, then, to argue with García and demonstrate the very next day, with figures in hand, that the number of Peruvians who received pay and salaries from the state (officially or through the subterfuge of temporary contracts) was over a million. The opinion surveys made after this polemical exchange showed that out of every three Peruvians, two believed me and only one believed him.

  After that, and as a reprisal against my well-publicized trip through Asia, Alan García announced that Peru was granting recognition to Kim Il Sung’s regime and establishing diplomatic relations with North Korea. He hoped in this way to prevent or, at the least, put difficulties in the way of Peru’s economic interchanges with South Korea, and, indirectly, with the other countries of the Pacific Rim, for which Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship for life—under which North Korea was contending with Libya for the title of the state most actively promoting terrorism on a global scale—was an outcast regime.

  But this was not the only reason. Through that gesture, Alan García was also repaying favors received by him and his party from that regime which, besides having been quarantined by the community of civilized countries, represented a survival of the most despotic form of Stalinist megalomania. During the 1985 presidential campaign, the communications media in Peru had pointed out with amazement the continual trips by Aprista leaders and by Alan García himself to Pyongyang, where, for instance, Representative Carlos Roca, dressed in a proletarian uniform, was in the habit of being photographed with North Korean officials. That the government of Kim Il Sung had given financial aid to Alan García’s campaign was something that went without saying, and there had even been a vitriolic denunciation in which a photographer from the periodical Oiga* had chanced upon a
secret reunion of Aprista leaders and the semiofficial delegation of North Korea in Peru, at which, supposedly, one of the deliveries of campaign funds had been made in a shoe box!

  During Alan García’s term in office the contacts had continued, in a more worrisome way. There was a strange purchase by the Ministry of the Interior of North Korean submachine guns and rifles to update the weaponry of the police and the Civil Guard. Nonetheless, only a part of that weaponry in fact reached those forces, and there were many reports concerning the final destination of the remainder—ten thousand firearms, apparently. It was another affair about which the government had never offered a convincing explanation. The alarm about the weapons imported from North Korea came not only from the press, but from the armed forces as well. The officers of the navy and the army with whom I talked in unbelievable meetings—in which it was necessary to change vehicles and places several times—had all referred to this subject. What had happened to those rifles? According to the most alarmist among them, they had ended up in the hands of the shock forces of the Aprista party and their paramilitary commando units, while according to others, they had been resold to drug traffickers, terrorists, or on the international market, to the profit of the few high-ranking officers and civilian bureaucrats closest to the president.

  What benefit could bring Peru to legitimize a terrorist regime, which had trained and financed groups of Peruvian guerrilla fighters from the MIR and the FLN in the 1960s, and which was not in a position to be a market for our products nor a source of investment? The drawbacks, on the other hand, were going to be enormous, beginning with the obstacle that this would present for our obtaining credits and investments from the government of South Korea—which by contrast had abundant financial resources.

  In accordance with the Front’s committee on foreign policy, which was headed by a retired ambassador, Arturo García, and which (discreetly) advised various civil servants who were active in the administration, I announced, on November 29, that once installed, my government would put an end to all relations with Kim Il Sung’s regime. Several members of the consultative commission of the Ministry of Foreign Relations resigned from it in protest against Alan García’s decision to recognize North Korea.

  Thirteen

  The Fierce Little Sartrean

  I worked with Raúl Porras Barrenechea from February 1954 until a few days before I left for Europe, in 1958. The three hours a day I spent there, in those four years and a half, from Monday to Friday, between two and five in the afternoon, taught me more about Peru and contributed more to my education than the classes at San Marcos.

  Porras Barrenechea was a master in the old style, who liked being surrounded by disciples, from whom he demanded complete loyalty. An elderly bachelor, he had lived in that old house with his mother until she died the year before, and he now shared it with an aged black servant who had perhaps been his nursemaid. She addressed him with the familiar tú and scolded him like a little boy, prepared the delicious cups of chocolate with which the historian received the intellectual luminaries who came by on a pilgrimage to the Calle Colina. Of those, I remember as the most delightful conversationalists the Spaniard Don Pedro Laín Entralgo; the Venezuelan Maríano Picón-Salas, a historian, essayist, and sharp-witted humorist; the Mexican Alfonso Junco, whose timidity disappeared when the conversation turned to the two subjects that impassioned him, Spain and the faith, for he was a militant crusader for Hispanism and Catholicism; and our compatriots the poet José Gálvez, who spoke a very pure Spanish and had a mania for genealogy, and Víctor Andrés Belaunde—in those days Peru’s ambassador to the United Nations—who often passed through Lima, and who, on one occasion I am thinking of, talked all night and didn’t allow either Porras or any of the guests at the gathering over chocolate given in his honor to get a word in edgewise.

  Víctor Andrés Belaunde (1883–1966), who belonged to the generation before Porras’s, a philosopher and a Catholic essayist as well as a diplomat, had a celebrated controversy with José Carlos Mariátegui, whose theories on Peruvian society he refuted in his La realidad nacional,* in which he defended a Christian corporatism that was as artificial and unreal as the schematic—although a most novel approach for the time and widely influential—Marxist interpretation of Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos. Porras esteemed Belaunde, although he did not share his ultramontane Catholicism, or that of José de la Riva Agüero (1885–1944), or the latter’s crepuscular enthusiasms for fascism, although he did appreciate his erudite and all-inclusive vision of the Peruvian past, which Riva Agüero interpreted as a synthesis of the indigenous and the Spanish. Porras professed an admiration without reservation for Riva Agüero, whom he regarded as his master and with whom he had in common meticulousness, exactitude regarding facts and quotations, a love of Spain and of history understood in Michelet’s romantic fashion, a certain ironic disdain for the new intellectual currents which held the individual and the anecdotal in contempt—anthropology and ethnohistory, for instance; while at the same time he stood apart from him by virtue of a much more flexible turn of mind with regard to religion and politics.

  Diplomacy, to which Porras Barrenechea had devoted part of his life, had taken up a great deal of his time and energy, keeping him from crowning his career with what everyone expected of him, that masterwork on the history of the Discovery and the Conquest of Peru—or the biography of Pizarro—subjects on which he had been preparing to write the definitive work since his early years and on which he had managed to acquire so much information that it resembled omniscience. Up until then, Porras’s wisdom had taken the form of a series of learned monographs on chroniclers, travelers, or ideologists and defenders of emancipation, as well as of beautiful anthologies on Lima and Cuzco or of essays, that were to appear over those years, on Ricardo Palma, Riva Agüero’s Paisajes peruanos (Peruvian Landscapes), or his textbook on Fuentes históricas peruanas.† But those of us who admired him, and he himself, knew that these were mere crumbs of the great overall work on that watershed era of Peruvian history, that of its establishing close relations with Europe and the West, which he knew more about than anyone else. A fellow scholar of his generation, Jorge Basadre, had fulfilled an equivalent undertaking in his monumental Historia de la República, which Porras had annotated from beginning to end and on which he had passed judgment, an opinion at once respectful and severely critical, in his microscopic handwriting, at the end of the last volume. Another fellow scholar of his generation, Luis Alberto Sánchez, exiled at the time in Chile, had also crowned his career with a voluminous history of Peruvian literature, under the title Literatura peruana. Although he had certain reservations and differences of opinion with Basadre, Porras had intellectual respect for him; for Sánchez, a disdainful commiseration.

  Unlike Basadre or Porras, that third musketeer of the celebrated generation of 1919, Luis Alberto Sánchez (the fourth, Jorge Guillermo Leguía, died very young, leaving only the bare outline of an oeuvre), who, as the leader of the APRA, had lived for many years in exile, was the most international and the most fecund of the trio, but also the most devil-may-care and the least rigorous when it came time to publish. That he should write entire books in one go, trusting in his memory alone (even if it was the impressive memory of Luis Alberto Sánchez), without verifying the data, citing books he hadn’t read, making mistakes as to dates, titles, names, as frequently occurred in the flood of his publications, made Porras furious. Sánchez’s inaccuracies and carelessness—even more than his ill-will and his retaliations against his political adversaries and his personal enemies that can be found in abundance in his books—exasperated Porras for a reason that from a distance I think I now understand better, a loftier reason than what, at the time, appeared to me to be a mere rivalry between scholars of the same generation. Because those liberties that Sánchez took in the practice of his profession took for granted the underdevelopment of his readers, the inability of his audience to identify them and condemn them. And Porras—like Basadre and Jor
ge Guillermo Leguía and, before them, Riva Agüero—even though he wrote and published little, always did so as though the country to which he belonged were the most cultivated and best-informed one in the world, demanding of himself an extreme rigor and perfection, as would be only proper for a historian whose research is going to be subjected to the examination of the most responsible scholars.

  Those years also brought the polemic between Luis Alberto Sánchez and the Chilean critic Ricardo A. Latcham, who, reviewing the former’s essay on the novel in Latin America—Proceso y contenido de la novela hispanoamericana (History and Content of the Hispano-American Novel)—pointed out a number of errors and omissions in the book. Sánchez answered with lively rejoinders and jokes. Latcham thereupon overwhelmed his adversary with an inexhaustible list of inaccuracies—dozens and dozens of them—which I remember seeing Porras read, in a Chilean publication, murmuring half to himself: “How shameful, how shameful.”

  Since Sánchez survived Leguía, Porras, and Basadre by many years, his version of the generation of ’19—the intellectual quality of which would not be repeated again in Peru—has been enthroned in a manner little short of canonical. But, in all truth, it suffers from the same defects as the innumerable books of this good underdeveloped writer for underdeveloped readers that Sánchez represented. I am thinking, above all, of the prologue he wrote for Porras’s posthumous book on Pizarro, published in Lima in 1978 by a group of Porras’s disciples, and put together piecemeal, without giving the proper bibliographic information, jumbling together published and unpublished texts in a confused and uneven hodgepodge. I do not know to whom we owe the responsibility, or rather the irresponsibility, for this ugly edition—with commercial advertisements inserted in between the pages—which would have horrified that historian who was a perfectionist, but even today I understand still less the reason for entrusting the prologue to Luis Alberto Sánchez, who, faithful to his character and his habits, made of this introduction a subtle masterwork of malice, recalling amid saccharine manifestations of friendship for “Raúl” those episodes that had been especially embarrassing to Porras, such as his having supported General Ureta and not Bustamante y Rivero in the 1945 elections and not having resigned as ambassador to Spain, a post to which Bustamante had appointed him, at the time of Odría’s military coup in 1948.