A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  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.

  What was the attitude of the Church, on the eve of the first round of balloting? One of consummate prudence. Until April 8, it forbore to take part in the debate, not allowing itself to be dragged into the campaign issue of my “atheism” and my affronts to the Christ clad in purple, but at the same time not showing the slightest sign of approval of my candidacy. At the beginning of 1990, Cardinal Juan Landázuri Ricketts, the archbishop and primate of the Church in Peru, had retired because he had reached the age limit—he was seventy-six years old at the time—and had been replaced by a prelate ten years younger, the Jesuit Augusto Vargas Alzamora. I paid both of them the visits called for by protocol, not suspecting the extremely important role that the Church would play in the second round of voting. I had seen Cardinal Landázuri, an Arequipan who was related to my mother’s family, a number of times at reunions of relatives on my mother’s side. He had granted the dispensation that enabled me to marry my cousin Patricia in 1965 (since Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga demanded that we be married in church), though I had not been the one who went to request it of him; my mother and my Aunt Laura did. Cardinal Landázuri had been assigned the mission of leading the Peruvian Church from May 1955 on, perhaps the most difficult period in its entire history, what with the division that liberation theology brought with it and the Communist and revolutionary militancy of a considerable number of nuns and priests, together with the process of secularization of Peruvian society, which made greater advances in those decades than in all the preceding centuries. A very prudent man, not given to impressive moves in new directions or bold intellectual advances, but a scrupulous and painstaking arbitrator and a most astute diplomat, Cardinal Landázuri had managed to maintain the unity of an institution undermined by tremendous dissensions. I went to see him at his home in La Victoria on January 18, with Miguel Cruchaga, and we talked for some time, about Arequipa, about my family—he remembered having been a schoolmate of Uncle Lucho’s and told me anecdotes about my mother when she was a little girl—though he avoided the subject of politics and, of course, didn’t say a word about the campaign regarding my atheism, at its height at the time. But as he was bidding me goodbye he whispered to me, with a wink, pointing to the priest who was with him: “This Father is a fan of the Democratic Front.”

  I didn’t know Monsignor Vargas Alzamora. Accompanied by Álvaro and Lucho Bustamante, who, as I have already said, is a sort of Jesuit ad honorem, I went to congratulate him on his being named Primate of Peru. He received us in a little study at the Colegio La Inmaculada and from the first moment of the conversation between us I was impressed by his lively intelligence and his clearsightedness with regard to the problems confronting Peru. Although we did not mention the electoral campaign, we spoke at length of the backwardness, the poverty, the violence, the anarchy, the lack of stability, and the inequalities in Peru, and his information about all those subjects was as solid as his opinion was judicious. Slender and delicate, most circumspect in his speech, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora nonetheless betrayed signs of great strength of character. He seemed to me to be a modern man, sure of his mission and possessed of great fortitude beneath his courteous manners, surely the best helmsman for the Peruvian Church in the difficult times that it was going through. After I had bidden him goodbye, I said as much to Lucho Bustamante. I couldn’t have imagined that the next time I saw the new archbishop of Lima it would be under spectacular circumstances.

  Meanwhile, my trips throughout Peru followed one after the other without a letup, at a rate of visits to four, six, and sometimes more places a day, trying to cover for one last time the twenty-four departamentos, and in each one of them the greatest possible number of provinces and districts. The schedule set up by Freddy Cooper and his team—the efficient Pier Fontanot from the campaign’s command headquarters was in charge—was met perfectly, and I must say that the logistics of the rallies, transportation from place to place, connections, food and lodging, rarely broke down, which, in view of the state of the country and the national idiosyncrasy, was a real feat. The planes, helicopters, motorboats, minivans, or horses were there, and in all the villages or hamlets there was always a little platform and two or three young people from Mobilization who had arrived there beforehand to make sure that the microphones and loudspeakers were working, and that a minimum of security measures were in place. Freddy had several aides whose time was devoted exclusively to giving him a hand at this task, and one of them, Carlos Lozada, whom we called Woody Allen because he looked like him, and also like Groucho Marx, intrigued me by his gift for being everywhere at once. He looked as though he were disguised as something or other, though we couldn’t figure out what, with a strange headpiece, at once a cap and a helmet equipped with earflaps that reminded me of Charles Bovary’s headgear, and a loose jacket with a big backpack from which he took out sandwiches when it was time to eat, portable radios for communications, soft drinks to allay people’s thirst, revolvers for the bodyguards, batteries for the minivans, and even that day’s papers so we wouldn’t lose touch with the latest news. He was always on the run, and continually talking into a little microphone hanging from around his neck, with which he was constantly in communication with some mysterious control center to which he reported what was going on or from which he received instructions. I had the sensation that that eternal monologue of Woody Allen’s was organizing my destiny, that he was deciding where I would speak, sleep, travel, and whom I would see or fail to see in the course of my junkets. But I never managed to exchange a single word with him. Later on I learned that he was a public relations man who, having begun to work for the campaign in a professional capacit
y, discovered his real vocation and secret genius: that of a political organizer. In all truth, he did a magnificent job, solved any and every problem and never created a one. Glimpsing, wherever I arrived, whether in the midst of the underbrush of the jungle or amid the crags of the Andes or in the little towns along the sandy coast, his bizarre outfit—the thick glasses of someone very nearsighted, a colored shirt, and that sort of article of furniture with slipcovers that he carried around on his back, that Pandora’s box from which he took out unimaginable things—gave me a feeling of relief, the reassuring presentiment that, in that particular place, everything would come off as planned. One morning, in Ilo, immediately after we arrived, and before going to the rally in the main square where people were waiting for me, I decided to go down to the port, where a boat was being unloaded. I went up to it to speak with the stevedores, who, leaning on the gangplank of the vessel, were supervising the loading and unloading being done by the puntos (workers to whom they hire out their work), and all of a sudden, as though he were simply one more of those in the group, hidden underneath his combination cap and helmet and portable trunk of a backpack, talking into his microphone, I spied Woody Allen…

  Amid these whirlwind tours all over Peru, I still arranged things so as to go to Brazil for a day, in answer to an invitation from the recently elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello. His triumph seemed to represent the victory of a radical liberal program, similar to mine, over Lula da Silva’s ideas in favor of mercantilism, state control, and interventionism, and for this reason, as well as because of the importance of Brazil to Peru—its neighbor with more than three thousand kilometers of common borders—it was decided by the directorate of the Democratic Front that I should make the trip. I took Lucho Bustamante, the head of the Plan for Governing, with me so that he could meet with Collor’s already appointed minister of finance—the instantly famous Zelia Cardoso—and Miguel Vega Alvear, whose Pro-Desarrollo (Association for Development) had drawn up a series of projects of economic cooperation with Brazil. One of these projects had aroused a great deal of enthusiasm on my part when it was described to me, and since that time I had encouraged its being worked out in detail. It had to do with linking the Pacific and Atlantic coasts through joining the highway systems of the two countries, following the Río Branco-Asís-Ipanaro-Ilo-Matarani axis, which, at the same time that it satisfied a long-cherished Brazilian ambition—having a commercial outlet to the Pacific and its emerging Asian economies—would act as a powerful economic stimulus for the development of all the southern region of Peru, particularly Moquegua, Puno, and Arequipa. The likable Collor—who could have imagined in those days that he would be impeached, having been accused of misappropriating state funds?—received me in Brasília, in a house surrounded with gardens straight out of a Hollywood movie (herons and swans strolled about all around us as we lunched together), with an encouraging sentence: “Eu estou torcendo por vocé, Mario” (“I’m pulling for you, Mario”) and the surprise of meeting an old friend, whom I had not expected to see there: José Guillermo Melquior, at that time the ambassador of Brazil to UNESCO. Melquior, an essayist and a liberal philosopher, a disciple of Raymond Aron and of Isaiah Berlin, with whom he had studied at the Sorbonne and at Oxford, was one of the thinkers who had defended with the greatest rigor and consistency the theses of a market economy and of the sovereignty of the individual in Latin America at a time when the collectivist and nationalist tide seemed to be monopolizing the culture of the continent. His presence at Collor’s side struck me as a magnificent sign of what the administration of the latter gave promise of being (an assumption not confirmed by reality, unfortunately). Melquior was already seriously ill, with the disease that would take his life a short time later, but he didn’t tell me so. On the contrary, I found him in an optimistic mood, joking with me about how times had changed since the days when, ten years before, in London, our countries seemed to us to be irredeemably immunized against the culture of freedom.

  The meeting with Collor de Mello was extremely cordial but not very productive, because a large part of the conversation during the luncheon was monopolized by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, one of my economic advisers, with jokes and pieces of advice that at times gave the impression of being orders to the brand-new president of Brazil as to what he should and shouldn’t do. Pedro Pablo, the former minister of energy and mines in Belaunde’s second term in office—the best minister the latter had—had been persecuted by Velasco’s military dictatorship, to his good fortune. For living in exile allowed him to go from being a modest bureaucrat in the Central Reserve Bank of Peru to an executive of First Boston, in New York, where, after his experience as a minister of Belaunde’s, he was promoted to the office of president. In recent years he had traveled all over the world—he always specified a private jet, and if that couldn’t possibly be arranged, the Concorde—privatizing state-owned companies and advising governments of every ideology and geographical location that wanted to know what a market economy was and what steps to take to attain one. Pedro Pablo’s talent at handling economic matters was enormous (as was his talent for jogging and playing the piano, the flute, and the lute and telling jokes); but his vanity was even greater, and at that luncheon he displayed the latter above all, talking even with his elbows, giving us a professorial lecture and offering his services if there was need of them. At dessert, Collor de Mello took me by the arm and led me to an adjoining room where we could talk to each other alone for a moment. To my surprise, he told me that the project of integrating the Atlantic and Pacific coasts was bound to be confronted by the resistance and perhaps the open opposition of the United States, for that country feared that if the project were carried out, its commercial exchanges with the Asian countries of the Pacific Rim would suffer.

  With the passage of time, I would often remember something that Collor said to me during the luncheon, at a moment when Kuczynski allowed him to get a word in edgewise: “I hope you win in the first round and don’t have to go through what I did.” And he explained that the second round of balloting in Brazil had been unbearably tense, so much so that for the first time in his life he had had doubts about his vocation for politics.

  I was very grateful to Collor de Mello—as I was to President Sanguinetti of Uruguay—for inviting me in the thick of the election campaign, knowing that that would greatly displease President Alan García, and might displease the future Peruvian head of state, if I were not the winner. And I am sorry that this young and energetic president, who seemed so well prepared to carry out a liberal revolution in his country, failed to do so, except in a very partial and contradictory way, and, worst of all, did nothing to prevent corruption, with the consequent disastrous result.

  On my return to Lima I found an invitation from the CGTP (Central General de Trabajadores del Perú: General Confederation of Workers of Peru), the Communist labor union, to set forth my Plan for Governing to the Fourth National Conference of Workers, which was being held in the Lima Centro Cívico. The debate had been organized to give the CGTP’s blessing to the candidacy of Henry Pease García, of the United Left, as “the workers’ candidate” and as a counterweight to the CADE conference. Only the four candidates who appeared to have any possibility of being elected were invited to this conference, as to the one held by CADE, but Alfonso Barrantes had invented an excuse for not attending, fearing that he would be humiliated by those who looked on him as having turned into a bourgeois and a revisionist. The APRA candidate, Alva Castro, on the other hand, turned up and ignored the jeers and catcalls. It seemed to me that I ought to attend too, precisely because the leaders of the Communist union were certain that I wouldn’t have the courage to put my head in the lion’s mouth. Moreover, I was curious to know the reaction to my proposals of those union delegates, steeped in Marxism-Leninism.

  I hastily called together the leaders of the committees on labor and privatization—the obligatory subjects at the CGTP conference were the labor reform and popular capitalism—and, acc
ompanied by Álvaro, we presented ourselves at the Civic Center on the afternoon of February 22. The place was packed with hundreds of delegates, and a group of extremists from Sendero Luminoso, barricading themselves in one corner, greeted me with cries of “Uchuraccay! Uchuraccay!” But it was the CGTP’s own service in charge of keeping order that shut them up and I could explain my program, for more than an hour, without interruptions and I was listened to with the attention that an audience of seminarians would pay to the devil. I hope that some of them discovered that Satan wasn’t as ugly as they made him out to be.

  I told them that labor unions were indispensable in a democracy and that only in a democracy did they function as genuine defenders of workers, since in totalitarian countries unions were nothing but political bureaucracies and transmission belts for the watchwords of those in power. And that, for that reason, in Poland a labor union, Solidarity, in defense of which I had organized a march in the streets in Lima in 1981, headed the struggles for the democratization of the country.