A Fish in the Water

  In all truth, that was what that reading was. It must have taken place at the end of 1954 or the beginning of 1955 and at it all the poets read or recited something that could be interpreted as an attack on the dictatorship. It was one of the first manifestations of a progressive mobilization of the country against that regime which, since October of 1948, had governed with an iron hand, crushing every attempt to criticize it.

  San Marcos was the focal point and amplifier of the protests. These often took the form of lightning demonstrations. Not very numerous groups of us—a hundred, two hundred people—would agree to meet in some very crowded place, the Jirón de la Unión, the Plaza San Martín, La Colmena, or the Parque Universitario, and at the hour when there were the most people there, we would gather in the middle of the street and begin to shout in chorus: “Freedom! Freedom!” Sometimes we paraded for one or two blocks, inviting passersby to join us, and then broke up as soon as the mounted Civil Guards or the antiriot vehicles equipped with high-pressure hoses that shot foul-smelling water at us appeared on the scene.

  I went to all the lightning demonstrations with Javier Silva, who, with all his fat, had to exert superhuman efforts so as not to be left behind as we ran from the police. His political vocation was becoming more widely known in those days, as well as his unrestrained personality, which made him want to be in on everything and be everywhere at once, playing a major role in all the conspiracies. One afternoon I went with him to visit Luciano Castillo, the head of the minuscule Socialist Party, and a Piuran, like Javier, in his little office on the Jirón Lampa. After a few minutes Javier came out of his office, beaming. He showed me a card: in addition to signing him up as a member of the party, Luciano Castillo had promoted him to the post of secretary general of the Socialist Youth Movement. As such, a while later, on the stage of the Teatro Segura one night, he read a violent revolutionary speech against Odría’s regime (which I wrote for him).

  But, at the same time, he conspired with members of the APRA, which was springing up again, and with the new opposition groups that were organizing in Lima and in Arequipa. Of these groups, four would take definite shape in the following months, one of them with only an ephemeral existence—the National Coalition, guided by remote control by the daily La Prensa and Don Pedro Beltrán (who had gone over to the side in opposition to Odría), whose leader, Pedro Roselló, was also the organizer of an equally ephemeral group, the Owners’ Association—and three others that turned out to be political organizations with a more prolonged future: Democracia Cristiana (Christian Democracy), the Movimiento Social Progresista (the Social Progressivist Movement), and the Frente Nacional de Juventudes (National Youth Front), the seed of what was to become Popular Action, with Eduardo Orrego, at the time an architecture student, as one of the organizers.

  By those years, 1954 and 1955, Odría’s dictatorship had grown weak. The repressive laws remained intact—above all, the Law of Domestic Security, a juridical aberration under cover of which hundreds of Apristas, Communists, and democrats had been sent to prison or into exile since 1948—but the regime had lost its basis of support in broad sectors of the middle class and the traditional right which (primarily because of its opposition to the APRA) had supported Odría since his defeat of Bustamante y Rivero. Among these sectors, the principal one, and the one that after its break with Odría was to turn into the most battle-hardened opposition to the regime, was La Prensa. Its owner and editor-in-chief, Pedro Beltrán Espantoso (1897–1979), as I have already said, was the bête noire of the left in Peru. His was a case very much like that of José de la Riva Agüero. Like the latter, he belonged to a tradition-conscious, very prosperous family, and had received an excellent education, at the London School of Economics. There he imbibed the principles of classic economic liberalism, a cause he had supported in Peru since his youth. And like Riva Agüero, Beltrán tried to organize and to lead a political movement—the former conservative, the latter liberal—in the face of the indifference, not to say the contempt, of his own social class, the so-called ruling elite, too selfish and ignorant to see beyond their very petty interests. The intentions of both, in the years of their youth, to organize political parties that would take an active part in public life, ended in resounding failures. And the furious rage of Riva Agüero in his mature years—documented in his Opúsculos por la verdad, la tradición y la Patria (Pamphlets in Favor of Truth, Tradition and the Fatherland)—which poisoned his intellectual work and impelled him to defend fascism and withdraw into a ridiculous caste pride, doubtless had a great deal to do with the disappointment he felt because of his powerlessness to mobilize that national elite which, as such, possessed in all truth nothing except money that almost always had been inherited or ill-gotten.

  Unlike Riva Agüero, Pedro Beltrán continued to be active in politics, but in a more or less indirect way, through La Prensa, which, in the 1950s, became, thanks to him, a modern newspaper, each of its editorial pages written by a very well-integrated and brilliant group of journalists, perhaps the best that any modern Peruvian publication has had (I shall cite the names of the best ones: Juan Zegarra Russo, Enrique Chirinos Soto, Luis Rey de Castro, Arturo Salazar Larraín, Patricio Ricketts, José María de Romaña, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and Mario Miglio). With this team and perhaps thanks to it, Don Pedro Beltrán discovered in those years the virtues of political democracy, of which he had not previously been a convinced supporter. On the contrary, La Prensa—like the oldest Peruvian daily, El Comercio—had attacked Bustamante y Rivero’s administration with great severity, conspired against it, and supported General Odría’s barracks coup in 1948 and the electoral farce of 1950 in which the latter proclaimed himself president.

  But beginning in the mid-1950s, Pedro Beltrán came to the defense not only of the market and private enterprise but also of political freedom and the democratization of Peru.* And he attacked censorship, for which he had lost respect, allowing himself more and more harsh criticisms of the regime’s measures and its principal figures.

  Esparza Zañartu, who was neither slow-witted nor dilatory, closed the paper, on which he mounted an assault with his informers and police, and Pedro Beltrán and his principal contributors ended up in the Frontón, the island prison just off Callao. He left it three weeks later—there had been strong international pressure for his release—as a hero of the freedom of the press (as he was proclaimed to be by the SIP (Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa: Inter-American Press Association) and with brand-new credentials as a democrat, which for the rest of his days would prove to be valid ones.

  The climate changed as quickly as possible and Peruvians could once again engage in politics. Exiles from Chile, Argentina, Mexico returned, semiclandestine weeklies or biweeklies of just a few pages and of every ideological line began to appear, many of which disappeared after a few issues. One of the most picturesque of them was the mouthpiece of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (T), the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (T)—T for Trotskyite, whose leader and perhaps only affiliate, Ismael Frías, recently back from exile, glided his sinuous humanity every noon all through San Marcos, predicting the imminent establishment of soviets of workers and soldiers throughout the length and breadth of Peru. Another, more serious publication, whose title changed each year—calling itself 1956, 1957, 1958—was put out by Genaro Carnero Checa, who, although expelled from the Communist Party for having supported Odría’s coup d’état before being exiled by him, always maintained his ties with the U.S.S.R. and the socialist countries. In the Congress then in existence—a product of the fraudulent elections of 1950—a number of previously well-disciplined representatives and senators, sensing that the boat was shipping water, changed their old servility into independence and even, in the case of several of them, into open hostility toward the master. And in streets and public squares there circulated a hodgepodge of names and possibilities for the presidential election that, on paper at least, was scheduled to be held in 1956.

  Of the new political gro
ups that were emerging from the catacombs, the one that seemed to me to be the most interesting was the one that later coalesced into the movement that came to be known as Democracia Cristiana (the Christian Democrats). Many of its leaders in Arequipa, such as Mario Polar, Héctor Cornejo Chávez, Jaime Rey de Castro, and Roberto Ramírez del Villar—or their friends in Lima, Luis Bedoya Reyes, Ismael Bielich, and Ernesto Alayza Grundy—had worked with Bustamante y Rivero’s administration, and because of this a number of them had been the victims of persecution and exile. They were young professionals still, without ties to the great upper-class economic interests, uncontaminated by political filth, present or past, who appeared to be bringing to Peruvian politics a democratic conviction and an unequivocal decency, what Bustamante y Rivero had so pristinely embodied during the three years of his administration. Like many others, as soon as that movement made its appearance, I thought it was being organized in such a way that Bustamante y Rivero would be its leader and guiding light and, perhaps, its candidate in the coming elections. This made it even more attractive to me, since my admiration for Bustamante—because of his honesty and his well-nigh religious worship of the rule of law, on which Aprismo heaped such ridicule, calling him the “limping legalist”—had remained intact during my militancy in Cahuide. That admiration, as I now see more clearly, had to do with the precise fact that the general public had fallen into the habit of commenting sympathetically on his failure with the cliché: “He was a president for Switzerland, not for Peru.” In fact, during those “three years of struggle for democracy in Peru”—as the book of personal witness that he wrote in exile is entitled—Bustamante y Rivero governed as if the country that had elected him were not barbarous and violent, but a civilized nation of responsible citizens, respectful of the institutions and the norms that make social coexistence possible. From the fact that he had taken the trouble to write his speeches himself, in a clear and elegant prose with a turn-of-the-century cast, always addressing his compatriots without permitting himself the slightest demagoguery or shoddiness, as if taking as his point of departure the supposition that all of them formed an intellectually demanding audience, I saw in Bustamante y Rivero an exemplary man, a head of government that if Peru ever came to be that country which his governance aimed to make of it—a genuine democracy of free and cultivated individuals—Peruvians would remember with gratitude.

  Javier Silva and I attended all the political gatherings at the Teatro Segura voicing opposition to Odría, meetings that the dictator gone soft now permitted: the one sponsored by the National Coalition, with Pedro Roselló as the main speaker, the one of the Socialist Party, with Luciano Castillo, and the one of the Christian Democrats, which was by far the best of all of them, by virtue of the quality of its backers and of its speakers. In a burst of enthusiasm, Javier and I signed the initial manifesto of the group, published in La Prensa.

  And both of us were also present, of course, at the Córpac airport to receive Bustamante y Rivero, when he was able to return to Peru after seven years in exile. My friend Luis Loayza tells an anecdote about that arrival that I am not certain is true, but could well have been. A group of young people had organized to protect Bustamante when he got off the plane and escort him to the Hotel Bolívar, foreseeing that he might be attacked by thugs hired by the government or by Aprista “buffaloes” (who, with the liberalization of the dictatorship, had reappeared, launching attacks on Communist meetings). They had given us instructions to stand with our arms linked together, forming an unbreakable ring. But according to Loayza, who apparently was also part of that sui generis phalanx of bodyguards made up of two aspiring writers and a handful of good kids from Catholic Action, the moment Bustamante y Rivero appeared on the steps of the plane with his inevitable hat edged in ribbon—which he ceremoniously doffed to greet those who had come to welcome him—I broke the iron circle and ran to meet him, shouting feverishly: “Mr. President! Mr. President!” In short, the circle was broken, we were overrun, and Bustamante was pawed, pushed, and shoved by everyone—among them by my Uncle Lucho, a Bustamante fan whose suit coat and shirt were torn in the struggles of this encounter—before he reached the car that drove him to the Hotel Bolívar. Bustamante spoke, briefly, from one of the balconies of the hotel to express his gratitude for his reception, without giving the slightest hint of any intention of becoming active in politics again. And, in fact, in the months that followed, Bustamante was to refuse to enroll in the Christian Democratic Party or play any role whatsoever in active politics. Beginning at that time, he adopted the role that he kept up till his death: a wise patrician, above partisan squabbles, whose competence in international juridical questions would be frequently sought in the country and abroad (he was eventually named president of the International Court of Justice at The Hague), and who, in moments of crisis, was in the habit of sending a message to the country exhorting it to remain calm.

  Although the climate in 1954 and 1955 was an improvement over the dense and oppressive atmosphere of preceding years, and the first public demonstrations tolerated, plus the new publications, created in the country a feeling of freedom in the air that stimulated political action, I nonetheless devoted quite a bit more time to intellectual work than to politics: attending classes at San Marcos, almost all of them in the morning, as well as those at the Alliance Française, and reading and writing nothing but short stories from that time on.

  I believe that the bad time I had had with “La parda” in Jorge Puccinelli’s coterie had the effect of unconsciously keeping me away from dealing with timeless cosmopolitan subjects, on which most of the stories that I wrote in those years had been based, and attracting me toward other, more realistic, ones, in which I deliberately made use of my own memories. Around that time there was a short story contest announced by the Faculty of Letters of San Marcos, to which I submitted two stories, both of them set in Piura, one of which, “Los jefes,” was inspired by the abortive strike at the Colegio San Miguel, and the other, “La casa verde,” by the brothel on the outskirts of the city, the warm haven of my adolescence. My stories didn’t even receive honorable mention, and when I took the manuscript back, “La casa verde” struck me as a very bad piece of writing and I tore it up (I would return to the subject years later, in a novel), but the one of “Los jefes,” with its bare hint of an epic air about it, in which my readings of Malraux and Hemingway were obvious, struck me as being recoverable, and in the months that followed I wrote it over several times, until it seemed to me to be worth publishing. It was very long for Dominical, the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, whose first page always had a story with a color illustration, so I proposed it instead to the historian César Pacheco Vélez, the editor-in-chief of Mercurio Peruano. He accepted it, published it (in February 1957), and made me fifty tear-sheet copies that I distributed among my friends. It was my first story to see print and was to furnish the title for my first book. That short story prefigures much of my later practice as a novelist: using a personal experience as a point of departure for the imaginary; employing a form that pretends to be realistic by virtue of its precise geographical and urban details; an objectivity arrived at through dialogues and descriptions observed from an impersonal point of view, effacing the author’s tracks; and finally, a politically committed, critical attitude toward a certain set of problems that is the context or horizon of the story line.

  In those years, an election was called for the rectorate of San Marcos. I don’t remember who launched Porras Barrenechea’s candidacy; he accepted with great hopes, and perhaps with a touch of self-congratulation—in those days being rector of San Marcos still meant something—but above all out of his enormous affection for his alma mater, to which he had devoted so many years and so much passionate enthusiasm. That candidacy was to be fatal for him and for his history of Peru. From the beginning, circumstances turned it into an antigovernment candidacy. His rival, Aurelio Miró Quesada, one of the owners of El Comercio, regarded as one of the symbols of the aristoc
racy, the oligarchy, and opposition to the APRA (the Miró Quesada family had never forgiven the APRA for having murdered the former editor-in-chief of El Comercio, Don Antonio Miró Quesada, and his wife), assumed the character of an official candidacy. Student organizations, controlled by the APRA and the left, backed Porras, as did the Aprista professors (many of whom, such as Sánchez, were still in exile). Porras and Aurelio Miró Quesada, who up until then had had cordial relations, had a falling out, in a vitriolic polemic in the form of open letters and editorials, and El Comercio (whose building was stoned by demonstrators from San Marcos who came out in force to run through the downtown streets shouting in chorus the slogans “Freedom” and “Porras for rector”) banished the name of Porras Barrenechea from its pages for some time (the famous “civil death” to which El Comercio condemned its adversaries was more feared, it was said, by those who belonged to Lima society than was political persecution).