A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (67 page)

We were in the midst of this discussion when an uproar outside the front door drowned out our voices. Fujimori had unexpectedly turned up there, and our security force was trying to protect him from the avalanche of reporters who were questioning him as to his reasons for coming, and from supporters of mine who were jeering at him and catcalling. I showed him into the living room, as Don Ernesto and Eduardo went off to inform Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party of our talk.

Unlike the day before, when he struck me as being calm and serene, I noted that Fujimori was extremely tense, owing either to the hubbub at the front door or to what he had come to tell me. He began by thanking me for having expressed my strong disapproval of the racist slogans the night before (he had seen the telecast of my talk on Channel 2), and without hiding how upset he was, he added that constitutional problems might arise if I gave up my candidacy. This was unconstitutional and would invalidate the election process. I told him that it was my belief that this was not the case, but that, in any event, I would make certain that it would not bring about a crisis that would lead to a coup d’état. I saw him to the door, but I did not go out onto the street with him.

At the time the inside of my house was full to overflowing, as were the grounds outside. Every last member of the political committee of Libertad had arrived—the one time, it seems to me, that not one of them failed to show up—along with several of my closest advisers such as Raúl Salazar, and Jaime Bayly having been alerted by Álvaro. Patricia was holding a meeting in the patio with a fair number of the leaders of Acción Solidaria. We found room as best we could for some thirty people in the living room on the ground floor, and despite the heat, we closed the windows and drew the curtains so that the reporters and supporters gathered in the street wouldn’t hear us.

I explained the reasons why a second round impressed me as useless and dangerous, and given the outcome on Sunday, the advantage if the forces of the Front reached some sort of agreement with Fujimori. Keeping Alan García’s policy from continuing any longer was now the top priority. The Peruvian people had refused to give us the mandate that we had sought from them and there was no longer any possibility of carrying out our reforms—not even in the hypothetical case of winning in the second round, since we would have a majority against us in Congress—and therefore we should spare the country another campaign the result of which we already knew, since it was obvious that the APRA and the United Left would make common cause with my adversary. I then read them my letter.

I believe that all of those present spoke, a number of them in dramatic terms, all of them, with the exception of Enrique Ghersi, urging me not to drop out. Only Ghersi pointed out that, in principle, he did not reject the idea of negotiating with Fujimori if that would allow us to salvage certain key points of our program; but Enrique too had his doubts about the independence of the Cambio 90 candidate to make decisions about anything on his own, since, like all the other advisers, he believed him to be a vassal of Alan García’s.

One of the most lively contributions to the discussion was the one made by Enrique Chirinos Soto, whom the monumental surprise of the election had pulled out of his lethargy and driven into a state of lucid paroxysm. He abounded with technical reasons proving that resigning from the second round went against the letter and the spirit of the Constitution; but it seemed to him even graver still to abandon the fight and offer a free field to a candidate who had been made up out of whole cloth, without a program or ideas or a team—to a political adventurer who, once in power, might well mean the collapse of democratic rule. He did not believe in my thesis that in the second round there would be a holy APRA-Socialist-Communist alliance backing Fujimori; he was certain that the Peruvian people would not vote for a “first-generation Peruvian, who did not have a single one of his dead kinfolk buried in Peru.”
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This was the first time that I had heard such an argument, but not the last. I was frequently to hear it from partisans of mine as cultivated and intelligent as Enrique: because Fujimori was the son of Japanese parents, because he didn’t have roots in Peruvian soil, because his mother was a foreigner who still hadn’t learned Spanish, he was less Peruvian than I was, less Peruvian than those who—whether Indians or whites—had shared Peruvian life for many generations.

Many times in the course of the next two months, I had to come out and say that arguments of that sort made me want Fujimori to win, since they betrayed two aberrations against which I have written and spoken throughout my life: nationalism and racism (two aberrations that, in fact, are one and the same).

Alfredo Barnechea delivered a long historical disquisition on Peruvian crises and decadence, which, according to him, had in recent years reached a critical point, which could be the source of an irreparable catastrophe, not only for the survival of democracy, but for the fate of the nation. The governing of the country could not be entrusted to someone who represented sheer dyed-in-the-wool knavery or was very probably a front for Alan García; my resignation was not going to appear to be a generous gesture to facilitate a change in the current situation. It would appear to be the haughty flight of a vain man whose self-esteem had been wounded. Moreover, it could lead to a ridiculous outcome. For, since it was constitutionally illegal, the National Election Board could call for a second round and allow my name to remain on the ballot, even though I wanted it removed.

At that point, Patricia interrupted our meeting to whisper in my ear that the archbishop of Lima had come to see me, in secret. He was upstairs in my study. I apologized to those present for leaving the meeting and, thunderstruck, went upstairs to see my illustrious visitor. How had he managed to get into the house? How had he been able to get past the barrier of reporters and demonstrators without being discovered?

Many versions of this visit have made the rounds, and I admit that it was a determining factor in my reversing my decision not to participate in the second round. I have only now learned the true version, through Patricia, who, in order that this book might be a true account, finally made up her mind to tell me what had really happened. On the day after the elections, several calls had come from the archbishop’s office, saying that Monsignor Vargas Alzamora would like to see me. In all the confusion, no one passed the message on to me. That morning, as we were holding our discussion in the meeting of the political committee, Lucho Bustamante, Pedro Cateriano, and Álvaro had left several times so as to keep Patricia and the leaders of Solidaridad, gathered together in the garden, informed about our heated discussion: “There is no way to convince him. Mario is going to give up running as a candidate in the second round.” At that point, it was Patricia, who remembered the splendid impression that Monsignor Vargas Alzamora had made on me the day I met him, who suddenly had an idea. “Have the archbishop come here to talk with him. He can convince him.” She conspired with Lucho Bustamante, and he telephoned to Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, explained to him what was happening, and the archbishop agreed to come out to my house. In order to get inside without being recognized, the car with reflecting plate-glass windows that I myself used when I went out and about was sent to fetch him, and brought him straight into the garage.

When I went upstairs to my study, which also had the blinds down so as to keep people from peering in from the street—there the archbishop was, taking a look at the books on the shelves. The half- or three-quarters of an hour that we talked together has become confused in my memory with certain of the most unusual episodes of the good novels that I have read. Although the conversation had the political situation of the moment as its only reason for being, subtle person that he is, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora managed to transform it into an interchange having to do with high culture, sociology, history, and lofty spirituality.

With a cheerful laugh, he remarked on his fantastic trip to my house, crouching down in the car, and like someone who is talking in order to while away the time, he told me that every morning, as soon as he got up, he always read a few pages of the Bible, opened at random. What chance had placed before his eyes that morning amazed him: it seemed to be a commentary on current events in Peru. Did I have a Bible at hand? I fetched the Jerusalem version and he told me which chapter and verses he was referring to. I read them aloud and the two of us burst out laughing. Yes, it was true, the intrigues and misdeeds ablaze with the fires of hell committed by that Evil One of the holy book were reminiscent of those of yet another one, more terrestrial and closer at hand.

Had it come as a surprise to him that, in the elections two days before, some fifteen evangelical representatives and senators on agricultural engineer Fujimori’s lists had won? Well, yes, just as it had surprised all of Peru, although the archbishop had had advance notice, through parish priests, of a very resolute mobilization on the part of pastors of evangelical sects, in the urban slum settlements and in the villages and small towns in the mountains, to further Fujimori’s candidacy. These sects had become more and more deeply involved with the marginal sectors of Peruvian society, filling the vacuum left by the Catholic Church because of the scarcity of priests. Naturally, nobody wanted to revive the wars of religion, altogether dead and buried now. In these days of tolerance and ecumenism, the Church got along quite harmoniously with the historic religious institutions that had come into existence at the time of the Reformation. But weren’t these sects, frequently small and sometimes given to extravagant practices and doctrines, whose mother houses were located in Tampa and Orlando, going to add yet another factor leading to factionalism and division in a society already as fragmented and divided as our Peruvian one was? Above all if, as appeared to be the case, judging from the belligerent declarations of some of the brand-new evangelical representatives and senators, the aim of these sects in coming to our country was to make war on Catholics. (One of the evangelicals just elected had declared that there would now be a Protestant church alongside every temple of popery in Peru.) Despite all the commentaries and criticisms that could be made against it, the Catholic Church was one of the most widespread bonds of kinship between Peruvians of different ethnic groups, languages, regions, or economic levels. One of the few ties that had resisted the centrifugal forces that had increasingly been separating one group from another, furthering their enmities and stirring up trouble between them. It would be a shame for religion to be turned into another factor of division and controversy among Peruvians. Didn’t it seem so to me?

Since so many things had been lost or were going badly, it was necessary to try to preserve, as precious objects, the good ones that still remained. Democracy, for instance. It was indispensable for it not to disappear, yet again, from our history. Not to offer pretexts to those who were endeavoring to put an end to it. This was a subject which, even though it was not officially within his sphere of responsibilities, he took very seriously. There were alarming rumors that had been circulating in the last few hours, and the archbishop believed that it was his duty to inform me of them. Rumors of a coup d’état, even. If a vacuum and a state of confusion came about, as would happen, for instance, if I withdrew from the electoral contest, that could be the pretext for those who were nostalgic for a dictatorship to strike their blow, maintaining that the interruption of the electoral process was giving rise to instability, anarchy.

The evening before, he had held a meeting with certain bishops and they had exchanged ideas concerning such subjects and they had all agreed that he should tell me the things he had just spoken of. He had also seen Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, a friend of mine, and he too advised me to go on with the runoff round.

I thanked Monsignor Vargas Alzamora for his visit and assured him that I would bear firmly in mind everything that I had heard him tell me. And I did just that. Until his arrival at my house I was convinced that the best thing I could do was to create, through the withdrawal of my candidacy in the runoff round, a de facto situation in which there were enormous possibilities that Fujimori would eventually form an alliance with the Democratic Front, which would give the future government solidity and prevent its becoming a mere continuation of Alan García’s populism. But his warning that my decision might well unleash a coup d’état—“I have sufficient facts at my disposal for judging the situation to enable me to say such a thing”—made me hesitate. Among all the catastrophes that might suddenly happen to Peru, the worst would be to return once again to the era of barracks coups.

I saw Monsignor Vargas Alzamora to the car in the garage, from which he emerged once again in secret. I went upstairs to my study to get a notebook and at that point I saw robust María Amelia Fort de Cooper emerge from the little adjoining bathroom, as though she were levitating. The archbishop’s arrival had caught her by surprise in the bathroom and she remained there, bashful and silent, listening to our conversation. She had heard every word. She appeared to be in a trance. “You’ve read the Bible with the archbishop,” she murmured in ecstasy. “I heard him and I could swear that the dove of the Holy Spirit has passed this way.” María Amelia, who has four passions in life—theology, the theater, and psychoanalysis, but above all else waffles with chocolate syrup, and whipped cream—had climbed up, the night of the rally in the Plaza San Martín in 1987, onto the roof of the building alongside the speakers’ platform, with sacks of
pica-pica
, whose contents she kept throwing down onto my head as I was delivering my speech. At the rally in Arequipa, the bottle-hurling by Apristas and Maoists saved me from new doses of that concoction, which causes a person to itch like mad, since she had to take refuge, with Patricia, underneath the shield of a policeman, but at the rally in Piura she perfected her technique and secured a sort of bazooka with which, from a strategic point of the platform, she cannonaded me with
pica-pica
, one blast of which, as the last cheers were ringing out, hit me square in the mouth and almost smothered me. I had persuaded her to forget
pica-pica
for the remainder of the campaign and work instead on the cultural committee of Libertad, which in fact she did, rounding up in it a fine group of intellectuals and cultural celebrities. Like other Catholic militants of Libertad, she always clung to the hope that I would come back to the religious fold. Hence the scene in my study enraptured her.