Among the individuals whom I invited to be candidates of ours were, as a representative, Francisco Belaunde Terry, and as a senator, the entrepreneur Ricardo Vega Llona, who had supported us since the days of the campaign against nationalization. Vega Llona represented that modern and liberal spirit in the businessman that we wanted to see spread among entrepreneurs in Peru — someone sick and tired of mercantilism, a determined supporter of a market economy, and without the social prejudices or the pseudoaristocratic, snobbish airs of many Peruvian businessmen. I also invited, as candidates for senator, Jorge Torres Vallejo, who had been forced out of the APRA because of his criticisms of Alan García and who, as the former mayor of Trujillo, we thought would be able to attract votes for the Front in that Aprista bastion, and a journalist who defended our ideas in his column in the daily Expreso: Patricio Ricketts Rey de Castro. And among our own militants, I gave in to the pleas of my friend Mario Roggero, who wanted to be a candidate for congressman despite his not having participated in the elections within the Freedom Movement. I included him on our list because of the good work that he had done as the Movement’s national secretary for unions, organizing various sectors of professionals, technicians, and craftsmen, never imagining that, once elected, he would turn out to be disloyal to those who had been responsible for his winning his seat in the Chamber of Representatives, first of all by helping Alan García out by taking a trip abroad so as not to cast his vote in Congress when the possibility came up of trying García for responsibility for the slaughter of prisoners that took place in June 1986, and then, after that, playing footsie with the regime that his party and his colleagues opposed.*
But we are still in the last weeks of 1989 and on one of those days — December 15—I had a brief literary parenthesis in the endless political hustle and bustle: the presentation, at the Alliance Française, of a translation of Rimbaud’s “Un Coeur sous une soutane” (“A Heart beneath a Cassock”) that I had done thirty years before and that had remained unpublished until Guillermo Niño de Guzmán and the enthusiastic cultural attaché of the French embassy, Daniel Lefort, finally took it upon themselves to bring it out. I could scarcely believe it when, for a couple of hours, I heard talk of poetry and literature, and of a poet whose works had been part of my bedside reading when I was young, and talked of them myself.
In the last days of December I went on tour once again, to take part in the distribution of gifts and toys throughout Peru that had been organized by a committee headed by Gladys Urbina and Cecilia Castro, the wife of the secretary general of Libertad in Cajamarca, and by the young people of Libertad’s Mobilization section. Hundreds of people participated in this operation, the object of which, besides bringing a little gift to several thousand poor children — a drop of water in the desert — was to test our ability to conduct mobilizations of this sort. We were thinking of the future: it would be imperative, in the hardest days of the fight against inflation, to make great efforts to bring aid to every corner of Peru in the form of food and medicine that would make the tremendous ordeal less of a hardship. Were we capable of organizing civil operations of major importance in cases of emergency such as natural catastrophes or for campaigns such as those for self-defense, literacy, and hygiene among the masses?
The results, from this point of view, were all that we could have asked for, thanks to the excellent work of Patricia, Gladys, Cecilia, Charo, and many other women members of Libertad. With the exception of Huancavelica, in all the other capitals of departamentos and in a great number of provinces, the boxes, bags, and packages full of the gifts we had gathered together thanks to factories, businesses, and private individuals, all arrived. Everything got done within the time limits we’d set: storing, packing, transporting, distributing. Shipments of them went out by truck, bus, plane, accompanied by young people from Mobilization, and in each city they were received by a committee of Libertad, which had also collected donations and gifts in the region. Everything was ready for starting the distribution of the gifts on December 21. During the final days, I went by the headquarters of the Solidarity program, on the Calle Bolívar, several times, and it was a swarm of activity, a hive of busy bees, with charts and time schedules on the walls, and vans and trucks filled to overflowing arriving and departing. On the morning we left for Ayacucho to start the distribution there, I said to Patricia, whom I scarcely saw during that time, since she devoted eighteen hours a day to that operation, that if all went that well for the Front, we already had victory in our pockets.
We left at dawn on the 21st, with my daughter Morgana, who was on vacation, and in Ayacucho we were welcomed, along with the departmental committee of Libertad, by the younger of my two sons, Gonzalo, who, for several years by then, had devoted his winter and summer vacations — he was attending London University — to lending a helping hand to the Andrés Vivanco Amorín children’s center. This institution had sprung up as a result of the revolutionary war being waged by Sendero Luminoso, which broke out in 1980 in this region. Because of it, Ayacucho was filled with abandoned children, who begged in the streets and slept on the benches of the Plaza de Armas or under the arcades bordering it. An old secondary schoolteacher, as poor as a church mouse but with a heart like the sun of his native land, Don Andrés Vivanco got to work. By knocking on people’s doors, by begging at public and private offices, he managed to secure a place to house many of those children and give them a mouthful of bread. That orphanage required heroic efforts on his part, and Violeta Correa, President Belaunde’s wife, helped him a great deal at the beginning. Thanks to her, the children’s center obtained a plot of land on the outskirts of the city. In 1983, I donated to Don Andrés Vivanco the $50,000 that I had received as the Ritz-Hemingway Prize for my novel La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), and Patricia had managed to get aid from the Ayacucho Emergency Association, which, through the initiative of Anabella Jourdan, the wife of the United States ambassador, she and a group of her friends had created at the beginning of the 1980s to bring help to the martyred region of Ayacucho.
Since then my younger son, Gonzalo, had conceived a passion for the orphanage. He collected money from his acquaintances and friends, and on each of his vacations he brought the nuns who had taken charge of the institution food, clothing, and little trinkets. Unlike his brother Álvaro, he was never interested in politics, and when I began the electoral campaign, he kept going to Ayacucho several times a year to bring provisions to the children’s center as though nothing had changed.
The distribution of presents in Ayacucho was made at the children’s center with an orderliness that did not cause us to foresee in any way what would happen in other cities, and afterward, I went to place flowers on Don Andrés Vivanco’s grave, to visit the soup kitchen for the poor of San Francisco, the University of Huamanga, and to go through the Central Market. We lunched with the leaders of the Freedom Movement, in a little restaurant behind the Hotel de Turistas, and that was the last time I ever saw Julián Huamaní Yauli, who was murdered a few weeks thereafter.
From Ayacucho we went by plane to the jungle, to Puerto Maldonado, where, after the distribution of Christmas gifts, a street rally had been planned. The instructions to the committees of Libertad had been quite clear: the distribution was a celebration within the Movement, the object of which was to bring a little present to the children of militants, a ceremony not open to everyone, since we didn’t have enough gifts for the millions of poor children in Peru. But in Puerto Maldonado the news of the distribution had spread throughout the city, and when I arrived at the fire station, the place selected for the ceremony, there were thousands of children and mothers with babies in their arms and on their shoulders, pushing and shoving desperately to get a place in line, since they had a presentiment of what in fact happened: the presents came to an end before the lines of people waiting did.