Despite the fact that my advisers tried to persuade me not to do so, after that editorial appeared I had my name taken off the masthead of that weekly which, in the days of its founders — Doris Gibson and Francisco Igartua — surely would not have played the role that it did in the electoral campaign. My letter of resignation to Zileri, dated January 10, 1990,* contained only one sentence: “I request you to remove my name from the list of contributors to the magazine, since I am no longer one.”
Seventeen. The Miter-Bird
Since my marriage, what with my classes at the university and the jobs to keep food on the table, I hadn’t had much time left over for politics, although, every so often, I attended the meetings of the Christian Democratic Party and contributed to the sporadic issues of Democracia. (After the third year, I gave up going to the Alliance Française, but by then I read French easily; besides, for the degree in literature at San Marcos, I chose French for the foreign language requirement.) But politics would enter my life again in the summer of 1956 in the most unexpected way: as paid employment.
The electoral process that put an end to Odría’s dictatorship was under way, and three candidates were coming to the fore as contenders for the presidency: Dr. Hernando de Lavalle, a wealthy man, an aristocrat, and a prestigious Lima attorney; the former president Manuel Prado, recently back from Paris, where he had lived since he left the presidency in 1945; and the one who appeared to be the minor candidate, because of a lack of financial resources and the air of youthful improvisation that marked his campaign: the architect and university professor Fernando Belaunde Terry.
The election finally took place in a very questionable way, in legal terms, under the unconstitutional Law of Domestic Security, approved by the Congress that was a fruit of the dictatorship, which placed the APRA and the Communist Party outside the law — and kept them from presenting candidates. The votes that the Communist Party would have garnered were few and far between; those of the APRA, the party of the masses and with a disciplined organization that it had maintained during the time that it was an outlawed party, would have been decisive. From the beginning Lavalle, Prado, and Belaunde sought, in secret negotiations and sometimes ones that were not so secret, an accord with the Apristas.
The APRA rejected Belaunde Terry from the start, with an instinctive certainty that in him Haya de la Torre, the founder of the APRA, would have not a cat’s paw but, in a short time, a competitor. (Such a serious one that he was to win out over the Apristas in the elections of 1963 and 1980.) And its support of Manuel Prado, who during his presidency from 1939 to 1945 had outlawed the APRA and imprisoned, exiled, and persecuted many Apristas, was presumed to be impossible to secure.
Hence Hernando de Lavalle appeared to be the favorite. The APRA demanded to be made a legal party again and Lavalle promised the Aprista leaders to back a law defining the status of political parties that would allow the APRA to reenter civic life. In order to negotiate these accords a number of Aprista leaders had returned to Peru from exile, among them Ramiro Prialé, the great architect of what was to become the regime of coexistence (1956–1961).
Porras Barrenechea collaborated in establishing this rapprochement between Hernando de Lavalle and the APRA. Although he had never been an Aprista, nor a party outsider favorably inclined toward it — a status that included a fair number of the middle and even the upper bourgeoisie — Porras, who, as a member of the same generation as Haya de la Torre and Luis Alberto Sánchez, kept up a friendship with them, on the surface at least, had many contacts with the APRA during the electoral campaign, and agreed to be a candidate for a seat in the Senate on the list of friends of the APRA, headed by the poet José Gálvez, whom this party supported in the 1956 elections.
A close friend of Lavalle’s, whose classmate he had also been at the university, Porras had actively supported the great alliance or civil coalition on which Lavalle wanted to base his candidacy. These forces included Luis A. Flores’s old and almost extinct Revolutionary Union and the Christian Democratic Party, with whom he held conversations looking toward the future.
One afternoon, Porras Barrenechea summoned Pablo Macera and me and offered us jobs with Dr. Lavalle, who was looking for two “intellectuals” to write speeches and political reports for him. The pay was quite good and there were no fixed working hours. That night Porras took us to Lavalle’s house — an elegant residence, surrounded by gardens and tall trees, on the Avenida 28 de Julio in Miraflores — to meet the candidate. Hernando de Lavalle was a kindly, elegant man, extremely circumspect, timid almost, who received Pablo and me most courteously and explained to us that a group of intellectuals, headed by a young and distinguished professor of philosophy, Carlos Cueto Fernandini, was preparing his program for governing, in which he would place great emphasis on cultural activities. Pablo and I would not be working with this group, however, but with the candidate alone.
Although I didn’t vote for him in the 1956 elections, but for Fernando Belaunde Terry — I will explain why later — in those months during which I worked alongside him I came to respect and esteem Hernando de Lavalle. Ever since he had been a young man it was said in Lima that someday he would be president of Peru. The descendant of an old family, Dr. Lavalle had been a brilliant student at the university and after that was a very successful attorney. Only now, when he was past sixty, had he decided — or rather, others had decided for him — that he should enter politics, an activity for which, as became clear during the electoral process, he was not well equipped.
He always believed what he told Pablo Macera and me on the night we first met him: that the aim of his candidacy was to reestablish democratic life and civil institutions in Peru after eight years under a military regime, and that in order to achieve that goal what was needed was a great coalition of Peruvians of all persuasions and a scrupulous respect for the law.
“The harebrained Lavalle wanted to win the election fair and square,” I heard a friend of Porras Barrenechea’s once say sarcastically, at one of the historian’s evening gatherings over cups of chocolate. “The elections of 1956 were rigged so that he’d win them; but this arrogantly proud, self-important candidate wanted to win fair and square. And that’s why he lost!” Something like that did in fact occur. But Dr. Lavalle did not want to win that election fair and square out of arrogant pride and self-importance, but because he was a decent person, and naïve enough to believe that he could win with clean hands an election which the existence of the dictatorship corrupted from the very beginning.
Pablo and I were installed in an office as empty as a tomb — there was never anybody in it except for the two of us — on the second floor of a building on La Colmena, right in the downtown section of Lima. Dr. Lavalle would drop in unexpectedly to ask us for drafts of speeches or proclamations. At our first meeting, Macera, in one of his typical outbursts, confronted Lavalle with this insolent remark: “The masses can be won over by contempt or by flattery. Which method should we use?”
I saw Dr. Lavalle’s face of a sad tortoise pale behind his glasses. And I listened to him for some time, embarrassed and disconcerted, as he explained to Macera that there was another way, outside of those two extremes, of winning over public opinion. He preferred a more moderate one, one more in harmony with his temperament. Macera’s brusque comments and wild remarks scared Lavalle — whom Macera wanted to have slip into his speeches every so often a quote from Freud or Georg Simmel or whoever else Pablo was reading at the time — but at the same time Lavalle was fascinated by him. He listened, enthralled, to his mad theories — Pablo expounded a great number of them every day, all of them contradictory, and then immediately forgot about them — and one day Lavalle said to me in confidence: “What an intelligent young man, but what an unpredictable one!”