On April 3 two good things happened. The attractive Gisella Valcárcel, who, after being a music hall performer, had gone on to host one of the most popular shows on television, after interviewing Fujimori on it announced to her audience, in his presence, that she was going to vote for me. It was a brave gesture, because Channel 5 had previously tried to keep Gisella from participating in the festivities that Acción Solidaria organized for Christmas. Nonetheless, she went to the stadium and emceed the show — even getting me to dance a huayno—and now, on the eve of the election, she had given me a public endorsement, trying to persuade her viewers to vote for me. I called to thank her, and to swear to her that this would not bring her reprisals; fortunately, none took place.
The second piece of good news was the results of the last nationwide opinion poll that Mark and his analysts, Paul, Ed, and Bill, brought to the house late that Wednesday afternoon: I had maintained my average of some 40 percent of the electorate intending to vote for me, and Fujimori’s offensive, which included not only Lima but also the remainder of Peru — with the sole exception of the Amazon region — was taking votes away from the APRA and the United Left for the most part, causing them to drop down to third and fourth place respectively in almost all of the departamentos. Fujimori’s advance in the marginal sections of the capital appeared to have been halted; and in districts such as San Juan de Lurigancho and Comas I had regained several percentage points.
Hundreds of reporters from all over the world were in Lima for the election on Sunday, April 8, and the campaign directors feared that the 1,500-seat capacity of the auditorium of the Sheraton would not provide enough room for them all. My house in Barranco was surrounded by photographers and cameramen night and day and the security guards had trouble holding off those who tried to scale the walls or leap into the garden. In order to maintain some privacy we had to close the blinds and draw the curtains and have visitors drive their cars inside the garage if they didn’t want to be hounded by the hordes of reporters. The election law didn’t allow polls to be published for the two weeks preceding an election, but the daily papers abroad had already printed news stories about the surprising appearance at the last minute of a dark horse of Japanese origin in the Peruvian presidential election.
I didn’t feel alarmed, as I had been at the time of the excessive ad campaign of our congressional candidates — which, in these two final weeks, was reduced to less extravagant dimensions — although I couldn’t help thinking that between that campaign and the “Fujimori phenomenon” there was a reciprocal relation. That spectacle of economic immodesty presented by our candidates had suited the purpose of someone who made himself out to poor Peruvians to be just one more “poor man,” disgusted with a “political class” that had never solved the country’s problems. I thought, however, that the vote for Fujimori — the vote meant to castigate us — couldn’t possibly amount to more than 10 percent or so of the electorate, the most uninformed and uncultured voters. Who else would vote for an unknown, without a program, without a team for governing, without any political credentials whatsoever, who had hardly campaigned outside of Lima, who had been jury-rigged overnight to serve as a candidate? No matter what the opinion polls said, it never entered my head that a candidacy so devoid of ideas and with no planning staff could carry weight in the face of the monumental effort we had put in over a period of almost three years of work. And secretly, without saying as much to Patricia, I was still cherishing the hope that Peruvians would give me a mandate for the “great change, in freedom” that Sunday.
A dream like that was nurtured, in large part, by a misinterpretation of the last rallies, all of which, beginning with the one in the Plaza de Armas of Cuzco, were most impressive. So was the one on April 4, on the Paseo de la República, in Lima, when I spoke of myself and my family in a very intimate way, explaining, against the propaganda that presented me as one of the privileged, that I owed everything I was and everything I possessed to my own work, and the one in Arequipa, the last one, on April 5, when I promised my countrymen that I would be “a rebellious and obstreperous president,” just as the part of the country that I was born in had been in the history of Peru. Those very well organized ceremonies, those public squares and avenues teeming with overexcited people hoarse from shouting our slogans in chorus — so many young people, above all — gave the impression of an overwhelming mobilization, of a country dazzled by the Front. Before the final rally, Patricia and my three children and I went through the streets of the city in an open touring car, in a motorcade that lasted for several hours, joined at every street corner in Arequipa by more and more people, with bunches of flowers or confetti, in an atmosphere of real delirium. During one of those tours of Arequipa, I had one of the most unexpected and nicest experiences of those years. A young woman approached the car, held up a baby just a few months old for me to kiss him, and shouted to me: “If you win, I’ll have another baby, Mario!”
But anyone who had sat down with a cool head to add and subtract and attentively observe the sort of people who attended those marches and rallies would have had reservations: those who took part in them represented almost exclusively the third of Peruvians with the largest incomes. Although a minority, there were enough of them to fill the main squares of Peruvian cities, above all now that, for one of the few times in our history, those middle and upper classes had backed, en bloc, a political plan. But there were the remaining two-thirds, all those Peruvians who had been most impoverished and most frustrated by the national decline of recent decades — including those who had once been interested by my proposals only to have their interest flag out of fear, confusion, and displeasure at the manifestation, in the last months of the campaign, of what appeared to be the old elitist, arrogant Peru of the whites and the rich, something that our advertising contributed as much to as did the campaign of our adversaries — and as I presided over those grandiose rallies that left me with the impression that I was retaining the very nearly absolute majority that the opinion polls said I enjoyed, these Peruvians, the other two-thirds, had already begun to change their minds in a way that would make the election results turn out quite differently.
A number of friends had arrived in Peru from abroad, among them Carmen Balcells, my literary agent from Barcelona who had kept me company in any number of my ups and downs, my English publisher, Robert McCrum, and the Colombian writer and journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, all of whom I had a chance to see on the eve of election day, in the midst of the killing series of interviews with foreign correspondents that figured on my schedule. I had another surprise when my Finnish publisher, Erkki Reenpaa, and Sulamita, his wife, also showed up in Barranco. Their snow-white Scandinavian faces had suddenly appeared as though by magic amid the crowd at the rally in Piura, without my being able to figure out how it was possible for those two friends from Helsinki to have turned up in that remote corner of Peru. I learned later that they had followed me, all during that last week, from one city to another, accomplishing miracles so that, by renting cars and taking planes, they could be present at all my final rallies. And that night, I found at home a telegram that had been sent to me from Geneva by the close friend of my youth, Luis Loayza, whom I hadn’t seen for years. It read: “An embrace, fierce little Sartrean,” and I was deeply touched.
On Sunday the 8th, Patricia, Álvaro, Gonzalo, and I went to vote early in the morning at the Colegio Mercedes Indacochea, in Barranco, and Morgana came with us, dying with envy because her brothers could already vote. Then, before leaving for the Hotel Sheraton, I checked to see how those tens of thousands of representatives of our alliance, which a team headed by Miguel and Cecilia Cruchaga had been training for this day for months, were doing at the electoral tables in polling places all over the country. Everything was in good order; the transportation arrangements had worked and our representatives had been at their posts since dawn.