Peru had gone on ruining itself and was now more backward and perhaps with worse social iniquities than when it inspired in Riva Agüero this gloomy meditation. Ever since I read it, in 1955, for an edition being prepared by my professor and mentor, Porras Barrenechea, the pessimism that permeates it struck me as being the same one that very often paralyzed me with regard to Peru. And until those days in August 1987, that historical failure seemed to me to be a sort of sign of a country which, at some moment in its trajectory, “fucked itself all up” (this had been the obsessive rhetorical device I had deliberately hammered away at in my novel Conversation in The Cathedral, in which I had tried to represent Peruvian frustration) and had never discovered how to get over it without continuing to sink deeper and deeper into error.
Several times in my life, before the events of August 1987, I had lost all hope in Peru. Hope of what? When I was younger, hope that, skipping intermediate steps in one leap, it would become a prosperous, modern, cultivated country, and that I would live to see that day. Later on, the hope that, before I died, Peru would have at least begun to cease being poor, backward, and violent. There are no doubt many bad things about our era, but there is one very good one, without precedent in history. Countries today can choose to be prosperous. One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them. There is no better philosophy than that for keeping them in a state of backwardness for all time to come. Because today that theory is false. In the past, to be sure, prosperity depended almost exclusively on geography and power. But the internationalization of modern life — of markets, of technology, of capital — permits any country, even the smallest one with the fewest resources, if it opens out to the world and organizes its economy on a competitive basis, to achieve rapid growth. In the last two decades, by practicing, through its dictatorships or its civilian administrations, populism, exclusively economic nationalism, and government intervention in the economy, Latin America chose instead to go backward. And through its military dictatorship and Alan García, Peru pursued, farther than other countries, policies that lead to economic disaster. Up until those days of the campaign against the nationalization of the financial system, I had the impression that, though deeply divided on many subjects, among Peruvians there was a sort of consensus in favor of populism. The political powers that be disagreed as to the amount of intervention that was desirable, but all of them appeared to accept, as an axiom, that without it neither progress nor social justice would be possible. The modernization of Peru seemed to me to have been put off till pigs had wings.
In the public debate I had with my adversary, on June 3, 1990, the agricultural engineer Alberto Fujimori gibed: “It seems that you would like to make Peru a Switzerland, Doctor Vargas.” Aspiring to see Peru “become a Switzerland” had come to be, for a considerable portion of my compatriots, a grotesque goal, whereas for others, those who would prefer to turn it into a Cuba or a North Korea, it was something intolerable, not to mention impossible.
One of the best essays of the historian Jorge Basadre is entitled “La promesa de la vida peruana” (“The Promise of Peruvian Life”), published in 1945. Its central idea is pathetic and splendid: there is an unfulfilled promise throughout the whole of the history of the Republic of Peru, an ambition, an ideal, a vague necessity that never managed to take shape, but that since emancipation was always there, buried and alive, amid the tumult of civil wars, the devastation wrought by military rule, and the eloquent oratory of the debates that took place on political speakers’ platforms. A hope forever reborn and forever frustrated from saving us, someday, from the barbarism we had been brought to by our persistent inability to do what we ought to do.
But on the night of August 21, 1987, standing before that deliriously enthusiastic crowd in the Plaza San Martín, and then later in the Plaza de Armas of Arequipa, and on the Avenida Grau of the Piura of my childhood, I had the impression — the certainty — that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Peruvians had suddenly decided to do what was necessary to make our country “a Switzerland” someday — a country without people who were poor or illiterate, a country of cultivated, prosperous, and free citizens — and to make the promise at last become a part of history, thanks to a liberal reform of our incipient democracy.
Three. Lima the Horrible
The Lima-San Miguel streetcar went along the Avenida Salaverry, in front of the little house in La Magdalena where we came to live in those final days of 1946 or early 1947. The house still exists, faded and shabby, and even now, when I pass that way, I feel sharp pangs of anxiety. The year and a little more that I lived in it was the most agonizing one in my life. It was a two-story house. Downstairs there was a little living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and across a little patio, the maid’s room. And upstairs, the bathroom and my bedroom and my parents’, separated from mine by a short staircase landing.
From the moment we arrived, I felt excluded from the relationship between my mama and my papa, a man who, as the days went by, seemed to keep his distance from me. It infuriated me that they shut themselves up in their bedroom during the day, and on one pretext or another I kept going to knock on the door, until my father upbraided me, warning me not to do it again. His cold way of speaking and the steely look in his eyes is what I remember best of those first days in Lima, a city I detested from the very first moment. I was lonely, I missed my grandparents, Auntie Mamaé, Uncle Lucho, my friends from Piura. And I was bored, shut up in the house, not knowing what to do to occupy myself. Shortly after we arrived, my father and mother enrolled me in the sixth grade of the La Salle primary school, but classes didn’t begin until April and it was only January. Was I going to spend the summer shut up inside the house, seeing the clanging San Miguel streetcar go by every so often?
Around the corner, in a little house identical to ours, Uncle César lived with Aunt Orieli and their sons Eduardo, Pepe, and Jorge. The first two were a little older than I was and Jorge was my age. My uncle and aunt were affectionate toward me and did their best to make me feel a part of the family, taking me one night to a Chinese restaurant on the Calle Capón — the first time I’d ever tasted Chino-Peruvian food — and my cousins took me with them to soccer games. I remember very vividly the visit to the old stadium on the Calle José Díaz, sitting in the cheap seats, watching the classic Alianza Lima-Universitario de Deportes match. Eduardo and Jorge were fans of the Alianza and Pepe of the U, and like him, I too became a rooter for this top-notch team, and soon I had, in my room, photographs of its star players: the spectacular goalie Garagate, the guard and captain Da Silva, the blond Toto Terry, “the Arrow,” and above all the very famous Lolo Fernández, the great center forward, the gentleman of the field and a scorer. My cousins had a barrio, a gang of friends from the neighborhood with whom they got together in front of their house to talk and kick a soccer ball around and make shots at the goal, and they would call to me to come play with them. But I never managed to belong to their barrio, in part because, unlike my cousins, who could go outside on the street anytime and have their friends over to their house, this was forbidden me. And partly because, although Uncle César and Aunt Orieli, as well as Eduardo, Pepe, and Jorge, always made gestures to me to come closer, I kept my distance. Because they were the family of that man who was my father, not my family.