We had reserved several floors of the Sheraton for election day. On the first floor were the press offices of the Front, with Álvaro and his team, and on the second floor fax machines, telephones, and desks for correspondents had been installed and the conference room where I was to speak after the results were in had been made ready. On the eighteenth floor there was a computer network office, where Mark Malloch Brown and his team received projections of how the vote was going, reports from our representatives, and the results of exit polls that came in via the computers that Miguel Cruchaga had installed, in semisecrecy, in San Antonio. They handed me the first projection around noon.
The nineteenth floor was reserved for my family and close friends, and the security service had orders to allow no one else to set foot on it. I had a suite in which I shut myself up around eleven in the morning, all by myself. I was watching on television as the leaders of the various political parties, or famous sports stars and singers, came to the polling places to vote, and all of a sudden I was tormented by the idea that for five years it was more than likely that I wouldn’t read or write anything literary again. Then I sat down and in a little book that I always carry around with me in my pocket I wrote this poem which, ever since I had read a book by Alfonso Reyes on Greece, I had been mulling over in my mind in my free moments:
ALCIDES
Pienso en el poderoso Alcides, Ilamado también Hércules. Era muy fuerte. Aún en la cuna Aplastó a dos serpientes, una por una. Y, adolescente, mató a un león, gallardamente. Cubierto con su piel, peregrino audaz, fue por el mundo. Lo imagino musculoso y bruñido, dando caza al león de Nemea. Y, en la plaza calcinada de Lidia, sirviendo como esclavo y entreteniendo a la reina Onfale. Vestido de mujer, el venido de Grecia hilaba y tejía y, en su gentil disfraz, divertía a la corte.
Allí lo dejo al invicto joven trejo: en el ridículo sumido y, paf, lo olvido.
ALCIDES
I think of the powerful Alcides, also called Hercules. He was very strong. In his cradle still he was known to have killed two serpents, crushed to death, one by one. And before reaching maturity he killed a lion, valiantly. Wearing its pelt, a fearless pilgrim, he roamed the world. An image I can't erase:
Muscular, burnished, giving chase to the lion of Nemea. And in the torrid public square in Lydia, serving as a slave and entertaining the Queen, Omphale. Dressed as a woman, the man arrived from Greece spun and wove and, in his charming disguise, amused the court.
There I leave the young man, unbeaten yet, neck deep in ridicule: whom, just like that, I forget.
Around one o’clock in the afternoon, Mark, Lucho, and Álvaro came up to see me with the first projection: I had close to 40 percent and Fujimori 25 percent. The dark horse was giving further proof of the remarkably solid base he had established everywhere in the country. Mark explained to me that my percentage would tend to go on increasing, but, seeking the look on his face, I could tell that he was lying. If these figures proved to be correct, the electorate hadn’t given me a mandate and there would be a congressional majority hostile to our program.
I went downstairs to talk to my mother and my aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, and ate a couple of sandwiches with them without telling them what I knew. Even Uncle Lucho, despite his stroke and paralysis, was there, smiling behind his immobility and silence, keeping me company on the great day. I went back up to the suite on the nineteenth floor, where at two-thirty they brought me a second and more complete nationwide projection. I immediately saw that it was disastrous: I had lost three points — I now had 36 percent — Fujimori was maintaining his 25 percent, the APRA had just under 20 percent and the two parties of the left, taken together, 10 percent. It didn’t require gifts of prophecy to see into the future: there would be a second round in which Apristas, Socialists, and Communists would do an about-face and vote en bloc for Fujimori, making him the winner by a comfortable margin.
Álvaro stayed alone with me for a moment. He was very pale, with those dark blue circles underneath his eyes that, when he was a little boy, presaged a temper tantrum. Of my three children, he is the one who is most like me, in his passionate outbursts and in his enthusiasms, in his excessive surrender, without reserve or calculation, to his loves and his hates. He was twenty-four, and this campaign had been an extraordinary experience in his life. It was not my idea but Freddy Cooper’s to make him our communications director, because he was a journalist, because he was continually obsessed by Peru, because he was so close to me and so closely identified with liberal ideas. It had been hard work to get him to accept. He said no to Freddy and me, but finally Patricia, who is even more stubborn than he is, persuaded him. Because of this, we have been accused of nepotism and baptized by the Aprista press as “the royal family.” He had done his job very well, having fights with many people, of course, because he refused to make the slightest concession when it came to matters of principle or agree to anything that we might regret later, just as I had asked him to do. In all these months he had learned a great deal more than he had in his three years at the London School of Economics, about his country, about people, and about politics, a passion that he acquired in his adolescence and that had absorbed him ever since, just as in his childhood religion had absorbed him. (I still have the surprising letter he sent me, from boarding school, when he was twelve, informing me of his decision to leave the Catholic Church to be confirmed by the Church of England.) “Everything’s turned to shit,” he said, livid. “There won’t be any liberal reform. Peru won’t change and it’ll go on the way it always has. The worst thing that can happen to you now is to win.” But I knew that there was no longer any danger of that.
I asked him to locate our representative at the National Board of Elections, and when Enrique Elías Laroza came up to the nineteenth floor, I asked him if it were legally possible for one of the two candidates who had been finalists in the first round to give up competing in the second one, handing over the presidency to the other candidate once and for all. He assured me emphatically that this was possible.* And still he egged me on: “Sure, offer Fujimori one or two ministries and let him give up the second round.” But what I was thinking of offering my rival was something more appetizing than a few ministerial portfolios: the presidential flag, in exchange for adopting key points of our economic program and getting himself teams capable of putting it into practice. My fear, from that moment on, was that, through an intermediary, Alan García and the APRA would go on governing Peru and the disaster of the last five years would continue, until Peruvian society broke down completely.
From that second projection on, I never had the slightest doubt about the outcome nor did I have the slightest illusion as to my chances of winning in the second round. In the previous months and years I had been able to feel physically the hatred borne me by the Apristas and the Communists, who found that my sudden appearance in Peruvian political life, defending liberal theses, filling public squares, mobilizing middle classes which they had previously kept constantly intimidated or bewildered, preventing the nationalization of the financial system, and demanding things that they had turned into taboos—“formal” democracy, private property and enterprise, capitalism, a market economy — had ruined what they took to be their unassailable monopoly of political power and of the future of Peru. The sensation, supported by opinion polls for almost three years, that there was no legal way of stopping that intruder who was bringing the “right” back to life, who would come to power with the enthusiastic backing of millions upon millions, had rendered their enmity even more poisonous, and with their ill-will further exacerbated by the intrigues orchestrated from the Presidential Palace by Alan García, their rancor toward me had been increased to the point of insanity. The appearance of Fujimori at the last minute was a gift of the gods for the APRA and the left, and it was obvious that both would devote themselves body and soul to working for his victory, without stopping for one minute to think of how dangerous it was to bring to power someone so ill-prepared to exercise it. Common sense, reason, are exotic flowers in Peruvian political life and I am sure that, even if they had known that, twenty months after he was elected, Fujimori was going to put an end to democracy, close down Congress, proclaim himself dictator, and begin to repress Apristas and Communists, they would have voted for him just the same, in order to keep a person whom they called enemy number one from taking office as president.