When our preparations were already well under way, at the Faculty of Letters one day, Rosita Corpancho asked me if I wouldn’t be tempted by the prospect of taking a trip to Amazonia. A Mexican anthropologist born in Spain, Juan Comas, was about to arrive in Peru, and for this reason the Summer Institute of Linguistics and San Marcos had organized an expedition to the Alto Marañon region, the homeland of the Aguaruna and Huambisa tribes, in which he was interested. I accepted, and thanks to this brief journey I became acquainted with the Peruvian jungle area and saw landscapes and people and heard stories that, later on, would be the raw material for at least three of my novels: The Green House, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, and The Storyteller.
Never in my life, and I can assure my reader that I’ve been to quite a few places in the world, have I taken a more fruitful journey, one that afterward would arouse such stimulating memories and images for inventing stories. Thirty-five years later, every so often I still remember certain anecdotes and moments of that expedition by way of territories nearly virgin at that time and remote villages, where existence was very different from the other regions of Peru that I was acquainted with, and where, in the little settlements of Huambisas, Shapras, and Aguarunas that we reached, prehistory was still alive, they still shrank heads and still practiced animism. But, precisely because of how important it turned out to be for my work as a writer and how greatly I have profited from it, I feel more diffident about referring to that experience than I do about any other, since in no other has imagination, which jumbles everything together, become so intermingled with the experience itself. Moreover, I have written and spoken so much about that first journey I made to the jungle that I am certain that if someone were to take the trouble to verify all those eyewitness accounts and personal interviews that I have told about, he or she would notice the subtle changes, which are doubtless abrupt ones as well, that my unconscious and my imagination have continually incorporated into the memory of that expedition.*
What I am sure of is this: discovering the awesome power of the still untamed landscape of Amazonia, and its adventure-filled, primitive, fierce world, with a freedom unknown in urban Peru, left me filled with amazement. It also enlightened me in an unforgettable way with regard to the extremes of savagery and total impunity to which injustice might lead for certain Peruvians. But at the same time, it unfolded before my eyes a world in which, as in great novels, life could be an adventure with no frontiers, where there was room for the most inconceivable feats of daring, where living almost always meant risk, boldness, permanent change — all within the framework of forests, rivers, and lakes that seemed like those of Paradise on Earth. It would come back to my mind a thousand and one times in years to come and would be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for my writing.
We went first to Yarinacocha, near Pucallpa, where the base of the Summer Institute of Linguistics was located, and there met its founder, Dr. Townsend, who had created it for a purpose that was at once scientific and religious: so that his linguists — who at the same time were also Protestant missionaries — could learn languages and primitive dialects in order to translate the Bible into them. We then took off to visit the Alto Marañon tribes and were in Urakusa, Chicais, Santa María de Nieva, and many villages and settlements where we slept in hammocks or on makeshift cots; in order to reach some of them, after disembarking from the seaplane, we had to be taken to them in the frail canoes of native ferrymen. In one of the Shapra villages, the tribal chief, Tariri, explained to us the technique used to shrink heads, which his people still practiced; they had a prisoner there from a neighboring tribe with which they were at war; the man roamed about freely among his captors, but they kept his dog in a cage. In Urakusa, I met the tribal chief Jum, recently tortured by some soldiers and “bosses” from Santa María de Nieva, whom we also met, and whom I was later to try to bring to life in The Green House. In all the places we visited I learned of unbelievable things and met extraordinary people.
Besides Juan Comas, there traveled with us in the little seaplane the anthropologist Matos Mar, with whom I have been friends ever since, the editor-in-chief of Cultura Peruana, José Flórez Aráoz, and Efraín Morote Best, an anthropologist and folklorist from Ayacucho, whom we had to lift off the ground, literally, so that the seaplane could take off. Morote Best had visited bilingual schools and traveled among the tribes, under heroic conditions, bombarding Lima with denunciations of the abuses and iniquities suffered by the indigenous peoples. These latter received him in their villages with great affection and passed their complaints on to him and told him about their problems. The idea I formed of him was that of a very honest and generous man, who had profoundly identified himself with the victims of that country of victims known as Peru. I never imagined that the gentle, timid Dr. Morote Best would, as the years went by, be won over by Maoism, during his rectorate at Ayacucho University, and open the doors of that institution to the fundamentalist Maoism of Sendero Luminoso — whose mentor, Abimael Guzmán, he brought there as a professor — and be regarded as something like the spiritual father of the most bloody extremist movement in the history of Peru.
When I returned to Lima, I didn’t even have time left to write the account of the expedition that I had promised Flórez Aráoz (I sent it to him from Rio de Janeiro, on my way to Europe). I spent my last days in Peru saying goodbye to friends and relatives and selecting the papers and notebooks that I would take with me. I felt very sad in the early morning of the day on which I bade my grandparents and Auntie Mamaé farewell, since I didn’t know if I would ever see those three elderly people again. Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga arrived at the Córpac airport to say goodbye to us after Julia and I were already aboard the Brazilian military plane, which, instead of seats, had parachutists’ benches. We spied the two of them from the little window and waved goodbye to them, knowing that they couldn’t see us. I was sure that I would see the two of them again, and that by that time I would at last be a writer.
Twenty. Period
On the day following the first round of voting, Wednesday, April 9, 1990, I phoned Alberto Fujimori early in the morning at the Hotel Crillón, his headquarters, and told him I needed to talk with him that same day, without witnesses. He agreed to inform me of the time and place for our meeting, and did so shortly thereafter: an address in the vicinity of the San Juan de Dios clinic, a house next door to a gas station and auto body shop.
The surprising results at the polls on the day before had created an atmosphere of consternation and Lima was a wasp’s nest of rumors, among them one about an imminent coup d’état. The frustration and stupefaction of the supporters of the Front had been succeeded by anger, and during the day the radio stations broadcast news bulletins of incidents, in Miraflores and San Isidro, in which Japanese were insulted on the street or thrown out of restaurants. Such a reaction, besides being stupid, was terribly unjust, since the small Japanese community of Peru had given me many proofs of their support ever since the beginning of the campaign. A group of businessmen and professionals of Japanese origin met every so often with Pipo Thorndike to make financial contributions to the Front. I had held talks with them on three occasions, so as to explain our program to them and listen to their suggestions. And the Freedom Movement had chosen a Nisei agriculturalist, from Chancay, as its candidate for representative for the departamento of Lima. (He lost his life, shortly before the elections, when the firearm that he was cleaning went off accidentally.)