As for pocket money, Uncle Jorge and Uncle Juan, and sometimes Uncle Pedro — who after graduating had left to work in the North, as a doctor on the San Jacinto hacienda — gave me five, and then ten soles every Sunday, and with that amount I had more than enough for the matinee, the Viceroy cigarettes we bought one at a time, or to have a glass of capitán—a mixture of vermouth and pisco brandy — with the boys in the barrio before the parties on Saturday nights, at which only nonalcoholic refreshments were served. In the beginning, my papa also gave me some pocket money, but ever since I first began to go to Miraflores and receive a bit of money from my uncles, I discreetly refused to accept any from my father, saying goodbye to him very quickly on Saturday morning before he gave it to me: another of my overly subtle ways of opposing him, an idea conceived by my cowardice. He must have understood, because from around that time on, the beginning of 1948, he never gave me another centavo.
But despite these demonstrations of economic pride, in 1949 I dared — it was the one time I ever did anything like it — to ask him to have my teeth straightened. Because they stuck out, they had bothered me a lot at school, where I was called Rabbit and teased about them. I don’t believe that it had mattered all that much to me before, but once I began to go to parties, to keep company with girls and to have a sweetheart, getting braces to straighten my teeth as several of my friends had done became a passionately embraced ambition. And, suddenly, the possibility came within reach. One of my friends in the barrio, Coco, was the son of a dental technician, whose specialty was none other than those braces to line up the upper and lower teeth. I talked to Coco and he to his papa, who arranged for the kindly Dr. Lañas, the dentist he worked for, to give me an appointment at his office on the Jirón de la Unión, in the downtown district of Lima, and examine me. He would fit me with braces without charging me for his work; the only thing I would have to pay for was the material. My pride and my vanity battled it out for many days before I took that great step, which, at heart, I considered to be an abject surrender. But vanity won out — my voice must have trembled — and I ended up asking to be fitted with the braces.
My father said that was fine with him, that he would talk to Dr. Lañas, and perhaps he did. But before Dr. Lañas began the treatment, something happened, one or another of those domestic tempests or running away again with my mother to my aunt and uncle’s house, and, once the crisis subsided and family unity was restored, my father didn’t say anything more to me about the subject nor did I remind him of it. I was left with my rabbit’s teeth, and the following year, when I entered the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, it no longer mattered to me if I was buck-toothed.
Four. The Democratic Front
After the Meetings for Freedom, in August and September 1987, I left for Europe, on October 2, as I was in the habit of doing every year during this period. But unlike other years, this time I took along, deep within me, despite Patricia’s outbursts and her apocalyptic prophecies, the disease of politics. Before leaving Lima, in a televised program thanking those who had supported me in the mobilizations against nationalization, I said that I was returning “to my study and my books,” but nobody believed me, beginning with my wife. I didn’t believe it either.
In the two months that I was in Europe, as I was attending the premiere of my work La chunga, in a theater in Madrid, or was scribbling the drafts of my novel Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother) under the skylighted cupola of the Reading Room of the British Museum (just a step away from the little cubicle in which Marx had written a good part of Das Kapital), my mind often wandered from the fantasies of La chunga’s male characters or from the erotic rites of Don Rigoberto and Doña Lucrecia to what was happening in Peru.
My friends — the old ones and the new ones, from the days of the mobilization — met periodically in my absence to make plans and to hold discussions with the party leaders. Every Sunday Miguel Cruchaga wrote me detailed and euphoric reports which, invariably, sent my wife into a rage or off to get a Valium. From the very first public opinion polls I appeared as a popular figure, with nearly a third of the electorate declaring their intention to vote for me in case I became a candidate — the highest percentage among the presumed candidates for the presidency in the 1990 election, still a long way away. But what made Miguel happiest was the fact that the pressure of public opinion in favor of a great democratic alliance, under my leadership, seemed irresistible to him. It was a subject that Miguel and I had toyed with, in our conversations concerning Peru, as a remote ideal. All of a sudden, it had become a real possibility, one that depended on my decision.
It was true. Ever since the rally in the Plaza San Martín, and because of its great success, in the newspapers, on the radio, on television, and all over Peru people began to speak of the need for an alliance of the democratic forces of opposition to confront the APRA and the United Left in the 1990 elections. As a matter of fact, the militants of Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party had become one with the independents in the main square that night. And in Piura and Arequipa as well. During all three demonstrations I brought those parties and their leaders to applaud because of their opposition to the government’s nationalization plan.
This opposition had been immediate in the case of the Christian Popular Party and somewhat lukewarm at first in that of Popular Action. Its leader, ex-President Belaunde, present in Congress on the day of the announcement, made a cautious statement, fearing perhaps that nationalization would have strong backing. But over the next few days, in accord with the reaction of broad sectors of the populace, his pronouncements became increasingly more critical and his supporters had assembled en masse in the Plaza San Martín.
In the weeks that followed the Meetings for Freedom, the pressure from the non-Aprista news media and from the public in general, urging in letters, phone calls, and statements for the press that our mobilization solidify into an alliance with an eye to 1990, was enormous, and it continued while I was in Europe. Miguel Cruchaga and my friends agreed that I should take the initiative to make that plan a reality, although they disagreed as to the timing. Freddy thought it premature for me to return to Lima immediately. He feared that, in the three years ahead before the change of presidencies, my bright new public image would fade. But if I were going to be active in politics it was indispensable to travel a great deal in the interior of the country, where people scarcely knew who I was. So, after shuffling any number of formulas, in discussions by telephone that cost us an arm and a leg, we decided that I would return to Peru at the beginning of December, by way of Iquitos.
The choice of the capital of the Peruvian region of Amazonia as the gateway for my return to Peru was not by chance. During the fight against nationalization, at the time of the rallies in Lima, Arequipa, and Piura, we had arranged for a fourth one in Loreto, from which I had received requests to hold one. The APRA and the government then unleashed against me, in Iquitos, an extraordinary campaign, and, strictly speaking, a literary one. It consisted of denouncing me on radio stations and on the state television channel as a maligner of the women of Loreto, because of my novel Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service), set in Iquitos, from which they reproduced whole paragraphs and pages that were distributed in leaflet form or were read aloud on the radio and TV, so that the aim of the novel appeared to be to call all the women of Loreto “visitors of the evening” and to describe their ardent sexual exploits. There was a parade of mothers dressed in mourning and the APRA called upon all the pregnant women in the city to lie down on the landing strip so as to prevent a landing of the plane in which I, “the pornographic slanderer who is endeavoring to sully the soil of Loreto” (I am quoting one of the tracts), would arrive. To cap the climax, it so happened that on the one opposition radio station in Loreto, the likable reporter who defended me (in language that resembled that of Sinchi, a character in my novel) believed that the best way to do so was by making an impassioned apologia in favor of prostitution, to which he devoted several programs. All this made us fear a fiasco or, perhaps, a grotesque witches’ Sabbath, and we gave up our plans for that rally.