In the middle of Belaunde’s second term, I was unexpectedly summoned one night to the Presidential Palace. He is a reserved man who, even when he talks a great deal, never reveals his most intimate thoughts. But on that occasion — we had two or three meetings on the same subject in the next few months — he spoke to me in a much more explicit way than usual, with some emotion, and allowed me to catch a glimpse of certain matters that were tormenting him. He was deeply distressed at those experts to whom he had given carte blanche to manage the country’s economy. And what had been the result? He was certain that history would not remember them, but he for his part would not be forgotten. He was indignant that certain ministers had hired advisers whose salaries were paid in dollars when the entire country had been asked to make sacrifices. And there was melancholy and a sort of bitterness in his tone of voice and in his silences. His immediate preoccupation was the 1985 election. Popular Action wouldn’t stand a chance of winning, nor would the Christian Popular Party, since Bedoya, without detracting from his personal merits, lacked drawing power at the polls. This could mean the triumph of the APRA, with Alan García in the presidency. The consequences for the country would be frightful. In the years that followed, I would always remember, because of the confirmation that time brought, the prophecy Belaunde made that night: “Peru has no idea what that young man may be capable of if he comes to power.” His idea was that this could be avoided if I were the candidate of AP and the PPC. He thought that my candidacy would attract the independent vote. He answered my arguments that I was no good at politics (a prophecy that time would also confirm) with flattering phrases and with a kindliness — I would use the term affection, if this word were not so at odds with his sober, not at all emotional personality — that he never failed to show me even in the tensest moments of the life of the Democratic Front (as at the time of my resignation, in mid-1989, because of the dispute over municipal elections). That project of Belaunde’s never went any farther, in large part because of my own lack of interest, but also because it found no echo either in AP or in the PPC, which wanted to present their own candidates in the 1985 election.
Bedoya, a witty man and with some ironic gibe or other always on the tip of his tongue, said that Belaunde was “a master at taking the syringe out of his backside.” And in fact there was no way of pinning down anything with Belaunde or even discussing it when a subject wasn’t to his liking or didn’t seem worthwhile to him. In such cases he always managed to take off on another tangent, telling anecdotes about his travels — he had been all over Peru, from top to bottom, on foot, on horseback, in a canoe, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the country’s geography — or about his two terms in office, without leaving anyone room to get a word in edgewise to interrupt him. And then, suddenly, he would look at his watch, get to his feet, and without further ado—“Well, just look how late it’s gotten”—bid us goodbye and disappear. One night I also saw him inflict these same clever evasive maneuvers that he used with Bedoya and me on three Aprista leaders high up in the administration hierarchy — the prime minister, Armando Villaneuva, the president of the Congress, Alva Castro, and the senator and historical relic of the party, Luis Alberto Sánchez — who had asked to talk with the leaders of the Democratic Front in view of a possible political truce. We met at the home of Jorge Grieve, in San Isidro, on September 12, 1988. But the Apristas didn’t even have the chance to propose such a thing to us, because Belaunde kept them silent all evening long, relating details of his first term in office, reminiscing about his travels and about well-known figures long since dead, cracking jokes and telling anecdotes, until in discouragement and, I suppose, driven half out of their minds, the Apristas gave up and left.
What we practically never talked about with Belaunde and with Bedoya, throughout those three years, was what the policy of the Front would be for running the country — its ideas, reforms, initiatives to dig Peru out of its ruins and put it back on the road to recovery. The reason was simple: the three of us knew that the parties had very different points of view on what the plan for governing the country ought to be and we preferred to leave the discussion for a later time that never came round. We would talk about the political gossip of the moment, about what Alan García’s next machination would be — what ambush, intrigue, or infamy he was cooking up this time — and we would discuss, whenever we could manage to keep Belaunde from wandering off the subject, the question of whether the Front would present joint candidates in the municipal elections in November 1989 or whether each party would go its own way with its own candidates.
Now that I had become involved, I made a depressing discovery in these tripartite meetings: that real politics, not the kind that one reads and writes about, thinks about and imagines (the only sort I was acquainted with), but politics as lived and practiced day by day, has little to do with ideas, values, and imagination, with ideological visions — the ideal society we would like to create — and, to put it bluntly, little to do with generosity, solidarity, and idealism. It consists almost exclusively of maneuvers, intrigues, plots, paranoias, betrayals, a great deal of calculation, no little cynicism, and every variety of con game. Because what really gets the professional politician, whether of the center, the left, or the right, moving, what excites him and keeps him going is power, attaining it, remaining in it, or returning to it as soon as possible. There are exceptions, of course, but they are just that: exceptions. Many politicians begin their careers impelled by altruistic sentiments — changing society, attaining justice, fostering development, bringing morality into public life. But along the way, in the petty, pedestrian practice of day-to-day politics, these fine objectives become, little by little, mere clichés of the speeches and statements of the public persona that they acquire, which in the end makes them all but indistinguishable from each other. What prevails in politicians, finally, is the gross and sometimes immeasurable appetite for power. Anyone who is not capable of feeling this obsessive, almost physical attraction to power finds it nearly impossible to be a successful politician.
That was my case. Power had always aroused my mistrust, even in my early years as a revolutionary, and one of the functions of my vocation, literature, that had always seemed to me to be most important was to be, precisely, a form of resistance to power, an activity thanks to which power — all powers — might be permanently questioned, since good literature always ends up showing those who read it the shortcomings of life, the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires. It was this distrust of power, along with my biological allergy to any form of dictatorship, that had so attracted me, from the 1970s on, to liberal thought, that of an Aron, a Popper, or a Hayek, of Friedman or of Nozick, with its commitment to defending the individual against the state, to decentralizing power by pulverizing it into multiple private powers that counterbalance each other, and to transferring economic, social, and institutional responsibilities to the citizenry as a whole instead of concentrating them in the political elite that rules the country.