When Mark Malloch Brown learned of my resignation he was happy. He was not surprised by the instant shift of public opinion in my favor, nor by my increase in popularity in the surveys. And he too presumed that I had planned it that way. “Well, you’re learning,” he must have thought — he who once assured me that I was the worst candidate he had ever worked with.
All this news reached me by telephone, through Álvaro, Miguel Cruchaga, and Alfredo Barnechea, a congressman who, because of the nationalization, had given up his membership in the APRA and joined Libertad. After Italy, I had gone with Patricia to take refuge in the south of Spain, fleeing from being besieged by the press. It was already decided that I would stick with my determination to resign and remain for a time in Europe. I had a long-standing offer to spend a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg, in Berlin, and I proposed to Patricia that we go there, to learn German.
At this juncture the news reached us. AP and the PPC had come to an agreement on all the points of contention between them and had put together joint lists of candidates in even the most remote parts of the country. Their differences had vanished as if by magic and they were waiting for me to come back to lead the Front and resume the campaign.
My first reaction was to say: “I’m not coming. I’m no good at that sort of thing. I don’t know how to carry it off, and what’s more, I don’t like it. These months have given me more than enough time to realize that. I’ll stick to my books and my papers, which I should never have left.” My wife and I then had yet another politico-conjugal argument. She, who had come close to threatening to divorce me if I were a candidate, now urged me to go back to Peru, marshaling both moral and patriotic arguments. Since Belaunde and Bedoya had backed down, there was no alternative. That had been the reason for my withdrawal, hadn’t it? Well then, it no longer existed. Too many good, unselfish, decent people were working day and night for the Front, back there in Peru. They had believed my speeches and my exhortations. Was I going to let them down, now that AP and the PPC seemed to be beginning to behave decently? The sawtooth mountain ranges of the lovely Andalusian town of Mijas bear witness to her admonitions: “We’ve taken on a responsibility. We have to go back.”
That is what we did. We went back and this time Patricia threw herself into working in the campaign as though she had politics in her blood. And I didn’t break with the allied parties, as many friends in Libertad too would have liked me to do, and as I ought to have done had I followed the opinion surveys, for the reasons I have already mentioned, which impressed me as being more worthy of being taken into consideration than the others.
Five. The Cadet
In the years that I lived with my father, before I entered Leoncio Prado in 1950, innocence, the ingenuous vision of the world that my mother, my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles had inculcated in me, vanished. In those three years I discovered cruelty, fear, bitterness, a tortuous and violent dimension that is continually, at times more and at times less, counterbalanced by the kind and generous side of every human destiny. And it is probable that without my progenitor’s contempt for literature I would never have pursued so obstinately what at the time was a game, but was gradually to turn into an obsessive and pressing need: a vocation. If in those years I had not suffered so much when he was around and if I hadn’t felt that it was the best way I could think of to pull the wool over his eyes, I probably wouldn’t be a writer today.
That I would be entering the Leoncio Prado Military Academy had been on my father’s mind ever since he brought me to live with him. He would announce it to me when he gave me a tongue-lashing and when he bewailed the fact that the Llosas had brought me up like a spoiled child. I don’t know whether he was well aware of what sort of an education pupils at Leoncio Prado received. I imagine he wasn’t, or else he wouldn’t have placed such high hopes in it. His idea was the same as that of many middle-class fathers with sons who were disobedient, rebellious, inhibited, or suspected of being queer: that a military college, with instructors who were career officers, would make of them young men who were disciplined, brave, respectful of authority, and with their balls in the right place.
Since in those days the idea of someday being just a writer never entered my head, when I was asked what I would be when I was grown up, my answer was: a sailor. I liked the sea and adventure novels, and being a sailor seemed to me to be a good way to combine those two things I was so fond of. Entering a military academy whose pupils received the rank of officers in the reserves was an advantageous jumping-off place for someone who aspired to enter the Naval Academy.
So when, on my completing the second year of secondary school, my father enrolled me in an academy on the Jirón Lampa, in the heart of Lima, to prepare me for the entrance exam to Leoncio Prado, I was all for his plan for me. To be a boarding student, to wear a uniform, to parade on the twenty-eighth of July along with the air corps, navy, and army cadets, would be fun. And living far away from him, all week long, would be even better.
The entrance exam consisted of physical and academic tests that took three whole days, in the vast area occupied by the school, on the edge of the cliffs of La Perla, with the sea roaring at the foot of them. I passed the exams, and in March 1950, just a few days before my fourteenth birthday, I appeared at the Academy with a certain excitement over what I was going to find there, wondering if those months of being confined to the school grounds until the first leave wouldn’t be a big hardship. (Third-year cadets — those who had completed two years of secondary school — got to leave for the first time on the seventh of June, Flag Day, after having learned the rudiments of military life.)
There were some three hundred of us perros—plebes in the third year of the class that would graduate three years later, divided into eleven or twelve sections, according to our height; I was among the tallest, so that I was placed in the second section. (In my fourth year, I would be transferred to the first one.) Three sections formed a company, under the command of a lieutenant and a sergeant major. The lieutenant of our company was named Olivera; our noncommissioned officer, Guardamino.