Apart from the evenings when there were little performances at school, I don’t remember having gone to the theater, until the year I entered Leoncio Prado. That year, I do remember, I went on several Saturdays to the Teatro Segura, or to the Municipal, or to the little stage of the National School of Dramatic Art, in the vicinity of the Avenida Uruguay, generally in the first balcony or even in the peanut gallery, to see Spanish or Argentine companies — in those days, though today it seems unbelievable, such things happened in Lima — that put on plays by Alejandro Casona, Jacinto Grau, or Unamuno, and, sometimes, on rare occasions, a classic work by Lope de Vega or Calderón. I always went alone, because it was none of my neighborhood pals’ idea of a good time to go to downtown Lima to take in a play, even though every once in a while Alberto Pool decided to go with me. Whether good or bad, the performance always filled my head with enough images for me to lose myself in dreams for days, and I came out of the theater each time with the secret ambition to be a playwright someday.
I don’t know how many times I wrote, tore up, rewrote, and again tore up and rewrote La huida del inca. Since my activity as a scribe who penned love letters and erotic novelettes had won for me among my pals at Leoncio Prado the right to be a writer, I didn’t work on my play in hiding, but during hours when I should have been studying, or after classes, or right in class and during my nights on guard duty. Grandpa Pedro had an old Underwood typewriter, which he had never parted with since the days in Bolivia, and on weekends I spent hours typing on it, with two fingers, the original and the copies for the contest. When I had finished it, I read it to my grandparents and to Uncle Juan and Aunt Laura. Grandpa took it upon himself to deliver La huida del inca to the Ministry of Education.
That little work was, as far as I recall, the first text that I wrote in the same way in which I would later write all my novels: rewriting and correcting, redoing a thousand and one times a very confused draft that, little by little, after countless emendations, would assume definite form. Weeks and months passed without news of what sort of luck I had had in the contest, and when I finished my second year at Leoncio Prado, and at the end of December or the beginning of January of 1952 went to work at La Crónica, I scarcely ever thought about my play — with the forbidding subtitle of An Inca drama in three acts, with a prologue and an epilogue in the contemporary era—or of the literary competition for which I had submitted it.
Six. Religion., Municipal Elections, and Backsides
Once the conflict with Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party over the municipal candidacies had been settled, I returned to Lima, on July 14, 1989, after having been gone twenty-two days. A motorcade of cars, trucks, and buses met me at the airport, headed by Chino and Gladys Urbina and the handful of boys and girls from the young people’s section of the Freedom Movement, with whom Chino and Gladys were to organize all our campaign rallies throughout Peru. Speaking from the terrace of the house to those who had accompanied me to my home in Barranco, I made my peace with the allies and thanked AP and the PPC for having put an end to their municipal quarrels.
The next day I went to say hello to Belaunde and Bedoya and the three of us were completely reconciled. In my absence a committee of both their parties, made up of Eduardo Orrego and Ernesto Alayza Grundy — candidates for the first and second vice presidencies — had made a Solomon-like distribution of the offices of councilmen and mayors that would fall to each party throughout the country.
The problem was the mayoralty of Lima, the one that would have the greatest political effect on the presidential campaign. It fell to Popular Action to designate the candidate and it was taken for granted that it would be the architect Eduardo Orrego. Born in Chiclayo in 1933, and a disciple of Belaunde Terry’s who shared his political beliefs from the start, Orrego was regarded as the natural heir to the populist throne. The AP congress, held at the end of April 1989 in Cuzco, had elected him as the party’s candidate for the first vice presidency. After Belaunde, he was the leader with the best image in his party. He had been mayor of Lima between 1981 and 1983 and had experience on the municipal level. His administration had been spirited although not successful, because of the lack of funds, which the heads of Popular Action had cut down on for his office, dooming him to powerlessness. The most important thing he did was to obtain from the World Bank a credit of 85 million dollars for the mayor’s office. But the bureaucracy saw to it that those funds would not materialize until after he had left office, so that only the mayor who succeeded him, the leader of the United Left, Alfonso Barrantes, the winner of the 1983 municipal election, could use them.
I was not at all intimately acquainted with Eduardo Orrego before the election campaign. I regarded him as one of the populists who had done the most to keep alive the romantic spirit of renewal that gave birth to Popular Action during Odría’s dictatorship. I knew that Orrego had traveled far and wide in a sort of process of political self-instruction — he had worked in Algeria and traveled in Africa, Asia and, extensively, in the People’s Republic of China — and I had a hunch that, unlike what had happened with others of his fellow party members, the years hadn’t dulled the enterprising spirit of his youth. Thus, when, some time later, Belaunde asked me whom I preferred as first vice president among the three or four names that were being bruited about, I answered, without hesitation: Orrego. I knew that Eduardo had been in very delicate health, because of a heart operation, but I was assured that he had made a good recovery. I was pleased to have him as a running mate, although at that juncture — July 1989—I was still wondering, not without apprehension, what it would be like to deal and work on a day-to-day basis with the person called upon to replace me should the presidency become vacant.
He turned out to be likable, intelligent, and amusing, always prepared to intercede with Popular Action to smooth rough edges and expedite accords with the other allies, and his anecdotes and witticisms made the long trips and the wearisome social gatherings of the campaign enjoyable. I don’t know how he managed it, but in every city and town he would invariably disappear for a few hours to explore the markets and craft workshops or visit hidden diggings, and would infallibly reappear with a handful of archaeological finds or handicrafts or with some little live animal underneath his arm (I understand that his passion and that of Carolina, his wife, for animals have turned their house into a zoo). I envied him that ability to preserve, in the middle of our absorbing and hectic public activities, his personal enthusiasms and sense of curiosity, since I had the feeling that, as far as I myself was concerned, politics had deprived me of mine forever. During the entire campaign we never had a single argument and I was convinced that he would loyally collaborate with me in governing the country.
But, although he never told me so, Eduardo struck me as a man disillusioned with politics and, deep down, completely skeptical as to the possibilities of changing Peru. Despite the fact that, in a very Peruvian way, he tempered it with jokes and cheerful anecdotes, something sour and sad, a bitter underside, showed through his words when he recalled how, during the time he spent in public office — in the mayoralty of Lima or in his brief term as head of the Ministry of Transport and Communications — he had discovered on every hand, among friends and among adversaries, and even on the part of persons above all suspicion, shady deals, influence peddling, and thefts. Hence, he did not seem to be at all surprised by the corruption in Alan García’s administration, as though he had seen it coming and it was an inevitable culmination of inveterate practices. It was as if that experience, in addition to the gloomy evolution of Peruvian politics since his years of youthful populist enthusiasms, had put a damper on Eduardo’s dynamism and his confidence in Peru.