There was a family council and the aunts and uncles decided that I was well on the road to perdition and that something had to be done. What they decided to do was bold: to talk to my father. They never saw him and knew that he detested them. They were of the opinion that my mother’s marriage had been a great misfortune, but for her sake, they had made an effort to receive my father as a guest in their homes and behave cordially toward him when they happened to run into him. He, however, stuck to his guns and did not try to hide his feelings. He never visited them. He would come by to drop my mother off at Aunt Lala’s, or Aunt Gaby’s, or at my grandparents’, but he didn’t get out of the car to say hello to them, nor did he do so at night, when he came by to take her back home. The decision to have a talk with him was a bitter pill they swallowed for the sake of what they believed to be a major consideration.
Uncle Pedro, Uncle Juan, and Uncle Jorge went to his office. I never knew how the conversation went. But I can imagine what they told him. That if I went on working at La Crónica I would never finish high school or study for a career. And that, to have any sort of future, I must leave that night job immediately.
A few days after I got out of the hospital and went back to work, I entered the editorial room at La Crónica one afternoon, and Señor Aguirre Morales remarked to me in a friendly way: “What a shame that you’re leaving us, my good friend. We’re going to miss you; we already feel that you’re one of the family.” That was how I learned that my father had just quit my job for me.
I went to his office and had only to take one look at his face — that of critical moments: more or less livid, with lips that were a little dry and slightly parted, and a fixed stare, with that little yellow glint deep down in the pupils — to know what was coming. Without informing me of my uncles’ visit, he began to read me the riot act, telling me that, instead of taking a job at La Crónica to work as a responsible employee, I had come there to wallow in vice and become a degenerate. He was bellowing with rage and I was sure he was about to beat me. But he didn’t hit me. He confined himself to giving me a few days’ time to show him the registration certificate from the school in which I was going to finish my last year of secondary school. And, naturally, I wasn’t to get any bright ideas such as claiming that there was no vacancy for me in any state school.
And so, overnight, I went from a frequenter of saloons and dens of iniquity to a forlorn scholar in search of classrooms in which to finish high school. I had lost too much time. It was now the end of March and in none of the schools that I made the rounds of was there a vacancy. And then I had one of the best ideas in my life. I went to the main telephone office and called my Uncle Lucho, in Piura. I told him what was going on. Uncle Lucho, who, ever since I was a small boy, had been solving the family’s problems, solved this one as well. He knew the head of the San Miguel state school, near his house, and would go have a word with him immediately. Two hours later, he called me back at the main telephone office to tell me that I had already been enrolled, that classes began on such and such a day, that Aunt Olga was happy that I was coming to live with them. Did I need money for a ticket to Piura?
I presented myself at my father’s, swallowing hard, convinced that he would shout abuse at me and refuse to let me go to Piura. But, on the contrary, it struck him as a very good idea, and he even allowed himself to tell me something that whetted my appetite: “I can already see you working as a journalist in Piura at the same time that you’re studying. Don’t ever try to pull my leg.”
So why not? Why not work on some newspaper in Piura at the same time that I was finishing school? I asked my friends on La Crónica, and the kindly headline writer, Alfonso Delboy, who knew the owner of La Industria, wrote a letter of recommendation to him for me. And Aguirre Morales another.
The last farewell was said as we celebrated my birthday, on the 28th of March 1952, over beers with Carlitos Ney, Milton von Hesse, and Norwin Sánchez Geny, in a restaurant on the Calle Capón, Lima’s Chinatown. It was a gloomy farewell, because they were friends I had come to appreciate and perhaps because I had an intuition that I would never again share with them those feverish experiences with which I had brought my early youth to an end. And so it turned out. The following year, when I came back to Lima, I didn’t hang out with them again or frequent the same places, which my memory would nonetheless preserve, with a bittersweet taste, and which I tried to recreate long afterwards with retouches dreamed up by my imagination, in Conversation in The Cathedral.
With my last paycheck from La Crónica I bought a ticket to Piura at the Cruz de Chalpón bus company. And my mama, her eyes filled with tears, packed my suitcase, in which I put all the books I owned and the manuscript of my little play.
I spent the twenty-four hours of the trip, through the endless deserts of the northern coast, in a rattletrap bus, torn between opposed feelings: a bit sad at having left that adventurous and somewhat literary job at La Crónica and the good friends it had brought me, but happy at the same time at the prospect of seeing my Uncle Lucho again, and curious and excited, imagining what this second stay in remote Piura would be like.
Eight. The Freedom Movement
The Freedom Movement was organized in a painter’s studio. At the end of September 1987, those of us who had planned the Meetings for Freedom were summoned to Fernando de Szyszlo’s by Freddy Cooper. There, amid half-finished paintings and masks and pre-Hispanic feather cloaks, we exchanged ideas about the future. The success of the fight against Alan García’s attempt to nationalize the banks had filled us with enthusiasm and hope. Peru was changing, then. Should we return to our usual occupations, telling ourselves that our task was fulfilled, or was it worth our while to make this nascent organization a permanent one, with an eye to the coming elections?
The dozen friends gathered together there agreed to continue our political activity. We would create something of broader scope and more flexible than a political party, a movement, to be known as the Movimiento Libertad, that would bring together those independents who had mobilized against state control and put down roots in the popular sectors, in particular among the tradesmen and small businessmen working within the so-called informal or parallel economy, a form of popular black market capitalism. They were an example of the fact that, despite the triumph of the ideology of state control among the elite of the country, an instinct for free enterprise existed among the Peruvian people. At the same time that it was attempting to organize these sectors, Libertad would draw up a thoroughgoing reform program and modernize Peru’s political culture, opposing both socialist collectivism and mercantilist capitalism by putting forward a liberal policy.
Of the goals we set ourselves in that hours-long conversation under the bewitching spell of Szyszlo’s paintings, the only one we completely achieved was the program. The Plan for Governing that the team headed by Luis Bustamante Belaunde had been doing the preliminary work on was what we came up with that morning: a realistic program for putting an end to privileges, government handouts, protectionism, and state control, opening up the country to the world and creating a free society in which everyone would have access to the market and live under the protection of the law. This Plan for Governing, full of ideas, with a firm determination to take advantage of the opportunities of our time so that Peruvians of every estate could attain a decent life, is one of the things that make me proud of those three years. The serious commitment to the work at hand on the part of Lucho Bustamante, of Raúl Salazar (who, despite the fact that he belonged to SODE and not to Libertad, was the head of the economics team of the Democratic Front), and of the dozens of men and women who, along with them, devoted countless days and nights to drafting the first rough outline for a new country, was a marvelous source of encouragement for me. Each time I attended the meetings of the executive committee for the Plan for Governing, or one of the specialized committees, even the most technical ones — such as those on reform in the mining sector, customs, the port authority, administration, or the judicial system — politics ceased to be that frantic, inane, and often sordid activity that took up most of my time and became instead a task requiring intellect, technical knowledge, the comparing of ideas, imagination, idealism, generosity.