Perhaps for that reason, but not for that reason alone, Piura came to mean a great deal to me. Adding together the two times that I lived there, they amount to less than two years, and yet that place is more immediately real in what I have written than anywhere else in the world. Those novels, short stories and a play set in Piura do not exhaust these images of that region’s people and landscapes that still hover round about me, battling to be turned into works of fiction. The fact that it was in Piura that I had the joy of seeing a work I’d written presented on the stage of a theater and that I made such fast friends there doesn’t explain everything, because reason never can explain feelings, and the tie that one forms with a city is of the same sort as the one that suddenly binds one to a woman, a real love affair, with deep and mysterious roots. The fact is that, even if after those last days in 1952 I never lived in Piura again — though I visited it, very sporadically — in a manner of speaking I went on living there, taking the city with me wherever I went, all over the world, hearing Piurans speaking in that lilting, drawling way of theirs, with their typical guás and churres tacked on to the end of words and their supersuperlatives—lindisisíma, carisisíma, borrachisísimo—contemplating their languorous desert landscapes and sometimes feeling on their skin the searing language of its sun.
At the time of the battle against the nationalization of the banks, in 1987, one of the three protest demonstrations we staged was in Piura, and Piura was the first city I went to on campaign, after the launching of my candidacy in Arequipa, on June 4, 1989. Piura was the departamento where I visited the most provinces and districts and to which I returned most often during the campaign. I am certain that my subconscious predilection for Piurans and for what was Piuran played a part in that. And, doubtless, for that very reason I was to experience such disappointment, in June of 1990, on discovering that the voters in Piura were not attuned to my feelings, since they voted by a large majority for my opponent in the final round on June 10,* despite the fact that Fujimori had made hardly more than a furtive visit to the city in the course of his campaign.
The trip to go meet Uncle Jorge was postponed several times, until finally we took to the road, at the end of December, very early in the morning. Our journey was marked by all sorts of mishaps — having to change a tire on the highway and confronting problems with the motor of the station wagon, which overheated. The meeting with the uncles coming from Lima took place in Chimbote, at that time still a quiet village of fishermen, with the very well-run Hotel de Turistas on the shores of a beach with crystal-clear water. We had a dinner with the whole family — Uncle Jorge’s wife, Aunt Gaby, and Uncle Pedro were there — and the next day, early in the morning, I said goodbye to Uncle Lucho, who was going back to Piura. When I gave him a hug, I burst into tears.
Ten. Public Life
Ever since the rally in the Plaza San Martín, my life had ceased to be private. Never again, until I left Peru after the second round of voting for the presidency, in June 1990, did I enjoy that privacy that I had always guarded so jealously (to the point of remarking that what attracted me about England was the fact that since nobody there ever picked a quarrel with anybody else, people turned into ghosts). Ever since that rally, at any hour of the day or night, there were people at my house, holding meetings, conducting interviews, organizing something or other, or else standing in line to talk with me, with Patricia, or with Álvaro. Reception rooms, hallways, stairways were always occupied by men and women whom I’d often never met and whose reason for being there was utterly unknown to me, reminding me of a line from a poem by Carlos Germán Belli: “This is not your house, you’re a man of the wilds.”
Since María del Carmen, my secretary, soon found herself swamped with work, others came to give her a hand, first Silvana, then Rosi and Lucía and later on two volunteers, Anita and Elena, and a room next to my study had to be built to lodge that woman’s army and make room for paraphernalia that I (who have always written by hand) saw, as if in a dream, being brought into the house, being installed and beginning to work all around me: computers, faxes, photocopy machines, intercoms, typewriters, new telephone lines, rows of filing cabinets. That office, next to the library and a few steps away from our bedroom, operated from early in the morning till late at night, and till dawn in the weeks immediately preceding the election, so that I came to feel that everything about my life, including sleeping and even more intimate matters, had become public.
During the campaign against nationalization we had two bodyguards inside the house, till the day when, sick and tired of running at every turn into armed men with pistols that terrified my mother and Aunt Olga — who were both living with us then — Patricia decided that the security unit would stay outside the house.
The story of the bodyguards included a comic chapter on the night of the Plaza San Martín. With the sudden increase in terrorism and crime — kidnapping had become a flourishing industry — there began to be more and more private surveillance and protection agencies in Peru. One of them, known as “the Israelis,” since its owners or directors came from Israel, was in charge of protecting Hernando de Soto. And he arranged, along with Miguel Cruchaga, to have “the Israelis” guard me at that time. Manuel and Alberto, two ex-Marines, came to my house. They accompanied me to the Plaza San Martín and stood at the foot of the speakers’ platform on August 21. When I finished speaking, I invited the crowd to go with me to the Palace of Justice to hand over to the AP and the PPC members of Congress the list of signatures against nationalization. During the march, Manuel disappeared, swallowed up by the crowd. But Alberto stuck to me like glue amid all the chaos. A station wagon belonging to “the Israelis” was to pick me up on the steps of the neoclassic white building on the Paseo de la República. With Alberto there beside me as always, like my shadow, and the two of us nearly crushed to a pulp by the demonstrators, we went down the stairs. All of a sudden, a black car with the doors open appeared out of nowhere. I was lifted off my feet, shoved inside, and found myself surrounded by armed strangers. I took it for granted that they were “the Israelis.” But then I heard Alberto shouting: “It’s not them, it’s not them!” and saw him struggling. He managed to dive into the car just as it was taking off and landed like a dead weight on top of me and the other occupants. “Is this a kidnapping?” I asked, half jokingly and half seriously. “Our job is to look after you,” the bruiser who was driving answered. And immediately thereafter, he spoke a phrase straight out of a movie into the hand microphone he was holding: “The Jaguar is safe and we’re going to the moon. Over.”
It was Óscar Balbi, the head agent of Prosegur, a company that was a competitor of “the Israelis.” My friends Pipo Thorndike and Roberto Dañino had arranged for Prosegur to provide for my security that night, but had forgotten to tell me. They had spoken with Jorge Vega, the chairman of the board of directors of Prosegur, and the entrepreneur Luis Woolcot had paid the expenses (I learned this two years afterward).
A while later, and through arrangements made by Juan Jochamowitz, Prosegur decided to take over the responsibility for the security of my house and my family for the three years of the campaign, without ever asking us for a fee (as a result, the government canceled the contracts it had with Prosegur to guard state enterprises). Óscar Balbi organized the security for all my trips and for the rallies of the Democratic Front and was invariably at my side in the planes, helicopters, trucks, light vans, motorboats, and on the horses that I used in those years to make two complete swings around the whole of Peru. Only once did I see a situation get the better of him: in the late afternoon of September 21, 1988, in the little rural community of Acchupata, in Cajamarca, in the Cumbe mountain range, where the 14,500-foot altitude made him fall off his horse and we had to resuscitate him by giving him oxygen.