Read Online A Fish in the Water: A Memoir by Mario Vargas Llosa - Free Book Online

since in the indescribably wretched country that bad governments have turned Peru into there would not be enough of them to fill a theater and perhaps not even a living room. And not the poor, the peasants or the inhabitants of the shantytowns that were euphemistically called “young towns,” who listened to the debate pitting state ownership against a market economy, collectivism against free enterprise, from afar, as if it were no concern of theirs. These middle classes—office workers, professionals, technicians, tradesmen, state employees, housewives, students—had seen their lot worsen by the day. For three decades they had watched their standard of living decline and their hopes come to nothing under each succeeding government. Under the first administration of Belaunde Terry (1963–68), whose reformism had aroused great expectations. Under the military dictatorship and its repressive socialist policy, which had impoverished, ravished, and corrupted Peruvian society as no other previous government ever had. Under the second administration of Belaunde Terry, who had won by an overwhelming majority, and who did not remedy a single one of the disasters of the previous regime and left behind him an overt inflationary process. And under Alan García, who—in those days this was barely beginning to be perceived—would beat all records in the history of Peru for inefficient administration, bequeathing to his successor, in 1990, a country in ruins, in which real salaries had been reduced by half, paychecks by a third, and in which national production had fallen to the levels of thirty years before. Stunned, lurching in bewilderment from the political right to the left, overcome by fear and at times by desperation, these middle classes had rarely mobilized in Peru outside of election campaign periods. But they had done so this time, nonetheless, with an instinctive certainty that if the nationalization of banks, insurance companies, and financial firms came about, the situation would be worse still and Peru would be even farther away from being that decent, reliable country, with jobs and opportunities, that they longed for.
    The recurrent theme of my three speeches had been that the way out of poverty does not lie in redistributing the little wealth that exists but in creating more. And in order to do that markets must be opened up, competition and individual initiative encouraged, private property not be fought against but extended to the greatest number, our economy and our psychology taken out of the grip of the state, and the handout mentality that expects everything from the state replaced by a modern outlook that entrusts the responsibility for economic life to civil society and the market.
    “I see it but I don’t believe it,” my friend Felipe Thorndike said to me. “You talk about private property and popular capitalism, and instead of lynching you they applaud you. What’s happening in Peru?”
    That is how the story of my candidacy began. From that time on, whenever I’ve been asked why I was ready to give up my vocation as a writer and enter politics I’ve answered: “For a moral reason. Because circumstances placed me in a position of leadership at a critical moment in the life of my country. Because it appeared that the opportunity was at hand to accomplish, with the support of a majority of Peruvians, the liberal reforms which, ever since the early 1970s, I had been defending in articles and polemical exchanges as being necessary in order to save Peru.”
    But someone who knows me as well as I know myself, or perhaps even better, Patricia, doesn’t see it that way. “The moral obligation wasn’t the decisive factor,” she says. “It was the adventure, the illusion of living an experience full of excitement and risk. Of writing the great novel in real life.”
    This may well hit the nail on the head. It is true that if the presidency of Peru had not been, as I said jokingly to a journalist,